The Broken Universe (15 page)

“And where’s your twin brother at?”

“Was a ghost … dimwit.”

There was a dull thud, as if someone had been kicked in the stomach.

John-7458 stood at the same time John did. They shared a glance, then ran.

John hit the barn door first and it gave. He stumbled and fell, felt John-7458 run past, screaming like a banshee. He tackled one of the two men—Russell.

John scrambled to his feet and tripped, ran, staggered at Amos.

If the man hadn’t been staring at the two Johns in horror, John would never have reached him.

“Ghosts!” Amos screamed.

John slammed into him and screamed into his face as he pummeled him with his fists. Why hadn’t they brought a gun? John wondered as Amos curled into a ball and screamed. Because they were ghosts.

John stood and looked down on Amos as he murmured and squealed. Then he spun as he heard Russell curse. He had John-7458 in a headlock, but his doppelganger was striking the back of his head weakly with a fist.

John saw the two-by-four on the floor. He grabbed it and swung it down at the top of Russell’s head. The man looked up just in time for the wood to slam into his eye socket. He fell to the ground like a crash dummy.

John-7458 stood up rubbing his neck. They both looked over at John Prime, tied to a post in the middle of the barn. He was bloody, his eyes bruised, his nose broken, and his lips cracked.

He smiled.

“I’m seeing double,” he slurred just before he passed out.

*   *   *

John-7458 trussed the two men with the same rope they had used on John Prime and was none too gentle about it. Amos merely whimpered and remained in his fetal position. Russell was unconscious long enough that John began to worry.

Prime, however, recovered enough to stand unsteadily.

“Who’s this?” he asked, pointing at John-7458. “Or rather which universe is he from?”

“This one,” John said. “I needed to get back fast, and he gave me a ride.”

“I assumed they’d run across you earlier when that lunkhead kept going on about ghosts,” Prime said, nodding at Amos.

“Yeah, I had to ditch and come back the long way.”

“Well, I’m glad you did.” Prime walked over to a pile of old boxes covered in canvas. “And now you’re glad you did.”

He pulled the canvas away, revealing a steamer trunk filled with gold coins.

“I found the treasure and didn’t have to dig for it,” Prime said.

John tried to guess how much there was, but he couldn’t figure the volumes in his head. There had to be thousands of gold coins in each box.

“My god,” he said. “That’s millions of dollars in gold!”

“It’s our gold!” Russell spat out.

“Not anymore,” Prime said and swung a kick into Russell’s exposed stomach. It would have done worse damage if Prime hadn’t wobbled as he’d stepped up to kick. Still Russell woofed and curled up as well as he could in his tied position.

John put a hand on Prime’s shoulder and pulled him back from a second kick on the helpless Russell.

“I know you’re pissed right now, but let him be,” John said.

“Sure, sure,” Prime said, but it didn’t sound like he meant it.

“Why don’t you bring your car around?” John asked John-7458.

“Okay.”

John helped Prime sit down on a hay bale. “You need to relax a bit.”

“I will, I am.” He sighed. “I hate almost getting killed.”

John put a hand on his shoulder.

“We thought this one was going to be a simple dig and run,” John said. “And we promised Casey you’d be back safe and sound.”

“We always make that promise.” He looked at the boxes of gold. “Well, that’s going to make your life easier, isn’t it?”

“Yep. Yours too.” He heard the Trans-Am coming up the drive. “Let’s pile this in the car.”

The car was noticeably lower in the back when they had finished putting the chests into the trunk.

“Don’t drive over any bumps on the way off the island,” Prime said. “Let’s go.”

“What about them?” John-7458 said, nodding at Amos and Russell. Russell had rolled over and was glaring at them.

“Leave them to rot,” Prime said.

“No.”

John looked around the barn and found a serrated knife on a hook. He picked it up, and then tossed it into the yard.

“You can crawl out and find that in the morning,” he said to Russell. “By then we’ll be long gone.”

“Screw you all,” he said.

“You tried, you failed,” Prime said.

“Let’s go.”

CHAPTER
11

“Where’d you get this?” the man asked.

“Why does that matter?” Grace asked. The man frowned and looked at the coin again through his magnifying glass. John and Grace had found Toledo Gold and Coins in the yellow pages, arriving as the owner was opening his storefront. The stockholders’ meeting with their investors was the next day.

