Читать книгу Westin Legacy - Alice Sharpe - Страница 9

As Lonnie fumbled the key in the lock, he glanced over his shoulder and scanned the faces of his buddies.

“Remember, you guys,” he said, not too surprised to detect a slur in his voice. Damn hooch sure snuck up on a man. “This is top secret. You gotta…gotta promise you won’t tell anyone about this. Especially not Janine.”

The other two men nodded solemnly.

The key finally clicked and he pushed in the door. He didn’t want to turn on the light until he’d secured the room again. Never knew when Janine might take it into her head to come on down to the basement and make sure he wasn’t gambling her trust fund away on a busted flush. He urged his friends forward into the heavy shadows. “Don’t touch nothing,” he warned.

Once they were all crammed inside, he closed the door, slid the dead bolt, switched on the light and waited for a chorus of gratifying gasps.

“What’s all this junk?”

The corners of Lonnie’s mouth drooped. “What do you mean, what is it? It’s artifacts.”

“Your ‘private stash’ is bunch of old broken pots?” one man scoffed. Now Lonnie was getting mad. After all these years he had finally decided to share his collection and this was what he got? He pointed at a square-looking figure in a glass case. “That there, that’s a rare Central American Human Effigy. Worth almost five thousand bucks.” He pointed at another case. “And that canteen is Southwest Anasazi. I paid three thousand for it. The case over there is full of Mississippian Indian relics. Any museum would love to have just one of these things.”

“Where’d you get ’em?”

This came from his best friend of the group, who was eyeing Lonnie as though he was some kind of traitor.

“Here and there.”

“Black market?”

Lonnie shrugged.

“What about this?”

Lonnie turned to admire a prehistoric carved rock bowl. The handle was a crude rendition of a human head, turned away from the indentation, the skull overlaid with a veneer of gold.

“That’s my latest purchase,” Lonnie boasted. “It’s local, from right here in Wyoming. No one knows which tribe, but it’s old. Prehistoric. Paid a bundle for it, too.”

“Someone local sold it to you? Who?”

Lonnie shook his head. “No, no, I ain’t telling. He promised me more pieces though. Said he was going deeper, whatever that means.”

There was a sudden chill in the room as though a north wind had just blown over the top of an icy Rocky Mountain peak. Lonnie looked from one face to the next. Neither set of eyes revealed a thing.

It was there, though. In the air. Something cold and watchful.

He rubbed his eyes, wondering if the booze had made him woolly-headed, but he couldn’t shake the feeling he wasn’t the only one in that small private room who kept secrets.

Or that the ones he sensed might be as dangerous as his own.