Nothing stirred in the dusty hot of a June afternoon in a small Kansas town. The big elms and cottonwoods provided some relief from a sun that shone from a hazy sky onto small bungalows and postwar prefabs lined up on an unpaved road.
Peters tried the first door on the right, a one-story box on a slab with a bare front yard scattered with kid-shit, bikes and plastic Chinese toys. 2 ADULTS MF 3 CHILDREN MMF 5-15-13 said the red spray paint on the front by the battered aluminum screen door. The door was locked. Foster took out a small metal cylinder, held it to the lock, and thumbed a switch. The pick gun vibrated, and three seconds later the lock clicked. Foster swung the door open.
Kitchen, bath, living room, and two bedrooms done in early Salvation Army. Two large, crusty stains on the living room floor marked the resting place of the adults. Peters found three kids in the bedroom: two on a bed and one in a battered crib. “Not much here,” he said. You get a feel for this, he thought, after a while, if a drawer would yield diamonds or gold jewelry or a manila envelope full of mad money.
“Could be drug money,” Foster said. Yesterday, the next town over, they’d gone into a house like this one, found a drawer full of twenties and bags of crack.
“Forget it. More like users. Let’s git.”
The next house (1 ADULT F 4 CHILDREN MMFF, no doubt each a different color of the rainbow, Peters thought) was the same: white trash who decorated with broken kids’ toys and beer cans. Number three (2 ADULTS) had been ransacked, and looked no different than the first two. Ditto four (2 ADULTS MF 1 CHILD M). Five (1 ADULT F, probably elderly), on the other side of the street, turned up some gold jewelry and three grand in benjamins, which Peters duly logged and placed in an envelope in the car. Six (1 ADULT F), more jewelry coming to a couple ounces, some rings and brooches, old lady stuff. Seven (2 ADULTS, probably young and broke), nada. Few of the houses had the light blue Relocation Authority stickers on them. Towns like this were mostly old people and losers in bad health, two demographics the Plague took with a vengeance.
House eight (1 ADULT M) was a small, one-bed cracker box, neat but unremarkable; inside functional but little else, a bachelor pad. Ancient Honda sitting in the drive. In the bedroom, another big brown crusty stain marked the occupant’s final resting place on the bed. A metal shelf held long cardboard boxes, three by three by ten, dozens of them, and big black binders. Peters took one of the boxes off a shelf, opened it.
It was filled with cardboard squares with round cellophane windows. And inside the windows, the glitter of gold. The whole box was filled with them. A second, third yielded the same. Others were silver, a few platinum and palladium.
Foster found him standing there. “What’s that?”
“The mother lode,” Peters said.
Foster took out her iPad. “Okay. Got his ID from the mail piled on the kitchen table. Lemme check and see if he owes—”
Peters put up a hand. “Wait a few minutes. This place has a basement.”
“So?”
“So,” he said, putting down the cardboard box and picking up a manila folder and flipping through it, “this guy’s dealing gold and silver and who knows what else. Mainly an internet business on eBay. Before the Plague hit, gold was running about three grand an ounce, silver close to a hundred, platinum was close to eight grand. Where you think he kept all that money?”
“A bank?”
“Maybe enough for groceries and gas.” He left the bedroom, looked in the kitchen, opened a door that led down into darkness. “But these guys tend to be odd birds. They deal in gold and metals long enough, they believe in it. Get all conspiratorial and such. The economy was going to shit before the Plague. My guess is—”
A crash from the basement just as Peters hit the light switch startled them into action. They drew their guns, racked the slides, flipped off safeties, flattened against the frame.
Peters was first, whirling around the frame and descending rapidly, Beretta at the ready, Foster behind; they did a quick sweep. Treasury had issued him a 9mm, and Foster carried a .40 Glock, but neither had drawn in three weeks. They did now, and tiptoed downstairs towards the noise.
They saw one strung-out, skinny white man anywhere from thirty to sixty depending on the history of substance abuse. He had a stethoscope around his neck, a couple of soiled duffel bags on the floor beside him.
“Hands up,” Peters ordered. “Out, slowly, follow me, get into the light. And get rid of the fucking stethoscope.”
“The fuck is this, man?” the figure asked as Peters backed up, drawing a bead on the forehead hid beneath unkempt and unwashed hair. “I didn’t know you were doing drug raids anymore. More important shit goin on.”
“We’re not DEA,” Foster said evenly. Second time she’d pulled her Glock as a leo. Maybe the thousandth counting her time as an MP in the big sandbox. “We’re searching for survivors.”
“Shit, the trucks come by here three weeks ago, loaded all the bodies in, took ‘em off to the landfill for cremation. Everyone else took off for one of the displacement centers down by Wichita. Heard they had air conditioning and plumbing.”
What they had, Peters knew, were a few box fans and port-o-johns that got emptied maybe twice a week, and a lot of tents. “This is need to know, and you don’t need to know. Up the stairs and outside, and then I need to see some ID.”
“Dewayne Decker,” Foster said.
“You know him?” Peters asked.
