Barbara Silkstone - Wendy Darlin 04 - Miami Mummies (12 page)

“My car broke down and we need to get to downtown Miami. It’s a matter of life and death.” I exaggerated. “We’ll pay you for your gas.”

“Don’t be insulting me. I’m mighty pleased to assist a hero lady. Just tell me where we’re headed and hang on.”

Roger and I crammed into the passenger side along with the tools, jugs, old newspapers, and cardboard coffee cups Squire had stashed in the cab. He floored old Betsy. The watermelons shifted in the truck bed which creaked ominously.

“You are a god-send,” I said.

“I like your unjustified positive attitude, missy.”

Within a few miles we had cell phone service. Roger placed a call to Peru, and then a call to the archaeological society ordering them to secure the sitting mummies, immediately. I loved watching him in action.

I called the Jag dealership. They promised to rescue Goldie. I could pick her up after they checked her out.

Forty-five minutes later we were in downtown Miami. Getting there we’d broken the watermelon truck land speed record. Twice. Squire pulled onto Tippy’s construction site. Roger and I took our dusty butts out onto the rough gravel and crumbling macadam. My back felt as if I’d been mule-kicked. A watermelon truck does not ride like a Jaguar.

The abandoned Bates Hotel had a semi-stunning view of the Miami River surrounded as it was with mirrored high-rise condos and office buildings. If this worked out the way it should Tippy would have a kick-ass condo complex and a penthouse for herself.

Roger shook Squire’s hand, and I squeezed his bare arm.

“Take a melon to remember me,” the old guy said looking awestruck to have been in my presence.

And to think I’d done the TV magazine interview just to help out my friend who was the producer and looking for filler. If I hadn’t, Squire wouldn’t have recognized me and Roger and I might still be stuck in the boonies outside Florida City.

I didn’t want to hurt Squire’s feelings so I hefted one of his huge watermelons out of the bed. A twenty-pound watermelon was exactly what I needed on a mummy hunt.

“Give ’em hell!” he yelled, bouncing onto Southeast Fifth Street, his cargo verging on hitting the street and becoming a Guinness Book fruit salad.

“Nice guy,” I said to Roger who was already climbing over the dig, a kid in FAO Schwarz.

He turned his head and said, “As long as you’re not on the wrong side of his .44 magnum,” then chugged on.

“Hey! Wait up!” I ran with the watermelon cradled in my arms. The lingerie football league was in my future.

The site was covered with bright blue hurricane tarps held down by stakes and stones, which almost broke me as I tripped over them with my melon burden. Red string looped around iron pins and formed a square at the dig site. Mounds of orange clay and sand were heaped in bulldozer size piles outside the tarps. The clay, a remnant of early twentieth-century developer Henry Flagler’s efforts to increase the size of his riverfront land by trucking in clay from north Florida, buried the remnants of an ancient civilization at the mouth of the Miami River. The dirt had to be carefully removed by skilled workers.

There wasn’t a soul around, and the only sound was the constant hum of the traffic on the South Miami Avenue overpass bridging the Miami River. There must be a thousand mirrored windows looking down on the site and yet not one on guard duty.

According to recent news, Tippy cooperated with the city by following the code for historic preservation but she still stood a chance of losing the land to the state. I hoped we didn’t bump into the prickly princess until Roger had a read on the mummies. Her lawsuit threats had pissed me off and I was already a little grumpy after somebody tried to kill us twice and the day wasn’t over.

Roger held his freshly bullet-holed fedora in one hand, shaded his eyes with the other, and spun a slow three-sixty. “I must be going blind. I don’t see the first sign of security at this site.”

I watched the hole in his hat, waiting for my chance to make his precious fedora disappear.

His jaw muscles bunched. “What the hell is going on? If this is an archaeological dig and integrity is to be maintained, security is mandatory. And who leaves a construction site unattended? There should at least be a watchman here. As Shakespeare penned, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’ Except in this case Denmark is spelled F-L-O-R-I-D-A, or more specifically, M-I-A-M-I.”

He started to roll back a section of blue tarp. I placed Squire’s melon on the ground. I ran around the pit, and pulled the cover ’til we had it flopped back a good ten feet. Roger slid down the stones bracing his hands on either side of the tunnel-like entrance, and disappeared from sight.

