Blood of the Reich

72.1.

“Look at your contour map again.”

“So?”

“What if it’s seventy-two point one times a hundred and one feet? Where does that put us?”

He multiplied it out. “That’s seven thousand two hundred eighty-two feet. That could be”-he looked from modern map to Hood’s fingerprint and back again-“the far side of this peak here, Lookout Mountain and Teebone Ridge, toward Eldorado.”

“Plot it on your USGS map.”

“Here, about. Below Little Devil Peak, above Marble Creek Canyon.”

“And what are the coordinates?”

He read them off.

“I think that’s where we need to go,” she said. “A little tricky to find in the woods, I’m guessing.”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “I have GPS. We can use it to walk exactly to this spot.”

“Cool! Then what happens?”

“I don’t know. He seemed to go to a lot of trouble to plot this, but then make it obscure. If you didn’t have the contents of his safety deposit box, nothing would make sense. Maybe our interpretation is still off. But I think you’re on to something, Rominy. We follow this frozen bearing the required distance and find… treasure. Maybe.” His tone was cautious. He was trying to control his hope. “What are the coins for, then?”

Rominy thought a moment and then beamed, triumphant. “That’s easy. You said yourself these mountains are riddled with old mines. We’re going to find a gold mine!”

“I like your optimism.”

“Maybe he found something in Tibet to help him mine.”

“I’ll get the daypacks,” Jake said.

“I’ll clean up the breakfast. When you go out, could you check for ghosts and skinheads?”

“And raccoons.”

Jake had started a garbage sack the night before. He was out by his old truck, dragging stuff from his big toolbox and poking around in the cab, when Rominy stooped to scrape leftovers into the bag. She saw he’d lumped in some perfectly good recyclables: the spaghetti can and two plastic water bottles. Odd for a Seattle boy; he was no tree hugger. She decided to fish them out for proper disposal. When she did so, something small, round, and shiny dropped from some crumpled paper towels where it had been caught. Had Barrow lost a coin?

Diving past strands of spaghetti, she picked it up. Not a coin but some kind of small battery. Odd that he’d think to toss one here.

Then a thought occurred. She glanced out the window; he was still busy. So she opened her purse, took out her cell phone, and opened its back.

Its battery was missing.

She put the discarded one in. The phone still didn’t power on.