GOLDEN GATE GLOVES (FIGHT CARD) Read online

  Sam got up on a crate so he could be seen and heard by the assembled group.

  "I have just inspected the gloves of Conall O’Quinn," shouted Sam in a shrill weathered voice, " and found them to contain these.”

  He held up a pair of brass knuckles.

  "You're fired, O'Quinn!" shouted Sam. "Now, get your lousy ass off this dock before I have you dragged off."

  ROUND 3

  I took a long drink from the beer sitting in a glistening mug before me. Benson had just finished telling me he had been taken into the office and also given his walking papers at the end of the day.

  "So, why did Sam fire you?" I asked.

  "He said I didn’t do my fair share of work today," said Benson, staring at his own mug of beer.

  "No one did their fair share," I replied with a disgusted shake of my head. "Everyone was watching the fight."

  Benson nodded silently in agreement.

  "Can you go to the Union?" I asked.

  Benson gave a derisive laugh, "Nope. The Union boss was in the office with Sam and he didn't look any too happy. Seemed like he wanted to beat me around the office, for some reason."

  "Strange," I said. "A new kid shows up, challenges me to a fight, his handlers load the kid’s gloves with iron, and when I still win, they pin the cheat on me. If this was all to get me fired, why not just fire me?” I trudged through the swampy politics in my head. "Why the elaborate set-up?"

  "It looks as if they wanted everyone to see," said Benson. He motioned for another draft. "And wanted everyone to know, or think, you were the one who cheated."

  I pondered the problem while I took another drink, hoping the elixir would loosen my thoughts.

  "No," I said, looking Benson square in the eye. "They wanted me to lose. Don't forget, the iron was in Barry's gloves not mine. They wanted me out on my back and disgraced."

  "Maybe you're right," said Benson. "But here we sit without a job, and more likely than not, blacklisted from every union this city has to offer."

  "Unless we find out what’s going on," I said, the makings of a plan beginning to emerge in my brain. "We need to get into the offices and find the reason why they want us out of the picture."

  Benson sat chewing his lip and staring at the fresh mug the bartender just laid down.

  "Can't think of a better plan," he said, before guzzling the beer in a rush. "Or a worse one. Let’s go."

  We sauntered toward the door when Lucky Hansen walked in. Lucky was also a dockworker. He was a friend and drinking buddy on occasion, but usually kept to himself. He had a wife and five kids, so he went to work and did his job.

  "Conall," said Lucky, stopping just shy of the entryway and scanning the crowed. "I've looked in every gin joint on the wharf to find you two."

  "You found us," I said in a friendly manner.

  "I'm worried about being seen with you," he said as his eyes darted back and forth over all the patrons of the bar. "The guy you fought, Barry, he’s the union boss’ son."

  "What the hell," I said.

  Lucky put up a hand to ease my building anger. "Before you start asking a bunch a questions I don't have the answers for, I'll tell you what I know. After the fight, after Benson got fired, a bunch of union thugs came down to the docks. They were saying terrible stuff about you … stuff about you planning to break the union, trying to kill Barry for your own personal gain. Just a bunch of stuff I know isn't true. I just came to find you to tell you to watch out. The thugs are out, and I think they're looking for you."

  "Thanks, Lucky," I said, trying to cogitate the information.

  Lucky turned and left without another word.

  Benson whistled softly. "What kind of a mess have we gotten into?"

  "I don't know," I said. "But we'd better find out."

  ***

  Working on the docks, Benson and I knew ways around without arousing the suspicions of the night watchman. The old guy was camped at the front gate with his radio quietly playing and munching on a sauerkraut sandwich judging from the smell wafting by.

  Quietly, like two professional crooks, we slunk along the dock toward the offices. The docks were a canyon with ships along one side, and warehouses on the other. A world unto itself in a pallet punctuated landscape of little islands in a sea of concrete. The only sound was the lapping waves on the pillars holding up the dock.

  We moved along the warehouse building until we got to the one door with the broken lock. The only people who used the door were us dockworkers, and none of us ever saw the need to turn in a work order to get it fixed, so we didn't. Once inside, the entire expanse of the warehouse was ours to explore.

  Getting to the foreman's office didn't take long. The upper floor of the structure sitting inside the warehouse housed a number of offices. One of those was where all the foremen worked when they weren't harassing their men.

  The alcohol was wearing off, and I was beginning to feel this wasn't the smartest idea I ever had. What were we thinking, that we would just walk in here and find a sheet of paper explaining why they were setting me up, and what the union had to do with it? The great thing about launching a plan when you’re drunk is everything sounds great. The bad thing about launching a plan when you’re drunk is everything you come up with is crap.

  We found the office and started looking over papers with the flashlights we brought. It didn't look as if we were going to find anything. Everything that was out was just general information. A file cabinet stood against a closet next to an old safe.

  "Look here, Ben," I said as I ran my fingers down the safe. "It looks as if each foreman has his own cabinet."

  "Yeah, but they're all locked," replied Benson.

  I'd grown up in an orphanage and was taught the evils of stealing, killing, coveting, and all the other commandments, but that didn't keep a group of boys from figuring out how to pick a lock. And after finding a paper-clip, Benson and I were rifling through the drawer.

