An Eye for Gold Page 15

  I shrugged.

  Faye opened the chamber of the gun and shucked the shells, then, leaving it open to show that it was empty, set it on the gun case. She applied a fresh target to the oil drum. I put on the safety glasses and she showed me how to close and open the chamber and work the speed loader, then demonstrated the posture I should use for shooting: feet shoulder-width apart, arms out straight, hands cradling the thick Pachmeyer grip. I eased in the trigger. As the ungodly loud blast of the gun’s discharge thumped my chest, I saw the pistol buck high from my planned aim, and a flash of burning gunpowder lit the air around my hands. Even in the brightness of the summer’s day, this was brighter. I had missed the target entirely.

  “Now that you’ve felt that, you’ll be ready for it the next time,” Faye said.

  It took more like twenty shots, but I began hitting the target with some regularity.

  Faye smiled absently. “Now think of your worst enemy. He’s after you. Going to hurt you. Rape you. Your job is to spare your own life. Your only hope to stop him is with this gun.” She pointed at the target, her face tightening with alarm. “Here he comes! Now!”

  My mind focussed instantly to a point, and I gave him three shots right in the stomach.

  Faye pursed her lips and nodded. “Nice work.”

  I felt kind of sick, right in there next to weirdly proud. I opened the chamber, shucked the shells, set the pistol down on the gun case, took off the safety glasses, and returned to my perch on the hood of the car.

  Faye moved the camp chair ten feet closer to the target and adjusted it so that she was facing ninety degrees away. Then she sat down, and, looking at me, said, “You wait a moment or two ‘til I look like I’m parking this thing, then yell, ‘Now!’ like before.” She pantomimed driving a car, both hands on the wheel, warming to her play-acting. She put out her right foot to brake and steered to the right, turning to an imaginary curb, then set an invisible hand brake. She began scrabbling around on an unseen second seat, as if picking up a package.

  “Now!” I yelled.

  In one fluid motion, Faye dropped her imaginary load, yanked the Colt out from under the seat, snapped it to her left shoulder, and pumped off two rounds, tattering the silhouette target in the solar plexus.

  “Now!”

  Two more, in the heart.

  “Now!”

  She emptied the magazine into the target’s head, dropped the pistol to the floor, whipped the Ruger out of her holster, glanced up to an imaginary rear-view mirror and right towards me. Only then did she relax. “Weak-arm shooting,” she said in explanation.

  “What if he comes up on my side of the car?” I asked.

  “Oh, I think I’ll leave that part out of today’s practice,” she replied.” I don’t want to mess up my wax job on the car.”

  “Thanks,” I said drily.

  Faye reloaded both pistols using bullets from different boxes, placing hollow points in the Ruger. In the Colt, she racked a hollow-point into the chamber, set the safety, then reloaded the clip with hollow-points, followed by a single fully-jacketed bullet. This, she explained, more fully guaranteed at least two good shots, although it was somewhat dicey to fire at someone with a jacketed bullet, as it would likely go right through and could hit something on the other side. The hollow points were the man-stoppers, designed as they were to flatten on impact and discharge all their kinetic energy into the “target,” but they more easily jammed in the automatic’s mechanism.

  She put the Ruger back into the hidden holster behind her hip rather than locking it away in its gun case. The Colt she slipped into position underneath the front seat of the Porsche.

  I began to wonder what in hell I’d gotten myself into this time.

  Driving back toward Salt Lake City, Faye said, “You were okay with that Ruger.”

  “Oh.”

  She glanced my way. “If you’re going to join the FBI, you’ve got to get used to such things.”

  I snapped around in my seat and stared at her, eyes narrowed. “Who said I was going to join the FBI?”

  Faye pulled her head back in surprise. “Hey, I only work here.”

  “Tom told you that?”

  “He said he was bringing a prospective trainee with him.”

  “Nice,” I said acidly. “Good old Tom. So tell me, are you a trainee, too?”

  “Oh, hell no. Too much like working for a living.”

  “Unlike what you’re doing today.”

