The Last Widow. Karin Slaughter

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       2

      Sunday, August 4, 1:33 p.m.

      Will Trent took his hand off the lawn mower to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. The task was not without complications. First, he had to shake the sweat off of his hand. Next, he had to rub his fingers on the inside of his shirt to get the grit off. Only then could he squeegee the liquid from his eyebrows with the side of his fist. He used the momentary reprieve from near-blindness to check his watch.

      1:33 p.m.

      What kind of idiot mowed three hilly acres in the middle of an August afternoon? He guessed the kind of idiot who’d spent the morning in bed with his girlfriend. As sweet as that had been, he really wished he could go back in time and explain to Past Will how fucking miserable Future Will was going to be.

      He turned the corner, angling the mower through a dip in the rough terrain. His foot caught in a gopher hole. Gnats snarled in front of his face. The sun felt like the lash from a belt on the back of his neck. The only reason he hadn’t sweated his balls off was because a thick paste of dirt, clipped grass and sweat had glued them to his body.

      Will glanced up at Bella’s house as he made another pass. He could not get over how massive it was. Money practically dripped from the gables. There was actually a book on the design that Bella had loaned him. The stained glass in the stairwell was made by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The plaster moldings had been shaped by craftsmen shipped over from Italy. Inlaid oak floors. Coffered ceilings. An indoor fountain. A mahogany-paneled library filled with ancient tomes. Cedar lining in every closet. Real gold on the gaudy chandeliers. A toilet in the basement for the help that dated back to Jim Crow. There was even a man-sized safe behind a hidden panel in the kitchen pantry that was meant to hold the family silver.

      Will felt like Jethro Bodine every time he came up the driveway.

      He grunted, putting his shoulder into bulldozing through a clump of cat’s claw that was bigger than an actual cat.

      When Will had first met Sara, he’d figured out pretty quickly that she was well off. Not that she acted differently or spoke differently, but Will was a detective. He was a trained observer. Observation one: her apartment was the penthouse unit in a boutique building. Observation two: she drove a BMW. Three: she was a doctor, so his detective skills were not really needed to figure out that she had money in the bank.

      Here’s where it got tricky: Sara had told him that her father was a plumber. Which was true. What she’d failed to add was that Eddie Linton was also a real estate investor. And that he’d brought Sara into the family business. And that she had made a lot of money renting out houses and selling houses and her medical school loans had been paid off, plus she’d sold her pediatrician’s practice in Grant County before moving to Atlanta, plus, she had money from her dead husband’s life insurance policy and his pension, and as the widow of a police officer she was exempt from state taxes, so financially speaking, Sara was Uncle Phil to his way less cool Fresh Prince.

      Which was actually okay.

      Will was eighteen years old the first time someone put money in his pocket, and that was for bus fare to the homeless shelter because he’d aged out of the foster care system. He had qualified for a state scholarship to go to college. He had ended up working for the same state that had raised him. As a cop, he was used to being both the poorest guy in the room as well as the guy most likely to get shot in the face while doing his job.

      So the real question was: Was Sara okay with it?

      Will coughed out a clump of dirt that had launched like a Trident missile from the rear wheel of the lawn mower into his face. He spat on the ground. His stomach grumbled at the thought of lunch.

      Bella’s mansion was bothering him. What it represented. What it said about the disparity between him and Sara because the place Will had lived in while he’d attended college had been condemned because of asbestos, not listed on the National Registry of Historical Homes.

      Sara’s aunt was a whole other level of loaded—in more ways than one. Will guessed by the smell coming off her iced tea that she was a fan of day drinking. As far as he could tell, she had made her money by marrying up. And up. And up. Which wasn’t his business until her incredible generosity had made it so.

      Last week, Bella had given Will a trimmer that was worth at least two hundred bucks. The week before, she’d noticed him admiring one of her dead husband’s record collections and foisted a boxful into Will’s hands as he walked out the door.

      Queen’s original A Night at the Opera. Blondie’s Parallel Lines. The 12-inch maxi single of John Lennon’s “Imagine” with a pristine green apple on the label.

      Will could mow this damn lawn for the next two thousand years and not even come close to repaying her.

      He stopped to wipe his forehead with his arm. He ended up smearing sweat into sweat. He took a deep breath and inhaled a gnat.

      1:37 p.m.

      He shouldn’t even be here.

      At this very moment, there was a huge, big shot meeting happening downtown. These meetings had been happening for the last month, and bi-monthly before that. The GBI was coordinating with the Marshals Service, the ATF and the FBI on the transfer of a convicted bank robber. Martin Novak was currently residing in an undisclosed safe house as he awaited sentencing at the Russell Federal Building. The reason he wasn’t biding his time in jail was because his fellow bank robbers had tried to blast a Novak-sized hole in the side of the building. The attempt had failed, but no one was taking any chances.

      Novak wasn’t a typical convict. He was a legit criminal mastermind who ran a team of highly trained bad guys. They killed indiscriminately. Civilians. Security guards. Cops. It didn’t matter who was on the other end of the gun when they pulled the trigger. The team moved through the banks they targeted like the hands of a clock. Every indication was that Novak’s group was not going to let their leader die in the bowels of a federal prison.

      As a cop, Will despised these kinds of criminals—there was nothing worse, or more rare, than a really smart bad guy—but as a human being, he longed to be in on the action. Will had accepted a long time ago that the part of the job that appealed to him most was the hunt. He could never shoot an animal, but the thought of lying in wait, rifle trained on the center mass of a bad guy, trigger finger itching to remove their miserable souls from the world, was an incredible high.

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