Read Online The Faberge Egg by Robert Upton - Free Book Online

will at least know where to come looking for me, he thought, as he tore the page from the book and placed it under the windshield. Then he reached under the seat and came up with his Smith 8c Wesson 9mm automatic, which he slipped into his jacket pocket as he slid out of the car. He walked quickly across the roadside clearing and was swallowed up in an instant between two rows of thick, grape-heavy vines.
    Although the grapes were not yet ready to be harvested, they gave off a sweet smell in the hot sun as McGuffin made his way stealthily up the side of the furrowed hill. By the time he reached the first terrace, less than halfway up the steep hill, his back was damp with sweat. He wanted to remove his tweed jacket but didn’t, knowing that his white shirt might be seen through the foliage, even though the house was still several hundred yards above and to the right. When he saw a wagon perched on the ledge directly beneath the house, he struck out diagonally across the vineyard, ducking under the wire strung from post to post. He was now dripping wet, and his shoes and pants legs were covered with clay dust by the time he reached the point he estimated to be directly below the house. He changed his course, heading straight up the hill until he was stopped by a dirt embankment some five or six feet high.
    When McGuffin peered over the top of the embankment and through the spoke wheels of the wooden cart at rest on the dirt road, he saw a young man digging at the vines across the road. And beside the young man, ears pointed skyward, stood the largest German shepherd McGuffin had ever seen. He lowered himself and pressed against the embankment while he considered his next move. There would be no crossing here, nor anywhere else, if that dog was part of a cadre of guard dogs and not just a single house pet. Getting past a human guard, even an efficient German, was always a possibility, but getting past a pack of junkyard dogs, and McGuffin had the scars to prove it, was as likely as running through the Chicago Bears.
    Deciding to look for another place to cross, McGuffin got to his feet and, head down, began to run along the embankment. He had gone only a short distance when he stepped into a hole and sprawled face down on the grass, accompanied by a suppressed but painful grunt. Ignoring the pain in his leg, he pulled the gun from his pocket and rolled over on his back, expecting the German shepherd to leap off the embankment and eviscerate him at any moment. But no dog appeared, nor did any sound come from the terrace above. He waited for a minute, then climbed to his feet and gingerly tested his knee. It was tender but workable.
    It was then that he saw what had tripped him - a recessed hatch cover, all but concealed by blown silt and sparse grass. An old well or cistern, McGuffin thought, until he remembered that some of the vineyards he had visited, Inglenook and Beringer among them, had subterranean storage tunnels carved deep into the rock, running for great distances under the vineyards. The entrance to the tunnel, if this were one, would logically be from one of the buildings above, the barn or the main house.
    McGuffin slid the gun into his pocket and dropped down to examine the hatch cover, wincing but otherwise ignoring the pain in his knee. He dug the loose soil from around the edge of the wood, found a fingerhold, and tugged. A cool rush of damp air blew up from the black hole as he lifted and slid the cover to one side. The low sun poked only several feet into the black before being swallowed up. He dropped a clod of yellow clay into the hole, heard the soft, dry thud of exploding dirt, and estimated the drop to be about twenty feet, too far for a free fall into an unknown void.
    The detective sat back on his haunches and pondered his problem. He could go back to town for a length of rope, or, he thought, surveying the long rows of vines strung from post to post on baling wire, make do with what was available.
    He