Tombstone, Arizona—zip code 85638. The town too tough to die. Center of the original American silver rush of the 1880s. What could be luckier than striking it rich in precious metals?

Conrad pulled the rental to a spot along the curb behind a minivan with a stick family decal that included seven people, three dogs, two cats, and a guinea pig. Fiona gave a moment's thought to whether she'd made the wrong life choices, looked over at the well-built handsome guy driving the Mustang, and decided she was doing alright without a small bus load of children and animals.

They climbed out and stretched. It was well over an hour's drive from Tucson and that's after sitting on a plane half the day. Her joints popped and protested the movements.

A gentle breeze whipped up a film of dust and carried it down Allen Street. She followed its progress with her eyes and looked straight into an old western movie. Two tottering red stagecoaches rattled along the road in opposite directions, pulled by teams of the biggest horses she'd ever seen. Men with red sashes and guns holstered at their hips strolled along the boardwalk arm-in-arm with women in hoop skirts and wide-brimmed, flowered hats. Tourists in shorts and polo shirts and bikers with heavy leather vests made way for them.

Conrad grinned like a little boy in a toy shop. "This is so cool."

"This is cool?"

In a small city park on the corner, two boys shot each other with plastic arrows.

"Definitely." He took off across the street. "Come on."

Fiona raced to catch up with him and reached his side just as he came to the old time photo place. Inside the dimly lit fake saloon, a huge family—maybe the minivan sticker people—were being organized for a photo. All the males, even the toddler, wore long beige dusters and held rifles. All the females, even the preschooler, wore saloon girl dresses. "Don't even think about it," she said.

Conrad's slightly maniacal grin only grew wider. "Too late. I'm already thinking."

"We have work to do, you know. I am not dressing up like a nineteenth century prostitute and having a photograph done with you."

He rolled his eyes. "Killjoy."

"Gunfight at the OK Corral; starts in fifteen minutes, folks." A tall slim man in a black suit and a red, satin brocade waistcoat slipped a gold watch into his pocket. "It's American history, folks. You don't want to miss it."

Fiona smiled politely. "We're actually quite—"

But Conrad was staring, agape, at the wooden sign creaking back and forth in the wind. "It's the actual OK Corral?"

"Yes, sir, the one and only."

Conrad practically ran through the doors.

"You can't be serious," Fiona sighed.

"Ma'am, Americans take their history very seriously."

She bit back a half dozen sharp retorts and followed Conrad.

"I got you a ticket," Conrad said. "There's a Historama show after the gunfight."

"We watch this little re-enactment and then we're back on task. No Historama. Do you understand me?"

He pouted and held up his right hand. "Scouts honor."

"You were never a boy scout."

"I was. They threw me out. It's only because the other boys were intimidated by my mad skills."

"No doubt."

He continued grinning. "We should find a seat."

"Lead the way."

They passed through another door and along the outside wall of the corral itself. "When I was a kid... man... we must have watched Tombstone a thousand times. Kurt Russell, with those squinty eyes and his big sexy mustache—"

Fiona couldn't hold in a little snicker. "You think Kurt Russell's mustache is sexy?"

"Hell yes, it is!" He gestured for her to go first into the little open-air theater.

On one side a bar sat center stage. Facing it, two sets of bleachers gleamed in the blazing sun.

Conrad kept chattering as they climbed to some open seats near the top. "And Val Kilmer as Doc Holiday." He switched to a slow, deep southern drawl. "I got two guns, one for each of ya. Go on. Say when." He shook his head. "Golden."

Fiona pulled on his arm, dragging him from the shop window.

"All I'm saying is that we'd fit in better if we bought some authentic old west clothes."

"We're not here to fit in," she said. "We're here to get a job done."

He stumbled off the boardwalk and let her drag him across the dirt road. They made a wide berth around a pile of horse droppings. "Do you even know where you're dragging me? And for what?"

"I'm dragging you there." She pointed at the batwing doors of a two-story saloon. "Because it appears to be the busiest place in town. We can blend in with the rest of the tourists asking annoying questions and figure out what our next step needs to be."

