I dropped Remy at her place and rolled down the windows of the truck, letting the cool air in as I drove past downtown. In a few minutes, I passed 10th Street and was about to turn south to pick up 906. To go home and crash.

But I didn’t turn south. I was restless and kept driving.

Plowing ahead into the numbered streets, I passed 15th Street, 18th.

At 20th, my truck almost unconsciously steered to the curb, and I stared across at something that made no sense.

Remy and I had been inside the Golden Oaks liquor store less than twenty-four hours ago, but now a green fence surrounded the entire block and a wrecking ball hung from a rig.

The vertical sign that read LIQUOR was gone. The giant one that I’d assumed was too expensive to tear down. And the building was half-demolished. Some partial walls stood, but most of the place was a pile of rubble, ten feet high. A rolling mountain of concrete debris.

I took a picture and texted Remy.

A moment later, a message came back:

WTF? Is that the Golden Oaks?

I told her it was, and my mind scrambled through a number of scenarios.

Lauten Hartley knew we’d been inside his place.

He must’ve been.

The building had sat dormant for almost two years. Now a day after we found the basement, the place was destroyed, rendering any revisit useless?

Had there been an alarm system? Cameras that Remy and I were caught on?

I started up my truck, but my mind was spinning. I got on 906, but saw Remy’s number blinking across the screen in the truck.

“I’m not searching the liquor store property,” I said as I picked up. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not calling about that,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about Brauer and that bodyguard. You okay just sitting this one out?”

“We can’t search fifty square miles, Rem.”

“Sure, but I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and find out about another school shooting. Or some dead elected official.”

I thought about the liquor store and the school shooting. About action and regret.

“Well, the Feds’ assumption was that the best way to chase this guy is to pick up digital scraps,” I said. “Some chat room or blog. The dark web. They’re probably right, Rem.”

“Sure,” she said. “But if this is about 3D printing and guns, we might know people who have better ears on the ground than the Feds.”

“Who? Wolf?” I asked.

“’Xactly,” Remy answered, imitating the way Wolf talked. “He didn’t want himself or his maker buddies to get maligned. Well, they’re about to. Anyone with a 3D printer is gonna be on an FBI watch list by tomorrow if someone innocent is shot.”

“Call him,” I said to Remy. “If he bites, let’s see if he can introduce us to this community he bragged about.”

33

One of the interesting things about living in modern times is how people of strange interests connect and find their own kind of people. You collect Victorian coins? So do a hundred other folks. And those people eventually want to meet “IRL,” as it’s called.