—————
The awkward atmosphere followed us from the Visitors Center, turning our trip to the workers' village into a quiet affair. Where before, during our treks the week prior, our discourse had been relaxed and covering the gamut of topics, now an uncomfortable atmosphere hung over us following Artur's revelation of just how bad his situation was.
However, the atmosphere was partially elevated by the fact that Artur hadn't entirely retreated into himself, instead working on his pronunciation with the tape recorder I had picked up.
Hearing him occasionally repeat lyrics from Elvis songs certainly helped to lighten the mood a bit.
Nearing a narrow section of road I twitched the Oliphaunt's head, sweeping the horn from side to side and smashing away or outright uprooting the vegetation that had encroached on the road without breaking stride.
Otherwise, though, nothing happened during the trip and save for a brief glimpse of the raptor at the edge of my range, none of the wildlife presented itself.
Leaning back in my riding niche I could almost get comfortable, the shape of the shell right here just almost fit my body. No backrest though, not even lower back support.
I let my eyes drift shut, visualizing what I wanted while scattering a bit of my swarm over the surface of the Oliphaunt's thorax, searching the shell behind its head for any anchor points I could use. While the support would be minimal with how much Green I had left allocated, it would still be a minor upgrade to the organic and ever-growing design of the vine constructs I was developing.
Humming, I tapped into the impression of the pure Green, setting it flowing around my prosthetic's rolling digits. I slowly extended a shoot from the vine making up the 'bones' in the prosthetic's hand until it broke through the surface of the palm, slipping through a small slit I had incorporated into the palm of the light green, arm-length glove.
Maybe if I hooked it around the protrusions to the sides… I dismissed the plan as a line of vine-entangled steel and concrete cutting through the jungle came into range. Promptly detaching the length of vine, casting it aside with a flick of the wrist, I reached back to swat Artur's shoulder. "Were here," I told him, shouting to make myself heard over the music. Bobbing his head in acknowledgment he pulled off the headset, thumbing off the cassette player with a solid clack.
Putting them away he picked up his rag-wrapped long rifle. Crawling up to sit beside me, he took the rifle's scope from a pouch on his vest and began fitting it into a quick detach mount on the side of the gun. By the time he had the scope in place, we were just reaching the ridgeline where the dirt road looked down on a scattering of buildings extending down a gentle slope.
Now sitting on the edge of the basket, with one foot on the Oliphaunt's thorax and the other on the edge of the basket, Artur balanced his rifle on his raised knee and sighted down on the town while I called forward a dragonfly resting in the shadow of the basket, where the woven vines overhung the curve of the Oliphaunt's carapace.
The iridescent, blue metallic sheen of the flier's shell shone in the sunlight as it alighted upon my palm. Slightly under two times as large as a normal dragonfly, my creatively designated 'Dragonspy' was just on the edge of how much weight its wings could biologically support.
It lifted off and climbed, vertically rising several hundred feet and leveling off, hovering just below the stronger air currents and giving me a bird's-eye view of the company town.
Besides the dragonfly's fine visual acuity, the polarized and ultraviolet spectrums their vision naturally encompassed made the town's infrastructure stand out in stark relief to the lush jungle, which had been largely left intact between the scattered buildings. Space intended for future expansion I suspected.
Encircled by a fence edged in by the jungle on both sides, it was so entwined with vines that it resembled a hedge wall more than a security measure. Within its perimeter rusted roofs dotting the jungle as bright specks, the metal absorbing the heat of the sun, while an irregular line in the canopy of the lush jungle revealed a street laid out in a boxy, but irregular, figure-eight configuration: bungalows and smaller structures irregularly scattered around the outside perimeter, while the worker housing and other structures were seemingly built on the inside.
While the upper half was largely residential, smaller structures, or a notably clear square of grass among the buildings, the motor pool, and its accompanying gas station occupied a good portion of the furthest half. With most of the vegetation cleared from that area to make space for weather-beaten sheds, a large fuel tank raised up on struts, pumping stations, and a maintenance bay, all surrounded by an outer line of trees and middling height concrete wall.
