Fool Me Twice

CHAPTER 28

I was the first one out the door. Ignoring protocol, taking advantage of the confusion and cacophony, I raced from the courtroom, ran down the carpeted stairs and out the front door beneath old Lady Justice and onto Main Street. I jogged to the parking garage on cleanly shoveled sidewalks, got the rental, its fenders caked with dirty snow, and headed east toward Smuggler Mountain.

The last two minutes in the courtroom had been chaos. H. T. Patterson pounded the table and demanded the state immediately dismiss all charges, and if not, he beseeched the court to do the job. “In the name of Jefferson and Madison, in the memory of Marshall and Brandeis, for the reasons blood was spilled at Gettysburg and Bull Run, Iwo Jima, and Normandy, this man should be set free without further ado

…”

I was all for skipping the ado.

“…Let the state move to right its wrong. Let this man pick up the pieces of his shattered reputation, and let him do it with dispatch. Let the bells of equity and justice toll for him. Yea, if liberty be thy name, let justice be done.”

It was good to hear Patterson preaching again, his voice hitting the high notes with that Holy Roller cadence.

The prosecutor pleaded with the judge to delay a ruling until he had a chance to meet with Ms. Baroso and determine if her testimony was simply the product of posttraumatic stress syndrome and whether she could be rehabilitated on redirect.

Translation: I just got run over by a cement truck. Give me till morning to count the broken bones.

Pretty fair ad-libbing, I thought. I admire lawyers who, like captains of sinking ships, refrain from leaping overboard, but instead appear on deck in their dress whites with the polished brass buttons. Judge Witherspoon listened stoically, occasionally banging his gavel at the spectators whose behavior was worse than New York Jets’ fans at old Shea Stadium.

As the door closed behind me, the judge declared a recess until nine the next morning, when he expected the prosecutor to announce whether he wished to proceed. If he did, the judge broadly hinted, a defense motion for a directed verdict would be looked upon with favor once the state rested.

“ Mrs. Cimarron,” the judge said. “You are free to go, but I admonish you against leaving Pitkin County pending the outcome of tomorrow’s hearing.”

I didn’t think Jo Jo was leaving town. Not just yet. I figured she was keeping her brother apprised of each day’s events. Today would be a hell of a briefing.

I’d love to be there. In fact, I was doing everything I could to be there.

It took just a few minutes to find the road where she lost me the day before. I coaxed the rental car around the turn I had missed, then pulled as far off the road as I could without sliding into a snowdrift. The branches of a fir tree weighted with snow hung low and shielded my car from view. Especially from someone with a lot on her mind.

I didn’t have long to wait.

The Dodge Ram dual-wheel pickup roared past me and headed up the road. I eased out from under the tree and hung back, catching sight of the pickup’s taillights as it took the fork that led up the mountain. Yesterday, I took the wrong turn. Today, I just followed her. From here, it was easy. Unless she doubled back, she was headed straight to the top.

I stopped the car along the road at the last bend, got out and walked the rest of the way, a quarter mile or so. It was one of those bright, cold, dry winter days, the sun glaring off the snow, the temperature in the high twenties.

There was a chicken-wire fence around the property. Fastened to an iron gate with an unlocked rusty latch were two signs, your standard hardware store no trespassing and a piece of rotting wood crudely painted danger, blasting, which was older than Granny.

I opened the latch and walked through the gate. The pickup was parked a hundred yards up the hill. Next to it was a Jeep Wrangler with a canvas top. Narrow-gauge railway tracks emerged from a tunnel cut into the rock and led to a small building of unpainted wood with a tin roof. The building had a wooden chute that emptied into a railway car twenty feet below. Other sheds in various states of disrepair sagged into snow-covered piles of dirt and debris. An elevator cage of rusted iron stood idle and filled with snow. All around the site, like the fossils of dinosaurs, the evidence of extinction. A fallen building of charred timbers, rusted boilers and compressors, winches and furnaces. I pictured the scene a century ago, the sky blackened with fires from sawmills and smelters. I thought of Cimarron’s great-grandfather and the other drillers and muckers, a mountainside crawling with grim-faced, wiry men whose hands would never scrub clean.

The entrance to the tunnel was framed by three wooden timbers, two vertical, and one horizontal connecting at the top. Rusty nails held a metal sign to the horizontal timber. Silver Queen, Tunnel No. 3, 1888.

I expected to see the tracks of a woman’s stylish high-heeled boots in the snow, but the imprints were of wide, plebeian work boots. The tracks went from Jo Jo Baroso’s pickup straight into the tunnel. Okay, she had changed shoes. Always prepared, that Jo Jo. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had a hard hat, a flashlight, and a pickax, too.