  Our eyes nearly bugged out of our heads when we saw the letter, with our names on it. Addressed to Anthony Lima, from Karl G. Creion, asking for the immediate assistance in "firing" two individuals from the docks. "Do you know what this means, Ben?"

  "I think so," Ben said with whispered fear in his voice. "They asked crime boss Tony Lima to take us out."

  I shove the paper in my pocket and looked through all the other drawers frantically. Next to the filling cabinet was an old safe piled high with papers, and used as a hanger for somebody's rain gear.

  "Hey," said Benson excitedly, "I got the combination to this safe. Maybe we can find something in there to help us."

  "How do you have the combo to this safe?" I said utterly disbelieving what he said.

  "They moved it in here from the pharmacy over a year ago, after the pharmacist died. Since I had helped the pharmacist out a few times, and we was both Navy, he gave me the combo in case of an emergency. After he died and they moved it out, I forgot all about it."

  "Well they probably changed the combination," I said.

  Benson pulled out his wallet and hunted deep inside the well-worn crevices, before pulling out a thin piece of paper with a series of numbers nearly invisible from time.

  He knelt down on the floor and spun the wheel, before clicking off the numbers. He reached for the handle and, with a clunk that echoed in the room, the safe door opened.

  Both beams of our torches meet inside the interior hole. An array of vials and pills filled it, most of which had been upended and jostled about.

  "I guess they never changed the combination," I said.

  Benson pawed around inside. "He never let anyone look inside the safe – said the stuff was too valuable. The old guy was kind of crazy, headed up to the foothills to go gold mining every chance he got. Always said he had a claim staked out."

  "How'd he die?" I asked.

  "Heart attack," replied Benson.

  Benson moved out of the way, so I looked inside to see what I could see. After all it was a safe, just t
he thought of something being locked up only lent itself to the justification it had to be valuable. And if it was valuable, why shouldn't something be in there I wanted, even if it didn't help our case against Karl and the union?

  In the far back of the safe underneath an old book on pharmacy, and another on drugs, was a folder.

  "What have we got here?" I said, as I took the folder from the safe and pulled out the yellowed contents.

  Benson sidled up beside me and lent his torch to mine.

  "Jamestown Mining Company?" I said.

  "He mentioned Jamestown a lot, after his weekends of gold hunting," said Benson. "Sonora, Columbia, Soulsbyville, a lot of little towns up there I never heard of, but he said they still had gold in the hills, and had a line on striking it rich."

  "These documents are a map to a load of gold hidden back during the gold rush," I said, a little bit of excitement edging in on my voice. "We got ourselves a treasure map."

  ***

  With the discovery of the map, our plans to discover information that would bring the dock and union to its knees fled like flotsam down the river. We were on the verge of being very rich men.

  The sound outside the warehouse tore us from our joyous celebration. Orange light flickered outside the high windows skirting the top of the warehouse walls.

  "Sounds like a whole bunch of people," said Benson.

  I stuffed the folder and its contents into my jacket pocket, and left the room. Benson was behind me, panting to keep up. A bottle streaming fire came crashing though one of the windows farther down the warehouse and exploded in a burst of flame.

  "Molotov cocktail!" I shouted.

  We ran toward the door and our exit, but there was a sudden crash against it, and the whole door came alight.

  "You think we were followed?"

  "I don't know, but we need to get out of here."

  From outside, we could hear shouts of, "Burn it down," from a gang of angry men.

  I grabbed Benson by his jacket and pulled him along. Behind us another crash and the back of the warehouse was ablaze. The inferno now before us was gaining strength and the flames already licked the rafters with their menacing tongues.

  "We got to get around it," I shouted.

  I worked myself between the pallets of cargo stacked high, and snaked my way through the narrow canyons. Benson kept close, but his face was wet with sweat and he took great gasps of air. Smoke began filtering around us like haunting ghosts on Halloween, when another fire bomb crashed through the warehouse in front of us. The gasoline splattered and my pants caught fire. I pulled my jacket off, and beat frantically at the flames. Benson jumped beside me and helped pat out the last of the smoldering cloth.

  "You almost got fricasseed," Benson laughed, somehow finding humor in the situation.

  We both looked up to see the folder and treasure map had fallen out and lay on the floor between two burning pallets. Benson jumped up and ran into the oven. He grabbed the folder and wobbled out. I cringed at the smell of his singed hair. He looked pale in the flickering firelight.

  "Let's get out of here, buddy," I said, putting my arm around his shoulder and helping support him out of the maze of pallets.

  We arrived at the front of the warehouse and the offices where the owner worked with his staff. Being the owners, they were afforded the luxury of widows in their offices. I busted open a door and threw a chair through the window leading outside the warehouse.

  Finally, we both stood hidden behind some trees and shrubs lining the front of the offices. In the distance sirens wailed. Around the corner, a riot of men shouted and broke up the place. I peered around the corner and saw the old watchmen lying face down in a pool of blood. The ships at dock had cut their lines and were getting underway without the help of tugs. This could soon turn into a disaster.