I was picking out minute details, counting what vehicles I could see. There wasn't as much as I'd have liked, but maybe there would be more in the repair bays and sheds. Shifting to taking stock of the town, my surveying was interrupted by a small shape suddenly entering the Dragonspy's field of view from above a moment before the image was thrown into chaos.
Suddenly, its eyesight was dominated by a radiant surface and its body was failing, wings crippled and organs ruptured as the trees passed by beneath it.
Looking up, I frowned as the dragonfly left my range and the faint shape of the hawk disappeared into the bright sky. "God damn it."
Lips pressing thin I immediately considered making a new Dragonspy to better survey the town with, but then dismissed the idea. I had already gotten a good look at what it held and making a new one would just be a waste of Blue and Green.
Instead, I reached back to my satchel and pulled out the binoculars I'd salvaged from the radio bunker.
"I am not seeing many vehicles," Artur said, raising his head from his rifle after looking down on the town for a minute.
"It isn't as bad as it looks. I spotted a pair of shuttle busses in the motor pool, so I'm thinking those are what they predominantly used to move people around. There were a handful of work trucks down there as well so we should be able to find what we need.
Add in whatever spare parts we may find at the motor pool, and I figure we should have more than enough to get started. Whatever we may find at the hydro plant or safari lodge will be extra."
At least, that was my estimation based on the napkin math we had done. It was hard to say exactly how many turbines and batteries we would need due to the technical limitations.
"So, take our time to find what we need and leave at dawn. Maybe fix up the trailer a little," Artur asked, looking back down the scope.
Sitting back I considered it.
I wasn't against staying, we'd been planning on it from the beginning, but I didn't see much in town that when it came to secure shelter. I glanced at my watch while mentally adding up the time. Given twenty minutes with each vehicle to pull out the alternators, batteries, and wiring that we needed… I didn't give us good odds of making it back to the Visitors Center before dark.
"Did you have somewhere in mind?"
The marksman promptly pointed down to a square of light green at the center of the town, a spot of grass or weeds penned in by two-story buildings where the land was terraced up and above the central street.
"What's there?" I asked him, raising the binoculars to look down on the spot that lay a short distance outside my current range.
"Emergency Shelter. The open space is the roof; it's buried, like the radio bunker. There are doors to access it at the street level. It was designated as an emergency shelter but served as space for extra storage and as a local junction for the utilities, well water pumps, backup power and such."
"All that in one place?" I shot him an inquiring look and glancing back he half lowered his rifle, shrugging. "And is it all under that cleared space?" It looked to be a hundred feet square at most. "That doesn't look very big."
"It isn't. It was a cost-saving measure according to the documentation we had. The owners were cheap. But it shouldn't be too bad off, it was supposed to be one of our pickup locations."
I hummed in response. "Good to know, though I think I'll reserve my option of it until I can get a look at what it looks like inside." The shelter at the Visitors Center had been flooded when I found the building, and it still was. Maybe I could do something about that with the Blue, drain it out and steam clean the concrete to kill the mold, but it seemed like a wasted effort when I could just sleep above the ground; the roof wasn't so bad.
Not many tall roofs to be found here. If this shelter wasn't as bad off, it could give me a good place to establish a base camp when in the area. I'd have to take a good look and see what could or needed to be done.
"What about the motor pool," Artur offered. "It's walled in and the outbuildings appear sturdy enough."
I refocused on the largest clearing and scanned it over, noting the tallish elevated water or fuel tank; not quite a tower, but almost. I eventually nodded. "Yeah, that'll work too."
I didn't say that staying at ground level without some solid walls and a roof wasn't exactly appealing, but then the concrete walls surrounding it weren't exactly short and they were walls. And the sheds had roofs, even if they looked somewhat flimsy and had pieces missing in places.
We spent a few more minutes observing, then retook our places on the Oliphaunt and continued down the red dirt road. It wasn't long before we reached the very edge of the small company town and passed through the broken open gates. Riding over a concrete line where a gate once stood, now crumpled in the foliage, the dirt road transitioned to paved bricks green with moss, darkened with mold, and littered with weeds growing up through cracks.