“Yeah. Everyone in five counties knows him. One of the biggest dealers around, mainly meth, but he got busted breaking into a pharmacy three years ago and stealing prescription pills. You got ten years for that, Decker, the hell are you doing out?”
Decker merely shrugged. “They had problems at the prison.” Guards dropping like flies, and prisoners; it had been no trick to throw himself into a meat truck and hitch a ride outside the walls, and then jump when they’d made it past the city limits. A pardon of sorts, but the feel and smell of the bodies had stayed through the booze and drugs he’d used the last couple of months.
Foster frisked him once they were outside. She was a pro, but still winced at the rancid unwashededness. She rooted around in a pocket, pulled out a handful of orange prescription bottles.
“Tylenol-3 with codeine, oxycodone, propoxyphene…” she said.
“Against the car, there,” Peters ordered. Decker complied, and Peters frisked him more thoroughly. “No weapons. Oxycontin, more propoxyphene, and—the fuck you need Viagra for, Decker? I don’t see too much action round these parts.”
Decker, who he guessed at forty, but with this kind of pharmaceutical hobby was closer to thirty with flecks of gray in his beard and the skinny build of a marathoner or heroin junkie, shrugged, gave a goofy grin. “Be surprised ‘bout that, McGarrett. Hell, figured I could sell it someplace. Fucking’s bout the only thing some people got, take their mind off all this shit.”
“You looking for more drugs?” Peters asked.
“Fuck no, man, I heard about them safes a long time ago. I was trying to get in ‘em.”
“Why?” Peters asked, but already knew.
“Heard the old man had a shitload of cash in there. Enough where I’m set for life, I can get into it.”
“And you figured all you needed was a stethoscope and a coupla bags, huh?”
“Worked before, man.”
Peters shook his head and gave a disgusted snort, pulled out a BlackBerry—not government issue, Foster noted—tapped a few keys, bringing up a file. “Watch him,” he told Foster, went back inside and down the stairs, set down the BlackBerry, spun the dials on one safe slowly, pulled the handle. The door refused to budge. Same with the other. He went back outside, found Foster holding a bead on the burglar.
“Damn. Changed the try-out combinations.”
“The what?”
“Try-out combination. It’s the combination set at the factory. Most people don’t change them. This guy did. And I’ll bet he doesn’t have the combination written down any
where handy. Probably memorized it.”
“Lemme go back to the car and get—” Peters knew she meant the auto-dialer that Treasury had issued him before he had been sent out.
“That won’t work,” Peters said.
“Why not?” Foster asked. “It’s designed to work on all the safes we find. That one back in Dodge, remember?”
“Stay here about thirty minutes,” he said, and she followed him up the stairs, back out to the car.
“Where are you going?” Foster asked.
“Machine shop,” Peters replied. “Saw one back at the end of Main Street, it’s been shut down.”
“Okay, so what’s in a machine shop that you need?”
“A good high-speed drill.”
“You’re going to open the safe,” she said.
“That I am.”
“And you don’t want anyone else to know about it.”
“Nope,” Peters said. “The auto-dial has a computer chip in it that can be read. The iPad creates a record of any inquiries on safes or metals holdings listed on 1099s that we send to Cincinnati. Anyone looking at the records of inquiries is gonna check the auto-dial records, which are also logged on a chip. And then look at the recovery logs. If there isn’t a shitload of cash or jewels from that address, they get suspicious. And since habeas corpus is suspended, whole country’s under martial law, and hoarding of state assets is a federal crime carrying twenty to life, they don’t even need probable cause to bust into my place or yours, slap us in a holding cell for as long as they need to, maybe even forget about us.” He sat silent for a moment. “You know, it’s kinda funny. I always envisioned the apocalypse as causing the complete breakdown of law and order. Not creating more.”
“Hold it,” Foster said. “What the fuck are you talking about? Ripping off everything in the safes?”
“If there’s anything there. We’ll be set for life.”
“What’s this ‘we’ shit? It sounds like theft, pure and simple.”
“Yeah,” Peters said, “I guess it is,” and walked off.
He walked down two blocks to the machine shop, walked up to the door, pulled out his pick gun, and was inside in five seconds. He began looking around in the deserted shop that smelled of old oil and grease.
He found a large drill and a box of diamond-tipped bits. The drill was electric, and the power grid had been shut down here for a couple months. The solution was a truck out of the fleet that had a power hook-up in the tool box on back, and a couple hundred feet of orange extension cord. Peters drove the truck back to the house.
He thought about Foster, if he could truly trust her. They’d been working together a couple of weeks, her bosses at the sheriff’s office the next county over were a little too eager to get rid of her. She wasn’t a slacker, but had avoided the head-rush of power that too many cops get, especially in small towns where everyone knew their place and wouldn’t bitch about bum stops or a little rough treatment if the recipient was one of the permanent, cross-generational criminal underclass. Good-looking, brunette hair cut short, athletic build, didn’t play along with the boys but got hit on by the boys at the cop shop, didn’t bite so they probably called her a dyke. And who knew, maybe she was, or swung both ways. Had dreams of going big time, maybe KC or Wichita or get lucky and get with the KBI; that wasn’t gonna happen now, not for a while. Now she’s stuck with some guy from Treasury going around legally looting homes to fill the federal coffers. She could’ve taken the Crown Vic and hightailed back to the next county and turned him in for attempted theft of federal recovery assets, throw him in federal prison for twenty years.
