Drago #5 (#2b). Art Inc. Spinella
Stephen King even looks like an alien.
I was first to break the silence. “Do we really need to see these places first hand?”
“Internet’s good, but I have a feeling it would be to our advantage, yes.”
“Something’s been bothering me about the whole affair. We have gold balls stretching across the country. We have Bo telling us all of the gold we found here came from the same smelter.”
Bo is a metallurgist who performs valuations and assessments for a high-tone clientele and has a laboratory in Bandon with the latest in high-tech assay equipment. Sal and I found his stolen, classic T’bird a couple of years back and he became a friend for life.
“And from Europe, Nick. The gold used to make the balls was Spanish, if you recall.”
“Odd, don’t you think?”
“That the gold came from Spain? Not really. It’s what the Spaniards were known for. They had this thing about gold.”
“No, odd because the gold found here was from Europe which logically means the gold balls in Maine, Illinois and Colorado also were likely from the same batch.”
Sal thought that over for a second. “So the Celts drug gold cross country. We already figured that.”
“Why?”
“Why would they bring it with them? Because it was part of their tradition or heritage or religion or culture. I don’t know.”
Walking back to the table, “Need fresh coffee.”
Sal followed me into the kitchen. “What are you thinking, Nicky?”
“We have all that Celtic writing from Altos’ notes, correct?”
“Sure. I took photos of it all before the government came down on us and gathered it all up.”
“But you still have the photos. Didn’t give those up. What say we have the text translated?”
“Worth a try. But who?”
“How ‘bout that crazy professor who first told us about…”
I never got to finish my sentence. The rumble of V8 engines on Beverly interrupted.
Sal and I walked out to the driveway. First through the gate, Cookie in her ’76 MG, long ago outfitted with a 5-liter Ford engine. On her tail, a beautifully restored 1966 Thunderbird, dark blue metallic followed by a black ’40 Ford coupe.
To Sal, “Did I miss the memo on a hot rod show?”
“Something’s a foot, Dr. Watson.”
Cookie climbed out of the MG. Frankie Blue slid out of the T’bird and Tatiana shut down the big-block Ford just as Chief Forte’s Bandon Police cruiser nosed in beside the three vehicles.
The chief climbed from the Crown Vic, shaking his head.
I walked to Cookie, “What’s the convention? And where did Frankie get David Kime’s T’bird and Tatiana Bruce’s ’40?”
“We’ll explain in 10 minutes, in the living room.”
With that, the three women disappeared – Tatiana giving Sal a toodles wave with her fingers -- into the house leaving Sal, Forte and me in the driveway.
“What’s up, Chief?”
“Got me, Nick. All I know is Frankie texted me to be here at 11:30. It is now 11:25. And I’m as in the dark as you guys.”
“When did Frankie get the T’bird?” Sal asked.
That got a simple shoulder shrug from the Chief. “What about the ’40? Isn’t that Bruce’s car?”
Sal scratched his beard, “Well I know she fell in love with it when we got back after the whole thing in the South Pacific. She didn’t have it this morning when we got up.”
Tatiana, a former Russian agent for that country’s equivalent of Homeland Security, and Sal had been an item a couple of years ago. Then she returned to her Mother Russia only to return as part of the team that captured a Russian tanker and brought it to Hawaii.
“Well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” I said. “Want a mini-donut, Chief?”
The living room has been redone a couple of times in the past twenty-four months after a couple of gun battles and a later explosion. It looked pretty good, except Cookie was right, it did have a slight donut smell.
The women were standing next to the big screen TV. Cookie waved the three of us to the couch.
“Tatiana, Frankie and I have made a decision.”
I raised my hand.
Cookie gave me a brief smile, “Yes, dear.”
“What’s with the hot rods out front?”
Tatiana giggled as only a 6-foot-2-inch tall, hot as a branding iron woman can.
“I’ll get to that, Mr. Drago.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The three of us,” Cookie continued, “are going into business.”
“Pizza palace, I hope,” Sal said. He wasn’t taking this seriously, either. “Nick, don’t you think it would be great if they opened a pizza palace?”
“Only if they deliver, so to speak.”
Forte snorted. Very ungentlemanly.
Frankie gave the Chief the evil eye and the smile evaporated.
“We’re opening a private investigation agency.”
CHAPTER TWO
The coastal hills had been reforested, cut and reforested again over the decades. Winter rains often turned the ground into mud, the smell of mold and moss and mildew heavy in the damp air.
Jolly bashed his way through the woods, climbing once clear-cut ridges, pulling himself up by wet limbs, boosting himself by planting a shoe into the dead stump of a long-cut tree, clawing his way toward the top of the hill.
Jolly only had one goal; one compelling reason for climbing these hills: To find a mineshaft of one of the scores of mines once spotting Coos County. The “portal” to coal that powered San Francisco for decades; that represented the fourth leg of Coos County’s economic base alongside timber, shipbuilding and agriculture.
It had been a hot June afternoon when Jolly found the portal purely by accident. This was his fifth exploration of the hill near his home. He had begun a’thinkin’ about the paths he found in the woods; the trails that were overgrown with blackberries; the rutted depressions in the ground that would occasionally cough up a railroad tie or spike.
“What’s up there?” he asked himself, staring hard at the hill, eventually seeing the sporadic growth differences between the older Douglas firs here and the smaller, younger ones there. You had to look hard, but once your eye became accustomed to those differences, there was a visible, though subtle, track up the mountain.
He began the quest as only a 12-year-old with a rambunctious nature could: A blue kerchief filled with an apple, three sugar cookies, a tin of water and a slab of homemade bread slathered in fresh butter.
Aloud, “Tub would just die climbing this hill. He’d be a’suckin’ on that inhaler thingy every two seconds.”
Jolly enjoyed each of the trips up these hills, although he never quite got to the top on the first four journeys. But each time, he’d sit in a clearing or against a tree overlooking the river, take in the clear dry summer air and tip back against a pine to eat his bread and butter, a cookie and a long slug of water.
On this day, at the plateau, sitting Indian style legs folded in front of him, he saw it. Maybe it was just the way the