hell are we going to drink with the Pub gone,” he said. “I mean, we use to live in that place. Even when you and I were three feet tall we went in there and old man Coe Jr. would draw us lemon sodas. Remember?”
He turned to see if I remembered. I did.
“And when the town was sealed off from the rest of the world by those whipping blizzards, it was Coe Jr., Butte and Shiela who made the upstairs into a bunk house and the downstairs into a cafeteria. All us ranchers would come in on our horses and snow mobiles to stay warm and feed each other and play cards and wait for the Reos to come thundering in to rescue us.” He paused. “Sometimes it wasn’t for weeks.”
“Don’t get all misty eyed on me, Smoke,” I said. “I remember.”
“You know, climate change is a bitch. I’m going to miss those blizzards,” he added.
“And the Pub,” I said.
That got his attention.
“Holy shit! I know what’s up...they’ve reached the vault!”
For the past hundred years the whole Bench wanted to know if the rumors of its existence were true. I reminded Smoke of this.
He jumped out of the cab and started off.
Then, over his shoulder, “They’re about to find out.”
I fell in behind. “We know they’re true.”
“Yeah, but only you, me, Hammersmith, Ruthie and maybe five other people who are still alive do.”
We were practically galloping down the sidewalk through the shade of the giant sycamores.
The scene that greeted us resembled a crowd packed around a gibbet to witness a hanging. The only things missing were the picnic baskets and people sarcastically canting, “Oh, My! I’m about to Die! Oh, My! I’m about to Die,” as a prisoner was being lead up the gallows stairs.
We pushed through the crowd towards the front above where Richter’s construction crew was down in the smoking crater. Firemen continued to pour water on the two standing walls and into the steaming rubble filling the basement crater, and a Cat diesel pump throbbed away sucking water from the hole and out into a storm drain on the west side of the street.
Two of the men in full fire gear were at the bottom up to their knees in black slop assisting Richter in the Hitachi EX200 bucket excavator drag brick and piping away from the door of a sixteen foot square cube of steaming concrete, This, Smoke and I knew was, in fact, the vault.
The vault’s walls were two feet thick, carefully poured to withstand fire, water, or breaching. In later years, MacAvity improved it with a steel security fire door and environmental controls. Grandpa Coe, when he built the Pub as his home and as a hotel for passing settlers, poured the vault to keep his whiskey, Salmon River gold, money, guns and his sole prostitute out of the hands of drunks, Mormons, and other heathens.”
The prostitute was Shiela’s grandmother whom Grandpa Coe brought along as he migrated west from Nebraska. They had rattled onto the Bench behind a light wagon pulled by two mules named Dan and Dory, and immediately set up a brick kiln, and stayed.
Seems the MacAvitys and Shiela’s maternal lineage had had a pleasant working relationship for over one hundred years.
Smoke and I had seen first-hand what was inside the vault. This happened four years ago when we decided it would be a good idea to protect Hammersmith and Ruthie. They were being threatened by a rogue SEAL who had decided to return from the distant Vietnam past to exterminate his old commanding officer. Butte had taken us into the vault to select our weapons of choice for the task at hand, and we saw the room contained eight large Remington gun safes loaded with Butte’s stock-and-trade. Apparently he walked off with the military spoils when he retired from training Special Forces and Navy SEALS. The safes contained everything from assault rifles and grenades, to night vision scopes and motion sensors. That sort of thing.
The vault also contained along one wall metal cabinets loaded with assault gear, and a large Standard AMSEC safe set in a corner that held cash placed in MacAvity’s care by some of our ranchers and farmers. Seems they had learned from their fathers, who had suffered the Depression, to distrust banks, and more recently, the Idaho State’s Income Tax Commission which had no common sense at all. Hammersmith was the largest of these depositors in the MacAvity treasury. Hammersmith knew that if the fire had been hot enough to breach the vault, several million in cash would be lost. Enough to focus the mind. And the men standing there following the recovery’s progress were very focused indeed.
We edged over and joined a knot of them. We watched intently as Richter pulled rubble away from the vault’s door with the Hitachi’s powerful jaws. It was then that we saw MacAvity, Shiela, and Hammersmith standing at the very edge of the crater.
Both Shiela and MacAvity looked ravaged and terribly old. Dust had settled on their donated clothing, their faces were drawn like rawhide over their cheekbones, and Shiela, particularly, had the pallor of a funeral shroud. Her grief was palpable.
MacAvity, on the other hand, looked like a man who had dropped from a great height and was about to get to his feet to wrack terrible vengeance on whoever had pushed him.
He and Hammersmith glanced sideways at us, nodded slightly and turned back to their vigil.
With a loud chattering grind, Richter bucketed out a concrete slab of rubble the size of a table top, exposing the bottom half of the scorched steel door. It was now completely freed.
The Hitachi went silent and Richter climbed out and down into the mud and came over.
It was time for the cutting torches to get to work.
Chapter Eight
“How do you want to handle this, Butte?” Richter asked MacAvity.
His two men popped their cutting torches to life. We watched as they set-to cutting the hinges.
Butte shook his head. “When Grandpa Coe built that thing, he meant it to endure heat so that his ammunition wouldn’t be ruined in case of fire. I suspect, though, it will be a hundred to one-forty in there.”
“I know.”
They thought this over.
“When we drop that door, how about I set up a brush fan to blow out the heat?”
A brush fan is like an airplane propeller set inside a cage and driven by a gas engine to accelerate slash pile burns.
“Good,” Butte said. “I have nine heavy fireproof safes in there. We’ll need to get them out, but unopened.”
Richter continued. “When we can get in, we’ll lay down planks and pull them out one at a time and sling them onto a lowboy. That work for you?”
“Yup.”
“And where should we take them?”
Butte looked at Hammersmith who had stood silently between them.
“How about my machine shed, Butte?” he said. “ They can finish cooling in there and we can keep an eye on them. Let them sit for two, three days.”
“Okay.”
The men were through the hinges. One looked up out of the hole and yelled, “What now, Boss? How do we get past the latch?”
Richter thought this over. Then, “Bend a rebar to make two U’s and weld them to the hinge edge. We’ll pull the door off from that side.“
With that, they climbed out and started off around the far side of the site and down the two blocks to Richter’s construction shop and office.
It was then that Charlie pulled up and parked his white Ford Explorer Sheriff’s rig next to a fire truck. He saw us, got out with Ross Bender, his detective, and came over to us. The crowd parted for them like the Red Sea.
“Well, well well,” he said.