But there she was, where he’d left her, standing in the yard under a big cottonwood, idly chatting with Decker who was leaning against the Crown Vic.
Peters parked the truck in the drive, ran the extension cords into the house.
“Aren’t you supposed to drill by the dial?” Foster asked him as he began hooking up the cords.
“Most safes now got a cobalt plate to protect the cam housing. Some have re-lockers that kick in when you hit a small piece of plastic in there. Locks it up but good, no way you’d ever open it short of an H-bomb. Couple holes here, one for a flashlight and one for a rod to lift the bolt.”
“You know an awful lot about this,” Foster observed warily.
“Strictly line of duty,” he said. “Not every counterfeiter or tax cheat is gonna give you the combination to his safe. So we gotta learn doing it the hard way.” He took the drill inside, down the basement, and began drilling. He kept drilling until he had two neat holes punched in the safe. A flashlight and metal rod from the truck, took two minutes of squinting and cursing, finally a metallic thunk and the door opened a notch, and then all the way.
He went out to the driveway, opened the trunk to the Crown Vic. “Need some bags,” he said. “And you.”
“Can I come?”
Peters frowned at Decker. From the back seat he produced a set of cuffs, locked one around Decker’s right hand, the second around the top of the door. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said.
Foster followed him down, carrying two canvas bags. They stood in front of the safe.
“How much you think’s in here?” she finally asked.
“Good guess, maybe a million.” The bills were bundled together with rubber bands, hundreds and fifties and twenties stacked up on the shelves, and a manila envelope with documents in it.
Same procedure on the second safe, same result: a pile of currency, smaller by half, but a couple dozen plastic tubes that held gold bullion coins. “Christ, how long’s it take to put away a stash like this?” Foster asked.
“His ID upstairs says he was in his sixties. Some of these,” Peters said, opening a coin tube and looking at the coins, “go back twenty, thirty years, mid-eighties.” He flipped through a stack of hundreds. “Same here. Old school hundreds. Series 1974, ‘77, ‘69—he’s been socking it away since Nixon was President.”
“Meaning the coins aren’t on the 1099 files. Those only go back to ‘11.” Part of the health care bill that had gotten sneaked in, all gold transactions were required to be registered. It was widely flaunted and never enforced, but a few dealers complied. Most didn’t.
“Okay,” Foster said slowly. “How do you plan on cashing it in?”
The way he explained it, out of earshot of Decker, still handcuffed to the car, it sounded smooth. The Plague came along in late 2012, didn’t kill everyone but killed about half of everyone, not enough for the tipping point into chaos. Bonus: no brain-chomping zombies, no one-eyed, two-headed mutants lumbering about, no collapse of civilization. There was still a government, though its reach was uneven in places (the Northern Rockies and the militia types in their compounds were an example), but still able to sustain itself, and what it needed to sustain itself was cash. And there the Plague had proved a huge windfall.
The United States in January 2013 had numbered 315 million, give or take. By June it held 200 million at best, 150 million at worst; the Census Bureau was working on it. Most people saw the mounds of bodies being burned in pits, the empty buildings and neighborhoods and cities and towns, and mourned over the tragedy of it all.
But the bureaucrats at Treasury saw something else—opportunity. A hundred fifty million plus dead, meaning taxes not paid but coincidentally a whole lot of surplus assets lying unclaimed.
And they needed it. The Plague had hit the elderly and the young particularly hard. Meaning that the Social Security rolls were thinned considerably, solving a long-simmering time bomb, but so was the current labor force that paid the payroll taxes that financed it, and a big chunk of the future labor force, until the next baby boom started, assuming there were no side effects like sterility or birth defects that came with survival, and that wouldn’t be known for another six, seven months.
Knocking out half of the labor force meant that what the fed’s take from each remaining paycheck wasn’t going to begin to cover the needed outlays for everything from
public welfare to national defense, not to mention the national debt. Or the huge clean-up, from mass burials to smaller things, like rebuilding the Hancock Tower in Chicago, taken down by a 767 with an ailing pilot at the stick. Or most of LA, burned in rioting, along with a dozen other cities torched when the Plague-induced insanity hit a fever pitch.
So Jack Peters found himself taken from a cozy office in what was left of Wichita, and sent to every one-horse-tank town west of I-135, looking for loose jewelry and piles of cash, opening safe deposit boxes and emptying bank accounts of the intestate. Lists of the dead were cross-checked with probate records, and after the government took its cut off the top, the heirs got their cut; jacking up the estate tax to 75% for the emergency was raking in tons of cash, since the bugs that caused the Plague didn’t discriminate by class. Die intestate (without a will) or if the heirs were gone, the government got it all. It was a great racket, despite howls of protest from the leftover tea-partiers, but they’d been dealt with. Hell, the new President was saying the national debt could be paid off, since the world economy had tanked and most creditors could be persuaded to take a settlement.
2013: The Aftermath Page 13
