1 | THE ASTROVETTE
BEN PRESCOTT HADN’T MEANT TO WANDER. Not really. But the moment he’d set foot in Alamo Heritage Auctions Co., he was the proverbial kid in the candy store on Christmas morning. The building wasn’t at all what he’d expected. He’d envisioned men and women in evening dress, velvet ropes, glittering chandeliers, voices speaking in hushed, reverent tones. Maybe caviar and flutes of champagne.
Instead, Buck Rensselaer had parked his rented Chevy Suburban in front of a rundown building that looked like it had once been a hardware store—or maybe a feed supply—and announced that they’d arrived.
Inside, the place still had the cluttered, jumbled energy of a swap meet, more flea market than auction house. Not something out of an old-time movie or musty book about rich aristocrats; this was much, much better.
Folding chairs stood in ranks between industrial shelving units, each displaying dusty curios, oil paintings, antique toys, lamps, postcards, statuary, furniture—and guns. So many old guns. There was even a cannonball or two that, from a distance, Ben thought might be Civil War–era, but which, on closer inspection, turned out to be promotional coin banks from the First Bank of Pancake, Texas. Ben pulled out his phone, looked up Pancake, and learned that it no longer existed. He snapped a picture for Austin Meekins, the producer of their podcast, American Treasure Hunters. Might make a good post for X or the Gram or whatever else Austin used to promote the channel.
“No photos.”
Ben looked up and saw a man in a pressed white western shirt and slacks. He wore alligator-skin boots and thin, gold-rimmed glasses. His hair was snow white and combed straight back from his forehead. An Alamo Heritage Auction Co. name badge pinned above his left snap-flap pocket identified him as Wilton Barnhill, auctioneer.
“Sorry,” Ben said as he reluctantly put his phone away.
He turned and pretended to be interested in the first thing his eyes lit upon. Unfortunately, this was a tacky velvet painting of a woman in an Indian headdress—and she was completely nude!
Ben’s face flushed. He could feel the eyes of the auctioneer on him.
He cleared his throat. “Hmmm. Interesting how the artist combined an Apache-style headdress with an Ojibwe bracelet.” He made it sound like he was talking to himself, though he kept his voice pitched loud enough to be overheard. “Of course, the fact that this woman is wearing a chief’s headdress is unusual in and of itself, but I suppose some artistic license is to be expected.”
Ben glanced over his shoulder. Barnhill was scowling at him. He smiled awkwardly, and the auctioneer shook his head. Ben wandered on, sparing only the briefest glances back at the Indian maiden, who he now saw was lying on a Navajo rug, though he supposed whoever bought the painting likely wouldn’t care. There were . . . other things to recommend it, despite its inaccuracies.
At the first opportunity, Ben ducked behind the shelving and into a cavernous back room, where larger items were piled more or less haphazardly: chairs with one leg shorter than the others, cracked mirrors, torn paintings, broken toys, crates full to the brim with miscellaneous . . . stuff. It smelled of dust and dry wood, like an attic that needed airing out. Glad to be free of the auctioneer’s glare, he moved past the objects, hoping to find a restroom. The auction would be starting in about fifteen minutes, and he didn’t want to miss a moment of it.
He made his way toward the back of the building, pushed through a swinging door, and found himself in a long hallway with several doors, one marked “Janitor’s Closet,” one marked “Electrical,” and several marked “Private,” but so far as he could see, none marked “Restroom.” The AC worked better back here. It was almost chilly. A fluorescent light flickered and buzzed loudly. Ben walked down the hall and paused when he heard voices spilling out of a half-opened door marked “Manager.”
“I’m telling you, Stanton, you selling this thing off-catalog is your best option, or there’s going to be a problem.” The voice was low and tense, faintly accented. “That piece, Lot 47, should never have made it to the floor. It doesn’t belong to them. The provenance is completely bogus.”
“Already told you,” came the reply, older and hoarser, like the voice of the guy who had done those “diabeetus” commercials back in the day that had been remixed a million times on various TikToks. “It’s in the catalog, and it’s being auctioned. You want it, bid like everyone else.”
“I’m offering you double the high estimate. Cash. Right now. You don’t take that, you’ll be sorry.”
There was a long, brittle pause, then: “Get out of my office.”
Ben took a step back, trying to look casual as a man in a brown leather jacket pushed through the door. He wasn’t particularly tall or muscular, but he seemed to fill the space. He was Hispanic, or maybe Native American, with thick, black hair combed up into a pompadour. His nose was a blade that had been honed too many times, his mouth set in a snarl. His black eyes pinned Ben to the wall. He was neither surprised nor startled. He looked like he’d expected someone to be there, and Ben had disappointed him.
“You lost?” the man said.
Ben shook his head, but the words wouldn’t come. He made a vague gesture toward the empty hallway. Looking for the restroom. Ben shrugged, offered a strangled smile.
