Last Ghost at Gettysburg Read Free Page A

Park.”
    “Too cool! You’ll have the run of the place.”
He raised an eyebrow. “And wasn’t there the mention of a young
female?”
    “You mean my cousin, LouAnne? Please. I
haven’t seen her since Mom’s funeral, but I can tell you, she’s
about as geeky as—” He stopped short, aware of his face
reddening.
    “As me? As geeky as me , T.J.?”
    “Nah, man. That’s not where I was going.”
    “It’s okay. I just have this feeling that
you’re gonna have a great time. Remember to bring your laptop so we
can stay in touch. Hey, did you know that in the Battle of
Gettysburg the Confederate Army approached from the north and the
Union Army from the south?
    “How could you possibly know that?”
    “Civil War Journal . Great show.”
    T.J. filled his cheeks with air, blew them
out. Tossed a pair of track shorts in his suitcase. “This is gonna really suck,” he muttered.
    Bortnicker shook his head in disagreement,
then smiled and offered, “Remember what The Dan said. ‘If
you’re a Major Dude, you tell your friend that if his world breaks
apart, it’ll fall together again.’”
    “Profound,” T.J. replied as he rifled a
running shoe at Bortnicker’s scraggly head.
     

Chapter Three

    Jamie Weeks adjusted the knobs on his metal
detector and repositioned the cushioned-fit earphones over his camo
cap. Man, this Coinstar 4000XL model was worth the $750 he’d
shelled out for it. If there was any precious metal between here
and China , it was going to show up on the screen. His
‘phones’ had been pinging like crazy for the past half-hour and
he’d dug some neat stuff with his army surplus collapsible spade.
Though it was pitch black in the woods near Spangler’s Spring, he
could make out one of the items he’d unearthed—a Georgia state
button from a Confederate soldier’s tunic. It was hard to
determine the condition because, well, it was half-past midnight.
And he was here at half-past midnight because he was committing the
illegal act of hunting for artifacts on protected national park
grounds. There was always the chance he’d get caught by the police
or park rangers or whoever patrolled these woods after dark, but
what the hay. Jamie was on a personal treasure quest.
    Since he’d been laid off at the fertilizer
plant back in Columbia, South Carolina where he’d toiled for the
past ten years, Jamie had realized a lifelong dream: to acquire the
best possible metal detector he could afford, load up his battered
black Explorer, and hit all the major eastern battlefields between
Charleston and Philadelphia. Already, he’d conducted stealth
missions at Petersburg, Appomattox, Chancellorsville, the
Wilderness, Fredericksburg and Manassas. Gettysburg would be the
final, and hopefully the most lucrative, stop on the treasure
trail. By his reckoning he’d found enough buttons, artillery
shells, weapons parts and assorted accoutrements to finance his
trip and still have an ample pile to display and trade with the
other members of his club, who had shortsightedly restricted their
expeditions to smaller regional (and legal) areas like farmers’
fields, snake-infested swamps or forests which bordered the sites
of Civil War conflicts. Not that there were a lot of them left.
Suburban sprawl was turning former battlefields of the South into
Wal-Mart megaplexes and gated townhouse communities at an alarming
rate.
    Jamie felt that some of the guys went a bit
too far—spending hours at local libraries or historical societies
delving into dusty military archives to calculate troop movements,
campsites and other such stuff. B-O-R-I-N-G. Weeks considered
himself a man of action , and there were many collectors or
Civil War buffs that would pay some serious coin for his finds. But
he had to work fast, figuring he had two more hours max before he’d
have to hightail it out of there. A patrol car made the rounds here
and there, but he’d always see the headlights coming and lay flat
in the military night