Карин Слотер - Cleaning the Gold

Or maybe the guy was just a dick.

Off the main road, Will spotted more office buildings than he could count. The Army's Human Resources Command called the base home, which Will gathered meant this was where paperwork came to die. Still, he was on an active Army base with a high level of security. Just getting past the main gate had taken two hours of waiting and a great deal of sweating over his various forms of Jack Phineas Wolfe fake-but-not-fake government-issued IDs.

The Gold Vault came into view at the end of a long road. The white granite building was fairly innocuous-looking, a typical art deco structure from the 1930s, the kind of thing that was more beautiful than it should've been because the Great Depression had put a chunk of the country out of work and people took their time making things when they had the luxury of a living wage.

Will had seen the vault from the highway and thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. It didn't seem right that something like that was out in the open. Then he'd clocked the razor wire and rows of electric fences and warning signs and Jeeps zigzagging around what was probably ten football fields' worth of claymore mines. There were no snipers on the roof, but by the time a would-be thief made his way across the wide-open fields surrounding the structure, there could be at least two hundred men aiming down on him.

Baldani pulled to a stop beside a low, one-story security building just inside the open gates. Though open was misleading. The heavy iron gates were swung back, but twelve bollards stuck up from the pavement. Rows of tire spikes jutted into the air like crocodile teeth.

Baldani told Will, “Time to bend over and cough, Wolfie.”

The car door was opened by a guard who looked like bags of Sakrete had been packed inside of his shirt. Will looked around, shielding his eyes from the sun. The last time he'd been surrounded by this many heavily-armed men, he was raiding a warehouse at the Port of Savannah under a joint operation with the FBI, DEA and ATF.

Baldani tossed his keys, cigarette lighter and ID onto a tray that was put through an X-ray machine, but that was the end of his examination. He leaned against the fence and lit a cigarette as he waited for Will to be processed. Getting on to the base had been difficult, but the scrutiny at the vault was like... getting into Fort Knox.

Will counted ten guards with M4s slung around their necks, the big-boy upgrade to the civilian AR-15. Their belts completed the look with Sig Sauer P-320s, pepper spray, Tasers and telescoping metal batons. They moved quickly, efficiently, pushing and pulling Will down a conveyor belt of scrutiny. A burly German Shepherd shoved his nose into Will's crotch. A teenager with a laptop raided Will's wallet and scanned various fake IDs into the system. Will's boots were put through the X-ray machine. He had to take off his belt and hold up his arms as a wand checked him for metal, then he was still patted down and asked to show his Chapstick and keys. Then a second guy patted him down again. Then a third ran a small piece of paper over Will's hands and stuck it into a machine to check for bomb-making residue.

The Impala was getting a similar once-over. Another guard ran a mirror underneath the car, knocking off the stalactites. A Belgian Shepherd was given free rein. Seats were pulled up. Floor mats and visors were flipped. The glove box was opened. The engine and trunk were checked. Someone ran a Geiger counter around the periphery. Someone else checked for explosive residue.

Will was already sweating from the heat, but a kind of flop-sweat dripped from his scalp when he was told to give a fingerprint scan. Would his Jack Phineas Wolfe cover hold up to this level of interrogation, or would Will end up getting shot where he stood?

Now was not the best time to be asking this question.

None of the guards looked old enough to legally buy alcohol. One of them still had peach fuzz on his chin. Another could've passed for Groot going through puberty. They all had the same bored look in their eyes that could easily lead to a trigger being pulled, a baton being slung, and Will being airlifted to the hospital or driven to the morgue.

His heart jackknifed against his ribs when the teenager with the laptop stepped back into Will's personal space. The kid had Jack Wolfe's driver's license, VA health insurance card, social security card and for some reason, his Costco card.

“Look into this.” Another guard was holding up a pair of heavy, black goggles. A springy cord ran from the top and plugged into a tablet.

Will pressed his face into the goggles. He saw nothing but black, then a line crossed his vision that gave him the sensation of eyeballing a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica.

The sun blinded him when the goggles were pulled away.

“Retina scan,” Baldani offered. The half-smoked cigarette dangled from his lips. He looked like he was enjoying Will's discomfort which, fair enough, was exactly what Will would've been doing in his place.

“Sir?” The kid with the laptop was back up in Will's business. He was looking at Will's IDs, then looking at Will, then looking at the IDs. His laptop made a beeping sound, but he kept his eyes on Will. Will stared back. He watched sweat roll down the side of the kid's shaved head. The soldier was eighteen if he was a day, his body cut the way you were cut if every second of your free time was spent either working out or trying to get laid.

The laptop beeped again, but the kid did not look at the screen.

Will broke first. He looked down at the screen. He looked back at the kid. He looked down at the screen.

The kid yelled, “Alpha! Mike! Foxtrot!”

Will waited to get shot in the face or shoved face-down onto the asphalt.

Baldani smirked as he flicked away his cigarette. “Adios. Mother. Fucker.”

The bollards dropped. The spikes were drawn back. The ten guards peeled away. Will took the deepest, most cleansing breath of his life.

Baldani smugly flashed a row of nicotine-stained Chiclet teeth as he drove up to the building. Will let him have the win, pushing the humiliation aside and turning his mind toward the job at hand. He wasn't here to beat the shit out of Dave Baldani or to clean gold bars. He was here to find a cop killer.

The initial crime had been committed on April 16, 1997, in a city one hundred miles south of Atlanta called Margrave, Georgia.

These were the facts:

A stranger was reported loitering in and around the library. Margrave was a small town. They didn't get strange people, at least not ones they didn't recognize. The loiterer was a white male with blond hair and blue eyes, well over six feet tall, built like a linebacker and dressed in dirty jeans and an Army camo jacket. Last seen pacing back and forth outside the library doors. He'd been inside once to use the bathroom and page through a copy of A Guide to Birds of the Southeastern United States . The librarian had called the sheriff's office when she'd heard the stranger mumbling to himself. Within five minutes, a deputy had rolled up to the scene. According to an eyewitness, the stranger had pulled out a revolver and shot the deputy in the head.

The deputy's name was Phillip Michael Deacon. Thirty-nine years old, twenty-one years on the force, a wife and teenage boy at home, a married daughter with his first grandchild on the way.

The stranger had given Deacon no warning. There were no words between the two men. Just a double-tap on the trigger, then the stranger had darted into the woods, never to be seen again.

Deacon had survived the gunshots, but it was hard to argue that he had lived. He never woke from surgery. He'd spent the next twenty-two years in a coma. Two months ago, he had finally succumbed to pneumonia, which converted the arrest warrant from attempted murder of a peace officer to murder in the first degree with aggravating circumstances, which carried the maximum penalty of death.