An Eye for Gold Page 14

  “Who’s calling please?”

  “Doctor Umberto Rodriguez.” He let his R’s roll. He was feeling good.

  “One moment” The line clicked as he was put on hold.

  “St, it will be only uno momento, porque your boss will want to speak with me” he told the empty telephone.

  The line clicked on again. He heard a man’s voice, quick and snappish. “Why are you calling me?”

  “All, Morgan, good evening. I have good news for you.”

  “Not now.”

  “No, of course” Umberto cooed, his spirits so high that he bowed deferentially toward the phone, even though his listener could not see him. Then he let his power suffuse his voice with a more martial air. “I am in Wendover; just crossed the state line. I will be in Salt Laky City in about two hours. Where shall we meet?”

  “Meet?”

  “Yes. I think when you hear what I have to tell you, you will be most pleased that you have come,” he said, letting it sound un poquito threatening.

  There was a pause, then: “No. Later. Be at the Saltair Marina, nine P.M. You know the place?”

  “Yes, yes. I am the biologist, verdad? I have been to this lake of yours to study your Franklin’s gulls.”

  Morgan again did not answer immediately. When he did, his voice was tight with constrained rage. “Bring your damned binoculars, then!”

  Umberto chuckled in spite of the counter-threat that oozed from the other man’s voice. “Hasta nueve” he crooned, then replaced the phone on its hook. He smiled and caressed the grip of the instrument as he removed his hand and closed his eyes, as if remembering a moment of illicit sex stolen on a warm afternoon. He raised the hand to his cheek and felt the warm plumpness of his own face with admiration. “Umberto, Umberto,” he sang to himself, “Tú estas un hombre ingenioso”

  LAUREL DIETZ PULLED the pickup truck up by the unloading dock at the assay lab in Reno. Her hands clenched the steering wheel tightly. The hope, the anticipation of actually knowing something had her wound up so tight that she was almost dizzy.

  She had timed her arrival well. There were few cars in the lot. The day shift would have left, and she had guessed correctly that only a small crew would be on during the evenings. Donning her Gloriana Mine ball cap, she hopped out of the cab of the truck and searched for someone to charm into unloading the samples for her.

  She quickly found a willing mound of muscle in the person of a young red-haired guy named Zeke, who smiled a special, “how ‘bout it?” smile at her. When he was done unloading, he put his thoughts into words: “Got anything goin’ for dinner?”

  Laurel smiled back her most innocent smile and deflected his question with one of her own. “You got the results of the last shipment yet?”

  Zeke stared blankly. “Aw, heck, y’ain’t got it yet? It’s all uploaded soon as it’s done.”

  “Well, yes of course, but my computer’s been down. In fact, if it gets out that I lost them, well . . . Can you give me another set?”

  Zeke looked left and right, as if there might be someone else around. “Well, actually I don’t have much to do with all that. And, urn, I’m the only one here just now, you see, and . . .”

  Laurel stepped a little closer to him and lowered her eyelids just a fraction. “You won’t rat on me, will you? I was supposed to have those numbers in, and you don’t know Virgil Davis, but he has this awful temper. . . .”

  Zeke gave her a smug look and hooked her ungracefully under the chin with a knuckle. “Well, now, I suppose I can get a diskette out and copy it off for you again—I mean, if you can figure out the code. There’s no names anywhere in the system, you know, for security. You got to have the code.” He looked back over his shoulder at her for reassurance as he led her into the belly of the building, past glistening machines and antiseptically-clean lab benches.

  “Wow, this is neat!” Laurel said. “I’ve never been in the lab before.”

  Zeke puffed his chest out with suddenly-assumed pride. “Oh, yeah, it’s cool. Totally robotic. The samples come in here with their bar codes and are split there, and through all the equipment there, and the numbers come out here.” He showed her into an inner office and closed the door.

  Laurel smiled at the array of computers. These, she understood.

  “You got the access code for your company, right?” Zeke asked, his doubt again rising. “I mean, shit, if anyone saw me doing this . . .”