  “Today I’m helping out a friend,”

  I was so angry that my mouth ran away with me. “Oh, great! And what kind of a friend? A Colombian with a kilo of something he needs dropped in somebody’s corn field?” I of course instantly wished I hadn’t said that. If I was wrong, it was insulting, and if I was right, it was about the last subject I should broach, a good way to wind up dead in a ditch somewhere. You idiot, I told myself, just reckon the price tag on that Porsche, and the hot twin-engined airplane—both nice and fast—and figure the likelihood that her whole story about being a trust fund baby isn’t a cover for where she really gets her money.

  Faye began to howl with laughter. “You think I’m running drugs’! Wow, that’s a good one!” She thumped the steering wheel with merriment

  Stunned, I measured her laughter. It bubbled and boiled out of her with joy. “Well, shit! You take me out into the desert and trot out a bunch of firearms, and—”

  “I’m transporting something to Denver that’s very small and valuable, but white powder it is not. Oh, Em, that’s a riot!”

  “What else is that small and valuable?” I asked stupidly, just before about twenty perfectly legal possibilities began to present themselves in my head. “Or should I say, what else requires someone to fly it in a private plane, for heaven’s sake?’

  Faye wiped a tear from one eye, and sniffed her laughter into control. “I told you, I get bored. I don’t fly for free, but I don’t charge my friends much over the price of gas and upkeep, especially when they offer to buy me lunch. And my service is so off the wall and variable that it makes me a good security risk. My friend phoned up last evening and asked me to carry this package today because he needed it in a hurry and because I’m about the last person anyone would expect to see carrying it around.” She considered what she’d said for a moment. “Well, actually I’m a rich kid and all that, so I suppose one might expect me to be carrying something valuable, but what I’m trying to say is, I don’t look like a delivery boy.”

  “No . . .” I said, still uncertain.

  Picking up on my tone, she said, ‘The pistol is just protection in case anyone’s watching at either end. It just wouldn’t be prudent to go without.”

  “Sure,” I said doubtfully.

  Now Faye looked at me like I was kind of nuts. “Do you wear a hat when you work in the sun?”

  I looked at my hands. “Yes, but—”

  “But what? You don’t approve of guns?”

  “Guns are tools,” I said.

  “Well, then, these guns are good tools for keeping yourself safe.”

  “I disagree,” I said. “Some people think four wheel drive is there to get them out of a jam if they get stuck. I think it gives false security, and gets you about twice as stuck. Why not just stay out of situations where you might need to defend yourself with lethal force?”

  “Make me a list,” Faye said, “and I’ll tell you where and when I’m ready to be limited by other peoples’ behaviors.”

  “Oh, come on, Faye, the shooting you were doing today was not ordinary shooting. You didn’t just learn that yesterday after your friend called up, now did you?”

  “No.”

  Faye suddenly looked embarrassed; so much so, in fact, that I almost stopped my questioning there. But this conversation had come this far, and it was time to rip it the rest of the way open. “All right, give: Where and when did you learn to handle a pistol like that?”

  Faye’s face went through a series of twitches, like she was thinking t
hrough not only what she was going to tell me, but if “I learned it over the past six months,” she said.

  “Where?” I insisted, and then, beginning to see the dawn, added, “Or should I say, from whom?”

  She gave me a silly, embarrassed display of her teeth. “Okay, so Tom taught me. And, urn, right there, where we were.”

  I leaned back in my seat and appraised Faye from a brand new angle. Well, I decided, I can scratch the nookie motive from the list of Tom’s possible agendas. Whatever he’s up to, he isn’t doing it to get into my pants, because he’s already in hers.