It had to be at least ninety degrees with all of five percent humidity. A beer sounded like a taste of heaven. He stopped fighting her. He could always slip away later and visit the gift shop.

A keyboard player sat on a small stage on one side of the saloon. He sang a warning for mamas, to not let their babies grow up to be cowboys. A stained glass window of a naked woman laying on a piano glowed over his head like an enormous pornographic halo. Women in corsets that pushed their bosoms to impressive heights and skirts that showed a whole lot of leg in the front and bustled up over their bottoms in the back hustled between the bar and two dozen round tables. One of them hollered in their direction as she passed by. "Take a seat anywhere, y'all."

Since all the tables were occupied, Conrad and Fiona sat at the bar. It was a good spot, on the end, tucked in a corner where he could lean his back against the wall and keep an eye on both the front door and the people coming and going from the kitchen.

A man in a black Stetson hat and black suspenders tossed two napkins in front of them. "What can I get you?"

"You have Dos Equis on tap?"

"Sure thing. Twelve or twenty four?" he asked.

"Twenty four."

Fiona rolled her eyes. "I'll have a large Iced Tea."

The bartender tipped his hat without a trace of self-consciousness or irony. Maybe if the whole thief-for-hire thing ever fell through he'd come to Tombstone and get a job slinging drinks in Big Nose Kate's Saloon.

Already, the eager beaver was interrogating the elderly couple beside her.

"So, you come here every year? That sounds like so much fun." She was positively gushing. "Hey, maybe you can help me. My friend and I are on kind of a scavenger hunt. We're looking for something that would be known as lucky here in Tombstone."

The old man scratched his bald head. "Well, you'll find 'lucky' just about all over the place. Somebody opened up the Lucky Cuss Bed and Breakfast right over there on Fremont street just a year or so ago."

"A year ago? No. Our lucky thing would have been here for quite some time. Longer than I've been alive, most likely."

"Well, that's only about a minute, right?" The guy wheeze-laughed at his own joke and poked his wife in the ribs with his elbow. "What else is lucky around here?"

The lady gestured toward the bar taps with her glass. "Lucky Cuss Lager."

"Right! And the Lucky Cuss Theater down on the end of the street."

Conrad took a long drink of his beer. "Why Lucky Cuss? Why not Lucky Dog or Lucky Horseshoe or something?"

A guy walking past the bar stopped and turned. "Why Lucky Cuss?" He stuck his hands in the pockets of his velour hoodie. With his matched jogging suit and slicked back hair, he looked like a cartoon gangster but his smile scrunched up his eyes in a way that made him somehow instantly likable. "Half the reason this town is here is because of the Lucky Cuss silver mine. You should catch the Historama show over by the OK Corral. It'd tell you all about it."

Conrad took another long drink and glared at the back of Fiona's head, but she ignored him.

"Is the mine still open?"

All three older folks laughed.

"There hasn't been an open working mine in Tombstone in a hundred years," The Gangster said.

"Well, there's the Good Enough Mine over on Toughnut Street. They're not mining it, but it's making money," the woman said.

"Fleecing tourists," her husband grumbled.

"You're just salty because you couldn't handle all the stairs and take the tour."

"We all make our living off tourism these days," Gangster said with a shrug. "And speaking of that. I have to check on the kitchen. Table four says they've been waiting forty minutes for their nachos."

"That's Steve," the old man said. "He owns this place."

"This place and half the others in town," his wife added.

Conrad finished his beer and took a moment to fully acknowledge his envy of Steve. Steve had a good life. Steve wasn't running all over the globe with a crazy moral-high-road crusader. Steve could go to the Historama every day if he wanted to and nobody would stop him. Heck, maybe Steve owned the Historama.

"Where's the Lucky Cuss Mine?" Fiona asked the old couple.

The guy shrugged. "Somewhere out in those hills, I reckon. Couldn't tell you which mine is which. Drive out old Charleston Road and you'll see a dozen or more of them out there. Every miner in the west staked a claim in the Tombstone hills."

