The Paper Strip

The sound of the damp night air rushing through the carefully curated collection of trees that lined the fairways mixed with the incessant low roar of traffic from the nearby expressway to almost make you think you were in the deep woods on an autumn night.

The dull discomfort of the bones in my right hip wearing on each other reminded me that my deep woods days had long since passed me by.

Head down.

Work to be done.

The clubhouse was maybe a hundred yards from the maintenance barn, but to get there without being seen and without running into whoever might be out there, meant having to cover about half the course. Down more fairways and across more greens until I could get to the far side of the clubhouse and the spot where I thought he might be.

Might have been.

He wouldn't still be there.

Of course not. He'd have bugged out as soon as he could after making sure that he hadn't been spotted.

That's what a pro would do.

That's what I would do.

No, there would be nothing to find and that would be the measure of how good he was.

But I had to go look, so I could tell what I was up against.

I remember sitting in class and listening to the old-timers talk about the wild west days. The days when they could take things and drop people—take people and drop things—and sign their work. People knew they had been played and by whom.

But those days were a long time ago.

Turns out, it's a small world after all and people feel ever so much safer if they think we can all just get along.

Signature became a bad word. Signing your work would get you bounced. Signing your work might get you arrested.

We'd play a guy and he would absolutely know he had been played, but he could never be certain by whom.

This was so important in our work that they started us out on clean-up right after graduation.

All this specialized training that maybe a school bus full of people have in the whole country and the first thing they do is put a broom in your hand and put you to work cleaning up other people's shit.

That's all I did for the first five years.

We'd go in after the fact and leave when it looked like it did before the fact. We sanitized safe houses, disposed of work cars and made certain that there was no track-back to our teams.

Sometimes a job would be as simple as sweeping up and disposing of the perishables. Sometimes, there was a lot that had to happen before we could slip the strip on the toilet seat.

And we didn't just clean up after our people, we backstopped a whole alphabet soup of other agencies. Sometimes they asked for our help, and some times they got our help and never even knew it.

It's not flashy work, but our paper strip kept the thermostat under control during a lot of the Cold War.

Part science, part craft: a good cleaning is a work of art and once you understand the skill set, you can appreciate the work.

It takes a cleaner to spot a cleaner.

I crawled to the top of a grassy knoll that framed the first tee.

From my vantage point, I could see the club's pool the foreground, behind that was the changing house, behind that was the dark void of trees where my dog had heard something,and beyond that was the street full of Fire Department vehicles.

Now I was seeing it from a whole new perspective. I was seeing it like he saw it.

The void was maybe an acre in size with club buildings on one side and private homes on the other. Access would have been simple. They could have parked in the hospital parking lot that formed it's southwestern border, breached the course fence and then hiked in much the same way I had.

Getting out would be harder.

People were up now.

Curious or not, the presence of the Fire Department had turned the entire neighborhood into witnesses and there would be no way of knowing who was watching what.

He wouldn't be able to run. The sudden movement would catch somebody's eye.

He'd have to back out slowly, very slowly.

He'd have started that almost immediately after the Fire Department showed up.

Could be out by now.

He's probably out.

Although....

Covering his tracks would take time. Slow him down.

And he would have to do it, because sooner or later the police would see the high caliber slug in the car's engine block and they would know exactly where to look.

I had a pretty good idea of the path he would have to take. I ticked off the things I would have to do in order to clean my way out of the scene and estimated how long that would take.

He could still be in there.

Inching his way slowly back toward the pool building.

Checking constantly for any trace that might have been left.

Brushing the ground to obliterate any trace of his body.

Making sure the no stones were turned over.

Yeah, he was still in there.

I decided to wait him out. Tail him back to his vehicle and see what other intel I could get.

I learned a long time ago that some stains you have to let set, before you start to clean.