“Have you got a flashlight in the car?” he called.

“Yup. But the car is out in the sticks.” When he zones in on an antiquity Roger’s short-term memory evaporates. Goldie was having lord knows what done to her fanciness on a lonely country road waiting for a tow truck. Probably stripped of her parts and left to die like Hic, fermenting in the sun parlor of an abandoned hotel. I felt helpless.

“There’s a pharmacy a couple blocks away. I’ll be right back,” I called to the absent-minded professor who teetered at the edge of the pit like Alice down the rabbit hole.

I felt angry eyes bearing down on me as I turned to make a quick run to the Walgreens. Two tall young dudes with straight black hair and chiseled features approached. It was too late to jump back in the pit, besides Roger was exposed and not in a good way.

The taller man was yummy in an ethnic-male-with-long-dark-hair way. He took care not to touch me if you don’t count eye-locking. “You’re that Wendy woman.” It was a statement not a question.

I nodded.

“The government has taken our ancestors’ bodies. Our tribe demands they be returned so their spirit journeys will not be disturbed. Senator Grant is ignoring our requests. He will live long enough to regret his greed. But now
you
must leave and take the man in the hole with you.”

I bounced from foot to foot trying to decide whether to run or light up a peace pipe. Problem was I wasn’t packing a pipe. “Gentlemen, I am a licensed real estate broker and that man in the pit is a world famous archaeologist. We have seen the mummies that were taken from this sacred ground. They are
sitting
mummies. Do you know what that means?”

They looked at each other in puzzlement and stepped aside to engage in head nodding and brow twisting. I waited hoping Roger wouldn’t pop to the surface like a whack-a-mole and mess things up.

The yummy dude spoke in a courteous voice, “We will give your expert until the next full moon to share what he knows of those mummies.”

“When is the next full moon?”

“One week from today.”

“Piece of cake.” I smiled hoping to seal the deal. “Excuse me now. I’m going to assist Dr. Jolley. Nothing will be desecrated. I promise.”

There goes that word again. Where the heck was the pause button on my promises?

The tribesmen left and I completed my Walgreens run.

Ten minutes later I held the flashlight as a weapon and ducked into the dig site. I stumbled down the steps cut into the sandstone whispering Roger’s name. The air was damp and oxygen poor although I was only a few feet below ground level. I managed to scrape my right arm along the rough walls and twisted my ankle, twice.

The pit smelled like seawater. It occurred to me that the Miami River could sweep in and create an underground tidal wave or the dig had hit the water table and the pit was about to flood. That would explain why everyone scrammed or I’d been watching too many
Indiana Jones
movies.

I pointed the light at a platform with a string of rope pulleys anchored to the wall. It looked like a
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang
prop. The pit was silent as a tomb. I hate when I say that, it’s so cliché.

“You’ve got a flashlight!”

“Yipes!” I almost peed my pants as Roger stepped out of the darkness.

Roger pulled a tampon-shaped gadget from his pocket. He’d perfected the Multi-phasic Unidirectional Density Diviner or MUDD as it’s commonly known, to a higher sensitivity. It could now detect abnormalities as finite as cloth in the earth.

“Shine the light on the MUDD while I set the controls.”

With shaking hands I focused the beam on the device while I stood in a pool of murky gray-black water.

Roger fiddled with the MUDD settings, aimed it down the pit, nodded, and patted my shoulder. “I may be awhile. You go back up top and keep watch. Call for help
only
if there’s a cave-in.”

I looked at the fissure he was about to drop his semi-hunky body into. “I’m going with you.”

“I’m only going down as far as they’ve dug, another five or six meters.”

I shot him a blank look.

He smiled. “Fifteen or twenty feet, max. There’s not enough room on the elevator for two.”

“That’s no elevator. That’s a board on strings.”

Roger stood between me and the rickety Otis lift. “Those sitting mummies were planted here to delay the condo construction. My archaeologist gut feeling is someone is trying to buy time to get down there and grab something worth the risk of transporting two ancient cadavers from one continent to another. This goes beyond the boundaries of dirty developers.”

“If this were some sort of antiquity plot couldn’t the bad guys have recruited some local mummies?”