"It's rumored that they'd sometimes claim a mine near a successful mine and cut through to steal the silver," the woman said.

The bartender had wandered back toward them. "That ain't just a rumor. See them spiral stairs over there? Go down there and you'll see where the old swamper who cleaned up this place back in the day dug hisself an entrance into what turned out to be a fine little side income."

Fiona finally turned to look at Conrad.

He shrugged. "Let's take a look then."

They rose and headed across the dance floor toward the spiral stairs. Halfway there, the guy with the keyboard played the opening notes of a song and Conrad stumbled to a halt.

"No way." It was like the past had reached out and grabbed him by the nape of the neck.

The woman who'd stepped up on the stage sang a single long, stretched-out word. "Craaaazzy..."

Conrad spun and faced Fiona. "We have to dance."

"Excuse me?" She took a step back from him.

He took a step forward, grabbed her right hand, and slung an arm around her waist. "My grandma used to play this song every time I visited." He spun her toward the center of the dance floor. "She told me any man who'd ignore a melody like this one had something deeply wrong with his soul."

Fiona clung to his shoulders and staggered along in his wake. A deep line formed between her brows. "We have a job to do."

"Shhh." He pulled her closer. "Just dance. We'll work after this song."

Conrad and Fiona sat at the tiny round table in Conrad's hotel room, peering at the screen of his laptop computer.

"So according to this the Lucky Cuss mine is about a mile out of town just south of where Old Mill Road makes this crazy curve around the base of the hill." Conrad pointed at the yellow star he'd pinned on the map.

"That's private property," Fiona pointed out.

He looked at her for a long, silent moment.

"I'm just saying." Was it really so hard for him to accept the fact that not everyone was super comfortable breaking whichever law was inconveniencing them at the moment? "How are we going to get there?"

He leaned back in the rickety chair and folded his hands over his stomach. "We drive."

"Someone will see us, for sure. It's not like there's a great deal of tree cover in the desert."

"Someone could see," he conceded. "But that would mean there was somebody out there who cared to pay attention." He pointed at the screen again. "Look. There's literally nothing there but scrub grass and coyotes. And this hill would block us from sight of the people who live in Tombstone."

Fiona needed to burn off some energy. She stood and paced the length of the room—eight steps from one end to the other. It was a tiny room. She turned and headed back the other way like a tiger in a cage. "This would be way easier if the Lucky Cuss was the one giving tours to the public."

Conrad scoffed. "We're going to look for a clue in the company of a dozen over-eager idiots with cameras?"

Oh, how she longed to make a comment about the over-eager idiots who lost their minds playing tourist in Tombstone. You have a job to do. She swallowed her criticism and returned to her chair. "What do you propose?"

He shrugged as if his idea should have been obvious. "We wait for dark, drive out there, check it out, be on a plane before lunch tomorrow.

"You think that checking out an abandoned mineshaft in the middle of the desert in the dark of night will be easier than ducking away from a group of tourists?"

He shrugged again. Insufferable, pompous jerk. "It's not the most difficult thing I've ever done. At least I won't have to go mano-a-mano with Mickey Mouse, am I right?"

She hated his stupid grin. His stupid, beautiful, thought-scrambling grin. She stood up and started pacing again.

"I'd have thought you'd have loosened up about bending the rules after our Disney adventure."

"The rules exist for a reason," she snapped. Then, after a deep breath, "We should go in the daytime."

"Aren't you the one who didn't want to be seen?"

"I'd rather be seen than fall to my death and be left there for the scavengers."

He looked at the map for a long moment and then agreed. "Fine. Have it your way."

"Fine," she agreed.

"Fine," he mimicked her.

She snatched up her things. "I'm going to bed.

"'Night!" he called after her. Insufferable.

When she got to her own room, the pacing continued. Her mind buzzed like an angry swarm of wasps.

I've been too trusting.

He's too quick to break the law.

He's a bad man.

