Jeff Abbott - Black Joint Point

So – Stoney had been kidnapped for real? Maybe Gooch was a partner Danny Laffite had that no one knew about. Or maybe Stoney had switched sides, decided to get out from under Alex’s thumb, gotten himself a new partner to take care of Alex. He swore. Screw worrying about getting the emerald, he should have killed Stoney the moment he figured out Stoney betrayed him. He felt the sting of his own greed.

Where the hell do I start looking for them?

He tried to calm his thoughts. Say Stoney decided to bolt, decided to hire muscle to cut out Alex. He’d have to call. Did Stoney have a cell with him? Alex went to the cordless phone in the cottage. There was a redial button. He pressed it. An answering machine clicked on, a low, comfortable drawl: ‘Hi, you’ve reached the office of Justice of the Peace Whitman Mosley. Office hours are nine a.m…’

Alex clicked off. Whit Mosley. That young judge in the loud shirt who came looking for Stoney to ask about the murdered old people.

So what the hell did a gun-happy Gooch have to do with a judge? He paced the floor for a minute. Maybe Stoney cracked. Decided to cut a deal and called the judge.

No. Police cars and sirens and Miranda rights would have been involved. Judges didn’t hire mercenaries to kidnap people.

But maybe it was even worse… maybe they knew about the emerald, the treasure. Maybe the judge and Gooch were just chasing it for themselves. Alex could see it: Stoney, babbling that he knew where a fat emerald was and knew a guy who’d hid millions in rare coins and could they help him cut a deal? Maybe a cop or a judge would think, Well, I’d like me some of that Even assuming Stoney hadn’t cracked, Gooch had already found Stoney here at the cottage. They must know enough. And nothing on the news yet about the treasure. No one else knew.

But they had Stoney, who had the Eye, and could completely ruin Alex.

The lunchtime heat wasn’t unbearable, the breeze a cool comfort. Whit met Dr Parker and a bookish, attractive woman on the waterfront dock of a small restaurant near the Port Leo harbor for Saturday lunch. Dr Parker introduced the woman as Dr Iris Dominguez with Texas A amp;M Corpus Christi. Pronounced her name the Spanish way, Ee-res.

The bones from the dig are in Iris’s car trunk,’ Dr Parker said. ‘I can sign custody of them back over to you after lunch if you like.’

Whit saw the waitress approaching for the drink order keep her smile frozen in place at the mention of bones.

‘He’s really not a maniac,’ Whit told her.

‘The day is young,’ Iris Dominguez said. She had a beautiful voice, soft but forceful, and a cool, unfussy elegance. Whit liked her immediately. They ordered hamburgers and onion rings, Parker asking for a Salty Dog, Iris and Whit ordering beers.

‘So you want to know about the coins and you’re bribing us with lunch.’ Parker scooped a tortilla chip with salsa and popped it into his mouth.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Why not just ask the sheriff’s office?’

‘I could. But I’m not popular with law enforcement right now. I just insulted the FBI.’

Iris Dominguez raised an eyebrow.

Parker laughed. ‘And why did you think that was productive?’

‘I’ll see if it gets the results I want,’ Whit said. ‘Plus, I wanted to thank you and Dr Dominguez for your help.’ He smiled at Iris. ‘You identified the relics. That was extremely helpful to me.’

‘You’re welcome. You’ve made my weekend interesting.’

The waitress arrived with their drinks; Parker licked the salt from the glass rim, sucked down half the grapefruit juice and vodka in a hard swallow.

Dr Dominguez waited until the waitress had departed. ‘Okay. What do you know about coins?’

‘They don’t stay in my pocket long enough,’ Whit said.

‘Let me give you a quick primer. These kinds of coins weren’t treated like how we treat quarters and pennies and dimes. They were created to make it easy to move massive amounts of wealth from Mexico to Spain. They might be struck in Mexico, shipped, and then immediately melted down in Europe.’ She sipped at her beer. ‘These are called milled bust coins, the last produced Spanish colonial coins. The gold coins come in denominations of eight, four, two and one escudo. The silvers are reales. Obviously the gold coins are worth more.’ She dug in her purse, pulled out a file of photos. ‘I took some pictures of the coins, nice big blowups so I can show you why these coins are particularly unusual.’ She spread the photos out, one group to one side, the other by Parker’s dwindling cocktail.

‘These all have a typical reverse side,’ she said. ‘See the pillars and shield? Typical of many Spanish colonial coins. And these have double rosettes under the pillars. Very unusual.’ She pulled the other section of photos into the center of the table. ‘The obverse sides of the coins often have either a monarch’s shield – like British paper money having the queen on it – or a design of the emperor’s head, which you can see these have. Most of these are Ferdinand VII. Don’t you think he had a weak chin?’ She pointed with a pencil tip.

‘Yes,’ Whit said.

Iris flipped the picture back over to the pillars, to the letters encircling the design. ‘You see the Mo? That means Monteblanco. Next, that’s the denomination – this is an eight escudo; and next are the initials of the assayer. Here that’s ET, Esteban Torres, the official of the Monteblanco mint. The other side has a date… Here, this coin was minted in 1819. Monteblanco was at that time the newest Mexican mint. Just opened. Freshly minted, you could say.’

‘Iris doesn’t get out enough,’ Parker said. ‘Does it show?’

‘I think you’re brilliant,’ Whit said.

She smiled and Parker said, ‘Hey.’

Just friends, Whit thought, right.

Iris tapped the photos with her fingernail. ‘So I dove into the historical archives, called a professor friend of mine in Mexico City to run some local checks down there for me. A large cache of the original silver and gold coins minted at Monteblanco – with this unusual double-rosette design – was being shipped to Spain right after being minted, aboard a schooner called Santa Barbara. But according to the records, Santa Barbara was lost at sea in March of 1820, somewhere south of Cuba.’

‘I see,’ Whit said again. 1820. Jean Laffite’s time. His heart neared his throat. This would make Jason Salinger’s day.

‘But the records of the time indicate that the weather was fair throughout that time in the Caribbean. So Santa Barbara probably didn’t fall victim to a Gulf storm.’

Whit cleared his throat. ‘I will embarrass myself a little now. But what if the coins were buried, as part of a treasure?’

‘Yeah, I didn’t tell Iris that part,’ Parker said. ‘I didn’t want to influence her data.’

‘You couldn’t have,’ Iris said dryly, ‘You’re talking about the locks. The latches I identified. They’re from the same period as the coins. You think the coins were originally buried with those relics and skeletons?’

Whit lowered his voice, leaned forward. ‘Yes, I do. I think Jean Laffite took Santa Barbara as his last prize, and he had no time to take and bank it under a false name in New Orleans. He was forced out of Galveston in the spring of 1820. Navies from Britain, Spain, and the US would have been hunting him in the Gulf. He had no base to hide, nowhere to run.’