An Eye for Gold Page 5

  He sighed again and closed the lid of the suitcase. All this would have to wait. How long? A week? Lucky that his first-class ticket could be so easily exchanged for a later date; no, on second thought, luck had nothing to do with it. An absent smile curved his lips. First class was just exactly that: full and complete recognition of his place in the universe, at long last. First class was, “Of course, sir, Mr. Giles, sir, we can change your reservations, no problem,” and “Let us look after these other niggling details so that your day can be more comfortable . . .”

  He slipped the suitcase back inside the heavy plastic bag that protected it from the gray dust that filtered insidiously in from the desert through the joints in the steel walls of the storage locker. Using quick, sure motions, he taped the bag shut and replaced the roll of packaging tape in the cardboard box he kept there to hold such little necessities. He looked around the otherwise empty storage locker, thinking. The case really deserved a stand of some sort, something beyond this film of plastic to keep it up off the cement floor. But it had to be something special. A mahogany luggage rack, perhaps. He would look for one on his next trip to San Francisco, or L.A. Perhaps he could small away over the weekend, and in some small way release himself from the agony of the wait.

  He nodded to himself, affirming that plan. Then he straightened up, cracked open the door, and looked to see if anyone was coming. The pavement beyond his storage unit was empty save for his car, an eight-year-old Honda Civic. Stephen curled his upper lip in disgust. That car was an abomination, but a necessary camouflage. As if to keep it in its place, he had parked it several doors away.

  Taking care to open the door to his unit no farther than was necessary, to prevent sudden passersby from seeing what he kept so carefully hidden within, he slipped out and applied his heavy-duty padlock to the hasps. Then he hurried across to the Honda, got in, fired the ignition, and pulled away, following a circuitous route in and out through several aisles of the storage facility before cutting through the electronically-controlled gate and back into the world of mediocrity that waited beyond it.

  As he turned onto the road that would lead him back into Reno, his job at the Bureau of Land Management, and another day as John Q. Nobody, he felt the familiar pressures rise.

  EARLY MORNING SHADOWS cast by ranging pickup tracks still reached like fingers down the main drag of Winnemucca, Nevada as Umberto Rodriguez, Ph.D., strolled into The Griddle, a homey little cafe where everyone who was anyone in the mining industry took their breakfast. He was in a good mood, an expansive mood. With the extinguishment of Pat Gilmore from among the breathing, his plan had become much simpler.

  He had timed his arrival well—not too early and not too late—to make certain that there would be many people already there eating their eggs and hash browns and sucking up their coffees like the silly pigs they were, but still few enough that he could easily chose from among several still-empty booths and tables. That way he could nod graciously to anyone of importance, even raise a hand in casual salute, but command his own place in the room. Let them come to him.

  The Griddle was a gathering place in part because some mines provided minivan transit from and to Winnemucca for their employees, and using a cafe as a gathering point meant they arrived at work well fueled. Such peasant accommodations were not for Umberto Rodriguez; he would drive to his office at the mine himself in his own elegantly appointed Ford Explorer, at a per-mile price to his employer, of course.

  On this morning, Umberto found several booths filled with scruffy geologists and unimaginative engineers from the local mines. Along the counter he recognized a few of the miners who were content to spend their lives moving loads of ore for the rich investors who would profit by their sweat. Like so many burros, thought Umberto, and then, without realizing the ambiguity in his own thinking, he gave over half a second to despising them for how well their work actually paid them. More than I make, he thought bitterly. I who am educated . . .

  One of the geologists did address him. “ ‘Lo Bert,” he said, but did not invite him to sit down. Umberto stared at him, trying to recall his name. He could not. Ah well, if he couldn’t remember, then the man was not important. But the husky man seated to his right was. Virgil Davis, superintendent at Gloriana Mine, a high-ranking employee of Granville Resources. He rarely saw Davis here, probably because the man lived up near the mine.

