Chapter 10

When I first saw my dream home it was a dump, albeit an extraordinarily interesting one that called out to me like a wet bedraggled lost pet yearning for a new master. Or rather it looked like an army of scavengers equipped with heavy power tools and bad attitudes had torn out, dug in, ripped apart or flat outright dynamited every square inch of space where it looked like any two original pieces of wood might have once made contact. All of the above combined to make it fairly hard to tell what the original interior looks of the house might have been.

Now that I was starting to restore the place, I was a bit lost about exactly what to do now, and in a stroke of enlightenment I asked Mark if he could use his Sheriff's department contacts to locate for me the original crime scene photographs for the house, from the day that DD was gunned down. No, I didn't want to see the actual gory details of the shooting, but I did want to look at the generic photographs taken inside of the house. The crime scene photographers shoot everything pretty much, every room and how things were laid out. I guess you can never tell what actually important sometimes in a murder investigation. Anyway, with photos of the layout and even furniture, I could now get a pretty good idea of what things ought to look like now, after the restoration. My watch boss and friend thought everything had gone into storage long ago but that he could probably eventually track them down ... but it might take awhile.

I told him to kept it on the down-low and avoid raising a fuss about them, if possible. The last thing that I wanted was to get law enforcement interested once more in DD's allegedly famous lost secret room too!

Everyone had kept telling me early in the buying process, before the real estate auction, that once upon a time this house had been a showstopper, a gorgeous (but albeit quirky) cross between a mountain hunting lodge and some building from out of Lord of the Rings. Exactly what sort of building, well, that's where the opinions became confused and contrasting. Nearly everyone said it was very Tolkien, but from there the architectural analysis started to get confusing. Some said it was 'very Rohan', others insisted it was instead 'high Elvish', a few further insisted that there were distinct 'Dwarven elements', and the rest were inclined to suggest more 'low burlesque' than anything else. Everyone agreed that the original owner 'DD' had both lots of money and a rather peculiar sense of style.

Even before the strip-out started (the house renovations - not the pole dancing), I hadn't been able to get my head quite around what the original layout and design feel of the house had been. The treasure hunters had focused most of their attention on the basement garage, but still most of the ground floor of the house had been rather professionally excavated. Particularly, the damage was more severe along the back of the house where it made significant contact with the base of the rear hill. In short, just about every place that made ground contact with anything had been excavated.

This was, I suppose, understandable. The treasure hunters had all surmised that the hidden loot was underground, probably in the basement, but three years of searching, not to mention our own careful seismic scans, had found nothing. This left the back end of the house where it abutted against the steep hillside as the next most logical place to hunt. One certainly could, in theory, create a secret door and then tunnel into the center of the hillside, creating in actuality an extremely large hidden cavern or secret room. Big enough in theory to stash away another house, secret and hidden. Most of those said walls had been in fact demolished and only just marginally patched and made secure with cheap plywood, but I decided to take another look for myself anyway.

A very nice theory, but in fact that secret entrance just didn't seem to exist. More and better people than I had already gone looking there. Thoroughly and with remarkable patience and skillfully applied violence. Every place where the rear of the house made any sort of contact with the hillside had been torn down or excavated down to the bare limestone. Jason and I had swept the hillside with the seismic gear too and didn't detect anything particularly interesting either, not that the semi-portable unit was powerful enough to scan through tons of solid limestone. For that sort of job, I needed the professional 3D ground scan of the property.

Damn it ... if there was a secret tunnel, passage or cave, or whatever ... it just had to be around here somewhere!

When I had asked Larry to hire the guy I was still feeling flush with the antique auction proceeds, but now, curiosity or not, I was starting to feel rather broke already and when it came to be time to actually write out the check I immediately regretted that I'd ever opened my mouth. I had to admit the geologist and his assistant worked fast and efficiently, running strings of sensor cables that covered most of the property, including the hillside, but his preliminary report wasn't really worth its weight in paper, let alone the damage it had done to my checkbook.

I was officially broke once more, and no Robin - there was no Batcave under the hill, at least according to the geoscientist!

"You're right on top of the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone." He had told me while handing over a series of colored underground seismic maps that displayed the results of his survey. He tried briefly to explain what they all meant, but most of what he said was geo-babble and even a non scientist like me could pick out the weasel words. In short, what he was more or less explaining was that there was plenty of underground water moving through the Recharge Zone here, and that did usually mean plenty of underground caves and old water channels. Some deep red colored stripes on one of his maps suggested that I certainly had some deep underground, but as for a cave under the property here or under the hill, none seemed to be indicated. Thanks for the fat check and sorry, no refunds!

For good measure, to make the poor broke customer feel a little happier, he tried to project the entire seismic readings into a nice colorful 3D map on his laptop that he could spin and rotate around, but the findings didn't particularly excite even him, let alone me. Lots of small underground water channels deep, starting about 50 feet below the surface and from the looks of things there were maybe a few larger pockets deeper, but nothing that looked unnatural or sman-made. As for the weasel words, I almost didn't quite catch it when he rather hastily made the caveat that the scan results of the eastern side of the property were pretty much 'junk', and I was just barely sharp enough on the uptake to get him to explain that little bit again, and in the Queen's English this time instead of rock nerd.

