Mike Hammer--King of the Weeds Page 20

  I asked him, “Would you like a tour?”

  Buckley nodded, frowning, uneasy. “Are we going to run into any bats?”

  Our voices echoed, just a little.

  “Not in this chamber,” I said. “Anyway, they have built-in radar. They won’t touch us.”

  “Then there is another chamber?”

  “Oh yeah. But let’s get a sense of this one first.”

  Following the irregular curve of the walls, I led him around the perimeter. Our flashlights poked at the dirt floor to reveal the scattered ghosts of bootlegging days—wooden boxes, an old truck seat, vintage tools, broken bottles—and in fifteen minutes or so we were back where we had started, near the Buick’s headlights. We’d stirred more dust and the stuff swam in the beams like amoeba under a microscope.

  I asked, “Notice anything the experts might have missed?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s get in the car and drive deeper. I’ll point you in the right direction.”

  Buckley got behind the wheel again and I climbed into the passenger seat. The headlights could not yet find the far wall of the cave, not by a long shot, but did pick up the scattered refuse here and there on the floor.

  “Hammer, there are broken bottles… the tires…”

  “Just go slow and careful. This way…”

  He inched through the vast empty dome. It took a while, but finally the high beams hit that far wall beyond a scattering of boulders—a high, wide, hard-packed pile of stony rubble.

  Buckley asked, “What happened here?”

  “When I got my first look at this place, the old caretaker said there’d been a minor cave-in years ago, and everything that fell from the ceiling got pushed up against the wall. To accommodate the bootleggers using this space.”

  He looked at me carefully. “Are you implying something else is going on?”

  “I’m not implying anything.”

  I got out. So did he. He shut the motor off but of course left on the headlights. I ran the mag light up at the ceiling, where the stone showed scarring. “That’s minimal damage compared to this wall of rubble and stones.”

  Buckley began running his flashlight’s beam around and across the cave’s back wall.

  “Do you hear something?” he asked, giving me an alarmed look. “Something’s back there. What’s back there?”

  Chirring and flapping.

  “There’s your bats,” I said with a grin. “We’ve woken them up. Thousands of them guarding billions.”

  He looked at me sharply, with a very unprofessional wildness in his eyes. “The other chamber’s beyond this wall of stones. Enclosed?”

  “Not entirely. Somewhere up high, those bats’ve got a way in and out. It might be possible to get in that way, if you had a real spelunker in charge. When you bring in workers to move these cartons of money, better make it a no smoking zone.”

  “What? Why?”

  I shone the flash on the wall with its near pebble-stone look. “There’s as much bat guano in there as money.”

  “So what?”

  “So the stuff is flammable. They make explosives out of it. Unless you got money to burn, Agent Buckley, keep the smoking lamp out.”

  Buckley was studying that rocky wall as if maybe he could say, Open Sesame, and a door would open in it.

  “You’ve been behind here,” he said softly, pointing the flash in one hand and gesturing with the other.

  “Actually, I built that wall, or re-made it, after I broke through with a backhoe and took a little look around the chamber beyond. Which is, by the way, larger than this one.”

  Buckley sucked in air—it was damn near a gasp. Then he frowned at me. “You closed it back up again?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Partly with the backhoe. Also used a little square of plastic explosive that somebody had generously left attached to the starter in my car. I hung on to it in case of emergency.”

  That made him blink, but he asked for no further details.

  I shone the flash toward him, not in his eyes, but still putting him in the spotlight. “So are we done here, Agent Buckley? Have you seen enough?”

  He frowned at me. “You have to be kidding. I haven’t seen anything except a pile of rubble against the back wall of this cave.”

  “You heard the bats, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know what I heard, or what I believe.”

  I shrugged. “Well, I don’t expect payment until you’ve excavated this site and recovered the money and other goodies. I’ll take your word. If you can’t trust Uncle Sugar, who can you trust?”

  He was shaking his head. “No. No, no, no. We’ve come this far. I need to see it. Now, Mr. Hammer.”

  That desperate gleam in his eyes spoke volumes.