“Too obvious. Someone wanted to arouse my curiosity. And they did. Maybe this is about killing two birds with one stone.”

“Kyzer Saucy? See I told you it computes.”

He searched his jacket pockets until he pulled out a gadget similar to a tiny hearing aid. “Take this earpiece. We should be able to stay in contact at least for the first ten or twenty feet.”

“Here, hold my hat.”

I took the edge of the fedora with my thumb and index finger and held it at arms length.

He wedged a matching earpiece in his ear. After a round of “testing, testing,” we were audibly linked. Roger aimed the flashlight toward the street level opening.

“Go back up top. I’ve got this under control. Somebody has to be available to call for help.”

Dizzy from the lack of air, I nodded. The grit in my eyes burned like salt. “Please don’t take any foolish chances,” I said.

Warning Roger Jolley about a dig equated to telling a child not to play with the Legos. He radiated excitement as he crab-walked to the rickety wooden platform, fiddled with the pulleys, and disappeared. I could hear him mumbling to himself through the headset. There went the love of my life.

The fedora fit nicely in a dark crevice of the dig, and with a few kicks of sand it was buried. We’d replace it with a new hat tomorrow.

I used the rough-cut steps to exit the pit; swinging one knee over the lip, I hoisted myself onto the sandy ground. Sites similar to this one had been discovered a few blocks south on the Miami River and a huge ancient cemetery was revealed about a hundred miles north of the city of Miami. Was this a part of that civilization? But why slip two foreign mummies into the deck?

I sat on the watermelon watching the afternoon traffic build while trying to look as casual as I could. I’d been in the development business long enough to know that you chain a site like this if for no other reason than someone taking a shortcut could stumble into a hole and sue the landowner. It defied logic for this dig to be sitting open for vandalism.

“Eureka!” Roger yelled from somewhere down in the pit. The plug popped in my ear.

“Did you find a vacuum cleaner?”

“I’ve hit limestone bedrock and…”

There was a scratchy sound and my earpiece went dead. My heart ponged against my ribs. I jumped into the pit and yelled Roger’s name three times with no response. I considered calling nine-one-one and then considered how pissed Roger would be if he weren’t in trouble.

Relief spiraled through my body when I heard him yell, “Coming up!”

I leaned against the wall, my spine performing a shimmy. The ropes and pulleys squealed like a herd of pigs but brought Roger to the surface in less than five minutes, his eyes two giant chocolate drops, his mouth struggling with words to contain his excitement. “I think there’s a mummy in the bedrock!”

He flicked on the MUDD and a tiny screen appeared showing a strange twisted fiber. “It looks like the edge of a cloth, but different than the palmetto fabric found at the Windover Bog site. I’m sure it’s not just a wrapped body, it’s a mummy.”

Located about two hundred miles north of Miami, Windover Bog revealed one-hundred and sixty-eight skeletons from infants to sixty-year-olds. Estimates placed the bodies two thousand years before the pharaohs. But they weren’t mummified, they were skeletons, each one wrapped in woven grass. Was this yet another civilization? From what I knew, which wasn’t worth a hill of sarcophaguses, a wrapped skeleton is not the same thing as a mummy.

“If this is what I think it is, it could throw an uber-monkey wrench into what we know about prehistoric society in North America.” He looked at the MUDD screen again. “It looks like mummy wrappings. Native American people did not make mummies. This could be an entirely different civilization overlapping the Bog people. But mummies need a dry environment otherwise they rot.” He scratched his head. “If this is a mummy how did it stay preserved in wetlands? How does this mummy relate to the Peruvian child mummies?”

“It can’t be a dried mummy, right? Dig down twenty feet and Florida is muck and water,” I said.

“It’s off to the side in a cavity. It seems like a tiny limestone tomb. I could swear the air felt dry. Here look at the moisture meter on the MUDD. It’s reading Sahara humidity… minus fifty points. That is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Panting, Roger indulged in an archaeological orgasm. I checked my watch to time him. He had three minutes to come.

The crunching noise above our heads could only be a vehicle cracking the shell and macadam surface. I popped out of the hole like a prairie dog.

A black stretch limo stopped twenty feet from me. With a theatrical flourish a young chauffeur slid from behind the wheel and stepped to the way-back door. The plate on the front of the car was a replica of the Florida State flag.