A Treasure Deep (10 page)

“One of two,” Perry replied.

The woman dropped her eyes and looked at his
bare chest, then raised them again. Her face flushed slightly.

“I wonder if I might have a moment of your
time,” she said. This time her words were more certain.

She recovers quickly, Perry thought. “I was
napping, and I have to work tonight. I’m not really in a mood for
questions.”

“I’m Mayor Anne Fitzgerald, and this is Bob
Vincent. He’s the head of our planning department.” Perry gave a
short and simple nod, which Bob returned. “We were just out at your
work site.”

“Mayor?” Perry said.

“Yes, mayor. I noticed your caravan of
equipment go through town, and since we had no record of permits
for construction, we thought we would take a look.”

“We’re not building, and we’re not in city
limits,” Perry said. “I don’t understand your interest.” He was
being short with her, and a twinge of remorse nagged at him.

“Problems don’t stop at borders, Mr. Sachs. I
spoke to some of your employees, but they just stonewalled me.”

“Who did you speak to?”

“Big guy . . . um . . . ,” the woman
began.

“Jack Dyson,” Bob chimed in.

“Ah, Jack. I’ll have to give him a bonus.”
Perry smiled.

The mayor’s face turned sour. “We may be a
small town, Mr. Sachs, but we are not stupid. We have certain
rights and powers, and I intend to use them.”

“Really?” Perry asked. “Like what?”

“Listen, Mr. Sachs, I just need a few
questions answered.”

“No.” Perry was blunt. “Everything we are
doing is within the scope of law. Trust me. I had six attorneys
working on it. We’re breaking no laws, local, county, or state. Our
work requires”—he paused for a moment, searching for the right
phrase—“a certain measure of discretion.”

“Secrets, you mean,” the woman snapped.

“That’s one way of putting it, Mayor. Now if
you’ll excuse me, I have only a short time to catch a few winks,
and I’d like to catch every one.” He started to close the door.

“I have only a few questions. It won’t take
too long.”

“With all due respect, this has already taken
too long.” Perry closed the door, peeled his shirt from his back,
and crawled back on the bed, not bothering to remove his jeans. He
listened carefully. The knocking didn’t return. He heard several
indistinguishable words. The tone, however, was clear. “Temper,
temper, Mayor,” he said softly, then closed his eyes. He heard the
sound of a car motor starting.

ANNE STORMED BACK to the pickup, cursing under her
breath. Bob followed quietly and took his place behind the steering
wheel. He fastened his seat belt and avoided eye contact.

“Who does he think he is?” Anne snapped. “He
can’t treat us this way.”

“I think he just did,” Bob replied.

“This goes beyond the pale. I’m tired of city
people thinking we’re nothing but backwoods idiots. He probably
thinks we drink moonshine at barn dances. This is Southern
California, and our citizens are every bit as erudite as the people
he hobnobs with.”

“You may be overreacting, Anne,” Bob said
softly. “He has a point. He’s outside our sphere of influence, and
if he wants to keep secrets, he can. He sure seems good at it.”

“But why? What are they doing that requires
such mystery? It makes no sense.”

“Who knows? Maybe they’ve found a
treasure.”

“Whatever it is, I’m going to find out.”

Bob sighed. “Don’t you think you may be
pushing this too far? You’ve already grilled the supervisor at the
site, called every motel in town until you found where Mr. Sachs
was, then banged on his door until you awakened him from his nap,
and immediately barraged him with questions.”

“It wasn’t a barrage, just my attempt to open
communications and find out what is going on under our noses.”

“We’re lucky he didn’t come out
swinging.”

“You would have protected me, Bob. It’s your
duty.”

“Sachs looked like he could take care of
himself. We might be safer banging on the muzzle of a sleeping
bear.” Bob backed the car out of the parking slot and started for
the street.

“He wouldn’t have hurt us. He has kind
eyes.”

“Kind eyes, eh?” Bob laughed. “They looked
like sleepy eyes turned angry.” Bob stopped the truck where the
parking lot met the street. “Back to the office?”

“No,” Anne said without hesitation.
“Sheriff’s substation.”

“Tell me you’re joking,” Bob shot back.

