I may have been wrong. “Look, I’m sorry. I thought that-”
“You didn’t think.” She glowered at me. “I helped you do research, I offered my services to help you find this ghostly wrecker’s camp and you accuse me of setting you up? You are a first-class son of a bitch, Skip Moore.”
She straddled the seat of her Harley-Davidson, turned the key, and blew out onto the street.
Em and I watched her disappear.
“It seems we’ve upset several people tonight.” Em let go of my hand.
“How else would they have been waiting for us at three in the morning? That’s not the time of night two grown men walk the beach.” I thought about that statement. “Unless-”
Em shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“The good news is that we found a metal box.”
“Really? The information you were looking for?”
“I think.”
“Skip, that’s fabulous.”
“The bad news is that I don’t think it made it over the fence. James didn’t have it back there.”
I had no idea where the metal box could be.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Dude, she peeled out of here. What happened?”
“Skip simply asked her if she’d turned us in to Doctor O’Neill and company. A fair question.”
He stepped back. “Never saw that coming.”
“My God, James, she was the only other person to know what we were planning. I mean, I think they were going to kill us.”
“Pretty serious accusation, amigo.”
“And what did you think?”
He smiled. “Same thing. She knew about our plans. And, it was strange that she showed up at the exact time we were getting grilled by the doctor and his friend.”
“We handled them though, didn’t we?” I thought about how I’d hit O’Neill in the nose. One of the prouder moments of my life.
“Gave ’em the old one-two.” James smiled.
“James, all of that hassle. And you never got the box, did you? Is it still on the vacant lot?”
He smiled. “As soon as I saw both guys were distracted, I picked it up where I’d dropped it. Right by the fence.” He reached into the truck and pulled out the old, dirty metal container.
I grinned. We were well on our way to finding the gold.
“I think I’ll go to sleep and dream about piles of gold, gettin’ bigger and bigger and bigger.” James was smiling.
“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” I said. No question. We’d both watched it one hundred times. Maybe more.
“Let’s drive over and pick up the shovels,” James said.
“Then I think we go back to the Cove and pry open the box.”
“It’s three thirty in the morning. Do we wake up Mrs. T.?”
“It depends,” my best friend said, “on what’s in the box.”
We drove back, Em never saying a word, the gun in her lap. Ma Barker, Bonnie Parker, “Squeaky” Fromme-the woman who pointed a gun at President Ford. I had fantasies of Emily as a gunslinging moll.
In my room, we worked on the lid, prying with a metal nail file from Em’s purse and a corkscrew that came with the room. James took the nail file and worked it up under one side. Then under the other. He slid it up between the box and lid on the front, and pulled back.
The file snapped, and half of the blade jammed between the lid and the box.
“Sucker is locked.”
“Rusted shut,” said Em.
“Both,” I added. “If we had a blow torch-”
“A hacksaw,” James suggested.
“A hammer.” Em slammed her fist on the top of the box.
It popped open, the lid springing up and the rest of the nail file dropping to the floor.
“Whoa.” James moved back.
“Oh, my God.” I gazed into the container. A folded piece of paper lay in the open box, yellow and curled on the edges.
“Take it out,” Em said.
“It hasn’t seen the light of day for seventy-five years.”
“If we want to know what’s on it, we’ve got to take it out.”
“Maybe we should wait.” James wasn’t sure we were making the right move.
I reached in and pulled it out with just the tips of my thumb and index finger. Careful not to do any damage.
It was crinkly and stiff like a cracker.
“Man, if we try to unfold this, it’s going to break into pieces.”
“We’ve got to see what’s on that paper.”
“James, we’ll destroy it.”
“Soak it in water.”
“The ink could run.”
“Skip, James. Do you remember where you were when I called you from Miami and told you about the letter I’d received?”
We answered together. “The library.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” James gave her attitude.
“Libraries do more than check out books. You guys saw a lot of news clippings and magazine articles.”
“Even some letters about the hurricane.”
“Libraries fix old letters. Old newspapers. They must have a process.”
“Oh.” James nodded. “Once in awhile, you come up with a decent idea.”
“I’ve bailed your ass out more times than I care to count, James. I’ve had a lot of good ideas.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I suggest we get some sleep and visit your friendly Islamorada Library first thing tomorrow morning.”
We agreed and headed to our respective rooms.
It was probably five a.m. when I heard the doorknob turn. The first thing I thought was that someone had made a mistake. They assumed it was the room next door.
Then I heard a clicking noise as if a key was being inserted. Pelican Cove still used keys, not the plastic slide cards that most places use.
“Who’s there?” I sat straight up in bed.
Em shook her head, wiped the sleep from her eyes, and stared up at me.
“Skip, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Someone’s trying to open the door.”
My girlfriend reached for the nightstand drawer beside her bed and opened it.
Standing up, I slowly walked toward the door.
“Skip, step aside.” There was urgency in her voice.
I took two steps back and heard the door handle turn again.
With a powerful thrust the door swung in, banging loudly against the wall. I saw a silhouette, both arms straight out in front.
“Get down, Skip.”
I dropped.
The first explosion was deafening, and I could just make out the second one.
I looked up from my kneeling position, peering out the open door. There was no more silhouette.
“Are you all right?” She was shouting.
“What the hell happened.”
She was standing by the bed in my T-shirt. Her blonde hair was disheveled and her face was ashen.
“Em?”
And then I saw the gun hanging from her right hand.
“He shot at us, Skip.”
“And?”
“I shot him.”
The outside lights shone bright through the door and I stepped out on the walkway. There was no one. Out in the parking lot the roar of a motorcycle split the night, then things got quiet again.
“There’s no one here, Em.”
She was suddenly by my side. Emily in my T-shirt, me in my boxers.
“Apparently, you didn’t do any damage.”
She knelt, running her fingers over the cement.
“Apparently, I did,” she said.
She held up her fingers and they were stained with bright red blood. And there was a whole lot more of it on the concrete.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The couple from the neighboring unit stuck their heads out the door.
“Jesus Christ, if that was a bullet, it destroyed our TV and almost took us out,” the guy said.
We heard commotion from down the hall and several other people stuck their heads out, trying to see if everything had returned to normal. I suppose it all depends on what you consider normal.
A guy with a dirty work shirt and thirty keys hanging from his belt came rushing into our room, walked to the headboard of the bed, and put his finger in the bullet hole.