CHAPTER NINE

“SERIOUSLY, bro,” Will Patrick told Flanagan. “The voice said ‘treasure.’ Heard it loud and clear, just like my grandmother yammering in my ear.”

“Clean out your ears then, because I ain’t heard jack.” Flanagan popped the first bottle of a sixer. “You owe me ten for the beer.”

The movie at the Orpheum Theatre had long since ended. The crowd had thinned to a few stragglers hunched in the darkness against the cold. In the Granary Burying Ground, Will Patrick and Flanagan sat at the base of the Franklin family obelisk, backs to the deserted street. They’d scored a couple of six-packs by slipping a homeless guy ten bucks, plus an extra ten when he refused to turn over the goods.

“Goddamn extortionist,” Will Patrick said. “I should’ve kicked his ass.”

He tossed an empty bottle across the graveyard. It crashed against the headstone of Paul Revere and broke into thousands of pieces.

“Hey,” Flanagan said, “you just defiled the grave of a great patriot.”

“Yeah right,” Will Patrick said but started tromping toward the grave anyway. “My history teacher said nobody ever heard of Revere until some dumbass wrote a poem. He made all his money as a silversmith. When he died, he had his silver hidden in his casket so grave robbers couldn’t find it. Wait! That’s it! Treasuuuuuuuuu—”

With a crack the ground collapsed beneath his feet. One second he was standing, the next he was writhing on his back, nine feet below, covered in dirt, leaves, and chunks of the lid that had once hidden the hole.

“You total wad.” Flanagan looked down into the hole. “What the hell?”

Will Patrick moaned and crawled to his feet, a sharp pain in his lower back bending him over. He raised a hand but couldn’t reach the lip of the hole.

“You’re in a freaking grave!” Flanagan crossed himself and spit. “Get out!”

“It’s not a grave. These walls are stone. It’s a tomb.” Will Patrick snorted. “I’m a tomb raider. Ha-ha.”

“You ain’t gonna think it’s funny when you see the goose egg on your skull.” Flanagan turned on his cell phone light. A stairway led down into darkness. “Stairs? Seriously?”

“Follow the yellow brick road.” Will Patrick laughed and started toward them, still hunched over.

“Hey!” Flanagan called. “Don’t go down there!”

Will Patrick waved him off and disappeared into the shadows.

“Ten bucks says you piss yourself,” Flanagan said. He knew he should follow but Grandmother had raised him Catholic, and even if he never listened in Mass, he knew doing belly flops with the dead was a bad idea.

For a few seconds his cell phone light continued to illuminate the stairway. Then, without warning, it went out.

“Yo!” Flanagan’s voice echoed, but there was no answer, and there was no light. Seconds ticked off, but they felt like minutes, and panic formed in the pit of his gut. Something was wrong. He could feel it. Holes didn’t suddenly open up in cemeteries, and you sure as hell didn’t go crawling around them in the dark.

“Asswipe!” he stage-whispered into the blackness. “Answer me!”

“Boo!” Will Patrick shouted, jumping out of the darkness.

“Holy hell!” Flanagan screamed and fell backward into the dead leaves. He clutched his pounding heart. “Don’t do that! I had too many beers for that shiz.”

Digging his toes for purchase onto the stone wall, Will Patrick pulled himself from the hole and knocked the dirt off his pants. A goose egg was rising on his head, and a rivulet of blood trickled down his face to his neck, but he didn’t seem to notice. “You’re not going to believe what I found!”

“For real?”

“A casket covered in writing and pictures.”

Flanagan let out a long burp. “Liar.”

“What if the casket holds Paul Revere’s hidden stash of silver? Huh? Huh?”

“You didn’t look?”

“I tried. The lid wouldn’t budge. You want to try?”

Flanagan had no desire to open some dead jackweed’s coffin, but if there really could be treasure? “I’ll get a crowbar and maybe a sledgehammer. Meet back here to open the bitch up.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Will Patrick said. “What time?”

“Midnight.”

“The witching hour. I like it.”

“Sláinte.” Flanagan raised a toast. “May the road rise to meet you, boyo.”

“Erin go bragh,” Will Patrick said. “Or some Irish shiz like that.”

“Watch your mouth about the Irish,” Flanagan called back as he cut across the burying ground. “Or the road’s going hit your pretty face.”

A street cleaner rumbled down Tremont. Flanagan waited till its bright lights were almost past, then stepped on the low wall and vaulted over the iron fence. He looked up as a massive crow soared into the trees behind him. The bird landed on a thick branch and started preening. It yanked its feathers by the beakful and let them drop into the hole below. In minutes half its breast was plucked bare, as if it were molting, and its corneas had turned milky white like the eyes of an ancient blind man.

That’s one fugly bird, Flanagan thought. His grandmother always said crows were an evil omen. Even though he didn’t believe any of the crap, he crossed himself just to be sure, unaware that it had already marked him for death.