  “Buckley, why would I make this long trip in the company of a fed if I was trying to pull something?”

  I sensed something was wrong, and I admit having suspicions about this guy from the start—a Treasury agent working as a lone wolf, wanting me to contact him only by way of a cell number, with a willingness to offer a civilian a billion-dollar finder’s fee the way a dentist promises a kid a lolly-pop before the drilling.

  But I didn’t know he was dirty until he went for the .38 in the cross-draw holster, only my .45 was out and on him before he could jerk the gun free. His eyes were wide and so was his open mouth and his nostrils flared, like a rearing horse reacting to a rattler. He thought he was looking at death as I trained the .45 on him with one hand and the beam of the big flash with the other, purposely blinding him.

  “You’re lucky you’re a fed,” I said. “Putting a bullet in you isn’t worth the red tape… Let’s have those hands up.”

  Blinking at the brightness, he said, “Hammer, be reasonable. You can still have that finder’s fee. We can just forget this little bump in the road between us.”

  “Agent Buckley, you never intended to pay me that finder’s fee. You were going to leave me dead somewhere, weren’t you? You’ve spent a career chasing tax offenders, at government pay rates. Now you’ve located the hidden funds to end all hidden funds, and the boodle is right here near your grasp… but as a fed yourself, you can’t even claim a finder’s fee.”

  I caught something flash out of the corner of my eye and felt the burning sensation cut across the upper edge of my wrist before the echoing thunder of the gun caught up with it, and that searing pain popped my fingers open and the .45 thudded to the hard dirt floor. A wide red welt of torn flesh right at the join of hand and wrist was the end result of some very fancy shooting.

  I hadn’t heard him come in. He must not have driven his vehicle inside the cave. He had followed the voices and walked quietly through the darkness to where those high-beam headlights pinpointed us. My flash, still gripped in my left hand, swung over to catch the lanky frame of Frank Hellman approaching in a charcoal suit better than mine or even Buckley’s, Savile Row perhaps, a Glock in his right fist pointed my way as he flashed that confident smile I’d seen at the Canterbury Club where he had first shown off his marksmanship skills.

  The tall, thin, youthfully handsome financial advisor with those touches of gray at his temples stopped five or six feet from me. “Mr. Hammer, I’ve proven you wrong. You said shooting only counts when someone else is firing at you. But it also counts if you shoot somebody before they can fire at you.”

  “Point taken,” I said. I felt the blood dripping around either side of my right wrist, but no serious flow was going.

  Buckley had put his hands down. He came over to Hellman, saying, “Jesus, I thought I’d lost you outside of Albany. You worried the hell out of me, Frank. This maniac might have shot me!”

  I ignored this piss-ant display, preferring to speak to Hellman, in whose direction my flash beam stayed. “The feds can’t pay an employee a finder’s fee, but your people sure can… right, Frank?” My laugh was loud enough to rate an echo. “You two have been in on this from the start, playing me from either side.”

 
; Hellman shrugged. “That’s right. It’s not very complicated, really. A finder’s fee of a billion is nothing when it leaves another eighty-eight… not to mention all those deeds and stocks and bonds. An ideal way to infuse new capital into an old but profitable business.”

  “So we’re back at the Pontis,” I said, wiping the blood from my wrist onto my suitcoat; it burned but not bad. “Fitting. That’s enough money to make you the new don, or whatever it’s called in this brave new era.”

  “CEO will do. There’s a crisis of leadership among the Pontis and somebody strong has to step forward.”

  “But somebody else strong was planning to, right, Frank? Rudy Olaf. That evil old man has dreams of taking over a criminal empire himself… he wants to be CEO of Ponti Enterprises, too, right? So you had to beat him to it. You got your chance when Rufus Tomlin put you in touch with Sing Sing’s favorite librarian, before his release. Your job was to get things ready for Olaf to step in and take over the Ponti throne. Olaf knew all about the billions, thanks to his pal Brogan, who helped Marcus Dooley fill this cave with mob goodies and seal it up after. Only Olaf didn’t share with you where those goodies were hidden, did he?”