  Laurel tapped her head. “I have it right in here.” It took me long enough to get it, she thought. Damned if I’m going to trust it to a scrap of paper after that hassle.

  Zeke leaned over the keyboard and awoke the machine from its slumbers. After one last hesitation, he typed in the password and initialized the database.

  Laurel moved Zeke aside with a flirtatious shove and got to work searching for the right codes. The numbers she was looking for would mean nothing without the index back at the mine, but once she had the assay results imbedded in these codes, she could get the index, she was sure. It was all a matter of matching the right set of numbers and then getting the map out of someone like . . . Kyle. Her hands flew expertly over the keys. Yes, here they are: last week’s assays from the mine. So that means that these other assays under our code are MacCallum’s. She whipped a floppy disk out of her shirt pocket, popped it into the drive, and began to highlight the rows she wanted to copy.

  Two minutes later, when she rose from the chair in which she’d perched herself, Zeke put a hopeful hand on her delicate little shoulder. “So how about dinner?” he said, his face growing soupy with lust.

  Laurel tipped her head perkily to one side. “I don’t have time for that,” she said cheerily. No, much better not to be seen with this guy outside of this building. Keep this interchange just as quiet as it is now. Better something quicker than dinner; something that will seal his silence. She smirked. Something no one would believe, even if he opens his bovine mouth and brags. “But how about a little you-know-what? Right here, Right now.” She glanced at the carpet. It was clean enough. “The floor will do nicely.”

  18

  AT QUARTER TO FIVE, I PHONED THE MECHANIC AND found that my truck was not yet fixed. Something about the wrong part having been delivered from the supplier. I knew I could get around Salt Lake City easily by bus or by cab, so I was not worried about transport, but I still couldn’t figure out what to do with my evening or what I wanted for dinner, so I stayed at the library and continued to read. It was an effort, but I began to understand a little about how and where gold crystallizes in the earth’s crust, about the various theories regarding why the crust had fractured and heaved as it did across the Great Basin, and about the connections between the two phenomena. Then I began to read again about gold as money.

  So I was pretty deep in thought when Ray suddenly touched my shoulder. I about jumped out of my skin. I was in the middle of the evolution of the gold standard, and had been concentrating hard to follow the logic, or illogic, of currencies. “Gol, Ray, you surprised me!” I spun around without rising from my seat, adrenaline pumping.

  Ray’s expression was watchful, as if uncertain of his welcome. He settled onto his haunches next to my chair, the posture pulling his off-duty jeans up nicely around his muscular legs. He also looked a little perturbed. Wasn’t this his town, and didn’t he have every right to come looking for me?

  I dropped my voice to the whisper appropriate for libraries. “How’d you find me?” I demanded, embarrassed that he had.

  ‘Took a few calls.” His face stiffened. “Why? Are you hiding?”

  In answer, I hung my head.

  Ray put a hand to his lips in thought. That was one of the things I liked about him: He seldom spoke without first thinking through what he had to say. It saved a lot of unnecessary clarification and rebuttals. His brow slowly knit with sadness, or worry, I was not sure which. At last, he dropped his hand and said, “Dinner?”

  “Sure.”

  He smiled shyly. “There’
s a pizza place just off campus.”

  I returned his smile with one of my own. Pizza, the next best thing to total junk food. Ray was learning the simpler, more reliable ways to my heart.

  THE PIE PIZZERIA is located just west of the university campus, downhill toward the center of the city. It’s the ultimate student hangout, although it seemed to draw young families with hungry children, too. It is accessed from a steep staircase a level down from the sidewalk. Ray and I were shown to a table back by the pinball machines, near an exposed brick wall sporting the obligatory T-shirts offered for sale. The logo emblazoned on them was pretty good, as these things go: the Greek symbol pi surmounted by a thick crust and lots of cheese.

  When we’d ordered (Canadian bacon and artichoke hearts, oh heaven), we settled in over our soft drinks and waited. Ray took my hand in his and stroked it with his thumb. “How was Nevada?”

