Blood Money (Joe Dillard Series No. 6) (11 page)

She awoke when the eagle tore out her liver and flew off into the clouds.
 

Chapter 18

AT
ten o’clock the next morning, Charlie was back in the saddle. Jasper had gone to town and taken Biscuit with him, so she and Sadie were on their own. The storms from the night before had moved northeast, but a thick cover of puffy, gray cumulus lingered and a fine mist of fog hovered over the mountain like damp gauze. The weatherman on the radio had said more storms were on the way. She’d gotten out of bed early and driven into Elizabethton to pick up some things at Wal-Mart. Charlie had made up her mind. If there was really something in the cave, she was going to find it.
 

There was a high-powered, battery-operated searchlight in one of the saddlebags along with extra batteries. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, and she had gloves and a stocking cap to keep her warm in the cave. She had a lighter in one pocket and a small can of pepper spray in another. She had enough food and water to last an entire day tucked into a backpack, along with two dozen small, cylindrical wax candles. The labels said they would burn for at least three hours.
 

The morning was unusually still, the forest chilled and misty. Charlie rode slowly, watching and listening for anything that seemed out of the ordinary. She expected Zane Barnes to spring from behind every tree and rock she passed. She strained to see as she topped ridges and rounded bends. She stopped often and turned to look behind her.
 

When she got to the creek across from the cave entrance, Charlie walked Sadie back to the same laurel bush where she’d tied her before. She wrapped the reins loosely around a small branch and pulled the searchlight out of the saddlebag.

“You can get away if you need to,” she said, stroking the white patch between Sadie’s eyes. “There are black bears up here, but they won’t bother you. The bobcats and the coyotes are too small. You’ll be fine.”

Charlie looked back at Sadie as she stood at the mouth of the cave, took a deep breath, turned on the light, and walked inside. The difference between the piddly flashlight she’d used on the first trip and the spotlight was amazing. She’d decided she would spend as much time as she needed familiarizing herself with the cave. She wanted to know its scope, its depth, its dimension. She wanted to know if there was more than one entrance. She’d spent a great deal of the previous night trying to convince herself that this could be an adventure. Exploring a cave could be
fun
.
 

The temperature inside the cave was cooler than it was beneath the cloud cover outside. Again, the only noise Charlie could hear was the sound of her own breathing. Her eyes moved constantly, following the beam of light up the walls on both sides, across the ceiling, and back down to the floor. She reached the spot where the tunnel opened up into the cathedral. The size of it reminded her of the basketball arena on the University of Tennessee campus. Charlie stood there looking, marveling at the formations. She knew enough about caves to know that the formations had grown over thousands, perhaps millions of years and were still growing. She wondered how anything could grow in total darkness. How could a rock grow? It was fascinating, and so, so frightening.

This time, she kept going. Something like a path, about two feet wide, wound its way down through the rock. She kept moving the light, surprised at the colors that surrounded her: splotches of deep red, walls of tan and brown, the sparkle of crystallized oxide. She made her way deliberately, scanning the walls and ceilings, hoping she wouldn’t encounter anything too terrifying.
 

When she got to the bottom, to what appeared to be the floor, Charlie took a candle from the backpack, lit it, and placed it on the ground. If she could get back to this spot, she knew she could find her way out. So, like Hansel and Gretel dropping bread crumbs, she started lighting candles every twenty steps and working her way along the wall around the cathedral floor.
 

Five candles in, Charlie’s light illuminated a round opening in the rock about thirty feet ahead of her. It looked very much like the elliptical opening at the mouth, but it was much larger. When she reached it and shined her light through, it appeared to be another tunnel, angling sharply downward. She set another candle down and forged ahead.

Sadie entered her mind. How long had she been in the cave? She took her cell phone out of her pocket. No signal, of course, but it told her the time. She’d been inside about thirty minutes. She kept going.