“I don’t deal in stolen goods,” he said.

“If the police come looking for it, feel free to turn us in,” Grace said. “They won’t.”

The man took a book off the shelf and flipped through it.

“I’ll give you a thousand dollars for it,” he said.

John laughed despite himself. He had expected to be ripped off. When Grace had consulted the yellow pages at the library, John had paged through a numismatics book. The North Carolina gold coins minted by the Bechtler Mint were exceedingly rare.

“We know how rare it is,” he said.

“It’s not even in a coin case,” the man said. “And I have no idea what the provenance is. I have risk that you have to pay for.”

“By a factor of forty? These have gone for forty thousand dollars.”

“At auction to dedicated coin collectors,” the man said. “You want that kind of money, you need to take it to auction.”

“We don’t have the time,” Grace said. “We need a better price.”

The man shrugged.

“At least we can buy coin cases from him,” John said.

The man shrugged and laid a single case in front of them.

“Fifty cents,” he said.

“No, we’re going to need ten thousand of them,” Grace said.

The man’s jaw dropped open. “What did you find?”

Grace shrugged at him.

“Hold on, hold on,” the man said. “You have ten thousand Bechtler coins from the 1830s?”

“About that many. We didn’t count.”

The man typed some numbers into his calculator. “That’s hundreds of millions of dollars you have. Do you realize it?”

“Yes, we had an inkling. Now we need to sell them for cash,” Grace said. “Can you help us or not?”

“This might be the greatest coin discovery of the decade!” the man exclaimed. “You can’t just lug the coins into a coin store and sell them!”

“We need the money now,” John said.

“You need four hundred million dollars right now?” the man asked. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, we only need about fifteen million,” Grace said.

“We don’t have to auction them now to get that money,” he said.

“We?”

“Yes, you let me handle the auction at three percent, and I can help you assess the coins at a reasonable value. A bank will loan you cash on that collateral.”

“That makes a lot of sense.”

“We just need to establish the provenance,” the man said.

“How do we do that?”

“We need to show where you found the gold.”

“We dug the coins up,” John said.

“Where? On public land, private land? Do you own the land? Does your grandmother?”

“It was public land,” John said.

“Federal, state, or county?” the man asked.

“State land,” John replied. They had decided to go with the story that they had found the gold coins as if they were lost during the Civil War in the same place on Kelleys Island in this universe as 7458.

“Did you have a permit?”

“Nope.”

The man rubbed his chin.

“We can get around that. There’s no law that requires you to have a permit on state land, unless it’s posted as you enter the area.”

“We didn’t see anything.”

The man had begun to sweat, and his gestures were wild and exaggerated.

“Uh, I think we’re good,” John said. “Thanks for your time.”

“I can help,” the man said. “I really can.”

“No, we’re good.”

John and Grace left the store, running back to the car.

“He seemed a little desperate,” John said.

“But he had a good idea,” Grace said. “We don’t need to sell them. We just need to appraise them. Then any bank can give us a loan with the coins as collateral.”

“Who’s going to appraise the coins?”

“I don’t know. Let’s call my guy at Ladora Savings.”

“Who?” John asked. Ladora was the bank that Grace had set up all their business accounts through.

“Clay Burgess,” she said. “He’s kept us going with lines of credit during the bad times. Maybe he’ll know what to do.”

“Um, maybe we should cover our tracks, too,” John added. “Get Henry to buy a plot of land on Kelleys Island near the forest preserve.”

“I see what you mean,” Grace said.

They stopped at a pay phone and Grace called Henry.

“He’ll call a Realtor,” Grace said. “But if anyone looks closely at the timeline…”

“Why should it matter? We have the coins and no one can ever claim they had them first,” John said. “They never existed on that island in this universe.”

“True, but when we’re talking about a half billion dollars, people do stupid stuff,” Grace said.

“Wait, turn here,” John said. “There. Coin shop. It was second on the list. Let’s buy the coin holders.”

“You mean, let’s look like we know what we’re doing?”

“Yes.”

