Page 11 of Deathmarch

Harper blinked, but the vision didn’t disappear. He wasn’t hallucinating the pile of 100-gram gold bullion bars. They gleamed in the light, making him feel like a certain famous boy wizard peeking into a vault guarded by goblins.

Except this was no fairy tale for children. Like the door handle, a couple of the bars on top were smudged with blood.

He estimated about seventy or eighty bars altogether. 999.9 pure gold, according to the letters and numbers stamped into each. He happened to know the value. At around sixty-five hundred dollars a bar, he was staring at a cool half a million US dollars.

“I have to go.”

He hung up on Murph without explanation and called his mother, who didn’t pick up—big surprise. She tended to set her phone down in the office and leave it there while she worked in the kitchen.

He called the old wall phone at the bar, then swore at the busy signal.

He shouldn’t have taken the stranger to his parents’ place.

Then again, maybe she hadn’t gone in. Last Harper had seen her, in his rearview mirror, she’d still been standing on the street, looking after him.

She’d probably called her partner, or partners, in crime by now for a ride. They might even be on their way to pick up the gold.

Harper watched the road as he tried to make sense of the past hour. For one, why would she give him her keys?

Maybe she hadn’t wanted to arouse his suspicion by refusing when he’d asked. Maybe she hadn’t thought he’d open the trunk. Maybe she’d figured they’d catch up with him before he got this far and take care of him.

“Come and get me, then,” Harper mumbled as he headed to his pickup. He had his gun in the glove compartment. He didn’t keep it on him when he was off duty.

He dialed Leila at the station, running on pure instinct. “Hey. Any bank robberies reported?”

“Nope. Why?”

“I’ll tell you later.” He had another thought. “Do me a favor. I need whoever is closest to Old Man Lamm’s place to pop in for a wellness check.”

Chuck Lamm was Broslin’s eccentric recluse. He was always convinced the sky was falling, the New World Order was about to take over, war was about to break out. Either that or a zombie apocalypse. The only person Harper knew in Broslin who might have gold bars stashed in the basement—in preparation for the collapse of the banking system.

While Harper listened to Leila on the radio, requesting assistance from any unit in the vicinity, he grabbed his gun and looked back at the Chevy.

“Abby” had said she’d been traveling to Broslin, had a room at Shannon’s B and B. She could be lying. Snow had long covered her tire tracks, so he had no way of telling from which direction she’d come. When the car had slid out of control, it could have turned around, crossed the road, done any number of spins before it smashed into the snowbank.

Harper didn’t know for sure that the gold had been stolen, but the blood definitely didn’t give him a good vibe. A wellness check on Old Man Lamm was no big deal. No harm done if Harper was wrong.

If he wasn’t…

He moved around for heat, stomping his boots as he waited.

“Chase just pulled into Lamm’s driveway,” Leila said over the phone. “Okay, he says the front door is busted. He’s going in. He’s requesting assistance.”

Harper swore. “Who else is on duty?”

“Mike.”

Okay.Mike was good backup. Broslin PD was a small outfit, not one bad guy among them, which made work a hell of a lot easier.

Leila kept the phone line open.

Harper could hear Chase on the radio, but couldn’t make out the words. “What’s he saying?”

“I’m going to have to call everybody in.” Leila’s voice was thin with shock. “Someone shot the old man in the face.”

Chapter Four

“Oh my God. Allie Bianchi?” Brittany Wallingford squealed from the pub’s entry where she waited with two friends to pick up their order.