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“What is it?”

“Flood control.”

We stand there like two idiots, staring in silence at the work of some engineering drone twenty years ago.

“Nice,” I say.

“Thought you’d like it.”

“Give me dried hoofprints and the smell of old manure any day.”

McCord laughs. At least he has a sense of humor about himself. I can feel the giggles rise like bubbles…. Maybe that’s how it will begin.

“One thing about wranglers,” he says. “We take you to the best places.”

“Really? I thought you were interested in Sara.”

“Sara’s hot but way too young.”

“That’s what she said about you. The opposite. In reverse.”

I snicker self-consciously. Awkward, too, he kicks at the wire cage covering the pump. It moves. It is not secured by the rusted lock, only looks that way.

Wordlessly, we catch our fingers in the wire mesh and pull. It comes off easily and we set it aside.

“Someone’s been messing with this, for sure.”

We squat closer. The flashlight reveals a hole in the iron plate that is fitted around the pipe assembly. A hole for lifting.

McCord checks with me. “Are you ready?”

“Go for it.”

He hooks a finger in the hole, but it is hard to lift. No hinge—it just sits in the square opening.

“Need a crowbar. Got one in the truck.”

“I’m not staying here alone.”

“No problem.” McCord finds a heavy stick. “I’ll lift, you get the stick under there and pry.”

“Ready.”

“Wait a minute!”

“What?” I whisper with alarm.

“Watch out for that Indian ghost,” he hisses. “If he comes charging out of here, I’m gone.”

“Don’t make me laugh!”

“This is serious stuff. Indian lore. Buried treasure.”

“Just lift.”

“You know the old Indian chant—”

“Just do it before I pee my pants!”

McCord hooks his finger firmly, sets his back, and lifts. I push the stick underneath the edge and we slide the plate to one side of the hole and shine the light inside.

I scream like a madwoman. “Close it! Close it quick!”

Inside the culvert, four feet down, is a nest of rattlesnakes.

“Just stand still.”

“Oh my God, Sterling—”

“Don’t move. They’re cold. They’re resting. This is not their time of day.”

Resting? The slow, slithering mass is pit-of-the-stomach hell. McCord keeps his flashlight on the entwined bodies—big ones, inches thick, with long rattles and darting wedgelike heads.

“These guys are old,” McCord observes, “and full of venom. If one of these daddies bit that little horse, it’s amazing that he lived.”

“They’re waking up—”

Like the Indian curse.

Their eyes glint. The rattling, faint at first, is quickly becoming deafening, like medicine men hallucinating wild dreams.

“Put the cover on,” I plead.

McCord whistles and bends closer. I grab his belt, terrified he’s going to fall in.

“Look at this!”

I cannot look any longer at the glistening knot of reptiles.

“What is it? Is it the turquoise?”

“I don’t see no turquoise,” McCord drawls, “but there’s a hell of a lot of guns.”

Now I do look, and carefully. The rattlesnakes are crawling over a pile of semi-automatic weapons and boxes of grenades.

McCord ticks them off: “You got your Heckler & Koch MP5s, a Berreta Model 12, a couple of Ingrams, and your basic Makarov handguns, extremely popular in the Arab world. It’s a global terrorist barn dance down there.”

And a .50-caliber McMillan M87, heavy sniping rifle, made in the USA.

Just like the rifle that killed Sergeant Mackee.

Careful. What would Darcy say?

“All this stuff is worth money.”

McCord shoots me a look too quick to read in the dark. “Seen enough?”

“Wait!”

Scattered across the cache of firearms, like offerings in a tomb, are the skeletons of tiny animals.

“What are those?”

“Looks like rabbit bones,” says McCord.

“The baby rabbits,” I whisper. “Stolen from the farm. Do you think someone’s been feeding them to the snakes?”

“They sure didn’t hippity-hop down there on their own,” says McCord.

We drag the lid over the seething pit.

Thirty

Some very unlucky FBI agents (I hope it was the dopey duo from Portland who brought the ducks) dig through the rattlesnakes guarding