Ten thousand coin holders wiped the shop owner out. He also sold them small cartons that held a hundred coin holders each. It made carrying the coins easier than lugging them around in a cardboard box. They spent two hours sliding the coins into coin holders and then the coin holders into the boxes. John’s fingers began to hurt, and he accidently dropped one of the coins into the space between his seat and the center console of his car.

“Careful,” Grace said. “That’s forty grand down there with the bubble gum wrappers and old French fries.”

John extended his sore fingers and managed to grab the coin.

“Got it,” he said.

Clay Burgess was a young man, too young it seemed to be a business banker, but he greeted Grace with a hug.

“I still haven’t heard anything from Mr. Gilbert in Investments about the funding,” he began, but Grace shook her head.

“We’re here on something else,” she said. “We’ve stumbled upon some coins, and want to see if we can use them as collateral for a loan.”

“Coins?”

“Civil War–era coins,” Grace said.

“But you were looking for an investment of twenty to twenty-five million, weren’t you?”

“It’s a lot of coins.”

“That’s not my area of expertise, Grace,” Clay said. “I’ll need to talk with someone else.”

“Of course, but as you know, we’re in a bit of a hurry. Our corporate meeting is tomorrow.”

“Hold on,” he said. He disappeared from his desk in the open area of the bank, going upstairs.

“We may not make it by tomorrow,” John said.

“That’s fine,” Grace said.

“It is?”

“Yes, we have capital now. With capital we can do anything,” Grace said.

“I expected you to be more agitated with the meeting tomorrow,” John said.

“No, I’m calm,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want them to have my company, but we have bigger fish to fry, and now we have the money to do it.” She paused to look at John. “In how many other universes are those coins just sitting there, do you think?”

“How many more have Amos and Russell?”

“We know how to deal with them,” Grace said.

“Grace, are you … well?” John asked.

“You mean, have I snapped finally due to my torture at the hands of Visgrath?”

“I—”

“No, I’m fine, John. More fine than ever before.”

Clay appeared with an older woman, dressed in a skirt-suit.

“I’m the bank manager, Margaret Carlisle. Mr. Burgess says that you wish to secure a loan with coins as collateral?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“May I see the coins?”

Grace took a box from her satchel and thunked it onto Clay’s desk. The other boxes were in the trunk of John’s car.

She took a coin from the middle. She held it up to her face, lifting her glasses off her nose.

“From 1834?”

“They are all pre–Civil War coins, of the same mint,” Grace said.

“How many?”

“Ten thousand.”

The woman looked shocked. “The gold alone…”

“Two and a half million dollars, best guess.”

“We can arrange a loan of the amount of two million dollars,” she said. “Based on the weight in gold.”

“We need fifteen million,” Grace said.

“I have no idea how much these coins are worth,” she said. “We’d need to assess their value.”

“Let’s do that,” Grace said. “Do you have a valuator who can assess these coins immediately?”

“I’ll have to ask our district manager,” Carlisle said.

“It is very important to us that we have the fifteen million dollars tomorrow,” Grace said slowly. “We have a stockholders’ meeting during which we want to buy back the shares of our company held by our investors. Fifteen million is the set price for the recovery of their investment this year.”

“I don’t know if we can do it that fast,” Carlisle said.

“Assess the coins, Miss Carlisle, and then determine the value of our continued use of Ladora Savings Bank as our prime financial institution.”

“I … um…”

“Do you need a calculator, Miss Carlisle?” Grace asked.

The woman’s face became stone, and for a moment, John was certain Grace had pushed her too far. Instead, the woman nodded.

“We’ll get someone in here right away,” she said. “May we store the coins in our vault until then?”

“You may store a sample of coins in your vault,” Grace said. “The rest can reside in our safe-deposit box.”

“That seems reasonable, Miss Shisler.”

“Excellent,” Grace said. “I will call you at noon to assess your progress.”

“Certainly.”

With the help of two bank guards, John lugged the remaining cartons of coins into the bank vault. He kept a couple dozen, however, in his bag. Carrying gold wire was a good way to transfer wealth between universes. But a coin worth $40,000 had a far greater density of wealth, even if the value was only of the gold itself. Wouldn’t most universes have had a Civil War and a mint in North Carolina? Of course if Corrundrum was to be believed, worlds like his, where the United States was dominant, weren’t the most common. Just apparently around the universes he’d traveled in, clustered in the 7000s maybe.