Chapter 29
To humor Alex, Con opened the gold rush book with zero intention of actually reading it. He just didn’t want to leave his partner alone again. There were few places that were safer than the OC Field Office, but he hoped that his presence would reaffirm that he had Alex’s back.
That he could be trusted.
The old adage that trust had to be earned bore true. Just how long this process might differ from person to person.
The only thing Con knew for certain was that he’d dug a big hole for himself, first by trying to kiss Alex outside the bar and then by letting her get accosted in the movie theater.
With a sigh, Con absently flipped through the pages. Soon, he found himself actually reading a section that pertained to the initial gold rush settlers.
And Alex had been right.
They had set up camp in Yerba Buena and not the Mojave.
Con began to wonder how he’d made such an egregious mistake. Sure, he’d been drunk, angry, despondent… but Yerba was to Mojave as Bourbon was to Slippery Nipple.
It didn’t make sense.
Con reluctantly plugged his headphones into his phone and loaded up the audiobook. His teeth were clenched even before he heard The Sandman’s voice.
He played the relevant section of audio twice.
Matthew clearly said, “ the Mojave Desert”.
The rest of the paragraph matched word for word with the text version. But not this part.
It’s just a mistake , Con thought. A mistake by a man who is barely literate .
But this mental assertion did nothing to relieve the sense of unease growing within him. If anything, it reinforced it.
Con looked at Alex who was concentrating on watching the shitty movie. Her eyes were narrow, her neck craned forward, her tongue still making a mound in her cheek.
I can’t believe that I tried to kiss her.
Alex Frost was undeniably attractive and their age difference, him thirty-five, her twenty-four, wasn’t that extreme. She was the exact age that Con had been when he’d brought down The Sandman.
The major difference between them was that she still had her shit together and he, well, didn’t.
Oh, and then there was the fact that his wife of more than eleven years had just left him.
Con shook his head.
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
Alex grunted an affirmative and Con hurried out of the computer room and went upstairs. There, he scooped a pad of paper and a pencil from his desk and returned to the computer room.
For the next two and a half hours, Con listened to the audiobook while he read along with the text. He did so at double speed, which helped him not only to get through the dull story faster but also warped The Sandman’s voice, making it sound less like the serial killer.
In the end, he noted six major differences. There were a handful of minor errors, like the use of these instead of the , that sort of thing, but six were blatant changes.
He made sure to note these with the time stamp and page number.
From the text: The group of settlers, tired, malnourished, and on the verge of giving up, set up camp below a rare Ficus, which offered them a modicum of shade from the unrelenting sun.
From the audio: The group of settlers, tired, malnourished, and on the verge of giving up, set up camp below a large rock outcropping, which offered them a modicum shade from the unrelenting sun.
It sounded like an editorial change, only it was a specific detail and not a stylistic choice.
Why the fuck did The Sandman make that change?
Con had chewed his pencil down to a nub.
Why?
This seemed similar to the Mojave desert change.
Similar and deliberate.
Curiously, the other four differences were all related to numbers.
The first was in reference to a sizable gold haul that Captain Lou Stevenson had made.
The text said 37 ounces, the audio 35. The population of one of the earliest camps was listed as 13,000 but The Sandman said something completely else entirely. Con thought he said 10,110, but on a second and third, listen this wasn’t the case. Matthew Nelson Neil actually said, ‘ zero thousand one hundred and ten ’. It wasn’t an actual number, so Con just scratched ‘0110’ on his notepad.
Similarly, another settlement had 28,462 members in the text and 11,562 in the audio—less than half as many.
The final deviation was regarding the price paid to purchase a local vending stand.
Text: $5,212.
Audio: $4,732.
Con stared at his chicken scratching, begging for something to pop out at him.
But nothing did.
Yerba Buena versus Mojave Desert.
Rare Ficus versus rock outcropping.
37 ounces versus 35.
13,000 versus 0110.
28,462 versus 11,562.
$5,212 versus $4,732.
It was nonsense, just purposeful changes to drive him mad.
Con began rewriting these numbers on a separate page. Still nothing jumped out.
He tried again.
And again.
Frustrated, Con balled up a few of these pages and threw them to the floor.
He was about to give up, to turn his attention back to Alex and her menial task when he had one more thought.
Rather than write the numbers as a whole, he included only the digits that were different.
35, 0110, 115, 4734.
Mojave.
Rock outcropping.
And then it clicked.
It was a location… a rock outcropping in the Mojave Desert. And the numbers? They were GPS coordinates: 35.0110 N., 115.4734 W.
“Jesus Christ,” Con whispered.
“You see that, too?” Alex said.
Con, who was used to working alone and deeply entrenched in his own thoughts, bit down on the pencil so hard that it snapped.
He spat fragments of yellow paint onto the floor and Alex whipped her head around.
She noticed the pad, the broken pencil, the balled-up papers on the floor.
“You all right?” she asked, her voice tinged with concern.
Con continued to pick bits of pencil off his tongue.
“Yeah—yeah, sure. Just, uhh , engrossed in this book. What did you find?”
Alex gave him a curious look.
“Here, check this out,” she said hesitantly, turning back to the computer.
During Con’s gold rush adventure, Alex had managed to create an eight-second video of all the inserted clips.
She pressed play.
Now, the video, dark as it was, made sense.
It showed a man with shaggy dark hair seated next to a table. He bent down, brought a rolled-up bill to his nose, and snorted what could only be cocaine off the glass top.
This was damning enough, but to Con’s surprise, Alex had also been able to isolate the audio.
And what the man said came through the computer’s built-in speakers loud and clear.
“Fuck these trannies. Why can’t we just call them chicks with dicks like we used to?”
Con winced.
“Shit, I know that guy,” he whispered. “That’s Adon Guerrero. That’s the man who directed the pirated films.”