“So we need the actual page,” I said.
“I wrote detailed instructions. If I get access to the cipher, we should be good.”
“Can you decipher it?”
Mickey gave a confident nod.
47
It was later that afternoon when Kylie texted me a picture of the cipher. It was a series of seemingly random groups of numbers. Each number represented a letter in the alphabet, offset by a numerical value. A=1+x. We just needed to figure out what “x” was.
Kylie texted:[I always wondered what this was.]
[Thank you.]
[You’re welcome. I think what Katie did was wrong. I hope Mickey gets his daughter back. I just have one small request.]
[Name it.]
[Flynn has to take me to dinner.]
I laughed. [I’m sure that can be arranged.]
When I told Flynn her demands, he said, “Why, that would be my pleasure.”
I relayed the message, and Kylie was over the moon.
The cipher was simple. With only 26 letters in the alphabet, x could have 25 possibilities. We could brute force it or upload it to a GPT and solve it instantly.
We did the latter.
Mickey looked stunned at the results. “Holy shit. That’s where it’s been this whole time?”
“With any luck, it’s still there,” Flynn said. “How do we know Kylie’s old man didn’t already crack the code?”
We all shared a concerned look.
“I say we get some shovels and head out that way,” Jack said.
48
We drove to the cemetery. It was still open at this time of day. We had all piled into the Revenant. The giant tires whirred as Jack cruised through the city of the dead, rolling past above-ground crypts and mausoleums. Iguanas caught the last rays of sun perched atop tombs. They had taken over the cemetery, and their burrows had become a real problem. It was a perfect place to let Augustus go and roam free.
Mickey directed us to a private mausoleum.
The grand structure stood tall, weathered and stained, overgrown with grass and vines. It hadn’t been tended to in a long time, and the cemetery had been lax about upkeep, with no one to stay on them about it.
Jack parked at the curb, and we hopped out.
The cemetery was empty.
I kept a cautious eye out nevertheless. The cemetery had developed a bad reputation of late, with unsuspecting mourners robbed by thugs.
The name Delmar was engraved in the arch above the entryway to the mausoleum. The metal door was locked with a padlock.
"Are you sure this is it?" I asked Mickey. "I'm not particularly keen on desecrating a grave."
"Augustus has spoken," Mickey said, still cradling the iguana. He finally set it down and let it go. The Lizard King loitered around for an instant, then crawled off and joined his friends.
