A Dime a Dozen (42 page)

I debated taking a picture of the bucket and the stairs, but I was afraid that the flash might alert someone to my presence, just in case the stairs did lead to another exit and there might be someone on the other side. My time ticking to an end, I turned and left, making my way through the weaving and winding passageways back to the tunnel. I didn’t look forward to climbing through the claustrophobic muck and mud, but since it was the only way out for me, I gritted my teeth and climbed inside.

Getting the big piece of slate into place wasn’t as difficult as I had thought it would be, as there seemed to be handholds carved into the rock. Taking a deep breath, I started out on hands and knees, reminding myself that the passageway would get wider as I went.

Once I had crawled about ten feet, I stopped to get a photo of this part of the passageway. I set my flashlight in my lap and was just digging for my camera when I heard the noise.

It sounded like whistling, and it sounded like it was coming my way!

Frantically, I turned off my flashlight and sat there in absolute darkness, heart pounding in my throat. Someone was headed down the tunnel toward the mine. Judging by the whistling, I assumed it was Zeb Hooper.

As quickly and as silently as possible, I shoved my flashlight into my pocket and scooted backwards, kicking out the slate with my foot.

Blindly, I slithered out of the tunnel into the mine, tripping on the slate and scraping my already-scraped knees. Looking into the tunnel, I could see a dim glow in the distance, and I knew the person was getting closer.

On hands and knees, I lifted the slate and pressed it into place, capping the tunnel. I knew I had only a minute, maybe two, before the cap would be coming back off.

I had to make a quick decision. My first inclination was to hide nearby, wait until the person came through, and then slip out of the tunnel behind them. But as I clicked on my flashlight, I saw that there really wasn’t anywhere to hide, since I couldn’t know whether this person was going to turn right or left once they got into the mine.

There was no other choice. Breathing heavily, I ran along the passageway until I reached the chamber with the buckets, the beams, and the stairs. I had no choice but to go up and out, no matter what was on the other side.

Forty-Nine

It wasn’t easy. First I had to get to the stairs, which meant wedging myself between the beams. As I did, dirt began raining down on my head. I realized the beams must be there to support a ceiling that wanted to give way. I closed my eyes and forced myself through. Once I got on the other side of the beams, I climbed up the stairs. They did indeed lead to a door. There was no doorknob, so when I reached it I simply pressed and pressed until I could feel it start to give way.

Something was providing resistance from the other side. I pushed harder. With a scrape and a big thud, the door finally swung open. As it did, my flashlight slipped from my hand and clattered down the stairs, and more dirt began crumbling down from overhead. Shielding my eyes from the falling debris, I stepped on through into a dark room. The dirt stopped falling and I shut the thick, heavy door, collapsing against it. I had made it.

I wiped mud from my eyes and looked around, trying to figure out where I was. Light was coming in from under another door, but otherwise the room was dark, and there were no windows. A box of papers had spilled out across the floor, and I realized that must’ve been what caused the thud.

Heart pounding, I knew I wasn’t out of danger yet. If the person in the mine had heard the thud or the falling dirt, they would come looking. When they got there, they would find a flashlight lying on the ground, still turned on. They would know someone was in here.

I went toward the other door, toward the light. Cautiously, I inched it open, to see what looked like a storage room. It was empty, so I stepped through, vaguely recognizing it. Then I realized where I was.

Su Casa.

The tunnel that led to the mine had led all the way to underneath Tinsdale Orchards. In a flash, I understood why Zeb had to launder his income from the gemstones:
They weren’t his gemstones!
He was slant mining onto Tinsdale property and stealing the gems from there.

The door I had come through to get into the building was a door from the mine into Zeb’s office at Su Casa. I turned and looked at that door now, but it didn’t even show. From this viewpoint, it just looked like a cinder block wall. Zeb had fashioned himself a hidden door out of wood and cinder blocks, another secret entrance to the mine.

That must’ve been what Enrique Morales found that had gotten him killed. This building was under construction the day Enrique disappeared. I was willing to bet he somehow stumbled upon the secret door, and his discovery had cost him his life.

I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. Without pausing to think, I stepped back into Zeb’s windowless office, clicked on the light, and began pushing his desk along the wall to block the door. The desk was heavy, but slowly it began to move. With a great groan, I slid it into place. It would be nearly impossible for someone to open the door from inside the mine now.

That done, I ran out into the front office, startling Trinksie so badly that she screamed and dropped the files she was carrying. Danny Stanford was there too, and though he didn’t scream, he also looked shocked.

“Callie!” Trinksie yelled. “Where did you come from?”

“What happened to you?” Danny echoed, and I realized that I was covered, head to toe, in mud.

“Trinksie, call nine one one,” I said, but she just stood there, stunned.

“I’ll do it,” Danny offered, stepping toward the phone. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

“You’re not going to believe this,” I said breathlessly, “but I’ve been down inside a mine.”

“A mine?” asked Trinksie.

“A gem mine. Like rubies, emeralds? This building sits atop an entire mine, and there’s an entrance to it right from Zeb’s office.”

They stared at me like I was crazy.

“Yeah, hold on just a second,” Danny said into the phone, and then he looked at me skeptically. “What do you want me to tell them?”

“Just say they need to send the police out here right away. But no sirens, because we’ve got to get the other exit covered before he tries to come out.”

“He who?”

“Zeb Hooper. He’s in the mine now, and he may have realized I’m onto him.”

Trinksie started fanning her face with her hands.

“This just isn’t happening,” she said. “You’re nuts.”

Charging past me, she headed straight for Zeb’s office. I followed along behind as Danny tried to explain the situation to the authorities over the phone.