  Hellman seemed impressed and maybe a little surprised. “You really aren’t stupid as you look, Hammer.”

  Buckley muttered, “How could he be?”

  I went on: “So while your client was tied up with getting out of stir and dealing with the city government and other fun and games, you figured to snag it away from him, before he got the chance. And I was your way in—the hard-ass private eye rumored to know where the billions were storehoused.”

  The smile on Hellman’s smug face had faded. He was thrown off balance by me knowing as much as I did.

  “I won’t confirm or deny any of that, Hammer. It’s all moot now. All that’s left is to make sure you haven’t led us on a snipe hunt. We’re going to see what’s on the other side of that wall.”

  I swung the flash from Hellman to the pebble-and-rock wall. “I can save you the trouble, Frank. It’s the Lost Dutchman’s Mine. It’s Eldorado.” Then I brought the beam back in his direction. “But I’m afraid I left my backhoe in my other pants.”

  The smug smile was back. “I was prepared for this contingency, Mr. Hammer… Roger, my car keys are here in my right-hand suitcoat pocket. Get them, would you?”

  Buckley did, having to juggle his own flash to do so.

  Then Hellman said, “Go get me the duffel bag in the trunk.”

  With a nod, Buckley disappeared quickly into the darkness, footsteps echoing and diminishing.

  “Explosives?” I asked.

  Hellman nodded, the smug smile widening but not showing those impressive teeth. “An educated guess. I knew the theory had the hoard stashed somewhere in these mountains, and that these two caves had been the chief candidates. I figured you might wall it up in a side shaft or something.”

  The echo and increasing volume of footsteps announced Buckley’s return. Hellman handed the T-man the Glock and took the duffel bag from him, walking it over to the solid wall of smashed-together rubble. From the bag he took a pliable square of yellow putty-like material that I took to be plastic explosive. He molded five such squares, each set several feet apart on the wall, roughly making a connect-the-dots circle. I could just make out the blasting caps stuck into the blobs. From the duffel bag he also removed a spool of yellow plastic detonator cord that he used to daisy-chain the charges.

  “Mr. Hammer,” Hellman said as he came over, “you’ll want to accompany us.”

  This suggestion was amplified by Buckley jamming the nose of the Glock in my back. Hellman and I got in the back seat of Buckley’s Buick Regal, which he backed up until we reached the shaft of daylight near the cave’s opening. Then I was instructed to get out, and prodded with the gun again until we all three were just outside the cave in daylight thinning to dusk. Not far away a silver Mercedes, obviously Hellman’s ride, was parked off to one side on the steep grassy slope.

  I was directed to stand away and to one side of the opening with Buckley putting that rod in my neck now and Hellman likewise avoiding the opening when he used a hand-held detonator to set off the charges.

  The explosion sounded farther away than reality, and the boom echoed big but died away fast. I expected smoke to billow out the opening, but none came. The cavern was just too deep and large and, if that wall had given way, the smoke would follow the bats up and out through some high crevice.

  You could hear them escaping, the flapping of wings en masse and the chilling scree of their song.

  Buckley had an anxious expression while Hellman’s smugness had been replaced by satisfaction. The latter was clearly in command, the Treasury agent with the big bad rep turning servile around the would-be mob CEO.

  Hellman said, “Roger, get back in your car and drive inside and park perhaps six feet from that wall, with your high beams on, so we can see what we’ve uncovered. May take a little while for that smoke to clear… But first, give me my car keys and my gun.”

  Buckley nodded, handed his partner the items, and slipped back inside the cave. Glock in hand, Hellman marched me over and directed me to get behind the wheel of the Mercedes, then came around and got in on the rider’s side. He looked over at me warily, handing me the keys.

  “No hero stuff, Hammer. Drive on in there and help put some light on the subject. You go faster than a crawl, and I’ll put one through your head. You are fast outliving your usefulness, after all.”

  I drove through the narrow entry, almost scraping one side of the vehicle. The windows were up and the air conditioning on low, and I smelled only the faintest trace of smoke. The headlights cut through the darkness and smoky wisps floated like yolk in egg-drop soup, nothing substantially limiting visibility, certainly not the fog-like conditions I might have expected after that explosion.

