I know he’ll come for me again if he learns where I am. So I’ve got to
keep my head down.”
From the sofa, Clint said, “I better flip the tape over.”
They waited while he popped the cassette out of the recorder.
Although it was only three o’clock, the day was in the grip of a false
twilight indistinguishable from the real one. The breeze at ground
level was striving to match the wind that drove the clouds at higher
altitudes; a thick fog poured in from the west, exhibiting none of the
lazy motion with which fog usually advanced, swirling and churning, a
molten flux that seemed to be trying to solder the earth to the thunder
heads above.
When Clint had the recorder going again, Julie said, “Frank is that the
end of it? When you woke Saturday morning, were you wearing new
clothes, with the paper bag full of money on the bed beside you?”
“No. Not then.”
He raised his head, but he didn’t look at her. He stared past her at
the dreary day beyond the windows, though he seemed to be gazing at
something much farther away than Newport Beach.
“Maybe it’s never going to end.” From the second flight bag out of
which he had earlier withdrawn the bloody shirt and the sample of black
sand, he produced a one-pint mason jar of the type used to store
homecanned fruits and vegetables, with a sturdy, hinged glass lid that
clamped on a rubber gasket. The jar was filled with what appeared to be
rough, uncut, dully gleaming gems. Some were more polished than others;
they sparkled, flared.
Frank released the lid, tipped the jar, and poured some of the contents
onto the imitation blond-wood Formica desktop.
Julie leaned forward.
Bobby stepped in for a closer look.
The less irregular gems were round, oval, teardrop, or lozenge-shaped;
some aspects of each stone were smoothly curved, and some were naturally
beveled with lots of sharp edges. Other gems were lumpy, jagged,
pocked. Several were as large as fat grapes, others as small as peas.
They were all red, though they varied in their degree of coloration.
They vigorously refracted the light, a pool of scarlet glitter on the
pale surface of the desk; the gems marshaled the diffuse glow of the
lamps through their prisms, and cast shimmering spears of crimson toward
the ceiling and one wall, where the acoustic tiles and Sheetrock
appeared to be marked by luminous wounds.
“Rubies?” Bobby asked.
“They don’t look quite like rubies,” Julie said.
“What are they, Frank?”
“I don’t know. They might not even be valuable.”
“Where’d you get them?”
“Saturday night I couldn’t sleep much at all. Just minutes at a time. I
kept tossing and turning, popping awake again as soon as I dozed off.
Afraid to sleep. And I didn’t nap Sunday afternoon. But by yesterday
evening, I was so exhausted, I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more. I
slept in my clothes, and when I got up this morning, my pants pockets
were filled with these things.”
Julie plucked one of the more polished stones from the pile and held it
to her right eye, looking through it toward the nearest lamp. Even in
its raw state, the gem’s color and clarity were exceptional. They
might, as Frank implied, be only semiprecious, but she suspected that
they were, in fact, of considerable value.
Bobby said, “Why’re you keeping them in a mason jar?”
“Because I had to go buy one anyway to keep this, stuff.
From the flight bag he produced a larger, quart-size jar and placed it
on the desk.
Julie turned to look at it and was so startled that she dropped the gem
she had been examining. An insect, nearly as large as her hand, lay in
that glass container. Though it had a tough shell like a
beetle-midnight black with blood-red markings around the entire rim-the
thing within that carapace more closely resembled a spider than a
beetle. It had the sturdy, hairy legs of a tarantula.
“What the hell?”
Bobby grimaced. He was mildly entromophobic. When he encountered any
insect more formidable than a housefly, he called upon Julie to capture