After twenty-seven steps, the tunnel opened onto yet another space, not as long and wide as the cathedral, but still huge, with a ceiling that was much, much higher, maybe eighty, ninety feet. There was a small crack in the rock almost straight above her through which oozed the faintest bit of daylight. She looked around; something to the left caught her eye. The beam had passed over something that definitely didn’t fit, but it was far enough away that she couldn’t quite comprehend the shape. She held the beam, hesitant. It wasn’t conical or funnel shaped like so many of the rock formations. It didn’t seem to belong. She moved toward it carefully, staring, and she came closer, she realized what it was.

A still.
 

There was a vat to the right, large and made of wood, shaped like a barrel that had been cut in half. Just to the left of the vat was a pile of neatly-stacked firewood. To the left of that was a cooker, jacked up on columns of flat rocks. It looked like the fuel-oil tanks Charlie had seen sitting on metal stands outside of people’s homes. She wondered how many gallons it held. Beneath it was a fire pit, full of burned coals that glittered like black diamonds under the flashlight. A shiny, spiral copper tube rose from the top of the cooker and descended to another metal container, this one much smaller than the cooker, but still twenty-five gallons or so. A pipe that looked like an outdoor water spigot came off the bottom of the container. Charlie realized she was standing on the spot where Roscoe’s great-grandfather made his liquor. She flashed the light around nervously, feeling, like yesterday, as though someone, or something, was watching her.
 

She stood for several seconds without moving, heard a sound, a small splash like a fish breaking the top of the water. The light from the candles flickered off the cave walls. She took a few steps toward the sound, shining the light along the cave floor. The stream came into focus after her next step. The cave, at that spot, was about sixty feet wide. The stream itself was less than ten feet across. Charlie walked carefully down a short slope and shined the light onto the water. She could see the water moving, slowly, from her right to her left. It disappeared beneath the rock face to her left. Roscoe’s letter said that direction led out of the cave. She moved the light to her right to another rock face, but there was a little clearance, maybe eighteen inches or so, between the top of the water and the bottom of the rock. She walked close to the spot, knelt and shined the light beneath. There was clearance between the water and the rock for as far as the light would penetrate, but there was only one way to see what was in there.

Charlie removed her backpack, took everything out of her pockets and set it all on the rock floor. She took a deep breath and waded into the water.
 

 
It took a few seconds for the water to seep through her boots and jeans, but when it did, it nearly took her breath. The water was freezing cold. She slid her feet along the bottom until she was in the center of the stream. It was above her waist, just a few inches beneath her chest. She held the flashlight at chin level, bent over just a little, and moved beneath the rock.
 

She tried to count the number of steps she was taking, but the freezing water made it impossible. She turned her head to make sure she could still see the spot where she’d gone under the rock. When she turned back and took another step she heard a sound like a fountain, water falling into water. The sound grew louder and two steps later, she found herself in another chamber, this one about the size of her bedroom. About fifteen feet ahead and above her, an underground stream bubbled through the rock face and fell into a pool. She shined the light around…

There.

Right there.

Charlie’s heart almost stopped. On a wide ledge to her left was a line of stacked, wooden crates. Charlie scrambled out of the water and stood. Could this be it? Could it?

The crates were small, about sixteen inches long by eight or ten inches wide, maybe four inches deep. They were stacked ten high, five stacks, fifty crates in all. Charlie forgot about the cold, the darkness. Nothing existed accept what might be inside the crates. She lay one of the flashlights down on the stack on the far right. The top crate looked as though its top had been removed. The others were nailed shut. She hooked her fingers beneath it, lifting slowly.
 

Sawdust.
 

How could that be?

She removed the glove from her right hand and reached down, began brushing the sawdust away. The pad of her finger touched something solid and cold. She leaned down, pursed her lips, and blew. The particles of wood separated like fairy dust. Charlie straightened.

Beneath the light, a brilliant, lustrous glow appeared. Charlie’s eyes widened. She reached down again. Her hand wrapped around the hardness, the coldness. She had trouble lifting it with one hand, so heavy. She reached down with her other hand and lifted a bar of gold from the crate. It had to weigh twenty-five pounds or more.
 