  So his first call had been to Ava. That meant he was trying to be kind and forgiving, even understanding. A good stunt, considering I didn’t really understand why I’d gone to Nevada, myself. “Fine. Kind of interesting.” Fishing for something nonvolatile to offer, I said, “I got to sit up front with the pilot. It was a twin-engine Piper, really fast. She let me fly it for a while.”

  Ray smiled, happy for me. Then he waited for me to say something else.

  “Yeah, okay,” I began, figuring to throw the whole story out in the open where it could lose some of its bite. ‘Tom Latimer has this idea I could help him with this case he’s working on out there.” My best intentions thus offered, I waffled, keeping back those details to which Ray would most likely object. “It’s a fraud case. There’s this gold mining company that’s hired a wildlife biology firm to find out if there are any endangered species on this property they want to develop into a mine, and the field biologist sent in some figures that say the little critters are feeling just great and in fact breeding like . . .” I had almost said hell.

  Ray took this in with his usual quiet, then asked, “What’s this got to do with you?” His look had become piercing, and coming from Ray’s blue eyes, that was somewhat devastating. He had hopes of making detective with the Salt Lake City police, and he had the knack. He had cut right through the fuzzy edges of what I was not saying.

  “Well, nothing yet, really.” I bit my lip. I didn’t want him to know that the biologist had now met her death and that I was already spinning theories about what had caused it. I was supposed to be acting like a girlfriend, and a house guest. “Well, I guess I was supposed to say something about the gold mine. But we didn’t see it. There’s a big range fire. Lots of smoke. Sage burns so hot you don’t want to go driving around out there until it’s out.”

  Ray nodded, his version of saying, “Oh,” but he continued to stare. I would have been angry at this scrutiny except that it was half of what had hooked me on him in the first place: Beneath all his fidelity to faith and family, he took absolutely nothing on faith, and, like me, wanted every last bloomin’ thing proved to him.

  So I dug in my heels and began to stare at the table top.

  Ray squeezed my hand. “Em.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “I knew it was going to be hard for you here.”

  My throat tightened. Tears began to sting my eyes.

  We were both silent until the pizza came, and, as we ate, commented only on the succulence of the dish. We drove in silence to his mother’s house, and sat in silence in the cab of his pristine four-by-four for many long minutes after he had turned off the engine and set the brake. It was a good thing to do. In this hour of quietude, the weight of the differences between our pasts slipped away, and fears of how the future might evolve melted under the warmth of the moment. Tension slowly eased into comfort, and it once again became clear to each of us that we simply liked each other’s company. In silence, we had, as always, found a place for ourselves, and hi silence, outside the ideologies and controversies of words, we were a couple. He held my hand, I leaned my head against his shoulder, and Salt Lake City slowly faded from the rose of alpehglow into the shadows of night. Finally, he kissed the top of my head, sighed, and said, ‘Time.”

  “Yeah.”

  As he walked me up to his mother’s house, he slipped an arm around my waist, took my near hand in promenade dance pose, and swung me expertly around. I laughed. He continued to lead me, now whistling a tune. He released my waist, spun me, and fetched me back, all the time moving with such exquisite rhythm and physical communication that he was easy to follow. We wound up on Ava’s front steps under the glare of the porch fight, laughing, our arms around each other in happy embrace. Then, playfully pulling the lapel of his jacket up to shield me from the neighbors’ watchful windows, he gave me a wonderful, warm, lingering kiss. He followed it up with a playful peck on each cheek, and said, ‘Tomorrow, seven o’clock, same place. You, me. We’ll go dancing.”

  I grabbed his shirt front and pulled him down for another kiss, die clearest answer I could imagine.

  AN HOUR LATER, as I settled into my bed and Ray settled into his halfway across town, the obvious gaps in our relationship once again rose to plague me. I realized I needed someone to talk to, and it wasn’t going to be Ava. When I awoke early the next morning and faced the fact that I had a whole day to kill before I saw Ray again, the need doubled and tripled. Considering that I knew just about nobody in Salt Lake City who was not related to Ray, I set aside my usual shyness and phoned Faye Carter. “ ‘Lo?” she answered groggily, then, remembering that she was a businesswoman, added, “Oh. Um, Special Deliveries.”