“No joke. These guys have crossed the wrong
girl. The only people that keep secrets that tightly held to their
chest are government types and crooks.”

“You can’t be serious,” Bob protested. “They
didn’t sneak into town; they drove right through in broad daylight.
They’ve taken rooms in a motel and not just one room, but a whole
wing of them. Doesn’t sound like a Mafia project to me.”

“Then why the big brush-off? Why stonewall us
at every question? They’ve got something up their sleeve, and I
want to have a peek.”

Bob cranked the wheel and pulled onto the
main street. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he admitted.

“Have I ever led you astray?” Anne asked.

Bob cut a glance her way then returned his
gaze forward. He said nothing.

“I’M NOT SURE I like this.”

Gleason Lane gazed down at the printout of
the latest GPR. He was seated on a canvas camping chair. Brent was
seated next to him.

“What’s not to like?” Jack Dyson asked. He
carried a bottle of mineral water with him. It was a passion for
which he endured a thousand jokes. “The ground changing on
you?”

“No,” Gleason said, with a subtle shake of
his head. He ran a hand through his hair then adjusted his glasses.
“Brent and I have run the program we designed, and it’s
confusing.”

“The one that blends the surveys into a
single composite?” Jack asked.

“Yeah. Look.” Jack joined Gleason at the
table and gazed over his shoulder. What he saw was a mass of lines
and colors. Gleason ran his finger along the printout. “We can see
this on the computer, but the printout lets us see more at one time
than can be viewed on a computer monitor.” He tapped a blank area
on the left side of the page. “This is an enhanced image based on
the surveys. It’s the virtual X on the treasure map. As you can
see, it lacks density, implying that it’s—”

“Hollow,” interjected Jack. “We expected
that.”

“We did expect that, and as we saw with our
earlier, preliminary surveys, there appears to be a change in the
density of materials running from twenty-five meters southeast of
the hollow area to our target area. I still think that it
represents an ancient trench.”

Jack could see the multicolored lines
converge into a tight pattern that looked like a road. “What are
those?” Jack leaned over Gleason’s shoulder and pointed at several
dark objects that lined the path of the ancient trench.

Brent answered, “That’s the puzzle. We don’t
know what they are. They’re not large and seem to be made of a
dense material or maybe filled with something.”

“Like what?”

“Again, that’s the mystery,” Gleason
answered.

“Could they be hoards of something?” Jack
wanted to know.

“I suppose,” Gleason said, “but we won’t be
able to tell until we dig one up.”

“I count six of them,” Jack said. “Why do
they show up darker the farther from the site they are?”

Gleason shrugged. “My guess is that the
farther away they are, the closer to the surface they are.”

“That makes sense,” Brent added. “The
readings show that the trench descends toward here.” He pointed at
the blank area of the page. “Whoever built this started twenty-five
meters over there and kept digging until they had a sloping
trench.”

Jack thought for a moment. “Not a trench,
gentlemen, a ramp.”

“Why a ramp?” Brent asked. “If you’re going
to bury a treasure, why not dig a hole in the ground like the
pirates did?”

“It all depends on the kind of treasure,”
Jack said. “There may be other factors too. How deep is the
target?”

Gleason answered. “Deeper than our equipment
can read. The image we have is just the top of whatever is down
there. We may need to bring in more powerful ground survey
equipment. We hadn’t anticipated this kind of depth.”

“So we know where it is but not how
deep.”

“We know the top of it is fifteen meters
below grade,” Gleason said. “That’s the equivalent of fifty feet .
. . over four stories below ground.”

“Pretty deep hole for an ancient people to
dig,” Jack said. “I know I wouldn’t want to be on the shovel team
that digs out the last few feet of dirt. If the ground gives way,
you’d be killed and buried all at the same time. But not
necessarily in that order.”

“There’s a cheerful thought,” Gleason said.
“So you think they dug out a sloping ditch and used it as a
ramp?”

“Exactly.”

“Wait a minute,” Brent said. “A deep ditch
can collapse as easily as a deep hole. The situation could be just
as deadly.”

“Right you are, my young friend, but you’re
overlooking the obvious.”

“Which is?”

“Shall I tell him?” Jack said to Gleason.