  Umberto’s interest in the occupants of this table rose. Was this a breakfast meeting, called in reaction to the crisis they faced after the previous night’s events? Or did they know yet that Pat Gilmore was dead? Regardless, he would let them raise the topic first, but must look suitably grave. He must give Davis just the right greeting, a peer’s acknowledgment of his prominence within the corporation; bowing his head slightly, he passed his upturned right palm from left to right at the level of his navel. Yes, that was perfect.

  Davis nodded, and continued to chew his toast.

  Rodriguez lingered just an instant longer. Far more interesting than Davis was another mine worker present, Laurel Dietz. Laurel was una rubia, a choice young blonde with blue eyes as big as lakes. To Laurel he presented a sympathetic smile. She blinked back distractedly and took a suck at her orange juice. Perhaps she has not yet had her morning coffee, thought Umberto, as he passed onward, now wishing indeed that any of them, especially Laurel, had invited him to sit down. Que lástima, he would seat himself at the center table to the left, just as he had previously planned.

  He ordered the Cajun scramble and ladled sugar into his coffee, still thinking about Laurel. Perhaps she screamed at the moment of orgasm. The quiet ones often did, a kind of inverse relationship between the profane and the profound, fueled by the release of repression. Ah, she was looking his way. He smiled slightly, and nodded to her over his cup, making certain to keep his face impassive should she feel the need to cover her interest in a married man—but no, her eyes flicked away again, without so much as the tiniest dance of flirtation. She was a tough one, but worth the chase.

  Virgil Davis and another man rose from their booth and came over to Umberto’s table, but remained standing. Virgil coughed. “Sorry about your coworker,” he said.

  It was time to look grieved. Umberto lowered his gaze and let his lower lip sag from his swarthy face. “Yes. It is terrible. So young.”

  “Yeah. Well, these roads are dangerous sometimes.”

  “Yes,” said Umberto. “Perhaps a tracker fell asleep at the wheel and drifted across the road, or perhaps she herself fell asleep.” He made a long, trailing gesture with his hand, indicating the trajectory of the hapless biologist leaving the road and thus exiting this existence.

  “She wasn’t on the highway,” the other man said, staring at him blankly.

  Virgil glanced at the man out of the corner of his eye. “Oh. Umberto Rodriguez, this is John Steinhoff, our metallurgist.”

  Rodriguez inclined his head in greeting. Steinhoff continued to stare.

  Virgil coughed again, a deep, phlegmy rumble.

  “That cough sounds bad,” Umberto said conversationally.

  “It’s the smoke.”

  “Yes, I heard. Range fire over by Lovelock.”

  Virgil’s eyes slipped out of focus, then sharpened again. “Well, anyway, it’s sad about your biologist, but here’s the thing: you think it’ll slow the project down any further?”

  Umberto set his wrists at the edge of the table and steepled his fingers. He wanted to say, with some annoyance, that with someone as incompetent as Pat gone their pitiful project would most certainly speed up, but such a display of candor would not do. Instead, he said, “We shall redouble our efforts. You may depend on Intermontane Biological Consultants as always.”

  Davis smiled vacantly. “Great. Because we want to start drilling that property ASAP. How close are you to pushing the permits through the BLM?”

  “Very close, I am sure. I foresee no delays.” Umberto had in fact no idea where they were in the permitting process. That had
been Pat’s domain. Damn her obstinacy, she had managed to conceal the paperwork somewhere, and his contact at the BLM had been less than forthcoming this time.

  “How soon? I’d like to start grading the roads. I got a cat skinner just sitting up there cooling his heels.”

  “Let me make some inquiries for you. Give me your card, okay?” This was good; he was moving in already on what had been the irritating Ms. Gilmore’s territory. “And don’t worry,” he murmured soothingly. “I’ll take care of this for you.”

  WHEN THE TELEPHONE rang in Scarf ace Pete’s mobile home at Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, his middle-aged daughter Hermione answered it. She had sensed that a call would be coming, a bad news call, and had come quietly across the desert soil from her own small trailer to wait. Shirley Cook’s voice rose angry and exasperated from the other end of the wire. “I got rotten news,” Shirley said.