"The eastern side lawn?" He mumbled and then blinked at me a few times while checking over his scan data for that part of the area. "Yeah, it's very, very unlikely but sure, anything's possible, maybe ... that this area didn't scan very well. The layout of the strata for anything east of the house, especially around the deck and the swimming pool isn't really very clear at all. Too much backscatter ... rubbish results really. The ground has all been dug up here and refilled, and fairly deeply too. All quite normal probably, related to the installation of the big fuel storage tanks and maybe the pool too. I also think there are metal pipes from the tanks running all over that area too, and these would reflect and deflect off a lot of the seismic probes ... but it's probably all nothing."

Now he tells me! In other words, the eastern side of the house and deck area was still all one big giant seismic mystery. Maybe there was something there, but maybe it was all just shadows and 'reflections' from the pool, pipes and fuel tanks. He didn't know ... and didn't seem to much care. He had my check in hand and was gone the first time I turned my back to ponder another few further questions.

Thanks for nearly nothing asshole! I now had less than $300 in my checkbook and as far as the great treasure hunt was concerned I wasn't a penny the wiser!

Jason's interior restoration job was really only about half done but I was out of money. I could owe him, I supposed, but neither of us really wanted it to work that way.

"Ok, I'm tapped out." I warned him later that same afternoon while we were taking a walk-through. To my eyes, more things seemed to half done than completed, but I supposed that there was some method to the restoration madness. "What are you going to need to finish up?"

"Good question. Three months ago I'd have been able to get the last of the fine lumber flooring and paneling on what you've already paid me for, but those costs have doubled in just the last month alone. The same almost with fixtures and finishing materials. It's all gone 'bad-crazy' in the hardware stores too. All of the big contractors have sensed there are going to be supply shortages and they're all buying up everything they can get their hands on, knowing that it's all going to cost maybe twice as much again by fall. There's stuff that I need badly to finish that I can't even find now!"

"So we're fucked again? Why am I not surprised!"

"Pretty much. If I had another $50k, cash in hand, today ... I could probably make a few phone calls and buy what I need at a crazy-loco markup that's three times what it ought to have cost, if it was available in the stores."

"Well, if I look under the cushions on Garry's sofa I might be able to scrape up a couple of dollars in loose change. That's about the best I can offer you. Kathy gets paid next Tuesday on the 31^st and she's promised me two thousand, if we need it, but that's a drop of water in the river, from the sound of things."

"Actually, I'm going to need it." Jason grumbled. "I'm down to just a crew of three now, including the kid Gabe, and that will cover my payroll for the next couple of weeks. I could let him go, but he's cheap and turning into a pretty useful employee."

"Then keep him. He's still spying for Lupe?"

"Pretty sure of it, but his hands are clean around here. He's got razor sharp eyes and keeps his head down and does his job, and he isn't trying to stir up trouble or sabotage anything."

"Then it's better to keep him around and out of potential trouble. Maybe he'll even give us some sort of advance warning if his gang boss tries for a rematch with another armed posse of thugs."

"That was my thought too. The kid's young enough that now that I've got a pretty good read on him. If he starts getting nervous, then I'll know that things might be getting ready to start getting interesting again."

"I'd rather that they didn't, actually. Ok then, triage time. Assume that Kathy's $2k is the last cash in hand you'll have for awhile. What can you actually finish in the next few weeks until your operating budget flat lines to zero?"

"You still want to make the top upstairs bedroom the master?" He asked and I nodded. "Ok, that's about 80% done and we can finish that. For the rest, I'd suggest that we try to finish the ground floor, especially the kitchen/dining room and just ignore the entire second floor bedrooms and baths. They're sort of liveable, in a rough and tumble sort of way, but they won't pass code. That's going to be a problem. Before you can legally move in the county building inspector is going to have to come and look everything over and sign off. If he inspected us today, he'd just laugh and walk off."

"That sucks, but finishing those two areas first does makes sense, so worst case scenario, we have a working kitchen and an upstairs bedroom & bath? Enough to move in, albeit quietly and illegally, and not quite be camping for awhile, semi-functionally anyway?"

"More or less. Closer to more, except for the kitchen. You filled those propane tanks alright, but my gas line guy still can't find any line leading out from the tanks that connects into the main house, so until he jury rigs something, like an entirely new line to the main gas tank meter, the gas stove is off. Same with the clothes dryer in the pantry/laundry room."

"Fuck, he'd mentioned that last week and it slipped my mind. He's the last of the outside contractors, so I need cash to pay him still?"

"'fraid so. He's a decent guy and might let you make payments, but he is going to need some cash for the new piping. There goes Kathy's two kay, I'm afraid."

"Fuck ... looks like it. I guess I could put it all on my VISA card and make minimum payments for the next five or ten years, but I'm saving that for my next financial emergency."