  From this greeting, I surmised that she didn’t get a whole lot of calls for her services, or that I had phoned too early. ‘This is Em Hansen. You flew me to Nevada yesterday.”

  “Oh, yes. Em. What’s up, Cisco?”

  I let out my breath in relief. “Nothing, Pancho. Absolutely nothing. Can you play?”

  I heard her laugh. “Sure. Hey, I got to run an errand, but I’ll tell you what, you come with me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see. Shall I pick you up?”

  “Si, Cisco, my horse he still lame.”

  “I’m Pancho; you’re Cisco.”

  “Like I say, real lame.”

  She laughed again. “Give me an address.”

  AN HOUR LATER, we were in Faye’s Porsche, accelerating into the desert southwest of Great Salt Lake with the CD player blasting Brazilian vocals and exceedingly fine lattes in our hands. It seemed that Faye had a date to deliver something to someone somewhere in downtown Denver, and needed to sharpen a certain skill before attempting it. I had no idea what she was talking about, and I didn’t much care. The moment she had arrived at Ava’s, I had set aside my confusion over Ray, had remembered that I loved to raise hell, and that was that.

  We turned off down a side track that led back east toward the west flank of the Oquirrh Mountains. It was a lonesome place; hot, dry, and beautiful. Faye parked the car near a low hill and popped the hood, pulled out a couple of pistol cases, and set to unlocking them.

  “We’re going plinking?” I asked.

  ‘Target practice,” she said, pulling out a full-sized silhouette target and applying it with duct tape to a rusting, bullet-riddled oil drum that lay up against the nearest rise. “You like revolvers or automatics?”

  “Ah, rifles, actually.”

  “Don’t own one.”

  “Mm.”

  She said, “Perhaps I am being presumptuous. You of course don’t have to shoot But I got to bring my aim back up to snuff here before today’s run.”

  “Why?”

  “This time I’m not carrying people.”

  “Oh,” I said, not the least bit certain what she meant. And somehow I didn’t want to ask, like maybe this was a personal question, or the answer was something I didn’t want to know.

  She adjusted her aviator sunglasses and tossed me a pair of ear plugs and some safety glasses and popped on a set of shooter’s muffs
, then set to work loading a six-shot snub-nosed Ruger .357 with a speed loader. She snapped the chamber shut and laid it back down on the open gun case, then applied a clip of bullets to the Colt .45, slipped it into an odd looking holster, and set it back into the other case. About twenty feet from the silhouette target, she unfolded a low camp chair and clipped the .45 holster underneath it The Ruger she tucked into a holster inside the back of her jeans, and she draped the voluminous Housing of her soft rayon shirt over the protruding butt. A concealed weapon. I began to have suspicions about what she was delivering to Denver. I likewise began to be a little less certain about playing Thelma and Louise.

  “You stand between me and the car,” she said cheerily, pointing the opposite direction from the target. “No way I’m going to shoot at that”

  I backed away, squeezing the little foam plugs into my ears, and sat right down on the front fender of the Porsche. I have perfect respect for firearms.

  Faye said, “You wait a moment or two and then yell, ‘Now!’ “ She turned her back to me and waited, shrugging a sudden tension from her shoulders.

  “Now!”

  Faye whipped the Ruger out of its hidden holster and unloaded it into the target in three two-shot bursts. Then she walked up to the oil drum and had a look. “Dang,” she said. “I’m rusty, all right.”

  She had stitched the target right across the heart, missing the penultimate ring that circled it with only one shot. “Urn, if that’s rusty, what’s oily look like?”

  She laughed. “Oh, when I’m hot I can do a lot better than this. It’s a Zen thing.”

  “Oh.” ‘

  Faye returned to her position, cranked another speed-loader full of bullets into the Ruger, and let fly with some more premeditated shooting. I quickly saw what she meant. She was a vicious good shot Needless to say, I began to feel a little intimidated. After emptying a third, fourth and fifth load into the target, she asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to have a go?”