As we passed through the gap in the fencing the lack of more thorough security methods struck me as odd, that there was nothing more than the fence... Then again, neither the unfinished hotel on the road to the airstrip nor the Visitors Center itself had had any extra security measures— or any at all in the case of the Visitors Center.
Maybe the designers had just been that confident the dinosaurs wouldn't escape?
That confidence had certainly cost them.
Proceeding into the town proper on the left side of the 'figure-eight', we began passing by some of the small, single-story, few room bungalows that had been built scattered around the outer perimeter. I looked over one of the buildings as we passed it, gaze resting on the small front veranda with its chairs and wood storm shutters, the plants encroaching on the building and penetrating it in places.
Frames lined the hallway and room walls, pictures and certificates, a shelf of books and a plush wingback chair beside a record player.
Someone's home, once upon a time.
I looked down the street, eyes catching on the gap in the foliage where another bungalow had been built. All of the bungalows had been homes.
The two-story apartments toward the center of the town, overlooking what I could only think of as 'mainstreet', were minimally decorated and appeared to be little more than places for six people to bathe, eat, and sleep: staff housing.
The bungalows had been people's actual homes though, fully furnished with personal effects and touches.
They would have left the island, expecting to come back in a day or so, after the hurricane had passed. Then the incident happened, the few that had stayed behind had died, the park was shut down and the fantastical dream they had been working toward was lost.
All those that had spent enough time here to put down roots hadn't been allowed to come back.
All that they would have known for years, gone, and people they had known and worked with, those few that had stayed behind, dead.
"It almost reminds me of home."
Drawn out from my own thoughts of home I glanced back to see Artur looking at the bungalows.
I knew he lived in a considerably rural part of Russia, rural even by the standards of the massive country, but… I glanced at a bungalow we were passing with a caved-in roof, to a two-story building a ways ahead that had vines covering its street-facing wall and a tree growing out of the second-story apartment.
"That bad?"
He hummed a tone for a moment. "Not so bad as this, but... there were many empty farms and homes. In the last few years—" He caught himself. "Before the Army, people my age were leaving for the cities, Yakutsk, Murmansk, going wherever there was work... a few years more and it may not be too different."
Breathing deep he slowly let out a held breath. "My grandfather does well enough, he has the hunting tourists to support him and grandmother. It is not good, but they are comfortable enough."
It sounded more like he was reassuring himself.
I didn't pry. Quickly enough, my own thoughts turned to Brockton Bay in the aftermath of Leviathan's attack. The exodus of those that could leave, that had the means or nothing to hold them back, and what had remained that the others and I had worked to stabilize.
The town actually made me think of what a small suburb may have looked like had the city just been abandoned, as other cities targeted by the Endbringers had been. Planters would have eventually grown beyond their bounds, weeds choking out grass and growing up where the pavement was split and cracking while homes sat empty, slowly being reclaimed with no one to return to them.
Abandoned, in every sense of the word. Forgotten, left behind.
The town even had the 'commercial' examples of abandoned buildings like those that had been in the Bay, though in this case unlooted and even mostly undisturbed from the looks of things.
There was a bar, a Cantina as the signage read, a laundromat and small general store the more notable 'shops' situated beneath the employee housing, and a dozen more with several spaces left empty. Even the emergency shelter, which seemed to be in fairly good condition despite heavy water damage, was almost comparable to the Endbringer shelters that had briefly supported the refugee camps with their generators and food stores.
Before I could ruminate further, I noticed the scent of rotting meat at the far side of town, and a few moments later a cluster of decomposers nesting and feasting on a mass of it came into range.
I held my tongue for a few moments as the picture further resolved, giving me a better idea of what I was looking at before letting Artur know what was up.
Though it was all but a certain thing, really; there was little other reason for maggots and other decomposers to be feasting on a mass of rotting meat that was suspended some fifteen feet above the ground and wrapped in synthetic fabrics. And as more and more of my swarm landed upon the mass I was able to make out the shape of metal buckles and buttons.
I slowed the Oliphaunt to a stop before we could turn onto the main street and Artur looked up, roused from his ruminations by the stop. The air rapidly filling with bugs pouring in from the jungle and buildings didn't escape him either and he grew tense.