The man stood there too long, taking a good look at Ben, like he was filing away his face for later. Then he pushed past, deliberately clipping Ben’s shoulder.
“Watch yourself,” the man said, quiet and full of warning.
He stalked down the hallway and pushed through the swinging door, the sound of his boots on the concrete loud and final.
Ben did his business quickly, washed his hands, and headed back to the main floor of the auction house, his stomach fluttery from his encounter. He scanned the assembled crowd. Only about two-thirds of the chairs were occupied. He didn’t see the man from the hallway. Blade Nose. Maybe he’d left.
He spotted Porter, Latch, and Uncle Buck about a third of the way back on the left-hand side. Ben made his way to the seat that had been saved for him between Porter and Latch, apologizing when he accidentally stepped on the foot of an overweight man in a bow tie who had made zero effort to scooch out of his way. The man grunted but didn’t move, didn’t even look at him, just stared straight ahead with a passive look of serene focus.
“Where have you been?” Porter asked. He had a toothpick sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
“Restroom,” Ben replied.
“You fall in?”
“I was also looking at stuff.”
“In the restroom? What kind of stuff?”
“Not in the restroom.” Ben waved at the crowded shelves that surrounded them. “You know, historical stuff like this.”
“Wanna see my souvenir?” Porter removed the toothpick from his mouth. “It’s historical. I got it out of an antique toothpick dispenser labeled ‘Schilo’s Delicatessen.’ This thing is older than all of us combined, Mr. Rensselaer included!”
“Yeah, that’s gross, bruh.”
“That’s the problem with you, no appreciation for living history.”
Ben shrugged. He glanced over his shoulder, scanning the crowd once more for Blade Nose. Ben couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been marked somehow by the man—for hatred. It was a silly thought.
Maybe.
“Listen,” he said, “something weird happened while I was looking for the restroom . . .” He pitched his voice lower, already second-guessing himself. It wasn’t so much what had happened, but the way it had made him feel, and he wasn’t sure he could get that across to Porter. “I overheard—”
“You two shut it,” Latch McRae hissed. “It’s about to start.” His elbows were on his knees, eyes locked on the low dais at the front of the cavernous room.
Ben was quiet. Probably he was overreacting.
As the auctioneer—Wilton Barnhill—took the podium, Ben glanced at Latch and Buck. They were cool customers, but both looked more nervous than usual. Latch’s face had the pinched-mouth expression it had when he was mulling over a particularly hard problem, and Uncle Buck’s right leg was bouncing up and down rhythmically.
Well, Ben thought, their anxiety will soon be over.
The Corvette Uncle Buck had come to bid on—the entire reason this trip was happening in the first place—was Lot 1.
Buck Rensselaer, the richest man in Ben’s hometown of Ridgeport, North Carolina, and Ben’s uncle by marriage, had flown the three hunters—Ben and his two best friends, Porter Rockwell and Latch McRae—to San Antonio to attend the auction and “have a guys’ week,” in what he insisted on calling “San Antone,” like some dusty cowboy from one of the westerns he watched. Uncle Buck had brought Latch along as his personal mechanic to look the car over, which Latch had done the previous evening after they’d touched down in Buck’s private jet and checked into their hotel, the historic Menger. “The only place I ever stay in San Antone!” Buck had proudly announced at check-in.
The auction house hadn’t let Latch get too thorough a look at the car, but Latch had proclaimed it in good condition so far as he could tell. Latch was seldom wrong in his judgment about things like that, and this was good enough for Uncle Buck.
The condition of the car didn’t matter as much as its history did.
The 1969 Chevrolet was not just a Corvette Stingray, but one of the “AstroVettes” driven by the Apollo astronauts. In this case, Pete Conrad of the Apollo 12 mission, the third man to walk on the Moon! It had been lost for decades before turning up in a barn in Uvalde, Texas, six months earlier. A handful of these AstroVettes, which had been leased to the astronauts for $1 a year, had come up for sale, most famously the one owned by Conrad’s Apollo 12 crewmate Alan Bean. But many of them were missing, which is what made Conrad’s such an exciting find.
Though he was only seventeen, Lachlan Angus McCrae— “Latch” to his friends, enemies, and everyone else, aside from his mom when she was mad at him—was the best mechanic in Ridgeport, bar none. He had worked part-time for Uncle Buck since his sophomore year of high school, taking care of Uncle Buck’s collection of vintage cars, motorcycles, boats, and various other mechanical conveyances, which he called his “man-toys.” Buck had said he wouldn’t dream of bidding on the Conrad ’vette without Latch giving it the once-over, though Ben thought probably this wasn’t strictly true and that Uncle Buck was just being his usual generous self, offering Latch and his buddies a chance to ride in his Gulfstream and live high on the hog in Texas for a few days. For the most part, Buck treated Latch like the son he’d never had, while Ben and Porter were something akin to favorite nephews, which, in Ben’s case, was literal. Buck was married to Ben’s Aunt Maude, his mother’s sister.