  “You’re doing fine,” Hellman said, and I floored it while throwing an elbow into his throat and he was too busy gurgling and choking to fire his weapon. The Mercedes made a purring roar as I gave him another elbow in the side of the head and that made him groggy, and seconds from crashing into what was left of the wall, I opened the car door and threw myself out, rolling into the darkness as the vehicle’s nose smashed into the wall and Hellman crunched a spider’s web into the windshield.

  The Mercedes shut itself off, the engine crumpling like a paper cup, but it didn’t explode—cars aren’t the fire bombs movies make them out to be. The headlights were out. But I was off in the relative safety of the darkness, and with the echo of the crash dying away, I could hear Buckley’s desperate yells: “Frank! Frank! My God, Frank! Jesus!”

  Somewhere in this darkness, on this dirt floor, was the wedding-gift .45. But the odds of me finding it in all this darkness, all this vastness, sucked to hell. And I hadn’t bothered with a hideout gun, figuring they’d frisk me, which they hadn’t.

  Maybe I was just as dumb as I looked…

  Over by the wreckage, Hellman was stumbling out, staggering out, having to crawl down from the smashed upraised vehicle, helped by Buckley. If I’d been closer, I could have jumped them. Hellman was like a drunk, the whites of his eyes stark against the smeared and dripping red of his face, giving him a crazed look.

  But I’ll give him this much: he still had the Glock in hand. And once Buckley seemed certain his partner could stand on those two shaky legs, the T-man pulled his own weapon, that .38 on his hip, and then they both went fishing for me in the dark, sending their flashlight beams crisscrossing.

  Quietly I crawled behind a boulder. I was hurting. When I jumped from the car, I’d landed on my bad side, and rolling had aggravated where the two .22s had punched me in the chest. I was breathing hard and every intake felt like a kick. I slowed my breathing, tried to keep it quiet. Tried to be the quietest thing in this vast cool cave.

  Buckley said, “Maybe he hurt himself!”

  “Jumping from the car, yeah,” Hellman managed. He sounded out of b
reath. He was hurting, too.

  “Prick doesn’t have a gun. He’s no threat.”

  “Roger, take a goddamn look at me. Hammer’s always a threat.”

  “I say fuck him. I say we take a look. It’s what we came for, isn’t it?”

  “Okay. Okay. But stay alert. That guy is batshit.”

  My breathing was slowing to normal. I hurt but I wasn’t in pain. Quietly, carefully, staying so low I was almost crawling, I moved out into the darkness.

  I wanted a look myself.

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure-dome decree…

  The Buick was parked at an angle and its headlights revealed a hole wider and taller than the one my backhoe had made, which had been just wide enough for Velda and me to enter side by side. This was a portal, a big ragged window onto the adjacent chamber where all those over-size cartons were stacked six high, making a fortress whose front wall was fifty feet wide while the massive rest of it yawned into the darkness like the Great Wall of China—eighty thousand cartons worth. That warehouse where they burned Charles Foster Kane’s sled had nothing on this place. Smoke from the plastique explosion drifted like lazy fog, giving the bizarre tableau a haunting, unreal look.

  I risked moving closer, and other aspects of the chamber presented themselves. There were piles of black pellets everywhere, on the floor, massed on top of the cartons, heaps of the stuff as high as a man’s waist, elsewhere just scatterings. Hellman said I was batshit, but that’s just an expression. This was the real thing, created over years and years of the grotesque flying vermin making a home out of this crypt of cash.

  And off to one side were the discarded skeletons of butchered mob soldiers draped in shrouds of black bat droppings.

  They were in there, Hellman and Buckley, their flashlight beams stroking the cartons as if those cardboard vessels were the soft inner thigh of a beautiful woman. They had guns in hand, but their backs were to me. They had forgotten me. They didn’t even notice the crap piles they were all but wallowing in. Maybe that was because they could see, on the nearest carton—where I’d slit it open last year to collect a modest fee for my trouble—fat stacks of green were waiting.