  “Yes,” Hermione replied.

  “Pat Gilmore is dead.”

  Hermione said nothing.

  “You hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is really the limit. You get any word on this from anyone else?”

  “No. You’re the first.”

  “I have to assume it was a road accident.” Shirley grunted. “Or not an accident, know what I mean?” she added darkly.

  “Yes.”

  “Shit, ‘Mione, this is no moment for your inscrutable Injun stuff. I called the sheriff’s office, they ain’t talking. I called the coroner’s office, same run-around. I called the paper, they’re asleep at the switch. Now you’re doing your yes-no act. Cut the shit; this is a disaster.”

  “For Pat.”

  “Of course for Pat! We’ll all miss her, boo hoo, we’ll hold a wake and grieve her later. Right now we got work to do!”

  “I hear you.”

  “Good,” Shirley said, her voice dropping promptly into the sadness she had not heretofore let herself feel. “You heard from the Salt Lake group?”

  “I’ll get back to you,” Hermione said.

  “Do that.” Shirley’s voice was on the edge of breaking down.

  Hermione heard a click as Shirley hung up the phone. She rose from the straight-backed chair on which she had been sitting to await the call, moved to the narrow bed where her father rested, and touched his shoulder. He lifted one great hand that had grown glassy smooth with the disuse of extreme age and closed it around hers. Even trembling slightly with the slow disintegration of his nervous system, his hand was, as always, cool and dry, and comforting. “What?” he asked, the sound coming as a concussive huff from his disease-riddled lungs.

  “A warrior died,” she said softly.

  “Ah. A loss. Pat Gilmore?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she tell?”

  Hermione stared out at the stark, beauty of the dry landscape, at the morning sun glinting off the glittering surface of Pyramid Lake itself. “I hope not,” she said.

  7

  FAYE BANKED THE PIPER TOWARD RENO’S AIRPORT. I had seen Reno only once before, or more precisely, had seen it fleetingly. I had been one of five squealing eighteen-year-olds packed into a Volkswagen, amped on caffeine and junk food and a mistaken sense of immortality. It had been a Saturday night, and we had turned off the highway on a whim and zipped down Virginia Avenue, right through the heart of “the action.” I was in my freshman year at Colorado College, it was spring break, life seemed like one big smorgasbord of weird experiences, and we were on a road trip to California, another five zit-faced wackos aiding and abetting each other in misspending our youths.

  Then, the excesses of a state and city which upheld gambling and other such compulsions as a manifesto of liberty had struck me differently. Then, I had found it extravagant and exciting to cruise past the dizzying displays of neon lights. Then, I had marveled at the sights of slot machines spilling right out onto the street and skinny rubes with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths skulking the sidewalks, and had wondered which of the tarted-up women counted themselves among Nevada’s legion of hookers. Then, life had seemed one big carnival of independence, and I had greeted each day with the impressionableness of a baby chicken. Now, I was almost three years past thirty, that age past which giddy eighteen-year-olds could no longer trust me. Now, life had shown itself to hold fewer possibilities and harsher repercussions. Now, I approached a Reno caught naked in the cool glare of morning, and the idea of gambling and all its attendant self-indulgences touched me with fear.

  My headphones crackled with radio calls to and from the tower as Faye brought the twin expertly down into the landing pattern, dodging between a Boeing 727 inbound from San Francisco and a private Lear jet outbound for who knew where. The air was bright and clear now; a hundred miles or more back out over the empty desert, we had passed to the south of the obscuring pall of smoke that still belched like billowing ink from the range fire. I gawked with cowgirl frankness at the jumbled Reno city scape, amazed by the dimensions of this clutter of passion-palaces that sprawled across the desert floor and sloshed up against the blue rampart of the Sierra Nevada. I noted the notch in the mountain front through which the 1849 emigrants had labored, whipping their flagging oxen up over the final grade toward the waiting gold fields and farmlands of California. South along the mountain front lay Virginia City, home of the Comstock Lode, the center of Nevada’s first rush for precious metals. Silver had been mined there first and foremost, winning Nevada the title of the Silver State.