  19

  IN FOR A PENNY, IN FOR A POUND. ONCE FAYE HAD told me she was taking a small and valuable package to her friend in Denver, I got to asking the obvious questions, and the whole story came out. Her friend was a gem dealer who specialized in resetting antique stones in modern designs, and he needed Faye to run courier for him with a few bits of ice from which an old dame in Salt Lake City had just announced she was ready to part. It was an expensive but relatively se-cure way of shipping the goods, as Faye was unlikely to lose her way or forget to deliver. She had built up an entertaining little business handling specialty deliveries, and was successful in part because her customers knew she wouldn’t be tempted to steal. She did not need die money. And many of them knew her first socially, having met her over foie gras at Grosse Point or over escargot in Paris. “It keeps life from getting boring,” she told me, “and it makes a great tax write-off. And I love to fly, but I’m one of these weird pragmatists who needs a place to fly to.”

  I shook my head in amazement. “But what about the uniform, then? Doesn’t that make you stand out like a sore thumb? I mean, it could blow your cover.”

  “I don’t wear the uniform when I’m handling goods, only when I’m carrying passengers. It makes them feel more secure.”

  ‘Tom Latimer needs security?” Then I thought through what I was saying. “Well, I know he hates riding in helicopters, but I thought he was okay with fixed-wing craft.”

  “He is, as you could see yesterday with him falling asleep in the backseat.” I was tempted to say something acerbic like, So you’re past the uniform stage with Tom, when Faye did her own job of digging herself in deeper by adding, “I only wore the uniform yesterday because you were going to be along, and we had to make it look more legit”

  I let the particulars of her relationship with Tom go for the moment, in part because what she’d said opened an even greater can of worms. “Oh, great. So you were in on this scam to get Em to Nevada. So what’s the—”

  “No, that was a legitimate flight.”

  “You mean the FBI paid you for it? Since when do federal employees get to hire private planes for a trip they could make more cheaply and faster by public carrier?”

  Faye bit the side of her lower lip. “Well . . . Tom uses me, well, because of course I’m good, but also because I’m usually available, damn it Okay, so I don’t really charge him. He gives me what it would cost him to fly commercially. It about covers the gas. Hey, I’m building up a résumé, okay? Or I guess you call it a statement of qualifications. I get to say I’ve flown government agents around on hush-hush stuff. But Tom requires that everything be by the book.”

  “Sure. That’s our Tom,” I said, with heavy irony. I was certain that taking me to Nevada with him was anything but according to Hoyle.

  “You know what I’m saying!” Faye said with that special note of aggravation women save for defending their choice of men to other women.

  “Unfortunately, I do. Oh, lawdy, but I do.”

  “Tom is a good man,” Faye said hotly.

  “And that’s about all the more I want to know about him, if you’ll forgive me.”

  “Sure.” An angry blush began creeping up her throat.

  Sticking my foot in farther,! said, “I just want to keep it strictly professional between him and me.”

  Faye’s face reddened further.

  “Okay, so I’ve stuck my toes in past my tonsils,” I said. “I am sorry. What I’m trying to say is—”

  “No, that’s just fine,” she said, cutting me off. She took a quick breath and let it out. And focussed purposefully on her driving.

  Strict etiquette would have dictated that I let the subject drop, but this wasn’t exactly a moment for manners. “So what is his big idea, taking me to Nevada?”

  Faye gave me a quick glance, her brows drawn close with confusion. “He’s trying to recruit you. What’s so hard to understand about—”

  “Forget I asked,” I said.

  Faye braked and downshifted to catch an exit ramp off of Interstate 80, well inside the Salt Lake City limits. “So; why don’t you come to Denver with me?”

  I had my mouth half opened to say yes when it occurred to me that her invitation seemed a wee bit too pat. Had Tom put her up to it? “No, I’d be in the way. You have to do your delivery, and, well . . .”

  She gave me a nudge. “You’ll be part of my cover. Just two chicks out to Denver for the day. We can do some shopping, you can fly the plane. . . .”

  “Your offer is more than tempting, but really . . .”

  Faye made a silly face. “Hey, I don’t like to beg, but I’d really enjoy your company. All my friends here are either at work or staying home with half a dozen small children.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. “Not a local, are you?”

  “It’s not like this in Michigan.”

  “I’d have to be back by six.”

  She held up her near hand in agreement, and I gave her a high-five.