I headed into the mine. Bare electric light bulbs were strung along the rocky ceiling, laced to old timbers. Canvas air chutes ran along the walls. The bulbs were lighted, and even after the tunnel took a gentle, rounded turn to the right, cutting off light from the entrance, visibility was fine. It was warmer inside, probably in the fifties, but dank. Water dripped down walls of rock stained purple and yellow from whatever minerals had been locked inside by volcanic explosions a thousand millennia ago.

I had walked maybe half a mile when the tunnel opened into a cavern, a ballroom-sized chamber with fifty-foot ceilings. Inside, where I imagined a thick, rich vein of silver was found, now were only empty ore carts and wooden crates that may have once held dynamite or tools. On the ground, a broken bottle of thick, brown glass, the remnants of a miner’s beer break. I took off my topcoat and tossed it into one of the ore carts and kept going. At one end of the chamber, there was a ladder of steps cut into the mountain itself. It only went one way, down.

I started the descent, slowly at first, the way lit by the overhead bulbs. Timbers stained black from thousands of hands provided a railing. Perhaps fifty feet below, another horizontal tunnel connected with the downward shaft. I kept going. Another tunnel connection, then another. Deeper still, I paused and listened. The steady thumpeta-thumpeta of machinery, a pump maybe. It came from below. I descended farther, counting eleven tunnels at different intervals before running out of ladder in a narrow, darkened tunnel. I paused on the last step. No lights here, but the sound of the machinery was louder. A steady whirring and a combustion induced chugging, joined the thumpeta-thumpeta machine.

I took the last step and splashed into a puddle of icy, black water. At least I thought it was a puddle. I slogged two steps into the darkness. Then two steps more. It wasn’t a puddle. More like a river. The floor of the tunnel was covered by a foot of water. I was sweating, but my feet were freezing.

I had no idea how far I had descended. Five hundred feet, a thousand? I waited a moment for my eyes to get adjusted to the light. They didn’t, because there wasn’t any.

I started my way along the wall in the direction of the sound. I was moving away from the mountain and back toward the town. If I walked far enough, I’d probably be right under the courthouse.

Ouch! My forehead cracked hard into an overhead timber. I’ll bet miners a century ago weren’t six feet two.

Now, I hunched forward and scuttled along, my hand trailing over the ragged walls. Ahead of me, a sound of rushing water, like the rapids on a shallow, rocky stream. I kept wondering where the sound was coming from until my foot stepped into space and I fell forward into the torrent. The drop-off was only two feet or so, but the landing was hard, facedown. I tumbled ahead, water pouring over me from the ledge I just stepped off. Soaking and freezing, I got up, spitting out cold, filthy water, feeling for sensation in my right shoulder. It still had a stainless steel pin inside, and it didn’t take kindly to surprises.

I kept going, splashing along until I saw the light, a yellow glow from an opening at the side of the tunnel. I cautiously inched ahead. Suddenly, a blinding flash turned the black water a bright orange, illuminating stalactites overhead-or stalagmites-who the hell can remember the difference? The flash was followed by a dull thudding explosion, and a wave of dust rolled down the tunnel from the direction of the light. Overhead, timbers creaked and groaned.

With the explosion still bonging in my ears, I hurried my pace. If I couldn’t hear my splashing, I figured no one else could, either. In twenty seconds, I was at the opening. It was a rough rectangle in the limestone walls, perhaps four by six feet, beginning a few feet off the floor of the tunnel. Three steps were cut into the rock wall and ended in a ledge, which led directly through the opening and into another cavern, higher and drier than the tunnel. From inside, voices echoed off the walls. I crept closer.

As dust rolled out of the opening, I heard a man cough. “ Jesus Cristo! Too much dynamite. We’ll be buried here along with this silver-dollar puta.”

Blinky’s voice, no mistaking it.

“ How else do you propose we get it out?” Jo Jo Baroso asked.

“ The same way they got the bitch in if we could find the old shaft.”

I lay flat on the ledge and peered through the opening, trying to keep out of view. Inside, a gasoline generator chugged away, powering spotlights mounted on two aluminum poles. One of the lights shone directly in my eyes, and I couldn’t make out my favorite team of siblings.

“ There isn’t time.” She sounded exasperated. “There wasn’t before, and there surely isn’t now. I’ll be lucky if I’m not charged with perjury. If you’re found, you’ll be charged with murder.”

The sound of a shovel scraping against rock, then gravel clattering against metal.