  We touched down and taxied to the private transit terminal, where the FBI agent found his local contact waiting with a car. The Reno man was young, slender, and broad-shouldered, and had flint-black hair and skin tanned the color of strong tea. The two men stepped aside and spoke in voices too low for me to hear, their heads bowed. By the increasing tightness of my host’s brow, I gauged that something was amiss. After mulling his new information for a moment, he turned to Faye and said, “We’ll be here a couple hours longer than I expected, and will need to cover more ground. I had thought to have you pick us up in Lovelock, but you’d better make it Winnemucca. Prep a flight plan and head back there whenever you’re ready. We’ll arrive there by car by say, three P.M.”

  “You got it,” Faye answered, snapping him an off-handed salute.

  The Reno man walked up to me and offered me a hand to shake. ‘Tom Latimer,” he said, grinning at the joke the more senior agent had obviously just put him up to. “And you’re?”

  “Eleanor Roosevelt,” I growled, turning toward the older man. “Good joke you’re playing on ol’ Emmy. What’s your real name? Something embarrassing, like Basil Frisby? Or Fauntleroy Fangmire. Or does the FBI only hire men named Tom?”

  He grinned. “I knew this job would be more fun if I brought you along.”

  “And I let myself believe it had something to do with my peerless capacities as a geologist!”

  “Well, that too.”

  A third man was now approaching us. He was about forty-five or fifty but boyishly lively in his looks. He was dressed in European-cut slacks and a knit silk short-sleeved shirt, and carried himself with an easy pride and a smiling presumption of command. He came straight up to the elder of the two FBI agents and stuck out a hand to be shaken. As he did so, I saw a fourth man a few strides behind him come to an attentive stop with his hands folded just below his muscular chest. He reeked of bodyguard. The man who had approached us said, in a crisp British accent, “Roderick Chittenden here, president of Granville Resources. I came just as soon as I heard of the trouble. I understand from your man here that you’re in charge of this investigation into the species business at my prospective mine.”

  So this was a corporate big-wig, just arrived by private jet. I wondered at the exquisiteness of his timing.

  The senior FBI agent said, “This is Em Hansen, a geologist. You’ve already met ‘my man’ here.”

  I stuck out my hand to be shaken. Chittenden moved his hand toward me, flicked his gaze my way and scanned my face. His eye
s were confident, sharp, and shrewdly intelligent, and he had a dashing sort of good looks and sense of mischief about him. Having all this aimed at me was unnerving. Luckily, it lasted only a split-second before he made a decision about my potential usefulness (none) and turned his attention back to the older FBI agent. “So. What do we think here?”

  The agent smiled a heavy-lidded smile I had come to know meant he was suppressing annoyance. “We have just arrived. How can I reach you if I have questions for you?”

  Instead of looking rebuffed, Chittenden’s face took on a look of robust pleasure. He raised a finger in signal to his second. “My man will give you some telephone numbers.” He clapped the agent on the shoulder, said, “Very well then, carry on, my good fellow,” turned, and headed away, calling instructions to his bodyguard. “Get the car, James; our first meeting is in ten minutes.”

  The redoubtable James produced a card, palmed it to the agent, and tore after him, bounding along with athletic grace to open the door for his master and hand him into the backseat of a waiting silver BMW.

  As I watched them leave, I had the nasty sense that I was playing a game in which I was privy to only a few of the rules.

  AS WE LOADED into our own U.S. government plain-Jane car, I said, “So we’re going to Lovelock and Winnemucca? Is that why you rented a plane instead of flying commercial, so you could zing home from wherever you wind up? Or was it so you wouldn’t have to explain me on the expense account?”

  “All that and the job just heated up,” the agent replied, his smile vanishing.

  “Oh. Because Chittenden just—”

  “No. Because the woman we were supposed to question was killed last night.”