  WE SWUNG BY the FedEx station so that Faye could pick up a freshly arrived cashier’s cheque that awaited her there from her friend the dealer, which Faye was supposed to present to the seller. The packet included a bill of sale which the seller was supposed to sign, establishing authenticity, and a notarized letter of introduction and identification for Faye, complete with a photograph of her which he had signed across the face. I began to feel even more at ease. Such things can of course be faked, but I figured that even Tom Latimer wouldn’t get this exotic in making up a cover to lure me to Denver. Besides, what could he want me to do in Denver?

  We then phoned ahead to warn the old lady with the rocks that two couriers were coming, not just one, and when we arrived at her quaint twenty-room house, we all went through a little charade that we were friends dropping by for tea with dear old “Auntie.” Once we were inside and the door was closed, our warbling octogenarian turned into a pleasantly tough old broad who shook us down for identification. After we’d satisfied this protocol, Faye produced a jeweler’s loupe and took a look at the stones, which I thought garishly large. The group included a ring with a twenty-two-carat diamond shaped long before the brilliant cut had been developed and a pair of ten-carat teardrop-shaped earrings.

  The old dame was very matter-of-fact. “I just don’t have anywhere to wear them anymore, and I can support such important causes with the money,” she told us. And she was nobody’s fool. She insisted that both Faye and I submit to fingerprinting. “No offense, girls, but you’d be amazed what people try on us old biddies.”

  She took us into a study the size of my parents’ whole ranch house and worked us over with an old-fashioned stamp pad and a piece of her engraved stationery. Then she did in fact give us tea and cookies, and, ten minutes’ worth of chitchat later, we were on our way back down the walk to the car, about two million dollars richer.

  Faye carried the diamonds in a small leather purse stuck deep inside a special pouch in her shoulder bag. She sloped back out to the Porsche just as casually as if carrying only cosmetics and chewing gum. When we were a mile or so from the house, and she had stopped and started and snaked around a bit to make sure no one was following us, she said, “Aw, relax, Em. It’s only carbon.”

  “Sure, diamonds are only carbon. That’s why they stick them in pencils to write with. Graphite is only carbon! Diamonds are carbon atoms which have joined in a tetrahedral pattern wit
h other carbon atoms at great temperatures and pressures!”

  “Uh . . .”

  “I really am a geologist.”

  “But it just rolled off your tongue.”

  “No it didn’t Yesterday at the library I was reading about gold, and I got to flipping through a text on elemental minerals. And don’t tell Tom I followed up on the Nevada junket with my reading, please,”! begged. Me and my big, bragging mouth. Cats outside of bags are gone cats.

  ‘Tom? Tom who? Just tell me more about diamonds and graphite,” she said, merging onto the highway that would take us to the airport and her plane.

  “Oh. Well, carbon atoms have four electrons in its outer shell, out of a possible eight So under low temperatures and pressures, carbon atoms will readily form sheets, holding hands with three neighbors. Each atom’s fourth electron is free to roam across the surface of the sheet, and these electrons form weak bonds with the next sheet. The weak bonds are easily sheared. That’s why graphite is so soft, and such a good lubricant. Diamond is formed when all four electrons form strong covalent bonds. It jams the atoms together into a very rigid tetrahedral lattice, the strongest known. But this takes some persuasion. It’s like the atoms become highly organized and cooperative, but they’ll only make this agreement under tremendous heat and pressure, like a bunch of congressmen. So diamonds form deep within the earth’s crust, in rocks called kimberlites.”

  Faye laughed. “So diamond mines go deep into the crust?”

  “No, the miners wait until the crust gets heaved up and eroded down, bringing an old kimberlite pipe to die surface. In some places, the pipes have eroded away completely—die kimberlite decays into clay at surface conditions—and the diamonds are tumbled away by passing rivers. The diamonds have a higher specific gravity—they’re the same size but heavier—than quartz sand, so they get concentrated in pockets in the rock the river flows over. That’s called a placer deposit You can find them lying around on the beach in Namibia.”