“ Like I told you before,” Blinky said, from somewhere behind the glare, “Jake bluffed you, and you fell for it. The prints will never match up, ‘cause I never touched the barrel. All they can prove is that I was in the barn, but that’s no case for murder. And when’s the last time anybody got prosecuted for perjury. I’m sorry you got embarrassed, Josie, me da mucha pena, pero, I’m glad Jake’s gonna be okay. He never fucked with me, and I didn’t want to sandbag him this way.”

“ Thanks for the testimonial, Blinky.” Shielding my eyes from the glare of the spotlights, I slid off the ledge and into the cavern, my wet shoes squishing on the hard rock. Blinky wore a red plaid shirt under coveralls and a hard hat and was tossing a shovel full of rocks into an ore cart. Next to him was Jo Jo Baroso with rubberized boots sticking out incongruously from her long, fur-trimmed coat. “What are you doing, kids, building a clubhouse?”

“ Jake, mi amigo, I’ve missed you so much.” Blinky leaned on the shovel and smiled at me. He seemed genuinely, weirdly, happy to see me. “You got no idea what it’s like to go underground. Hey, that’s a pun, isn’t it?” He allowed himself a short chuckle. “You give up all your friends, you gotta move around. Hell, I even gave some blood, which you found in the Range Rover. What a pain in the ass. Never again.”

“ Blinky, you’ll forgive me if I don’t throw my arms around you, but I’m-”

“ Don’t say it, Jake. We did you wrong. We never should have set you up. I said to Josie, let’s cut Jake in for a full share, let him figure out a way to just steal the maldita compania from Cimarron, but she said, no, you’d never go along with it. She was right. I knew that as soon as you raised a stink when we left a few things out of the prospectus. You just didn’t want to play the game.”

“ Not your game, Blinky. Not the con.”

“ Yeah, well this wasn’t a con. For once it was real. Really real and really big. That’s why we had to get Rocky Mountain Treasures back from Cimarron. Why give seventy percent to that condenado? Was that fair? Hell, if I hadn’t raised the money, he never could have found her. I asked him to renegotiate, but he said no and called me a door-to-door salesman in patent leather loafers. Hey, Jake, I never sold door to door, and you know it. This was his life, he said, everything he’d worked for, and a deal’s a deal, so I was stuck. So the little sister and me, we decided to get the company back, but that cowboy was smarter than-”

“ Shut up, Luis!” Jo Jo was glaring at him.

“ Hermanita, I’m gonna do the talking for once. Jeez, she even bosses me around down here. I learned this shit from Cimarron. How to drill the holes in a round pattern, put different length fuses on the dynamite so it explodes just right and the rock falls the way you want it. There’s a science to it, if you want to knock a hole in the rock without blowing yourself up. Jake, you wouldn’t believe it, but I like this shit. I really found myself down here.”

“ I’m not surprised. You’ve got a great future breaking rocks.”

“ C’mon, Jake, don’t be pissed. It’s time to make amends.”

Next to him was a wooden crate with sticks of dynamite poking out of the top. A fuse was attached to each stick.

“ Okay, Blinky, so now you’ve gone straight. You’re a miner, right?”

“ Yeah, sort of, and Josie thinks she’s the foreman of the crew. Some things never change, right? I always put up with it because she gave me the skinny on the state’s cases against me and my friends. She’d tell me when investigators were sniffing around, and we’d close up shop and head to another jurisdiction. When I got arrested, she’d pull stuff out of the files. Why do you think you had so much success on my cases, Jake? It wasn’t just buena suerte.”

I turned toward Jo Jo. “So it was always an act, how much you detested your brother?”

She didn’t answer, and for a moment, the only sound was the whirring generator and the thumping pump.

“ Nah,” Blinky said, waving his shovel. “She still ain’t president of the Louis Baroso fan club, but blood is thicker than water. At first, she tried to get me to go straight, but then, I started carving out a piece of each deal for her. Hey, the state attorney’s office pays peanuts. Pretty soon, she’s my partner. Hey, Jake, I learned a long time ago it’s easier to get an honest person to steal than to get a thief not to. Anyway, where was I?”

“ Something about how smart Cimarron was,” I helped out.

Blinky used the back of his sleeve to wipe streaks of dirt-stained sweat from his forehead. “Yeah, smart enough to know when he’s getting taken for a ride. He was pressuring Kyle Hornback, who didn’t know jackshit about the oversubscription of stock, but had some photocopies of bank transfers that would have told Cimarron everything I didn’t need him to know.

Cimarron was in town and was gonna see Hornback when Socolow was done with him.”

“ Why’d you try to pin it on me?”

“ Josie’s idea, entirely.”

“ Luis!”

