The Boogens Read online

  So Otis Blanchard had nothing to worry about—except the fact that he had stolen enough gold from the Hatcher mine to make him one of the richest men in Colorado. For twenty-seven years now, Tolivar had been telling himself how stupid he had been to play along with a son of a bitch like Otis Blanchard. And all along he had known damned well the day of reckoning was bound to come. Well, if he was going to take a fall, Mr. Otis Blanchard was going to come crashing down twice as hard.

  Tolivar pushed the cigarette butt out the window and warmed both hands at the heater vent. It was funny, he reflected. Twenty-seven years ago, when the whole thing started, the weather had been almost exactly like it was now. Maybe even worse. That time it had rained for seven days straight, and the town of Summit had almost been washed away.

  But it wasn’t the rain that had stuck in Tolivar’s memory all these years. It was standing in that mine shaft and staring down at those two skeletons—all that was left of those two kids he had seen walking around town less than forty-eight hours earlier. And it was what had happened ten minutes after that, when he was trapped at the end of that mine shaft with Charlie Lucas and old Bill Kennedy, with that slimy tentacle coming out of that crevice, thrashing and flailing at them and blocking their way out. Tolivar still had nightmares about that experience.

  It had been Bill Kennedy who had first discovered something was wrong up at the Hatcher mine. On the third day of the storm, with the roads all washed out and the phone lines down, he had driven his jeep up there to see if those kids were still okay. All he found outside was the remains of their tent lying in a soggy heap about a hundred feet down the mountainside.

  Early the next morning, Tolivar and Charlie Lucas had gone back up there with him and made a search of the mine. About three o’clock in the afternoon, they had finally found them deep in the west section—two skeletons in a heap of bones, one of them with his chest caved in and the other one with a hand missing.

  It didn’t make any sense that they were living and healthy one day and then nothing but bare skeletons the next. Under the bodies was a pool of sticky yellow stuff that trailed off into the darkness of a smaller shaft.

  And then Charlie Lucas had found the gold.

  Tolivar had been taking a closer look at the crushed bones in Thomas’ chest, and Bill Kennedy was peering deeper into the small shaft at the side when Charlie let out a cry. “Holy Jesus!” he shouted, “look at this!”

  Charlie was about thirty feet deeper in the shaft, in the place where Thomas and Hitchings must have been working before they died. There were piles of white rock on the ground, and a big hollow five or six feet deep had been dug away from the side, Charlie was shining his light in the hollow, moving the beam across from side to side.

  Tolivar never had known much about mining and even less about the various kinds of ore. But he knew the shiny, milk-white color of quartz rock. And there was no mistaking the webbing of gold that threaded through the white.

  Old Bill Kennedy couldn’t believe it. He’d been a prospector all his life, and he had never seen such a concentration of gold in a quartz deposit. He figured it would run as high as seven or eight hundred dollars a ton. From the looks of the vein, it was running off to the southwest and appeared to be getting bigger as it went. The amazing part of it was that the gold was so thick, it wouldn’t even need the heavy milling that most quartz gold had to have.

  They had stood there about ten minutes, looking at that quartz and digging out little chunks of it. Tolivar remembered that Charlie Lucas was laughing and shoving pieces in his pockets. And then the tentacle came sliding out of the crevice.

  The first thing they heard was a soft, gurgling sound coming from somewhere behind them. Then there was a plop, like a wet dishrag had dropped on the ground. For a minute they had all stared at the dark shaft. Then Tolivar had swung his light around and they all froze, not quite believing what they were looking at. About twenty feet behind them, the tentacle was stretching out of the crevice about four feet, reaching one way and then the other, as if trying to touch the other side. The thickest part was about five inches in diameter, and the upper edge was all scaly and crusted. A yellow liquid was oozing out of the crevice and running down to the ground.

  Tolivar never did remember exactly what happened in the next two or three minutes. He had taken out his service revolver, but he had been too dumbfounded and too scared to use it. Charlie and Bill had brushed past him, moving along the wall of the shaft, shouting at him to come on.