In the office, Trinksie saw the moved desk and the spilled box and demanded to know what I had done. Just then, the door from the mine began rattling, and I knew that Zeb was on the other side, trying to come through. Trinksie screamed.

“I’ll handle this,” Danny said, squeezing past us and going to the desk.

Even as the door continued to rattle, Danny rifled through various drawers.

“What are you trying to do?” I said.

He found what he was looking for in the back of the top left drawer. As he pulled out his hand, I saw that he was holding a gun. Pointing it at the door to the mine, he squeezed the trigger. A bullet blasted through the cinder block, leaving a smoking hole the size of a fist.

Instantly, the rattling stopped. From inside, we could hear the sound of Zeb’s body falling down the stairs.

Danny turned toward us, the gun still clutched in his fist. Trinksie and I stared at him, open-mouthed.

“Move the desk away from the door,” he commanded, gesturing with the gun.

Maybe I was a little slow, but it took me a good 30 seconds to realize that he was now pointing the gun at us.

I wanted to do something quick and simple to disarm him. But Trinksie stood between me and him, and there was nothing I could do that wouldn’t put her in even more danger.

Danny held us at gunpoint while Trinksie and I struggled to move the desk away from the door. Once we succeeded, he ordered me to stand with my hands against the wall, then he pointed the gun at my head and told Trinksie to go into the storage room and get a roll of duct tape. She did as he said, and then he ordered her to tape my hands together behind my back.

“I’m sorry, Callie,” she sobbed as she did so. I didn’t reply but merely kept my eyes, unblinking, on Danny.

When she finished with me, he had Trinksie turn off the office light, pull the door shut, and then open the door to the mine. Gun to our backs, he forced us to go down the stairs as he brought up the rear, pulling the door shut behind him.

Zeb was lying at the bottom of the stairs, his right shoulder covered in blood. Trinksie ran to him, still crying, and I was surprised that he was alive. I was also surprised to see that there were lights on inside the mine, a string of bare bulbs along the ceiling, wired from a plug near the door.

We crowded at the bottom of the stairs, blocked by the heavy beams. Danny pointed to one of the beams and told Trinksie to kick it out of place. As she did so, the beam fell to the ground and a shower of dirt rained down on all of us.

“Pull him through,” Danny barked.

She tried dragging Zeb between the beams but he was too heavy. Finally, Zeb used his legs to push himself while Trinksie pulled on his good arm, and they managed to make their way past the beams to the center of the room. At Danny’s command, I followed until we were all to the far wall of the chamber. He threw the roll of duct tape at Trinksie and told her to tape Zeb’s hands. Zeb moaned as she did so, in terrible pain from his wound.

“The police will be here any minute,” Trinksie said as she worked.

“The police aren’t coming, you idiot,” Danny said. “Did you really think I dialed nine one one?”

Once Zeb was taped, Danny frisked him and came up with a pocketknife. After tossing it to one side, he ordered Trinksie to sit down with her back to me, and then he managed to duct tape the two of us together using one hand and his teeth while he held the gun steady with the other. When he was finished, he stepped back and admired his handiwork.

“Well,” he said, breathing heavily from the exertion. “What do you think of this? Callie, thanks to you, we’re all here together.”

“What’s going on?” Trinksie whimpered.

“What’s going on is that Zeb and Danny are illegally mining on Tinsdale land,” I explained. “I was trying to explore the mine after Zeb had left for the day, but for some reason he came back.”

Zeb stirred and then rasped, “I needed the sump pump. My basement’s taking on water.”

I looked from Zeb to Danny, who was watching us with a bemused expression on his face.

“Why don’t you let us go, Danny?” I said. “Zeb’s still alive. It’s not too late to save this situation.”

“Oh, this situation has dragged on way too long already. Zeb, I do believe it’s time we parted ways.”

Except for Trinksie’s sniffling, the three of us on the ground were silent. Danny seemed to catch his breath and calm down, and then he pocketed the gun and methodically went about doing something with the beams near the stairs. At one point, he stopped and went deeper into the mine.

“Zeb,” I whispered when Danny was out of earshot. “That’s your gun he’s got. How many bullets are in it?”

“From my desk?” Zeb asked in a weak voice.

“Yeah.”

“Six. Well, five now.”

That was still five too many.

Danny came back into the room, humming, carrying a small ladder. I watched as he propped it against the wall near the beams, checked it for steadiness, and climbed with what looked like a pick in his hand.

“Danny, don’t,” Zeb said. “You’ll bring the roof down and kill us all.”

“Hmm,” Danny said sarcastically as he climbed. “Well, I think it’s worth the risk, and you folks are going to die anyway.”

When he reached the top of the ladder, he braced himself against it with his legs, then he swung the pick at the ceiling. Dirt poured down on him as he did so, but he didn’t seem to care; he just kept working.

“What is he doing?” I asked.

“He’s taking out the queen,” Zeb replied.

“The queen?”

“I stopped him from working on it weeks ago when I realized he was compromising the integrity of the ceiling. If he brings that stone out, I believe the whole area will cave in.”

I leaned forward and looked, and from what I could see, Danny was chipping away at the dirt around a giant rock that protruded from the ceiling. The white-and-blue color of the rock was the same as the one I had pulled from the bucket earlier, except it was about a hundred times bigger. At least.

“What kind of stone is that?” I asked.

“Sapphire,” Zeb said. “The whole mine is sapphires.”

“You wanna talk about sapphires,” Danny called out to us as he worked. “This queen is gonna top your Princess Tatiana at least four times over.”

Princess Tatiana. I thought back to where I had heard that name, remembering that Princess Tatiana was the woman Zeb Hooper was rumored to have run away with in his youth, when he later came back wealthy enough to buy a construction company.