Blinky shrugged. “Well, it’s true, and I suppose it had to be done. Cimarron had to think you were in on the scam, that you were stealing from the company, and you were banging Josie, too. If he didn’t hate you, it would never have worked.”

Jo Jo Baroso had turned away so that I could only see her in profile under the glare of the spotlights. “So that’s what it was from day one, Jo Jo. Including that night in your house. The only reason I was in your bed was to bait the trap.”

“ Don’t tell me you’re hurt, Jake,” she said, still not looking me in the eye. “Don’t give me that sophomoric how-could-you-do-this-to-me-when-I-really-cared-for-you bullshit.’’

“ But I did!”

“ You dropped me, Jake. You dumped me. Do you know what that’s like?”

“ Is that what this is about, you getting even with me for that?”

“ No, it was just business,” Jo Jo said.

I shivered, either because I was soaking wet, or from her cold-bloodedness.

“ C’mon, Jake, don’t be sore,” Blinky said, annoyed that I objected to being set up for murder. “It isn’t like we knew what was going to happen. In the beginning, we didn’t even plan on killing Cimarron.”

“ What did you plan?”

“ We wanted him to come after you, but we knew you wouldn’t kill him. That night in the house, we sort of hoped you’d kick some butt, soften him up, and then we’d renegotiate from different positions. It hurts a man’s pride to be beaten.”

“ I know.”

“ But anyway, he stomped you pretty good, and that shot the plan all to hell. Then, everything got out of hand. I mean, Josie said she was afraid Cimarron was going to kill you, and I said too bad it can’t be the other way around, what with me being the beneficiary of his life insurance and Josie as the sole heir of the estate. So we kept talking about it. What if, this. What if, that. How can we get all of her? Finally, it was a no-brainer. After all, if Cimarron died, we’d get her all. I figured you’d follow Josie up here, and I knew you’d come to the rescue if you saw Josie all black and blue.”

I turned to Jo Jo. “But Cimarron did beat you, didn’t he? You weren’t lying about that.”

“ Yes,” Jo Jo answered. “I told him I saw you at the music tent, and you wanted me to come back to Miami with you. He hit me, Jake. Time and again, just enough to cause pain without knocking me unconscious or leaving scars. He was a master at it. Can you blame me for wanting him dead?”

“ No, but I blame you for setting me up.”

Blinky leaned on his shovel as if it were a cane. “We figured you’d be so mad about what he did to Josie, and remembering what he did to you that you’d grab a pitchfork and make shish kebab out of him. At first, we planned to have Josie back you up, claim it was self-defense, keep you from ever getting charged.”

“ Why didn’t you, Jo Jo? Even after killing Cimarron, you could have told the truth, that I was defending myself. It would have been justifiable homicide if I had killed him.”

She didn’t answer, but Blinky did. “Once we had to give you a little help in the barn, the script changed. Josie got worried. What with her history with you, it would have looked like the two of you conspired to kill him. It was a close call. Hell, we almost went that way, but in the end, we figured the truth wouldn’t wash, and you’d both be indicted. Trying to get you off would make her look like a two-timing slut, but blaming you made her look like a grief-stricken widow, at least that’s the way we figured it.”

“ So I was just a fall guy to get the insurance and the stupid treasure claims?”

“ Not so stupid,” Blinky said. “Not when you’re talking about all of her.”

“ Her? That’s the third time you’ve talked about getting all of her. The mine?”

“ No, the Silver Queen.”

“ That’s what I said, the mine.”

Blinky was puzzled. Then he figured it out. “No, not that silver queen. This one.” He grabbed one of the light poles and swung it around, tossing the beam to a position directly behind him. It illuminated a lady of silver nearly twenty feet high. She looked a little like the Statue of Liberty, except this lady sat on a throne in a half chariot, half ship.

“ Ain’t she something?” Blinky asked. “I been studying up on her. I read all of Cimarron’s newspaper clippings from a hundred years ago.” Blinky lowered his voice into a Miami con man’s imitation of a Lowell Thomas newsreel. “‘The queen reclines with the voluptuous grace of a Cleopatra in her Egyptian barge.’

I walked over for a closer look. The chariot sat on a pedestal trimmed with a drapery of silver, gold, and what looked like ebony. Leading to the throne were steps inlaid with silver dollars. On the risers, the words “Silver Queen” were raised in letters of solid silver. The background was a mass of brilliant colored minerals, and the borders were white crystals. The words “Aspen, Colorado” appeared on a lower panel of the pedestal. The letters were formed from broken pieces of silver on a background that looked like pure white sugar. I moved closer for a better look.

“ Diamond dust,” Blinky said.