"What is it," he asked, his hand moving to where his rifle was leaning against the edge raised lip of the basket.
"Dead body over by the motor pool," I told him. "Relatively fresh, a single gunshot wound to the head."
Blinking once, he processed the information for only a moment, then understanding the implication lurched into motion; snatching up his long rifle and awkwardly dismounting then taking cover against the side of the beetle.
I did the same if a bit smoother, sliding off my seat and kneeling in front of him while he fitted the scope into its mount.
"Was there anything else?" The unsaid 'anyone else' clear enough in his voice as he prepared himself.
"Still working on it. The corpse is at least a few days old judging from the decomposition and the presence of certain larvae." It made me think that whoever may have shot the corpse was long gone but… I was hesitant to rely overly much on what I knew of forensics when the climate here was so different from what I was used to. "With the weather here I can't say for certain," I admitted, "for all I know it could be fresher than that. Also, it's hanging from a light pole so the wildlife hasn't been able to get to it." Much.
An absent thought and the swarm rousted a pair of dark feathered vultures perched on the corpse's shoulders as well as scattering a cluster of chittering compies that had been waiting beneath it, fighting over whatever scraps the vultures dropped.
More and more of my fliers reached the corpse, letting me get a good look at the ragged mess of torn flesh on the arms and upper torso that had been in reach of the vultures, and the ravaged stumps that had been its legs. Torn off at the knee, if I had to guess. The joint probably gave out under the strain of something jumping up for a bite. Something that liked meat.
Nothing immediately came to mind, but it didn't put my mind to ease considering the suspect that immediately came to mind.
I made note of the raptors position near the edge of my swarm and tracked its slow approach. It had been with us since we left the veterinary building, it was accounted for during that period, but there were four days Artur and I had spent heading to the geothermal plant; although, it had still been recovering at that time. Even in the past few days it was unlikely to have come here, not with how regularly it came into range or stopped by for its nightly visits and especially not with its leg still injured.
The dose of Green it had gotten from the whiptail notwithstanding, it still couldn't move too fast and probably wouldn't have been able to jump for a damn. So this probably wasn't the raptors doing.
That left that either there were more raptors on the island, or there was something else that would've been inclined to take a bite of leg.
More of my swarm reached the corpse and further built upon my image of it, on their immediate vicinity. I absently noted the score marks on the wooden light pole and was drawn to the tamped down weeds at the base of it, finding metal in the weeds. A few of my bugs died on contact.
"They were armed," I reported as I moved back to detach the trailer. "There's a rifle in the weeds beneath the corpse."
Rather than keep the Oliphaunt with us, I sent the beetle ahead to the motor pool while Artur and I took a more discreet route through backyards and under the cover of the trees.
-I-
We smelled the corpse just before we saw it, the faint scent of rotten eggs carried on the wind, and soon enough we were leaving the cover of the trees, looking up at it where it hung.
It was in just as poor condition as it had felt through my bugs, though there was something about seeing it in person that made it worse.
The head was nearly stripped bare to the skull. Little patches of marble-white skin and hair clung to it in places, but otherwise, the head was little more than pinkish bone that glistened dully in the early-noon sun. It was a gruesome sight, if relatively tame.
Artur looked up at it, rifle cradled in his arms, head slightly tilted as he looked up at it. "I want to say he could have been a lookout," he said, then sighed and turned, looking up and down the street before glancing my way. "You said there was a rifle?"
I pointed him to the base of the pole. "Watch where you touch it, there's something on it that killed some of my bugs."
A thoughtful look crossed his face in the middle of slinging his rifle, but getting it into place he dug into a cargo pocket on his pants. Shaking out a rag he ducked down and lifted up a boxy black rifle. "NATO battle rifle," he stated, "Spanish markings." Then turning it he examined an opaque, filmy substance splattered over the gun. I caught a whiff of a faint, pungent smell that briefly overcame the smell from the corpse; it was nauseatingly sweet, like old vomit.
I know what that is.
