Torrent(29)

At some point during my ramble, the server had brought over an omelet and orange juice for Temi, and she was digging in. I was taking the roundabout way to answer her question, but she didn’t look bored. “I knew this would be more interesting than working at a fast food place,” she said between bites.
“Hah, more interesting, but not exactly more lucrative, at least not yet. That’s why I’m working the estate sales too.”
“You didn’t find anything valuable at the Anasazi site?”
“Oh, there’s probably some good stuff there, but we didn’t do much digging before I called an archaeologist at the Department of Natural Resources. That was a mistake, because the bastard took all the credit for finding the site. They ran a multi-page article on it and him in Archaeology Magazine.” I waved a hand. “Not that I’m bitter or anything.”
“Why’d you tell him about it to start with?” Temi asked.
“The site was on state land.”
Her brow furrowed. “Isn’t all of the land you’d search on either state or privately owned?”
“Essentially, yes. To be honest, this part of our enterprise is a little... morally ambiguous. We’ve argued over whether Simon should make the software available to anyone or just sell it to universities when we’ve worked out the bugs. We might be assisting... the wrong sorts of people if we made it publicly available.”
The crinkle in Temi’s brow hadn’t smoothed.
“You see,” I went on, “archaeologists frown upon people who make money by finding things and selling them on the antiquities black market. Ideally, historically significant sites should be carefully researched for what they can tell us about past peoples, and artifacts should be turned over to museums. That’s why Simon and I stay away from Native American ruins for the most part. It’s awesome to be the first to find something, but we’re not going to make money on any of it because we’ll always feel obligated to inform the authorities about the finds. Though I’ll be damned before I call that guy at the DNR again.” I grumbled under my breath.
“So what are you making money on?” Temi asked.
“As it turns out, people get less huffy about proclaiming the historical significance of stuff white people left lying around a hundred years ago. A lot of what we locate falls into the category of most people’s junk and one man’s treasure. Lately we’ve been finding and selling old mining equipment. I kid you not, we recently auctioned a big claw bucket from a steam shovel for over a thousand bucks on eBay. Fortunately, the highest bidder was someone who lived in the state, and we didn’t have to figure out how to ship it.”
Temi’s eyebrows drew together. “Who would want such a thing?”
“I don’t know if we can thank the steampunk movement or what, but a lot of people are decorating with relics from the Industrial Revolution era these days. Some of these items do look pretty cool.” Though I’d been surprised when the bucket sold. Simon had argued for that one. I’d been ready to leave it, thanks to its massive weight, but he’d engineered a system to get it onto a trailer, and we’d hauled it off the abandoned mining claim. “They’re not all big items. We sold some old gold pans and pick heads to a bar owner over on Whiskey Row—” I waved in the direction of the street, “—right when we got into town. He thought they’d make good wall decorations.”
Temi had finished her omelet and pushed the plate away. “All right, now I get what your business does, but I don’t get why you were up on the mountainside hunting monsters.”
“Monsters? Is that what the newspaper is saying?”
“The television news. A boy from the White Spar campground was filmed saying monsters had eaten his parents.”
“Oh, man, I can’t believe the reporters pestered that poor kid,” I said.
“The police and reporters are calling it a bear attack, but the survivors they interviewed all said that what they glimpsed wasn’t any bear. Someone said it had to be the same creature that killed all those people in L.A.”
I nodded, having caught up with the news from over there now. Neither Simon nor I was the type to watch much television or spend a lot of time perusing headlines on the web, so we’d missed the excitement. The first mauled body had appeared at El Matador Beach outside of L.A. ten days earlier. There’d been several more deaths in the city, with each cluster of attacks occurring farther east, until the last two had shown up in San Bernardino. After that, things had quieted down, until five days ago when there’d been two more groups of slayings near La Paz County Park. In all of the cases, nobody had managed to get a picture of the culprit, because it always attacked at night. The official reports had blamed bears, though some of the deaths had been as grisly as the decapitated man in that mine shaft. Our tunnel incident seemed to be the only killing that hadn’t happened at night, though a dark mine probably didn’t qualify as a daylight attack.