The toppled artifact lay on the dusty floor of the vault beneath him, amid a dozen more of the objects lined upright on the bottom of the small room. He drew an exhilarated breath. The reward and the new life it promised him were nearly within his grasp.
He placed his lamp in the dirt at the bottom of the depression and swung his feet into the opening to the chamber, preparing to shimmy into the secret vault. Clods of dirt rolled past him, tumbling down the side of the cavity he’d dug into the floor of the alcove, and the sharpened blade of an ax struck the top of his head. The ax cleaved his skull, parting bone and brain matter in a powerful, deadly blow.
Joey’s killer slid to the bottom of the depression and withdrew the blade of the ax from Joey’s head with a slippery snick. Joey’s body slumped sideways and lay twitching. The man tugged Joey’s feet from the chamber opening and dropped into the hidden vault in Joey’s place, crouching with his leather satchel over his shoulder and Joey’s flickering lantern in his hand.
The lantern illuminated the low-roofed vault lined with the priceless artifacts sought by Gustaf—and others. The man filled his satchel with the objects and hoisted himself out of the chamber. He lifted Joey’s inert body to a sitting position and shoved. The teenager’s corpse slithered through the opening and flopped backward to the floor of the chamber with a muted thump.
The man wedged the plate-sized portions of sticks and mud back over the opening, resealing the secret vault. He climbed out of the neck-deep depression and set about refilling it with Joey’s shovel. Dirt and pebbles poured down the sides of the cavity and gathered atop the closed chamber. The stick-and-mud thatching, back in place over the opening to the vault, disappeared beneath the cascading debris as the man transformed the chamber, shovelful by shovelful, into Joey’s unmarked grave.
1
I hate this, I hate this, I hate this!” Rosie Ortega screeched. She squeezed her eyes shut, her hands gripping the rope affixed to the seat harness belted around her plump waist as she descended on auto-belay to the base of the indoor rock-climbing wall.
Chuck Bender wrapped her in a bear hug. “You did fine up there,” he assured her.
“No, I didn’t,” she cried, stomping her foot on the padded gym floor. Tears pooled in her eyes. She wriggled from Chuck’s grasp and tore at the climbing rope knotted at her waist. “I barely got off the ground.”
Other climbers in the gym averted their gazes as Chuck helped twelve-year-old Rosie free herself from the rope.
“Carm’s so good,” she blubbered, her lower lip trembling. She pressed her knuckles to her walnut-brown eyes. “I hate her,” she said to the floor.
“I heard that,” fourteen-year-old Carmelita called from where she clung to molded-resin holds thirty feet overhead, working an inverted route extending across the ceiling from the top of the wall.
Chuck craned his head at her. “Your sister didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, I did,” Rosie declared, looking up. “Well, the good part, anyway.”
“That much would be right,” Chuck told her. He massaged the back of her neck below her mane of curly black hair billowing from the bottom of her climbing helmet. “Your sister is good at this sport. Which is a problem for me, too.”
Rosie’s watery eyes widened. “For you?”
“I’ve always been a rock climber for the fun of it. Nowadays, though, climbing is a big-time sport, with everybody making it into a massive competition. And, like you said, it just so happens Carm’s pretty good at it.”
“Because she’s so skinny,” Rosie pouted.
“Just because,” Chuck said. “But you and I have to remember we’re climbing for fun when we’re messing around down low on the wall.”
She stomped her foot again. “I want to do something else for fun. Something that’s just for me.”
“Hmm.” Chuck cocked his head at her and closed one eye. “I kinda like that idea. Maybe you and I can come up with something different for you to do while Carm’s spending all her free time here at the gym, zipping around the ceiling like a spider monkey.”
“I’m not a monkey,” Carmelita exclaimed from above. Her dark ponytail hung long and straight down toward the floor from the back of her helmet. “That’s racist.”
Chuck grinned up at her. “I said you climb like one. Sheesh.”
Carmelita lost her grip and fell a few feet from the ceiling before her rope caught her. “You’re so culturally inappropriate,” she admonished Chuck as she swung back and forth beneath the holds.
She shook out her chalked hands while the auto-belay engaged and the rope automatically unspooled, lowering her to the ground.
Chuck fixed her with a teasing smile. “Let me get this straight. You’re labeling me a culturally inappropriate white man even though I married a Latina woman and have been stepfather to her two hotshot Latina daughters for the last five years?”
“O . . . M . . . G,” Carmelita announced breathily. “I can’t believe you just called Rosie and me ‘hot.’ That’s so totally and completely wrong.”
“I didn’t say ‘hot.’ I said ‘hotshot.’”
The corner of Carmelita’s mouth twisted. “It still has the word ‘hot’ in it.”
Chuck sighed but maintained his grin. “The two of you are handsome. How’s that?”
“Better. Still judgmental, though.”
“I’m just trying to let you know how proud I am of you.” He spread his hands. “But I can’t win, can I?”
“Nope.”
He glanced at the clock mounted on the wall above the climbing gym’s front desk. “It’s about time to head for home. Mamá will be coming off her shift in a little while. I need to get started on a culturally inappropriate dinner for us.” He dipped his graying head at Carmelita and smiled. “How about tacos?”
She groaned. “You’re awful.”
“Grrracias,” he said, giving the r an extra-hard trill.
“You’re . . . you’re . . . incorrigible.” She added a matching trill to the double r of the English word, offering up the slightest of smiles.
Chuck put his chalked hands to his stomach, leaving matching white prints on his blue T-shirt. “Got me.” He pointed at her shiny black climbing tights. “The way you use such big words, you’re getting to be too smart for your britches, you know that?”
Carmelita’s skin-hugging tights rose to her waist. Her burgundy top featured the Durango Climbing Team logo across its snug chest. The top was sleeveless and cut high across her midriff, baring her flat stomach and the smooth skin of her shoulders.
“That’s my plan for world domination—using my prodigious intelligence to rule the planet,” she said.
“Ooo, scary,” said Chuck. “But I imagine you’ll hold off taking over the world until later this afternoon, after your all-