There was a small circular imprint on the top of the gold bar, about the size of a wedding ring. Charlie bent closer, focusing the light. The words “Johnson and Matthey” were stamped around the top of the ring. At the bottom: “London.” In the center of the circle were the words, “Poured by.”

Charlie put the bar back in the crate, straightened and took a step back. She stood motionless, her eyes wide, her mouth open. The gold, illuminated by the flashlight, glowed like fire in the night.

“I found it, Roscoe,” Charlie whispered. “I found Prometheus’s fire.”

Chapter 19

I
walked into Perkins Restaurant at eight-thirty on Saturday morning and spotted the man I was meeting immediately. Pete Sams was sitting in a booth by a window against the far wall. He waved and I walked over.

Pete was a reporter for a little weekly in Carter County called
The Carter County Comet
. I wasn’t sure of his exact age, but my guess was he had to be mid-to-late sixties. He was a slim, jovial man with long teeth and thinning, silver hair. I’d talked to him a couple of times about cases over the years and had always found him to be cordial. He wasn’t overly aggressive, didn’t lean toward sensationalism, and had never misquoted me or tried to play me. He was just one of those small-town newsmen who popped up on the grid from time to time. He’d called late in the afternoon on the day Roscoe Barnes took his plunge from the courthouse clock tower and had asked if we could meet Saturday morning. He said he wanted to talk about Roscoe. I told him I didn’t think there was much I could tell him, but he was insistent, so I finally relented.

I slid into the booth and ordered a cup of coffee, hoping the conversation wouldn’t take too long. Caroline and I were planning to take our grandson and niece to Dollywood that afternoon and I wanted to be back home by ten. Pete was already munching on a muffin and sipping from a glass of milk. He smiled and offered his right hand across the table.

“Appreciate you taking the time to talk to me,” he said.

“Are we on or off the record?” I asked. “I always like to get that straight on the front end.”

“How about we just have a discussion and then if I want to quote you on something, I’ll ask.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “What do you want to discuss?”

“Have you ever heard of Russo’s gold?”

“Russo’s gold? I don’t think so, Pete.”

“It’s one of those legends that might actually have some truth to it,” he said. “Starts back in the thirties. This Philadelphia mobster named Carmine Russo supposedly did a lot of business with a local moonshiner named Hack Barnes. Hack Barnes was Roscoe Barnes’s great-granddaddy, and the story goes that he and Russo became pretty tight over the years. He lived on the property Roscoe owns, or owned until he killed himself. Carmine Russo was the top mobster in Philadelphia and finally got himself arrested by the feds. He was looking at five, maybe six years in jail for tax evasion, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold onto his rackets from inside prison. He also apparently didn’t have anybody in Philadelphia he could trust, so the story is that he converted a bunch of his cash to gold and brought it down here to Hack Barnes so Hack could hide it and hold it for him until he got out of jail. His plan was to retrieve the gold when he got out and buy his way back into power on the streets, but his plan didn’t work out because he wound up with pancreatic cancer and died a little over a year after he went to jail. Right around the same time Russo died, Hack Barnes, his wife and two of his children were murdered in their home. The old news stories called it the Buck Mountain Massacre. Nobody was ever arrested for the murders, but a Thompson sub-machine gun was used in the killings and there was a lot of speculation that mobsters were involved. The scuttlebutt has always been that Carmine Russo – or his wife – sent some of Carmine’s boys down here to get the gold back from Hack Barnes since Carmine knew the cancer was going to kill him. Hack wouldn’t give it to them so they killed him.”

“And the gold stayed put wherever Hack Barnes hid it,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Nice story. You planning to print it and somehow tie it to Roscoe’s death?”

“I was hoping you might be able to help me out with that. You were representing Roscoe in a lawsuit that was filed by his son. Did he say anything about finding any gold?”

“If he did, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, but what I can tell you, with complete honesty, is that Roscoe Barnes didn’t say a word to me about any gold.”