I pulled at the thought, trying to remember what it reminded me of as Artur brought the rifle close, sniffing at it, his lips curling in disgust. "It's Dilophosaurus venom," he announced, and the details clicked into place. It wasn't that I'd smelled it, but read about it at the Veterinary complex. This guy had been hit by the dinosaurs that had stalked me en route to the radio bunker the second day I had been here.
That… wasn't good.
"Shit. Well, at least they aren't in the area anymore."
Turning in place I examined the angles, the distances that the dinosaurs would have had to spit, and from where, in order to reach the corpse. It wasn't a small distance, at least thirty feet from the trees, across the street and up to where he would have been posted atop the pole.
While I was ruminating on what could have been an ignominious death during my first days here, Artur had pulled out one of his canteens, poured water over the goop, then wiped at the dried spit.
His efforts made the smell return in force, far stronger and cloying.
It was almost enough to make me gag but Artur kept at it, he had to be holding his breath.
I coughed. "Is the rifle you have not good enough?"
He just gave me an exasperated look and kept wiping.
After a few more seconds cleaning the rifle, Artur dropped the rag, popped out the magazine and ejected a round from the chamber. Stopping to pick up the brass round he leaned back against the pole and worked at the magazine, muttering under his breath as he thumbed out one round after another, pocketing a handful, then repeating until it was empty and pocketing the magazine as well. "They didn't shoot."
"What?"
"Whoever this was," he said, gesturing to the corpse, "they didn't shoot, not once." Turning in a circle he looked around, taking in our surroundings before looking up again to the dead man. A hand came up to his chin to scratch at his beard.
"It was the Dilophosaurus that got him, but he didn't get a shot off, which means he wasn't ready for an ambush. They either snuck up on him when he wasn't paying attention or…" He trailed off, his face pinching up like he had bitten into a lemon as he looked down the street. "Or he was looking out for something else, something bigger."
Bigger. Something bigger that they would have reason to be on the watch for.
Shit.
"What are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking we might be on a game trail," he bit out and waved down the street. "This road, it runs the circumference of the island. The gate at the other end of the street is broken down as well I assume?"
And in just as bad of shape as the others, though broken out rather than in. "Yeah."
"It's one giant game trail." His fingers came up to scratch at his beard.
So. The road was a game trail. That was bad, but in retrospect it made sense; the larger dinosaurs were noted to eat hundreds of pounds of plant matter a day, they couldn't just live off of what was down in the valleys. Still. "And yet it wasn't the Tyrannosaur or the venom that did him in."
He blinked once, twice, then waved dismissively. "A mercy killing. Without any anti-venom, he would have been dead no matter what. That or his friends didn't want to risk coming close and getting ambushed themselves. I can't know for sure, but that's how I can see it happening." His eyes moved back and forth, then up to the corpse and he frowned, focusing on it. "Have you found any clues to what they could have been here for? You don't station someone on guard like this if you aren't going to be here for an extended period."
"Still searching, nothing so far," I told him, then looked up at the corpse with him.
"This stinks," he uttered as he stared up at the corpse, jaw set.
He didn't elaborate, but he didn't need to. Other people, armed people, here days after his ride hadn't come? It was suspicious. Combined with the fact that his employer had been so paranoid about other people being on the island that he'd gotten himself so riled up that he forgot where he had been and gotten himself and his mercenaries killed?
What a mess.
"Well..." I sighed, staring up at the corpse. "We can't just leave it up there, can't have anything else catching wind and deciding to come by for a bite while we're here."
The grimace deepened but he nodded. "Do you want me to cut it down so your bugs can eat it down here or leave it where it is?"
"Take too long, easier to just bury it." I looked up, considering the body and what I could feel it had on it. Maybe there would be some clues… "I'll see what I can pull from the body, you dig the hole?"
Artur gave me a distracted look before reaching to his belt and pulling out his wood-handled spade.
-I-
Twenty minutes later I was washing off a particularly soiled wallet, the most recent item recovered by my swarm.
Flipping open the billfold there was little to find, a few large denomination bills of pink, blue, and green, a condom and prepaid phone card, little else. No identification or clue who this may have been. Or at least, nothing explicit.