  Bill Kennedy had run by the thing first. The tentacle had pulled back for a minute, and he’d gone by with three quick steps. Then Charlie Lucas was yelling at Tolivar to shoot, at the same time edging along the wall, getting ready to make a dash for it.

  Tolivar had shot and run at the same time. Whether any of his bullets hit the thing or not, he didn’t know. But in the midst of the three or four long strides he took, the end of the tentacle suddenly slammed into the side of his face and sent him sprawling into the dust. Then Charlie and Bill had him by the arms and were dragging him through the dirt back to where the skeletons were.

  When he thought back on it, Tolivar never did know for sure why he had insisted on taking those two skeletons halfway out of the mine. Maybe he was still groggy from being hit by that thing. Or maybe it was just a reflex action from his police training. In any case, he had grabbed Hitchings’ skeleton by the neck and yelled at Charlie Lucas to get the other one. Then they were running through the shaft dragging those bones along behind them. When they finally stopped to catch their breath, they dropped the skeletons in the shaft and didn’t bother taking them any farther.

  If the telephone had been working, or if the road had been open, that probably would have been the end of it. Tolivar would have called his superiors, the coroner would have come up as fast as possible for the skeletons and then there would have been a search of the mine and some kind of effort to kill that animal, or octopus or whatever the hell it was in there. But with the rain still battering at them and half the state of Colorado under water, there had been no way to get a message out of Summit in the next two days.

  Tolivar didn’t remember what he had thought about or what any of them had talked about when they got out of that mine. The biggest thing on their minds must have been that tentacle and what kind of animal was on the other end of it. But they also must have talked about that gold, because Tolivar remembered Bill Kennedy saying there was at least a million dollars’ worth of it in there. If the vein continued for any distance, there might be ten or twenty million. Tolivar also remembered scrubbing at the side of his face for some time to wash off that burning yellow slime that had been left there by the end of the tentacle. And then, about eight o’clock that night, Charlie and Bill Kennedy had come to his place, saying that Otis Blanchard wanted to talk to all of them up at the hotel.

  Tolivar had been in Summit only three or four months then, and he had never met Otis Blanchard. All he knew about the man was that he owned the hotel and had some kind of lead-mining operation on the other side of the mountain. Blanchard was not crippled then, and when they got to his office, he was standing behind a desk with all those pieces of rock Charlie Lucas had picked up in the mine spread out on a piece of white paper. Blanchard was a big man, about six four, with a barrel chest and the handshake of a lumberjack. He opened a bottle of twelve-year-old bourbon and then went into his quiet pitch.

  It was a frightening story Charlie had told him. But more amazing was the fact that those two kids, Hitchings and Thomas, had made such a rich strike in the Hatcher mine. It was tragic that they had been killed before they could dig out the gold.

  So what would happen now? Well, maybe they could never kill that monster down there, and nobody would ever get close to that gold. On the other hand, if the authorities were notified and the bodies were recovered, maybe they could pump some poison gas into the mine or maybe blast the monster out. Then the gold could be brought out and some people would be very rich. Those peop
le would be the heirs of Hitchings and Thomas—probably their parents. From what Mr. Blanchard understood, the boys’ parents were already very well-to-do. One of the fathers was a Wall Street attorney, and the other one was a heart surgeon. They certainly didn’t need the money.

  However, there was a way to get that gold out of the mine without disturbing that octopus, or whatever it was. It just so happened that Mr. Blanchard owned a lead mine on the other side of the mountain. The property bordered on the Hatcher mine claims, and there were existing shafts that came to within fifteen hundred feet of the Hatcher mine at the point where the two kids had found the gold.

  Over the years, a lot of men from Summit had lost their lives in the Hatcher mine. Somehow, it didn’t seem fair that all that gold should go to two rich families in the East. And at the moment, the only people who knew about that gold were the four men sitting in that room.