Six pillars of burnished silver and crystals inlaid with mosaics of different ores rose from the pedestal and supported the throne. The wheels of the chariot were four feet high and made of solid silver. A canopy of minerals and crystals covered the queen’s head. Her hair was made of glass, and the drapery across her Ruben-esque bosom was adorned with bright minerals I couldn’t identify. In her hand, she held a silver scepter that must have been ten feet long. It was topped with a silver dollar a foot across and a five-pointed silver star. Two Greek gods ran alongside the chariot carrying cornucopias filled with gold and silver coins.

“ Her head and body are carved from the biggest, purest silver nugget ever mined,” Blinky said, “more than a ton, and it came from this mountain.” There was a note of pride in his voice, as if he had made the damn thing. “What do you think of her, Jake?”

“ Let me try to find the word. How about tacky? Gauche? Overblown? Laughable? Kitschy, if there is such a word.”

“ Yeah, well I know it ain’t too subtle. Cimarron called it one of the last purely Victorian pieces, but who gives a shit if it ain’t a da Vinci? See, Cimarron figured it out. It’s got historical value plus the value of the minerals and the fact there’s never been anything like it, before or since. After the World’s Fair, the lady had been sitting there at the museum over in Pueblo, but they were going to tear down the place. The guys who owned the mines and contributed the minerals were mighty pissed and wanted her back, but the museum guys were going to send her to the Smithsonian or maybe New York, so the mining guys just stole the damn thing. Brought her here on a freight car and lowered her back into the ground from whence she came. The mine was petered out by then, and the bottom tunnel flooded. They wanted to put the lady on display for the local folks, but they had lost their minerals claims to the banks, and they had more to worry about than museums and such. Luckily for the lady, she sat up here where you see her, good as new, or she will be once we polish her up. We got the patents and the mineral rights to this mine, and the big queen is made of minerals found herein.”

“ What are you saying, that you own this thing?”

“ Free and clear, and I got the paperwork to prove it.” In a singsong voice, Blinky intoned, “Know all men by these presents that Rocky Mountain Treasures Inc. has located and claimed by right of discovery and location, in compliance with the Mining Acts of Congress approved May 10, 1872, and all subsequent acts, and with local customs, laws and regulations, seventeen hundred and fifty linear feet and horizontal measurement on the Silver Queen, No. 3, with all its dips, angles and variations as allowed by law, and all veins, lodes, ledges or deposits, and surface ground within the lines of said claim, blah, blah, blah. What I’m saying, Jake, is we got one hundred percent legal title to a fat lady worth millions.”

“ We?” I said. “As in you and your sister.”

“ No, we, as in you and me. You got ten percent of the company, remember.”

“ What about Jo Jo?”

“ You tell me, Counselor. She killed Cimarron. She hit him with the plank, then put a nail through his big fat, head. I oughta know. I handed her the nail gun, but I never touched the damn barrel.”

“ You’re going to give up your sister?”

“ After today, they gotta go after somebody new, so I say throw her to the fucking wolves.”

“ Luis! Have you gone mad?” Jo Jo’s face was a mask of anger, but anger without fear.

“ Nah, I’m just doing what’s got to be done.”

“ Blinky, what about Kyle Hornback?” I asked. “You killed him.”

“ No fucking way. I’m sitting with that chi chi cabron on your sofa, which I’d be embarrassed to give to the Salvation Army, and my little sister gives him a drink with enough barbs to knock out a cow. In about two minutes, he’s slobbering on my shoulder, and Josie goes up to your bedroom and brings down a tie your grandmother must have bought you.”

“ Luis!?Collate la boca! ” Jo Jo’s forehead was tightened into vertical lines, and a vein throbbed in her neck. “Do you think I’m going to let you get away with this?”

He turned toward his sister. “C’mon, it’s true. You strangled the hijo de puta with Jake’s tie. Hey, Jake, I thought that tie looked bad on you. You should have seen it on Hornback with his tongue sticking out.”

“ I did.”

“ Yeah, that’s right, I forgot.”

“ Who strung him up on the fan?”

“ That took both of us, and it wasn’t easy ‘cause Kyle didn’t help any.”

“ Is that right, Jo Jo? Is that the way it happened?”

But she wasn’t talking.

“ The failure to deny the accusation is admissible,” I said. “What’s the fancy name Judge Witherspoon gave it, an adoptive admission?”

“ Go to hell, both of you,” said my former love.

“ I’m home free, and she takes the fall,” Blinky said. “My holier-than-thou sister who always put me down. Well, let me tell you something. I never killed a man. I’m just a thief, but she is heartless and bloodless and soulless. I was there, man, and I tell you I nearly puked on your floor when she did Hornback. She never blinked an eye. He could have been a cockroach. With Cimarron, same thing. Mostly, she was pissed you didn’t do the job. There’s a name for what she is. A psycho or something.”