When Latch and Buck had gone to look at the car, Porter had elected to stay back at the hotel, ordering room service and responding to comments under one of his alt accounts on the ATH YouTube channel, but Ben had tagged along with Latch and Uncle Buck to see the AstroVette, which was not at the auction house but was being stored in a private garage in another part of town.
The AstroVette was plenty space-y. Though the body style was standard for a ’69 Stingray, Ben couldn’t help but think it looked like it was designed for an astronaut. At some point, it had been repainted a pearlescent white, though in a couple of places enough of the paint had flaked off that the original gold and black colors showed through.
As Latch and Uncle Buck discussed the condition of the engine, Ben ran a hand over the swooping front fenders of the car, his eyes closed, trying to will himself into one of the “flashes” he sometimes had. He wasn’t sure what these were, exactly. At times, he could feel the history of an object. Like he was there, back in time with it, inhabiting the life of the person who’d come into contact with it. He’d had the flashes since he was a kid. They usually occurred around some historical artifact, which were plentiful in Ben’s home, the stately but somewhat crumbling Marlboro Manse, stuffed as it was with centuries of clutter from his mother’s side of the family—and with additional artifacts brought in by his treasure-hunting father, Hamish Prescott.
At one point, his parents, under the advisement of a series of doctors, had had him subjected to a battery of tests to see if there was anything wrong with Ben’s brain. The tests had turned up nothing. One doctor had called his experiences “an autoscopic focal state” and said it was harmless, which was nice. The flashes often came on without warning—frequently at awkward times, like most recently when he and Piper were making out in the old barn the hunters used as their base of operations/podcast studio. His eye had fallen upon the key to an eighteenth-century chest—a souvenir they’d been allowed to keep from their latest treasure-hunting operation—and he’d found himself flashing back to Sam Adams during the Boston Tea Party. But there were times he could will himself into a flash successfully.
Not that evening, it seemed. And not with the AstroVette. Too bad.
Now, Wilton Barnhill was welcoming everyone to Alamo Heritage Auction Co., asking them to silence their cell phones and reminding them that making pictures or recordings was strictly prohibited. After a few more introductory remarks, a poster-sized photograph of the Conrad AstroVette was brought up on stage. Barnhill read the catalog description, then started bidding at $50,000.
Buck held back until the price reached $95,000. At that point, the bidding, which had started with a wide swath of the audience raising their numbered paddles to indicate a bid, had whittled down to just two: a man who looked like he may have emigrated from India. He wore a black suit and sat on the far left-hand side of the room. The other bidder was a man in a white Stetson two rows in front of Buck and the hunters. When Buck put in his bid, the other men turned in their seats, sizing up the recent competition.
Ben had to admit it was exhilarating watching the bids fly. The three men were soon locked in a war, but to look at them, they were playing penny-ante poker. All of Buck’s nerves seemed to have vanished. Soon, the bidding topped $120,000, and the Indian American man bowed out.
It was down to Buck and the man in the cowboy hat. Ben leaned forward, scooted to the edge of his seat. Porter was clenching and unclenching his fists, the way he did on those rare occasions when he was on the sidelines—and not on the gridiron—at a Ridgeport Raiders football game. Latch had his arms crossed, his brow furrowed. Ben knew he was pulling for Buck, but he also realized that the amount of money the men were throwing around probably irked his friend a little. Latch had a great appreciation for all things mechanical, and his reverence when looking over the AstroVette had bordered on the religious, but Latch could also be sensitive about money. His family sometimes struggled to get by. Latch liked Uncle Buck, knew that he had built his fortune from the ground up and deserved every penny of it. Still, Ben could see how it might be hard for Latch to watch someone, even someone you liked, spend more than your dad’s entire yearly salary on a car. Heck, Ben himself was in the same position. Ham Prescott may have been a treasure hunter, but the bounty from those hunts wasn’t nearly as high as the title might suggest.
The bidding escalated higher and higher, but though he was on pins and needles, Ben never doubted that Uncle Buck would come out the victor, and when Barnhill banged down the gavel and said, “Sold. For one hundred and seventy-seven thousand dollars!” it was the number of Buck’s paddle that he called.
Ben flopped back in his chair, wrung out from the bidding, as Lot 2 was announced, a decorative Victorian-era cast-iron birdcage taller than Barnhill.
“That thing is definitely haunted,” Porter whispered. “Buy that and you’ll be hearing ghost canaries for the rest of your life.”
Ben started to chuckle, but the sound died in his throat. Suddenly, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He turned to look behind him. In what had once been an empty seat sat Blade Nose. The man caught and held Ben’s eye just a little too long for comfort.
Ben turned back around. He busied himself with the auction catalog as a sneaky idea formed in his mind.