I set the wallet aside with a gold chain necklace, small short-range radio, two extra magazines of ammo, binoculars, and a small blue brick of a phone that I'd recovered so far while continuing to work on the corpse.
He had tattoos it turned out, a lot of tattoos, blocky, hooked letters inked across his arms, chest, and neck— where the vultures hadn't picked at him, at least. By and large, what remained was still hidden under his clothes or covered in blood. Gang tattoos, I suspected, though I would have to wait until we dropped him to know for sure.
Sitting back I looked outward, turning my attention back to perimeter security as my bugs worked.
I searched through living rooms to check what books were on the shelves, ate into tattered cardboard boxes to check what parts were in storage and checked the seals on cases of glass bottles at the cantina. I took inventory of the town.
There was a lot to parse through, a lot I could use to improve the creature comforts in the radio bunker and which Artur and I could use for the alternator-turbines,
The wind shifting for the second time had my lips pulled into a frown as I caught a whiff of Arturs B.O. in the wind as well as a familiar underlying: cannabis. Faint, but there.
My swarm had located a small patch of the plants during our approach but I'd put it out of my mind, now its presence nagged at me.
The strain was low-quality schwag judging by what the bugs in it could tell me, the kind of stuff I'd found on low-level dealers on patrols… and yet it was here. Here, where there was a corpse, and only here from what I had seen traveling back and forth across the island.
Why?
Now that I was thinking about it the question nagged at me.
Maybe it could have been brought here naturally, birds had a tendency to roost in structures when able and there were plenty here. But it could also have come to grow here naturally if baggies of weed were dumped out that'd had seeds in them. I certainly knew they had been in many of the baggies I'd brought in or discreetly destroyed.
Rather stupid of someone to light up here of all placed, but if people had come here then there had to be a reason for them to come back. This was presuming the plants hadn't been growing here since the island was abandoned, some scientist or manager self-medicating I imagined, but the patch was too concentrated for it to have started that long ago and I should have seen more around the island if birds had brought it.
No, the plants and the dead lookout were connected, I was certain of it.
Thus far my searching had proved inconclusive save that there was definitely no one lying in wait to take a shot at us. The plants gave me a point to focus my efforts and concentrating a percentage of my swarm on the patch I started working outward.
It didn't take long before I found what I was looking for: boot prints leading from a gap in the fencing to one of the bungalows down the street, disrupted foliage, several brass casings in front of the abandoned building. And ultimately, something stupid. Something very very stupid.
"It seems that paranoid criminals will be paranoid criminals regardless of the reality I'm in."
Artur stabbed his spade into the grass and leaned on it while still in the hole. "What what was that?"
"I've found what they were here for."
"Well? What is it?"
"Something stupid," I said, evading the question.
Standing I beckoned to him. "Follow me, it will help if I just showed you— and bring your flashlight!"
Beginning down the street, I took a few moments to figure out how to broach the topic before just settling on just explaining my experience.
"So you get that with my power I'm able to find things pretty well, right?"
He gave me an exasperated look that almost left me wishing for the days he had been afraid of me. "Just play along, this is stupid enough as it is."
'Sure."
"Ok." I let out a breath and began. "So, during my time in the Wards I got a bit of practice taking quick measurements of certain things; guns, pipes, types of wiring, stacks of money, car engines, whatever. It came in handy when I didn't have as much of a presence with my swarm as I'd have liked, or if I couldn't bring it out in force. Like, if I was scouting out a hideout or meeting point before my team went in. Eventually, I started getting brought in occasionally to find things that the PRT squads couldn't, or if they were in a rush and didn't have the time to search for themselves. It wasn't uncommon for me to be seconded to the normal police to check if a place was booby-trapped or to make sure it had been fully cleared out after the bad guys were gone."
Artur hummed, nodded. "I can see it, your bugs are versatile."
I smiled slightly and sent a dragonfly ahead. "Well, one of the things I ended up coming across a lot were plastic buckets. Five or seven gallons each, they came with lids and could be sealed against air and water. Like the bucket of rice left at the veterinary building. They were cheap, and there were as many uses for them as you could imagine, everything from dead drops, narcotics transport when there might be sniffer dogs, whatever. I got pretty good at identifying them."