“ A sociopath,” I said. “And as for you, Blinky, you’re clearly an accessory to Hornback’s murder and probably a conspirator to Cimarron’s. Or maybe it’s the other way around, I could never tell the difference.”

“ So what, they got nothing on me.”

“ Maybe they can piece it together. For starters, everything you’ve said to me is admissible against you.”

“ Are you loco! You can’t testify against me. You’re my lawyer. I got the whatchamacallit, the privilege, and besides, I want you to represent me, not rat on me. You’re the best, Jake, and more important, you’re mi amigo. For ten percent of the silver lady, plus a bonus, you can take care of it. Get me immunity up here if there’s any risk they’d try to indict. I’ll tell ‘em what I saw. I’ll take a polygraph.”

“ No dice. I’m through with both of you.”

Blinky’s expression changed. “Then what am I going to do with you?”

He raised the shovel as if to take a swipe at me.

I flexed my knees and let my arms dangle loosely at my sides. “Go ahead and try, Blinky. I’ll ram it up your ass.”

While he was thinking about it, Jo Jo Baroso took two steps to one side, reached inside her coat, and came out with a handgun. She pointed it at Blinky, then at me, then somewhere between the two us.

“ All right, both of you,” she said, waving the gun in the air. “Jake, move away from the ledge. Luis, move next to Jake.”

It was a Smith amp; Wesson Bodyguard. 38, the airweight model with the two-inch blue steel barrel. At less than fifteen ounces, just dandy for a lady’s purse.

“ I’ll bet Abe Socolow gave you that thing the day you got your badge and promised to uphold the Constitution,” I said.

“ Shut up, Jake, and do what I say.”

“ Most prosecutors can’t shoot a lick.”

“ Try me.”

“ Where you going to go, Jo Jo? After today, there’s nowhere to run.”

“ That’s enough, Jake. Just move.”

“ You going to shoot us?” I persisted. “Your brother and the man who loved you.”

“ If you loved me, you would never have left me. As for Luis, his loyalty has just been demonstrated. This is the last time I’m asking. I want both of you back by the statue.”

Blinky started walking in that direction. I took one step, leapt to the right and grabbed the aluminum pole with the spotlight, crashing it to the ground. The spot broke, and we were in the shadow of the Silver Queen, a second spotlight still shining fifteen yards away. A gunshot ricocheted off the rocks above my head. Not even close. I was on the hard, cold floor of the cavern.

Another shot, again wildly above me. I heard Blinky scrambling on all fours and saw him duck behind an ore cart.

“ C’mon out, you two!” she yelled.

I kept down, and Blinky got up, put a shoulder to the cart, and using it as a shield, began pushing it toward his sister. It gave me a chance.

I lunged toward the wooden crate and grabbed three sticks of dynamite and a handful of foot-long wooden matches. I turned in time to see Jo Jo deftly step to one side and Blinky crash the ore cart into a rocky wall. The impact sent his head into the side of the cart, and he reeled backward, collapsing on the floor. Jo Jo turned the gun on him, then swung it toward me.

Two more steps and I dived for the other aluminum pole, taking it down with me, crashing the spotlight.

Total, blinding darkness broken by a flash of orange, a gunshot missing me but pinging off the Silver Queen.

“ That’s no way to treat a lady,” I said. In the darkness, I picked up a rock and tossed it one direction while I crawled in another. Another stray gunshot just after the rock hit the far wall.

I crept behind the Silver Queen, scraping my hands and knees, but keeping silent. I heard Jo Jo’s “shit” as she bumped into something. Then a flashlight popped on. The flashlight was in her left hand, the gun in her right. I could see her, but she couldn’t see me. I grabbed a rock and winged it at her, but it missed, causing her to spin and shoot behind her. How many gunshots had there been? Four or five? I hadn’t been counting. The. 38 only holds five bullets. But was she carrying spare ammo?

“ Josie, let’s talk this over.” Blinky now, somewhere in the darkness. “C’mon, I never would have flipped on you. Let’s you and me work it out.”

I heard her spin the cylinder on the. 38 and looked up in time to see her slipping bullets in. The flashlight beam struck Blinky squarely in the face.

A gunshot and a scream.

“ You shot me! Jesus Cristo, Jake, she shot me in the fucking leg! I’m bleeding. She broke the bone. Jake!”

I kept quiet. I did not want to get shot in the leg or anywhere else.