  When Blanchard had finished talking, it was clear enough that Lucas and Bill Kennedy were all for taking the gold. There was a lot of sense in what Blanchard had said. Hitchings and Thomas were dead—there was nothing anybody could do about that. So the gold either went to some rich people back East or stayed in Summit. But there were some risks involved.

  “Sooner or later,” Tolivar had said, “somebody’s going to file missing persons reports. And if their families have a lot of money, there’ll be some private detectives looking around. The first place they’ll look is in the mine.”

  “Not if all their possessions are somewhere else,” Blanchard had said. “Particularly their truck. Bill suggested we drive it down to the Superstition Mountains in Arizona. A lot of prospectors have disappeared in those mountains. Bill and Charlie can take it down there. In the meantime, the west shaft can be sealed up with a cave-in.”

  “And what do we do about that animal down there?” Tolivar had asked.

  “The cave-in should effectively imprison it. And the entrance to the mine should be boarded up, of course. When we reach the gold from the back, we’ll block off the shaft into the Hatcher mine.”

  It had all seemed simple enough at the time. A year, two years at the most. Then the skeletons would be found. By then nobody would question anything. And that animal, whatever it was, would probably be dead.

  The profits from the gold were to be divided into six equal parts, with Blanchard receiving three of them to pay for his drilling a new shaft. Once the gold was found, all the costs of mining, crushing and smelting would be deducted before any profits were distributed. To make everything appear legitimate, the money would all be funneled through Blanchard’s mining company, and the payments to the other three partners would be made in cash.

  So the three dunces—Tolivar included—had walked out of the hotel that night thinking they were going to be rich as soon as Tolivar bored into the mine from the back.

  The millions had never come. According to Blanchard, there was only a tiny pocket of rich ore. The rest of it was embedded in hard quartz, and crushing it was an expensive process. After the first year, Tolivar, Lucas and Kennedy received a cash payment of thirteen thousand dollars each. After that, the annual dividends went down almost to nothing. It wasn’t until gold prices skyrocketed in the mid-seventies that the payments went up a little. But even then, they never reached thirteen thousand dollars again.

  As far as “discovering” the skeletons of Hitchings and Thomas was concerned, there didn’t seem to be any point in it as long as the mine was still producing. The Arizona police and the private investigator seemed satisfied that the two kids had died somewhere in the Superstition Mountains.

  Tolivar hadn’t the slightest doubt that he and Lucas—and Bill Kennedy before he died—were being screwed and that the fat gold profits were being hidden somewhere in the books of Blanchard’s mining company. But there wasn’t much they could do about it. Twenty-seven years ago, Lucas and Kennedy had driven the kids’ truck down to Arizona and left it, and Tolivar and Charlie Lucas had blown up the mine and given false reports about Hitchings and Thomas leaving Summit to go search for the Lost Dutchman mine. But Otis Blanchard had kept his nose clean. He hadn’t done a damned thing to implicate himself in the coverup. All he did was run a shaft across his claim line and into the Hatcher mine property—a little mistake that he claimed was made by one of his stupid engineers, now dead, of course.

  So Otis Blanchard, who thirty years ago had owned nothing but a broken-down hotel and a lead mine that was struggling to break even, was now a rich man, with acres of condominiums in Aspen and Vail and Pineglen and a dozen other resort towns in Colorado. Tolivar and Charlie Lucas had been thrown nothing but a few handfuls of peanuts.

  To hell with it, Tolivar thought. With those people from the Loomis Company digging up skeletons, and maybe another kid lying dead somewhere in that mine, he had no intentions of being the one left holding the short end of the stick. Either Blanchard came up with a good chunk of dough tonight or Sheriff Tolivar would be giving full and detailed answers to any embarrassing questions anybody happened to ask him.

  He had smoked two more cigarettes before a pair of headlights finally appeared in his rearview mirror. He snubbed out the last butt and watched silently as the car drew steadily closer. When it was within two hundred feet, it suddenly slowed and eased off the road to park behind him. As quickly as the lights flicked off, Tolivar knew it was not Blanchard. The car was a gray Buick, about four years old. Charlie Lucas. Tolivar pushed his door open, slid out and walked back to Charlie’s window.

