Second Chance Gold (Buck Reilly Adventure Series Book 4), John Cunningham [polar express read aloud .txt] 📗

the sheaf across the table toward him. He just stared at it. “It’s the best maps and information we have on other missing treasures—it’s worth a fortune!”

“But what are we supposed to do—”

“Take it, put it somewhere safe, sell the damned stock, and go away. Take Mom and go.”

The screen went black.

A sudden nausea built inside me. I leapt from the couch and just made it to the bathroom, where I threw up in the toilet. Perspiration seeped from every pore as I grabbed the sink, the small room spinning slowly, my equilibrium blown off its axis.

Fucking Jack.

He’d taken the fall all right, but he’d hidden his money. He obviously knew I’d taken the maps—hell, he’d made copies for himself first—had probably been planning this the whole time he’d been in prison.

Where I never once went to see him.

I rifled through my research material on the Concepcíon. Over two hundred men had died when she sank on a reef, some seventy miles off the coast of Hispaniola. The ship had foolishly left Havana on November 2nd, 1641, as a hurricane approached. When the storm ripped the ship’s mast off, the captain tried to steer her to Puerto Rico, but the violent seas smashed her into the reef. Even though 190 men lived to tell their story, it took until 1687 for the wreck to be salvaged by New Englander William Phips, who recovered over 68,000 pounds of silver and a modicum of gold. Although certainly a fortune, records of the Concepcíon’s manifest indicated that was at best only a third of her hundred-ton cargo. Numerous efforts to find the balance failed until 1978 when a private salvor named Bert Webber recovered six thousand silver coins and valuable artifacts. Yet an immense amount of the treasure—thousands of pounds of silver and gold—remained missing.

While at e-Antiquity, I’d assembled significant GPS data, detailed information from Webber’s records, and little known accounts from the original survivors that I’d hoped could lead a well-financed effort to the area where it was likely buried by coral in what was now called Silver Shoals.

Information Jack and I both possessed.

If I went after it, he’d throw me to the wolves. But as far as I knew, he was focused on the Concepcíon. There were still other treasures I could pursue—with Harry’s help—once I returned from St. Barths. I wouldn’t just sit back and let Jack banish me to poverty, but I would steer a wide path around him.

I checked the weather, flight time, and logical course to St. Barths, which was 1,120 nautical miles away. I decided to stop in Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic for fuel, then plotted the course. Like most islands in the Caribbean, neither the DR nor St. Barths allowed water landings, so the Beast would stay dry on this trip—fine with me, since saltwater was so difficult to clean out of the plane’s many nooks and crannies. Corrosion was one of the biggest problems for salt water based flying boats.

With Ray Floyd out of town, I still hoped to get one of my other friends to join me on the trip. Plus, I needed information. With that in mind I flipped through the tattered pages of my address book. An automatic grimace twisted my lips, but I dialed the number from the hotel phone anyway.

“Special Agent Booth’s office. Can I help you?”

Booth qualified for an assistant now?

“This is Buck Reilly. Is he available?”

After less than a minute the familiar voice came on the line.

“Charles Reilly, III? Are you calling to confess your crimes and turn yourself in?”

I swallowed back acid reflux.

Booth was the Special Agent in Charge of Florida and the Caribbean basin, and he’d dogged me since I moved to Key West. He’d made it clear the FBI believed I was guilty of insider trading—specifically of having warned my parents before e-Antiquity’s stock crashed—and Interpol still suspected me of plotting their deaths in Switzerland as if I had them killed to get the inheritance. Booth had forced me into being an under the radar operative a few times, to go places he couldn’t, all under the guise of keeping the heat off my case. He was a royal prick, and if he got his hands on the information Jack now held over my head, he’d happily arrest me. So, like any gambler, I wanted to keep an eye—or in this case an ear—on the opposition.

“Very funny, Booth.”

“Then to what do I owe this honor?”

“I’ve been hired by Lou Atlas to—”

“The Lou Atlas?” He paused. “Your client list is improving, but you’re wasting your time.”

“I’m looking for Lou’s—”

“Deadbeat nephew. That is what you were going to say, right? Jerry Atlas?”

I bit my lip. “Why is it a waste?”

“He’s just a missing person—no foul play, no interest to me. Just another drunk gazillionaire who pissed his life away.”

Pretty much the same summary Lou Atlas had offered.

“So the FBI doesn’t have any intel?”

“What makes you think you can call me looking for information, Reilly? You’re my gopher, not the other way around. And if I—”

“Okay, Booth. I thought you might benefit if I can find him, figured you’d be willing to give me some insight. Sorry I called—”

“Hold on, hotshot. I’ll tell you this. Since the guy’s related to Lou Atlas, of course we looked into his disappearance and called the local police—or gendarmes as the French call them. They had nothing but a lengthy rap sheet of drunk and disorderly, fighting in public, disturbing the peace, and a case of domestic violence.”

“Jerry’s a wife-beater?”

Booth snickered. “No, apparently his old lady kicked his ass at some beach bar once when she found him hanging all over a bathing suit model. Anyway, bottom line is, the local police assume he drowned because he hadn’t gone through Customs, which he always did when going island-hopping, and his body hadn’t been found, alive or dead. They claim to have conducted an exhaustive search, but who knows what that means.