I stayed huddled behind the right rear wheel of the Silver Queen’s chariot. Another gunshot, and the sound of glass shattering. Above me, the lady’s hair had fractured into a thousand shards and cascaded over me. I stayed put, struck a match to the rock floor and lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite. I crouched there, letting the fuse fizzle and crackle, keeping the flame between my cupped hands so it would not glow in the darkness, trying to figure what to do next.

I tried to calculate how long the fuse took to burn. I counted off the seconds, measured the inches, then realized it was about ten seconds from blast off. Extending my arm, I tossed a hook shot in the general direction of the entrance to the cavern. As I did, a flood of thoughts engulfed me. I didn’t know the strength of one stick of dynamite. Probably more pow than a string of Chinese firecrackers, but not enough to bring down the roof. Right? Didn’t Blinky talk about a circle of sticks just to knock a hole in rock wall? As my arm was following through on a pretty healthy toss, I thought of the old Road Runner cartoons. Wasn’t Wile E. Coyote always tossing dynamite and having it tossed right back?

I intended it as a diversion. A little boom, and I would dash.. .

“ Shit! Shit! Shit!”

All these years I’ve known Jo Jo Baroso and never had she been so scatological. Of course, then, I’d never thrown a stick of dynamite at her before.

The floppity-flop of her rubber boots across rock. A stomping sound.

“ You’re crazy, Jake!” Her voice, just this side of hysterical. “You’ll kill us all. These timbers aren’t stable.”

At least she hadn’t thrown it back at me.

From somewhere in the darkness, I heard the whimpering of my client who liked the privilege that kept me from testifying against him, but refused to adhere to any laws himself.

“ Blinky, how about it?” I shouted out. “Is it safe?”

“ Blow her up, Jake. Send her straight to hell.”

I peered out from behind the chariot’s wheel and saw the flashlight beam play across the floor until it found Blinky, curled up alongside an ore cart. “Jake, she’s going to shoot me again. No, Josie, no!”

“ I’ll take care of you later,” Jo Jo said, then turned the beam toward the Silver Queen. It flicked off, and I knew she was walking this way. I didn’t hesitate. I struck a match, lit the fuse, stepped into the open, and tossed it underhanded along the rocky floor. It bounced two or three times, the fuse burning green in the darkness.

I heard Jo Jo mutter the same monosyllable. I heard the boots slapping the rock. I watched the lit fuse, tried to memorize the spot in the darkness as she approached it. The glowing fuse disappeared under a stomping boot and I charged the spot. I was going to hit her head on, legs churning, and wrap her up, a picture-perfect tackle. I was going to drive her to the floor and do something I’ve never done before: I was going to hit a woman.

She must have heard my leather soles smacking the floor. Or my labored breathing. Or her instincts were just too sharp.

I saw the flash from the muzzle before I felt the impact.

The bullet caught me in the right shoulder. It was a clean through-and-through that didn’t strike a bone, a major blood vessel, or a steel pin that acts up when it rains. I felt a burning, the trickle of warm blood, and then a sharp pain as if an ice pick had been jammed into me and was still there.

I was still on my feet, but wondering why.

Shouldn’t I be on the ground or something?

The flashlight flicked on, bursting through the darkness, illuminating a craggy formation of blue limestone and dolomite above me. I turned, tucked my head, went into a crouch and rolled onto my good shoulder, scrambling back behind the chariot.

Another gunshot, and again the Silver Lady took one for me. Or maybe it ricocheted off Plutus, one of the little diapered gods at her side. I felt around in the darkness for the last stick of dynamite. Where the hell was it? I found the big silver wheel of the chariot, ran my hand along the ground, and there it was. I drew a match from my pocket, struck it, and nothing happened. My pants, still soggy from my bodysurfing in the tunnel, had moistened the tip. I found another match. Soaking wet. Another one, same thing.

I breathed on the first match, trying to dry the phosphorous, wiped it in the dust, struck it again. Nothing, and now the tip started to crumble.

I heard Jo Jo’s footsteps getting closer.

One last time, and it caught. I let the flame grow a second, then lit the fuse, waited a second and threw the dynamite as far as I could. I wanted to sail it over Jo Jo’s head to get her turned around. When she headed to stomp out the fuse, I’d rush her again, but this time, I’d zigzag. waited to hear the dynamite hit the ground, but instead of the smack against hard rock, I heard a soft thump.

Then I heard Blinky’s yell. “Jake, ay, mierda! Jake, maldito sea , it’s on the timber over the ledge. I can see the fuse burning.”