He's so charming.

Have I ever known anyone with such a quick mind?

A quick criminal mind. He's a bad man.

I've been too trusting.

She thought of the soft twangy music and spinning across the floor in his arms. His strong, tanned, masculine arms.

"Argh!" She shook her fists at the ceiling. "This is stupid. I don't need him." It only took a moment to put her boots on and lace them up tight. When she stepped out of her room she was careful not to let the door slam, lest he hear it and wonder where she was going.

Conrad sat in the old chair with his hands folded and replayed the dance in his head a dozen times.

Patsy Kline knew what romance was really like, Grandma had said. She knew it wasn't sunshine and daisies. It's kicking yourself in the shins for being so stupid and going along and doing the thing anyway. It's plum crazy.

He stood up and went to the mirror. "You've got to get a grip, my friend," he told the guy in the mirror. "You've been letting her distract you and that's not okay. Broke is bad. Dead is badder. Stop thinking with your little brain."

The memory of her half-unbuttoned shirt drifted through his mind.

"Dead, Conrad! You're going to be dead. Focus, man." Was he really going to risk getting himself killed because a woman showed him some cleavage? It wasn't even a lot of cleavage. Any one of the barmaids there in Tombstone had more on display.

He took a long moment to recollect the barmaids in Tombstone.

Lucky Steve.

"Luck has nothing to do with it," he told the wide-eyed idiot in the mirror. "I could wear velour jumpsuits if I want to, but not until I get paid and there's only one way to get paid." If he went now and found the clue he could be on the first flight out of Tucson in the morning. Stuck in the desert without a car, it would take Fiona at least a day to even figure out her next move. By the time she caught up with him he'd have the job finished.

He jammed his phone in his pocket, snatched the keys from the top of the dresser, and stalked out to the rental car. A right turn out of the hotel parking lot then a quarter mile drive took him to the historic district, but he turned right instead of left. Old Charleston road wound out of town in a nonsensical zigzag. He passed a campground full of the impossibly large RVs lived in by senior citizens of means, a bank made to look like an old adobe hacienda, and a run-down gift shop with a 'for sale' sign out front and then there was nothing but scrub brush and rocky hills.

He blew right past Old Mill Road and didn't realize it until he got to the bridge over the dry riverbed. On the map, the riverbed ran south of the road. He three-pointed a u-turn and headed back the other way.

No wonder he'd missed the road. It was little more than a stretch of desert with slightly fewer plants.

A car blew past him, headed south toward the small city of Sierra Vista. He waited until the red glow of their taillights disappeared around a curve and then killed his headlights and turned off the pavement.

Bumping over the rocks and ruts, it was impossible to go any faster than five miles per hour. At that rate, it took almost ten minutes to get to the big curve at the base of the hill. Twice, he veered off the track and didn't realize it until the high-pitched shriek of sharp-edged mesquite branches scraping away the car's paint alerted him. Oh well. He'd signed on for the extra insurance anyway.

At last, a metal headframe, standing about twenty feet tall like a giant upper-case A rose up in front of him. Under the shining full moon, the structure looked blacker than the darkness around it—as if the rust were actively absorbing all the light that dared come near.

Conrad shifted the car into park and killed the engine.

The alkaline air tickled his nose. Somewhere far away a dog barked. Probably back near Tombstone. Tiny pebbles rattled down the hillside to his right. He froze and listened.

He looked left and right and saw nothing but varying shades of gray. Thank God for the full moon. If it hadn't been there it would have been too dark to see his hand in front of his face. Probably some little lizard had skittered across the gravel and made the noise.

Maybe Fiona was right about waiting.

Forget her. Do your job, man.

Half a dozen long strides carried him to the mineshaft entrance. A rusty metal grate covered a hole that was maybe three feet across. He pulled his phone out and shined his flashlight on the grate. The dark hole swallowed the light.

It would be a good hiding place. That's for sure.

With his free hand he reached down and tugged. The metal screeched in protest but refused to budge. He pulled harder and got the same result.

