The Prostitutes Ball

Chapter 34.

"What is it?" Hitch said, crowding in to look over my shoulder. "DWP seal"

"The electrical panel? Shouldn't it be against the side of the house? Why would they put it way out here?" "They wouldn't."

I was beginning to remember where I'd seen one of these poured-concrete garages before. It was at an old turn-of-the-century house I'd visited at a party up in the Malibu Mountains a few years back. "You know what I think this is?" I said. "What?"

"This garage is covering an old water well. I've seen one of these before."

"A well. Why would they need a well?" Hitch asked.

"This house was built in 1908 and back then they didn't have an extensive water system in L. A. That was before the Owens Valley project. These old houses were built way before the water mains were installed up here. The owners would pay DWP to drill down to the water table and install these private wells. After the water mains were put into service, the private wells were decommissioned."

"So what's the garage for?"

"The guy who owned the house where I saw one of these told me you can't fill in a water well because it connects to an underground aquifer and whatever you pour down the well to fill it in just gets washed away."

"So they capped it, right?"

"Right, but the problem with that is vandals kept pulling the caps off. My friend told me in the mid or late twenties one or two kids fell down these old wells and died. DWP got sued, so they built these concrete garages and locked them shut to protect the welleaps from vandals."

"Okay, so it's nothing, then," he reasoned. "It got planted out because it was ugly."

"Yeah," I said. "Probably."

But as I was turning to go, I started thinking that holly was a strange choice for that job. There were better and cheaper ground covers. Then I remembered that holly was often used by people who lived in areas where city-use ordinances prohibited high fences. If home owners wanted to secure their property, but couldn't because the city limited fence height to four feet, they often planted holly bushes, which reached ten or twelve feet high. Holly also has plentiful inch-long spike-like thorns. It was an effective barrier and a deterrent to prowlers.

I started to wonder if it was just a coincidence that the well house had been planted out with holly, or had someone, like Stender Sheedy and Thayer Dunbar, not wanted this structure messed with like they didn't want anyone messing with the house?

"Let's open this thing up," I said.

"Why?

"Let's just do it."

I looked at the door clasp. It was held shut by a heavy chain with no lock. The chain had been welded to itself.

"Hang on," I said. "I'll be right back."

I ran to our D-ride parked down the street in the bushes, opened the trunk, and pulled out the jack handle. Then I ran back up the hill. By the time I got there Hitch had pulled the welded chain out as far as it would go.

"Okay, stand back."

I slipped the jack handle through the small loop he had created with the chain and tried to use its two-foot-long leverage to apply enough force to snap a link. It didn't yield.

"Grab on to this," I said. "Give me a hand."

We both hung on to the jack handle and put all our weight into it. After about two minutes of bouncing, one of the links finally broke and Hitch and I landed in the thornbush we'd just cut down from the front of the metal door.

"This better be worth it," Hitch growled, picking a painful-looking thorn from his palm.

We got up and pulled off the chain. Then we both yanked on the metal door. The hinges were rusted and the door was heavy, making it extremely tough to move. We managed to force it open wide enough to slip through. Musty air poured out of the crack and greeted us as we turned on our flashlights, both took a deep breath, and slipped inside.

The first thing 1 saw in the gloom was a large, boxy shape. I shined my light on it. It was a massive square object of some kind with a rotting tarp slung over it. The thing was sitting in the center of the rectangular space.

Hitch and I pulled off the canvas. Once it was removed, it revealed a thirty-year-old box-back armored truck. The faded red letters on the side read:

BRINKS MONEY amp; VALUABLES,

SAFETY amp; DISPATCH

"Damn. Look at this," Hitch said softly.

We moved around the truck. The tires were all flat from years of sitting here. Hitch climbed up on the running board and shined his light inside the cab.

"Auugh!" he screamed, and jumped back, almost falling down.

I moved up and shined my light where he had just been looking.

Staring back at me were two empty eye sockets and a bone white skull. A full skeleton was slumped over the wheel, its missing eyes turned to look out the window. All of the flesh had rotted away. A Brinks uniform hung on the bones like a scarecrow s clothing. In the passenger seat was another skeleton. This one was slumped against the passenger door, its uniform also in shreds. Bugs and bacteria had managed to get inside and do their work. Over the years, both guards had been eaten to the bone.

Hitch and I stumbled from the concrete structure and stood outside trying to deal with what we'd just discovered.

For almost two minutes, neither of us spoke. Once Hitch regained his composure, he looked over at me, pale but intense in the moonlight. His exact expression was hard to assess. There was excitement there, even avarice, but mostly he just seemed very happy.

"I told you once we got it worked out, the first act would be killer. In case you missed it, this is the rest of the big dark secret that was lying under Act One. It just exploded to the surface, changing everything."

"Huh?" I said, sounding like a Dunbar party guest. "This is what we've been praying for, dummy. It's our major complication in Act Two."