  Charlie was in his late fifties and half crippled up with arthritis now. “What’s going on?” he asked as he rolled down the window. He was wearing his usual gloomy face. “Blanchard called me from Denver and told me to be here by six o’clock.”

  Tolivar told him about the discovery of the skeletons and the backpack that was found in the lower part of the mine. Charlie nodded and stared silently through the windshield. “I guess it had to happen some time,” he finally said.

  “There’s also a good chance they’re going to find out that gold has been taken out of the mine,” Tolivar said. “Which means we could be in a lot of trouble.”

  “We didn’t take the gold out.”

  “A fat lot of difference that makes. If they find out we hid those skeletons, we’re going to be in a lot worse trouble. They wouldn’t have much trouble building a case to prove we killed those kids.”

  “What does Blanchard think about it?”

  “He thinks we shouldn’t worry. What he means is he doesn’t have to worry. He can just throw us to the wolves and forget it.”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “I think we’ve got to stand up to him. If we’re going to take the rap, we’ve got to get paid for it. Otherwise, we say Blanchard and Kennedy drove the kids’ truck down to Arizona, and Blanchard and Kennedy blew up the mine. We got cash from Blanchard, so there’s no way he can prove he gave us any money.”

  Lucas gave Tolivar an uneasy glance.

  “We gotta do it, Charlie. You got a kid you want to send to college, and I got twenty-eight years toward a pension. We’re going to be losing a hell of a lot more than he is.”

  Charlie took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay.”

  Another pair of headlights suddenly appeared at the bottom of the hill. Somewhere behind the clouds the sun was probably coming over the horizon, but the sky was still dark and gloomy.

  “I’m not shitting, Charlie,” Tolivar said. “He’s been screwing us for twenty-seven years. He can afford to pay plenty to stay out of jail.”

  Charlie nodded and glanced at the mirror as Tolivar moved back to the patrol car.

  The big gray Cadillac limousine swept past them without even slowing down. A moment later the gates swung open and the car disappeared behind the high brick wall. Tolivar started the patrol car and drove up the road with Charlie Lucas following closely behind him. The gates were still open. When they reached the house, Victor had already transferred Blanchard into a wheelchair a
nd was pushing him up a ramp and across the porch.

  Victor met Tolivar and Lucas at the door. “Mr. Blanchard wants you to wait in the library,” he said. He turned and led them through a pair of mahogany doors. “The bar is to the right. Mr. Blanchard said to help yourselves to a drink.” With that he walked out and closed the doors.

  The walls of the room were covered with books, and there was a big fire burning in the fireplace. Tolivar poured two straight bourbons and gave one to Lucas. As soon as they had crossed the room to the fireplace, the doors opened and Blanchard wheeled himself into the room. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said cheerfully. “Charlie, how’s your arthritis getting along?”

  “Not too bad, Mr. Blanchard.”

  “Sit down, sit down.” Blanchard rolled forward and drew himself up to the end of the long coffee table. Tolivar and Lucas sat on the couches on either side. “Well,” Blanchard said and fixed a cigarette into his holder. “It seems that we have a little problem. Did Tolivar tell you about it, Charlie?”

  Charlie nodded. “Yeah.”

  Blanchard grunted. “Tolivar, tell me about this backpack. Are you sure that couple found it in the mine?”

  “They said they did. I don’t see any reason why they would lie about it.”

  “And you think it belongs to the Myer boy?”

  “I don’t know. The kid disappears and then the backpack shows up in the mine. It seems like there’s a good chance it’s his.”

  “How would he have gotten into the mine?”

  “Probably at the entrance. It’s easy enough to pull off a couple of those planks.”

  “Why would he go in there?”

  “Who knows? Maybe he’s flying on pot. Or snorting something. Maybe he gets an idea it would be great fun dancing around in a mine shaft. I’ve seen those kids do all kinds of crazy things.”