Cursing, he jammed the phone back in his pocket and laced both fingers through the rectangular holes.

A spider, roughly the size of his palm and covered in black hair skittered out of one opening and straight up Conrad's arm.

He screamed like a three-year-old girl in a house of horrors. Flailing his arm in an attempt to dislodge the monstrous arachnid, he staggered back, stumbled over a large rock and nearly fell. Thankfully, the windmill motion he made to keep his balance sent the tarantula flying off into the night.

Conrad braced his hands on his knees and panted for breath. His heart banged painfully against his breastbone.

"Don't move."

He looked up.

Fiona inched toward him in the darkness. She held a shovel in a grip that would have made Hank Aaron proud.

"What are you doing, woman?"

"Seriously, don't move."

An ominous rattling shattered the night.

Without moving any other part of his body, Conrad turned his eyes downward just in time to see a snake, thick as his forearm, strike.

He screamed again and threw himself forward.

Fiona swung the shovel directly at the place he'd been standing.

Conrad fell in the dirt.

The snake's head landed next to him. Its dead eyes stared at him.

He sat up and watched the headless body flop impotently three or four times and still.

He looked up at Fiona. Maybe it was the moonlight, but she appeared white as a ghost. She dropped the shovel and ran her trembling hands through her hair. Both of them panted like they'd just finished a marathon.

Fiona recovered first. "We have to stop trying to one-up each other. Seriously. This is insane. You could have died out here if I wasn't here."

Arguing seemed like slapping fate in the face. "It does seem like we do our best surviving when we stick together. I think destiny is trying to tell us something."

"No more running off on our own, then?"

He rose on legs as sturdy as warm gelatin. "No more. We're in this together until the end."

She opened her mouth and he was certain she was going to ask what would happen when they reached the end, but she didn't. She asked, "Which of us is going in, then?"

"Going in?"

She gestured to the open mineshaft. Apparently, in his desperation to get away from the spider, he'd actually succeeded in pulling the trap door open.

He stepped to the edge and peered down into the dark pit.

Fiona stood on the other side and did the same. "This feel off to you?"

"Aside from the spider that may or may not have made me pee my pants while it attempted to murder me?"

She leveled a judgmental gaze on him. "You know tarantulas are pretty much harmless, right? The only reason it crawled on you at all is because you stuck your hand in a dark hole."

"Right. That was a bad move. You go in the mineshaft."

"There's no bird symbolism here. It's not a fancy club or the private wing of a museum or a holy crypt. It's just a hole in the ground."

Conrad grinned. "Scared?"

"Yes. I'm not insane."

They stared at the hole a while longer.

"Okay. So... daylight is coming eventually," he pointed out.

"We go in together. Me first. You can lower me down and then follow once we're certain there's a decent landing." She swallowed hard. "Don't let go of me. Destiny and trust and all that rot."

He nodded. "Yeah. I've got you." He shined his phone's light all around the edges, checking to make sure Mr. Spider or Mrs. Snake didn't have any family members hiding just inside.

Fiona lay down on her belly and lowered her legs into the void.

Conrad took her wrists and held on tight as she scooted further and further in. Just at the end of his reach she said, "It's okay. I'm on a solid rock shelf."

Great. That meant he had to go in, too.

Following her example, he rolled onto his belly. From there, he saw the tarantula watching him from atop a boulder, twenty feet away. He scrambled backward so fast he fell and landed on top of Fiona.

"What happened?" she clambered to her feet, staring up at the opening.

"I slipped," he said. "Let's go."

A lifetime of old western movies and Scooby Doo cartoons had led Conrad to believe the mineshaft would be pretty interesting—full of old tracks and rusty tools and flocks of bats that would take flight when he shined a light on them.

Sadly, it was pretty much just a series of dank, dark, dirty tunnels.

After over an hour of walking around, backtracking, trying new paths, and generally getting nowhere, Fiona shook her head. "It's not right," she said.