"And you found some," Artur concluded.
"Two," I said, raising two fingers for emphasis. "Foot traffic made it a bit tricky, but there were marks left in the dust for eighteen more, and even then they may have stacked them."
I stopped in front of our destination and nodded to the yellow-painted bungalow, one of the few on this end of the town that faced the motor pool wall; a three-room, one bath.
Inside and out, the bungalow was much the same as the others; wrecked, damaged by weather, being reclaimed by the jungle, covered with dust and mold.
"They were using a shed out back to store them," I told him, pointing a thumb at the bungalow and turning to push through an overgrown side yard. "I didn't notice anything off until I followed their tracks and started looking a little closer."
"So what, cash?"
"Cash is easy to work with. I'm thinking something not so easily launderable," I told him, absently accepting a tiny rock brought back by the dragonfly.
"Laun-der-able," Artur repeated, sounding out the word as he caught on my use of the English vocabulary, pronouncing it 'lawn der able'.
"It's the same word as washing clothes, in this context it means to wash the money so it's not connected to any crimes. The able modifier makes it so that the thing is possible. The definition of launderable literally means 'capable of being washed'. Is there an equivalent in Russian?"
Artur was quiet for a few moments, thinking, before giving me the closest equivalent in Russian and I tried it a few times in various contexts while absently rolling the rock between my fingers, feeling the edges. He corrected me on one of my uses but I got it well enough. One more gap in my growing Russian lexicon filled.
I needed to get a thesaurus or something whenever I made it back to civilization, movies with subtitles perhaps.
"Well, basically I think the island was being used as a long term storage depot while they laundered things like these." I held up the small rock, its bottom edge digging into the pad of my thumb.
"A diamond?"
I handed it to him, to let him inspect it himself as we reached a back yard overshadowed by the surrounding trees and crossed the brick-paved patio to a moderately sized, faded grey metal shed nestled in among the foliage. Opening the narrow sheet metal doors I stepped inside and to the right so Artur could follow.
"Light please."
Obliging, Artur drew out his flashlight and clicked it on. The beam cut through the shadowed room, playing off the old gardening tools and shelves mounted to the walls before settling on a pair of white plastic buckets at the back of the shed, their lids sealed in place with flaking grey duct tape. Around them, lit up by the lights, several four-pointed starbursts of dust made by a pattern of perfectly formed twelve-inch wide circles where the dust was absent.
"The crew that came had a bit of a spill or tried to skim a bit," kneeling down and reaching under a low shelf to pull out a gaudy, diamond-encrusted ring missing several jewels, and several loose pearls that probably went with a necklace. I put them on one bucket lid then cut the cap around the lid of the second and went about peeling off the lid.
Light from the flashlight shone off the contents of the bucket as I peeled the lid away, gleaming gold rings, diamond earrings, pearl necklaces, and much, much more filling the bucket three quarters of the way up; and among all the precious metals and jewels were grains of rice, a quick and dirty anti-moisture method.
"Yar me hearties," I commented flatly, "thar be yer booty!"
Looking at me with his brow furrowed it took Artur a few seconds to make the connection and let out a slightly hysterical laugh.
"Hidden treasure on an island of dinosaurs... this is stupid, they could have just buried it in a field."
I could do little more than shrug. "Like I said, paranoid criminals. It isn't the dumbest place I've seen people hide their ill-gotten gains." Much as I wished it was.
Artur stared at the little rock for several seconds before turning the flashlight onto the buckets.
Stepping aside I grabbed a pair of shovels off the wall, leaning on one while I glanced back to Artur, who still stared down at what had to be the single largest concentration of wealth he had ever seen.
Temptation, greed… desperation.
Everything in the buckets had no doubt been the belongings of people who had been shaken down, robbed, or flat out murdered, but the odds of it actually getting back to their owners? Some pieces may have had codes laser-etched into the jewel, or other identifying marks, but I wasn't going to hold my breath that many former owners would, or could, be found.
"So, a question about your country's mail system, can you send packages home from out of the country?"
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