Chapter 20: Into the Dark Scary Hole

I’m not particularly afraid of the dark, or spiders, or rats, or slimy mold, or ... But if you put them all together, maybe I’m just a little creeped out.

The vault

I set up a search routine on the main computer so I didn’t have to look at all Georgia’s sex tapes. Gross! But I wanted to know where she posted them and how she got paid. I figured indexing the files on all six computers according to my own list of keywords would speed the search and I wouldn’t have to watch her prostitute herself.

As soon as the bank opened in the morning, Cinnamon drove me down and I got a safe deposit box. I deposited all the jewelry. We went to the office next. I don’t like entering the office in disguise but with Cinnamon guarding the front door, I closed and locked mine so I could open the vault.

I still remember the first time Dag opened the vault in my presence. I knew we had servers someplace, but I had always thought they were offsite. Dag punched numbers in on his television remote control and a wall beside his desk opened, revealing a room bigger than my reception area/office. The room is temperature controlled with a dozen high-power servers, hard drives, laptops, and a safe. It might seem like overkill to have a safe inside the vault, but with a million dollars onsite, you get a little protective. No, it wasn’t cash. I had one hundred $10,000 cash cards, a retainer from Simon after I pulled him and Angel out of Croatia. I’d discovered Dag had other things in the safe as well. There were letters he was holding for his cousin in Finland, for his almost daughter the Hollywood actress, and a list of his accounts in a Swiss Bank. There were also six $100,000 bearer bonds issued by a bank in Mexico City. I wish I knew how he got hold of those! Dag kept a handgun in the safe and I wondered if he’d ever carried it. Now the safe also had the key to a safe deposit box with a potentially priceless piece of jewelry in it.

It would have been nice if Georgia had put the jewelry in a safe deposit box herself and only put the key in ice cubes. But her method worked, I guess.

When I was done stowing the key and had closed the vault, I sat in my chair for a few minutes just feeling like I was home for a while and could relax. Then Cinnamon drove me back to the house and I faced up to my squeamishness.

Storm cellar

There were no bodies or body parts. For that I am eternally grateful. But the experience was unpleasant all the same.

“I’m right behind you, Sugar,” Cinnamon said. “Don’t be scared.”

“Gee, thanks, Cinnamon.”

Armed with a flashlight and dressed in a sweatshirt and latex gloves, I led the way down into the low-ceilinged basement. I’m not sure you can actually call this a basement. It was more like a deep area in the crawlspace that only extended under the kitchen. At some time in the distant past it was used as a fruit cellar for canned goods. A shelf held a series of canning jars, covered with layers of dirt but full of unidentifiable foodstuffs. They all had paper labels on them that were pretty much unreadable. The one thing I managed to read when I wiped off one of the jars was “1958”. This was seriously old stuff. Since no one else had ever seen fit to clean the place out, I felt no responsibility for it.

Cinnamon screamed.

I spun around, ready to defend us against ... I didn’t know what. She was cowering at the foot of the stairs, frantically waving cobwebs away from her hair with one hand while she pointed with the other. I pointed my flashlight over into that corner and a rat jumped up from the floor to the top shelf and disappeared through a hole in the wall.

“I’m sorry,” Cinnamon whined. “It just went over my foot from under the stairs and I thought something was ... attacking me.”

“Something is,” I said calmly and reached to flick an enormous black spider out of her hair.

“Can we go now?”

“Yes. No. Wait.” Next to where the rat scampered up the wall was the first shiny object I’d seen down here. A new-looking fuse box was attached to the wall. An electrician had been down here? Something just didn’t seem right. The white wire that came out of the bottom of the box looped up behind the floor joist of the kitchen and disappeared. I nearly slipped on the slimy floor when I leaned over to see where it went.