As much as he hated to admit it, he suspected she was right. The name was right and the zip code was right, but something was off. He tapped his phone to check the time. "It's four in the morning. I'm done in. Let's go back to the hotel. We'll shower and sleep on it and reconsider our options over breakfast."

She yawned a great, jaw-cracking yawn and muttered a curse.

"Agreed," Conrad said. If they didn't figure out where they'd gone wrong, he'd have bigger things than spiders to worry about.

The OK Café was a small square block of a building perched on the intersection that divided the tourist bit of Tombstone from the regular-people-living-life bit. A server in black jeans and a white tee shirt handed them menus and told them the special of the day was the cowboy burger with fries. Fiona gratefully accepted her cup of coffee and ordered a salad. Conrad said he'd try the burger.

When they were alone, she admitted that she'd dreamed about wandering in mineshafts all night long. "There was just so much nothing down there I woke up feeling like that's all this is—a bunch of nothing."

He held his ceramic mug between his hands and stared into it as if trying to divine the future from the coffee grounds. "It's got to be there. Lucky eight five six three eight. It makes so much sense."

"Progress, they call it!" A woman with enormous blonde hair thumped her hand against the table next to theirs.

Fiona shot her a dark glance. Some people needed to learn how to act in public. "I'm with you," she said. "It all fits, but when we were out there—it just felt all wrong."

"Yeah," Conrad agreed. He sipped his coffee.

The uncharacteristic listless agreement dragged Fiona's mood even lower.

"Look at this town. It embraced what was good and made a living at it. Would anybody want to come here to visit if the Bird Cage Theater was sporting the latest surround sound technology?" the woman at the next table said.

Maybe it was disappointment or frustration or just plain old lack of a good night's sleep, but Fiona cracked. "Do you mind?"

All four people at the other table looked over at her.

"I'm sorry, but my associate and I are trying to..." To what, exactly? She settled on, "Trying to solve a problem. If you could lower your voice a little, we'd appreciate it."

"Well, I—"

"You'll have to excuse her," one of the men said. "She's all up in arms because we just learned they're remodeling this famous landmark in our old hometown."

"Well, famous is a stretch,'' the other woman at the table said.

"It is famous," the blonde insisted. She leaned toward Fiona. "It's like this. We're from a small town like this one, right? And nobody's ever heard of it except we have this pub that's been there forever. It's got a red, white, and blue sign that says Lucky's and this giant plaster Eagle flying over it. That place put our town on the map. A bunch of rich gangsters supposedly hung out in a secret posh room in the back that they'll only let you see if you have big money. It was even in the triple-A brochure back in nineteen seventy three. Now tell me. Why would you mess with a landmark like that?"

"Nineteen seventy six," the other woman said. "And they're not doing anything to Lucky's. They're refurbishing that old half-ruined strip mall it's attached to."

"It had to be seventy-three. It was the year Susie Edgewood won the fair queen's contest."

"Well, I hate to step in it with you, Gertie, but I'm pretty sure Kate's right. Nineteen seventy-six is right. It was the bicentennial. The red white and blue sign is what caught their attention."

Fiona looked at Conrad.

He had that adorable little grin on his face. "Destiny?"

"No way." It was just way too much to believe.

Conrad tapped the screen of his phone for a few seconds and waited.

"I'm just saying, if they keep tearing down places like Lucky's they might as well be tearing down America itself," Gertie insisted at the table next to them.

"For Pete's sake, woman, they're not tearing down the stupid pub. They're remodeling the mall," one of the men said.

Conrad turned his phone to face Fionna. On the screen was a picture of what appeared to be a run-down biker bar on the end of a strip mall that contained a tax service, a nail salon, and a Dollar General store. As described, the glowing neon sign and enormous eagle were the prominent features.

Beneath the photo was the description:

85638 US HWY 20

Van Tassel, WY 82225

"No way," Fiona said again, this time in a whisper.

"Destiny." Conrad's grin stretched from ear to ear. "I'm not saying it'll be as fun as Disneyland, but how would you like to fly with me to exotic Van Tassel?"