  I jogged back to Benson. He didn't look good, and had the shakes something awful. I pulled him up and we walked away from the dock.

  After a few shots of whiskey, Benson finally calmed down and stopped shaking. He avoided my question about what caused his distress and from the manner of his dismissal, I determined it had to do with what happened to him during the war.

  We decided then and there we needed to leave, get out of town before this whole mess got pinned on us. As far as we could tell no one saw us, but it was better to be safe. If we did get framed for the fire it was our word against fifty. The hills, head for the hills, it had a particular ring to it that calmed our current perturbation and set us on a path less stressed. Jamestown and an old lost gold mine was our destination.

  ROUND 4

  Benson snored loudly in the seat next to me, while I drove in the early morning dark. The moaning hum of the highway lulled me in a dangerous way only to be broken up by a potholed country road. I rolled the window down, and, to my surprise, the outside air was warm even at the early hour, like some ominous prelude.

  We’d made good time getting out of the city, packing what meager supplies we had, and dipping into our private stashes for enough cash to last at least a month. As my hand hung lazily on the steering wheel of Benson's Dodge custom D-24, I ran lists through my head of the items we still needed to acquire. Shovels, pickaxes, food, and someone who could really make heads or tails of this confounded map we had.

  Gray twilight began to change the sky and the stars began to dim when Benson choked himself awake on a particularly loud and throaty snore.

  "What, where we?" he asked, blearily fighting through the fog of wakening.

  "We just passed a little town called Oakdale. It looks like we’ve got another hour to Jamestown," I said, stretching in my seat and pushing hard against the steering wheel.

  The rest of the trip was made in silence. When it became light enough, Benson pulled out the map and studied it. On another piece of paper we’d taken with the map was a peculiar story about a trio of miners who had pilfered the gold from the company for whom they were working, and hidden it in an old abandoned mine shaft just before the entrance was blown and closed. They’d had a pact to return after the company moved the operation to a different site. But from what we gathered, the three men were never able to get back to the mine. One died. Another was put in jail for killing a man and died himself while incarcerated. No record of what happened to the third man was ever found.

  However, the one thing the notes were clear about was bags of gold were hidden in a mine shaft just off the main tunnel.

  Sun bathed the flat topped hills as we wound out of the flat lands in a red ocher brilliance. The scene looked more like a desert painting than the beginnings of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but who were we to say what it should look like as we’d never seen these hills before for ourselves. We snaked through them, climbing a short distance, when soon the signs for Jamestown appeared. Unfortunately, before we could pull over and stop, we had gone through the little town and had to turn back.

  The National Hotel, butted up to the street with scarcely enough sidewalk to keep car doors from scratching the walls. Small, dusty, and all but empty of people, Jamestown didn't appear to offer much other than a hotel and a few mercantile shops. But what we were in need of was information, and just as we exited the Dodge, an old guy with an apron and broom stepped out of the hotel and started sweeping dust off the sidewalk.

  "Good morning, sir," I said, approaching him with my most ingratiating smile.

  "Good morning, gentlemen," he said, propping himself on his broom handle, one hand atop the other. "What can I do for you?"

  "We're looking for a place to stay, a place to buy supplies, and a gold mine," I said.

  A chagrinned Benson elbowed my still bruised and battered ribs with a hefty elbow.

  The old guy's face almost split in two so wide was the smile that cut across it. "You two are a little late. The gold rush was over a hundred years ago."

  "We heard there may still be some old mines up here that might be available for claiming," I said casually.

  The old guy pu
lled an old handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his already glistening pate. "Yes, there are plenty of old abandoned mines all through this area and up and down the Sierra Nevadas. But most were shut down during the war and blown closed. Takes a considerable amount of money and equipment to open them up and start producing."

  "We're looking for one in particular," said Benson. "It was called the Jamestown Mine."

  "You're too late on that one," said the hotelman with a shake. "A guy named Freeman, who settled here about a year ago, bought up the land, brought in equipment, hired workers, and opened up the mine. However, you might be able to buy it from him for a song. Rumor has it, he's done spent way more than he's taken out, and he's nearing bankruptcy."

  "Which way to the mine?" I asked.

  ***

  After the old guy at the hotel gave us the directions, we headed out of town a short way, until we came to the turnoff he described. Down a dusty road over potholes bigger than fifty gallon drums, we bounced along as Benson steered like a madman about to be cheated out of his inheritance.

  "Easy, Benson," I said, holding on and attempting to keep my butt from flying off the seat. "You’re gonna bust up your Dodge, not to mention you’re killing my ribs."

  "Sorry, Conall," said Benson. He slowed down and eased around the next few holes. "I was feeling a whole lot of anger that someone may have staked out the claim that is rightly ours.” How he figured that was beyond me, but the thought of gold did strange things to a man.

  When we arrived, the mine was a bustle of activity. A small tent city sat off to one side away from the elaborate wooden structure, which butted up the side of a mountain. A complex of makeshift offices sat opposite. Over the door of the biggest building on the site stood a sign declaring, Freeman Mines.

  "Looks like we found the place," I said.

  "Can I help you?"

  It was a woman’s voice, which came from behind me, youthful and commanding.