Then I heard Jo Jo. Her vocabulary hadn’t improved. I watched the flashlight beam playing across the rocks above the ledge. Finally it stopped at the juncture of a vertical and horizontal timber. Wedged between them was a stick of dynamite with a glowing fuse.

The timber was at least twelve feet off the ground. In my younger days, I could dunk a basketball with a running start, but the basket’s only ten feet. Twelve feet was out of the question.

“ Jake, come here!” Jo Jo shouted at me. She was directly in front of the Silver Queen, maybe fifteen feet from the pedestal.

“ Why, you want a clean shot at me?”

“ No, you’ve got to put out the dynamite. Now!”

“ Throw your gun over here, and I’ll do it,” I said, though I didn’t have the slightest idea how.

“ Chingate!”

Well, at least she had expanded her stock of words. “The gun. Throw it out.”

“ First, the dynamite.”

“ No, first the gun.”

“ Would you two stop arguing and do something?” Blinky had picked up some rocks from where he was lying and was tossing them at the dynamite. I couldn’t see where they landed, but I didn’t think he was going to win a teddy bear at the county fair.

“ Jake,” she said. “Now!”

I quietly climbed up the rear pedestal of the silver lady’s chariot. Jo Jo turned the other way, her flashlight aiming a beam at the sizzling fuse. I hopped into the back of Cleopatra’s barge and shimmied up a silver pedestal until I could get my hands on top of the canopy. I hoisted myself up, swung a knee on top, and looked out at the darkness. I was twenty feet above the floor of the cavern. The fuse was still burning.

“ Jake, where are you?”

The flashlight beam was there below me. I could creep to the front of the canopy and leap at her. It wouldn’t be chivalrous, two hundred twenty-some pounds smacking into her, probably breaking some bones, but at the moment, she had the gun, and I was out of tricks.

I took a step to the front of the canopy.

“ Jake, where are you? There isn’t time!”

“ Josie,” Blinky called out. “We gotta get outta here. Help me into the tunnel.”

I took another step.

“ No,” she called back. “If that timber goes, this whole chamber will be sealed off. The statue will be crushed.”

I took a third step.

And the Silver Queen came to life. At first, I thought the two Greek gods at her side were moving backward. But they were standing still. Which meant we were moving forward.

The ship broke off the pedestal and sailed down a step, then a second, and a third, gathering momentum like a raft hitting the rapids of the Colorado River. When it smashed into the floor, the queen pitched forward, and so did I.

The flashlight beam turned, and I heard a gasp from Jo Jo.

The queen snapped in two at the waist. Her head separated and bounced across the floor. The top half of the queen’s torso flew straight ahead. I leapt from the canopy just before it hit, and I rolled, this time on my bleeding shoulder, the pain shooting through my arm. I bounded to my feet and tried to stand, bracing myself with one hand against something soft and spongy. I looked down and found my hand inside the queen’s head. I tossed it away, thinking how much lighter it felt than I thought it would.

I heard a cry from Jo Jo Baroso, an animalistic shriek of horror and pain, followed by a sickening gurgling sound. She was trying to say something but sounded as if she were underwater. I turned to look. The flashlight lay on the floor, pointing at her twitching feet. I picked up the light and shined it on her face.

The queen’s scepter was lodged in her throat, the point of the star buried just below the chin. Blood poured from the wound, coating the oversized silver dollar that sat just below the star. The life draining from her, Jo Jo said my name, softly, and what sounded like, “Why…”

I knelt beside her.

“…did you leave…”

Her lips were still moving when…

The explosion.

Echoing off the rock walls.

Sending a cloud of dust up and then down again.

Stillness. The roof didn’t fall in.

A couple of rocks tumbled from somewhere above, and the timber groaned. Then a couple more rocks fell.

Then quiet.

Nothing happened.

Until a boulder the size of a Buick crashed from above, splintering the pedestal, from which the Silver Queen so recently sailed. The timbers groaned louder. Smaller rocks began peppering the floor like a stinging hailstorm. A storm of dust rose from the floor.

“ Blinky,” I yelled in the darkness.

But there was no reply.

Around the chamber, wood timbers shrieked and split. A roar from above grew louder, like an approaching jet.

I scurried toward the ledge with short, quick strides, then dived across headfirst, pulling myself into the tunnel just as the horizontal timber crashed to the floor, followed by what sounded like the entire mountain collapsing into the chamber. In seconds, the opening was sealed tight by a thousand tons of rocks. I lay in the wet tunnel and listened to the rumble of thunder just a few feet away. The floor shimmied, and the black water rippled as the mountain coughed and sputtered and rearranged its parts. When the noise stopped and the shaking subsided, it was over, and the mountain had reclaimed a piece of itself.