“How else is he going to learn?”

“You’re assuming a ditch with vertical
sides,” Jack explained. “A ditch with sloping sides would be much
safer for the workers and wouldn’t require as much shoring.”

“But it would require much more time and
manpower.”

“Perhaps,” Jack said. “What’s your survey
show?”

Jack watched as the young intern studied the
wide paper resting on the folding table. “A ditch. A wide
ditch.”

“That’s what I see. I also think we’ll find
those dark objects are the remains of the shoring, stacked and
neatly buried. The years have compressed them under the weight of
the dirt.”

“So when do we start digging?” Brent asked.
“I’m dying to see what’s down there.”

“We all are, kid, but we do it by the book.”
Jack finished off his water and tossed the bottle in a nearby
plastic trashcan. “Let’s flag those dark objects. Once you have
that done, I want a crew to chalk the ground indicating the center
line of the ancient trench, its width, and each object we know
about. The drilling rig is ready to take core samples. Once we’ve
done the preliminary work, then we’ll get our hands dirty.”

“Can’t we just dig a hole?” Brent asked.

“In due time,” Jack said. “And due time will
be soon. Now let’s get to it. I want the flags in place and
chalking done before Perry gets back.”

“ARE YOU TELLING me ‘no,’ Greg?” Anne made no effort
to conceal her frustration. “I won’t accept that.”

Sergeant Greg Montulli leaned back in his
desk chair. It protested with a loud squeak. As ranking deputy
sheriff, Montulli was in charge of the Tejon substation of the Kern
County Sheriff’s Department. While larger cities provided their own
police force, Tejon contracted with the county for police
protection. Greg Montulli had been a deputy for twenty-six years,
and now at the age of forty-seven, he was showing the results of
middle age and too many hours behind a desk. “What do you want from
me, Mayor?”

“I want you to go up there and find out what
Sachs Engineering is planning.”

“Has any law been broken?” Greg asked. He
stroked his thick, graying mustache. “Unless there has, I won’t get
any farther than you.”

“Since I don’t know what they’re doing, I
don’t know if any laws have been broken.” Anne saw Greg cut a look
at Bob, who was sitting in one of the side chairs near Greg’s broad
metal desk. She followed his gaze in time to see Bob shrug. “Knock
it off,” Anne snapped.

“What?” Bob said with feigned shock.

“That thing men do, looking at each other in
a way that says, ‘The woman’s lost her marbles.’”

“I’m just sitting here being an obedient
employee of the city,” Bob said.

“Mayor,” Greg began, “I can go out there and
ask questions. But they can stonewall me too.”

“But you’re a cop. You show up in your
uniform and ask pointed questions, and they’re bound to tell you
what’s going on.”

Greg shook his head. “This isn’t the Old
West, Mayor.

It’s improper of me to misuse police
authority. I can ask questions, but unless I have reason to believe
that they’re there against the property owner’s wishes, or that
they’re involved in an illegal activity, my hands are tied. I
suppose I could call the landowners—”

“I already did that,” Anne admitted. “I
called them from the car. They said they knew all about it and that
Sachs was there with their blessing.”

“You don’t let any grass grow under you feet,
do you? There’s nothing I can do.”

“So you won’t even try?” Anne said the words
like a mother shaming a child. “You can’t be bothered enough to go
ask a few questions?”

“Mayor, if you tell me to go, I’ll go, but I
don’t want you to think that I’m going to drive into the hills,
flash my badge around, and come back with signed confessions.”

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that they’re
keeping everything secret?”

“A little, but not much. We’ll know in time.
From what you’ve said about the equipment, they plan on doing some
significant work. It’s an open area, so we should be able to see
something.”

“What if the owner puts up a ‘no trespassing
sign’?” Anne inquired.

“Then we don’t trespass without being aware
of a crime or obtaining a warrant.”

“This is unbelievable,” Anne said with
frustration.

“Look, Mayor,” Greg began, “I’ve got a couple
of things to do here, then I’ll take a drive up there and introduce
myself. Maybe a softer approach might work.”

“What do you mean, softer?”

Neither man said anything. Anne looked at
Bob, who raised his hands. “I’m just sitting here, Mayor.”