Chapter 47 - The Desperate Heir
We crawled through the opening with agonizing slowness. Every scrape of fabric against the damp granite felt deafening, but the clinking of steel chisels and Tyler’s furious curses from the far end masked our approach.
The flume opened into the sub-crypt—a forgotten vaulted chamber beneath the northern chapel. Rain was leaking through the hairline cracks in the ceiling, falling like cold needles onto our hair. In the center of the room, illuminated by the harsh white beam of a high-powered construction lantern, stood Tyler and his two companions.
Tyler looked terrible. His designer jacket was caked in mud, his face smeared with grease, and his eyes had the wild, bloodshot stare of an addict at the end of his rope. Gone was the smug, smooth-talking boy who had laughed while blowing birthday candles into my face; in his place stood a ruined creature, clawing at stone to preserve the illusion of his wealth.
His two hired men were burly, clad in oilskin jackets, working with heavy pickaxes on the stone base of a marble sarcophagus bearing the name *MERCER - 1888*.
"Almost got it," one of the men grunted, wedging a pry bar under a rectangular stone block. With a sharp groan, the granite yielded, tumbling outward into the mud to reveal a small, iron-bound cavity.
Tyler gasped, dropping to his knees without caring about the filthy water soaking into his trousers. He thrust his arms into the cavity and pulled out an elongated tin deed box, green with verdigris and sealed with lead solder.
"I found it!" Tyler laughed, a hysterical, breathless sound that echoed sickeningly against the stone ceiling. "I told you, Richard! I told you the old man had it hidden! The bypass deed! It’s all here!"
"Put the box down, Tyler," I said.
May you like
The sound of my voice cut through the damp chamber like an icy blade. Tyler froze, his fingers clamped around the tin box.
Both of his hired men spun around, their pickaxes raised instinctively, but they stopped dead the moment they saw the twin barrels of Julian’s twelve-gauge shotgun and the steady, leveled muzzle of my twenty-gauge pointing directly at their chests.