"Ok, that's the plan. Finish the kitchen, bedroom and bath on the cheap, and make do with what I've got."

No one was happy, but neither of us had any alternatives or hidden cards to play, and at least this would make the house moderately livable so that we could move out of Garry's guest room. He and Teresa were getting slightly serious and she wanted to now sell her house and move in with him. With the current hyper-inflation and insane gasoline prices nearing $7 a gallon, houses in suburban neighborhoods weren't selling at the moment at any discounted rate. Everyone wanted to be able to either walk, bike or take a bus to their jobs and commuting any sort of distance from suburbia wasn't financially practical now. Now we had both of the two houses to our right up for sale and neither of them was going to move any time soon!

Payday and the end of July came and went. Kathy's generous contribution to the rebuilding expenses was received and evaporated nearly instantly. She made a decent salary as a middle management banking officer and emotionally she was willing to contribute at least her share, and more, so that we could soon have a real home of our own. By 'We', this now included our new partner in love Amy, who in turn contributed a similar share of her own significantly lesser paycheck, which in turn was also instantly devoured by the final gas pipeline run expenses.

We were all flat broke now, together, but at least a 'temporary' gas line had been run from the nearest propane tank into the house, where it split off into a pair of gas lines feeding the ovens and the gas clothes dryer. If nothing else, we'd be burning firewood in the fireplaces this winter and wearing layers of sweaters if we couldn't get the heating system working by then. Since the salvage strippers had stolen the original gas furnace ages ago, buying and installing a brand new one was currently entirely beyond my means. Well ... I'd have two soft women to snuggle up to under the blankets this winter, but otherwise it was going to get very cold around here eventually!

The rainless skies of August weren't much kinder to us and the dry westerly winds didn't deliver us much in the way of better luck either. My current antique sales on eBay certainly weren't going to put much in the way of groceries on the table, despite my best efforts. The gals, due to their strenuous aerobic workouts and pole dancing, were getting more toned by the week and neither of them had much in the way of baby fat left to begin with. With the growing muscle, my own included from my own serious garage gym exertions, our appetites hadn't in any way decreased and the ladies liked their meals plentiful and regular ... and also their sex!

Philosophically, I could just barely tolerate the notion of being a kept man, having two women supporting me, since at least in theory I was providing the home, our shelter. Adding to the groceries would be very, very nice too. eBay sales were supposed to cover this, in theory, but with the crappy economy and extremely nervous consumers, sales were really only just covering expenses. In desperation, I probably could have skimmed a few hundred dollars out of my PayPal account and into checking, but this smacked too much of extreme desperation. Instead, since sale prices seemed absurdly depressed, I tried doing some bottom feeding, buying up good quality items within my limited budget that ought to have sold for more than just a silly token minimum bid, but hadn't. My instincts were good and I did flip a few items for a bit of profit, but the market remained depressed and that one nice little bit of online auction bonanza luck just continued to elude me!

Tired of being depressed, broke and mentally tired from the unceasing growing stress as well, I decided that I just had to do something and get off of my ass and make an effort to force my luck to change. I'd been thinking semi-seriously off and on since I first looked at this house about perhaps trying to reopen a retail shop once more, and while the location wasn't exactly ideal, the large collection of strip malls along I-35 on and near the our county road did seem to offer the most sensible location. In commercial real estate, there are only three things that ever matter: location, location and location. Being located right at I-35 in a retail shop would give me that, visibility (in theory) from the highway and accessibility to traveling casual customers and antique collectors between San Antonio and Dallas. Sure, I ought to have set up in one of the antique meccas north of Austin, like Round Rock, but from what I could hear their retail sales were none too healthy at the moment either.

Antiques are a luxury. In theory, in bad economic times you can still market to the very rich, the 1%ers so to speak, but I didn't have that sort of quality stock anymore. Those goodies, the nice furniture, etc, had all been sold at the going out of business auction months ago. What I had left now was pretty 'meah'. To make any sort of money at retail I was going to need a cheap rent, absurdly so really, since my operating capital was pretty much nil, zilch and zip!

Mark had a friend who was head of security for one of the strip malls that I was interested in and his buddy arranged a meeting for me with the leasing agents. They seemed eager to bring me in as a tenant, almost pathetically so, and from the majority of empty un-leased units in this site, I could tell that the place had problems, probably security related. No, no one would actually come out and admit that burglary, armed robbery and other crimes were rampant in this area, but Mark had hinted as much privately. He understood my finances and wanted to be supportive ... but he hinted it was a bad idea. Yeah, I wasn't feeling warm and fuzzy about the location either! In fact the very first question the head of security for the strip asked me in my conversation with him was, 'did I own a handgun?', hinting that the only correct answer was 'yes'. The poor guy couldn't badmouth the company that signed his paycheck, but he did a magnificent dancing act that suggested rather clearly that the area wasn't a safe or fit place to do business. From the looks of the section 8 apartment projects that covered the next half mile up the county road, any business in this area was going to be targeted for crime.