Niceville

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Niceville Page 5

by Carsten Stroud


  Bock, his face darkening, had begun to object, but his lawyer shut him down with a hoarse whisper.

  Judge Monroe let a long moment pass while he glared down at Mr. Bock’s inflamed face.

  “I will repeat. Mr. Bock will have no contact of any kind, either supervised or unsupervised, until such time as an independent family review committee shall make a determination of the likelihood of Mr. Bock repeating the pattern of manipulation, deceit, bad faith, cruelty, aggression, and abusive and assaultive behavior that has been so well documented in this court. I do not rule out,” said Monroe, gesturing with a clawlike hand knotted by age, “some sort of supervised contact in the future, but only after an assessment such as I have described has been made and the results delivered to me for my consideration. I have also directed and required the various law enforcement agencies involved to ensure that there is no contact of any kind—written, electronic, visual, televisual, semaphoric, hieroglyphic, telepathic, in a séance—no contact of any kind will occur between Mr. Bock and any member of the Dellums family. Hear me now, Mr. Bock …”

  He fixed Bock with a cold gray eye.

  “I will regard even a casual encounter on the street as a matter to be carefully reviewed. I will consider the unexpected arrival on Miss Dellums’ front porch of a white dove with a sprig of laurel in its beak to be a flagrant breach of this order and I am ready, Mr. Bock, quite ready, to enforce your full compliance with this restriction upon you in any way within my power, up to and including your incarceration upon a bench warrant for such time as the statutes and my judicial discretion may allow.”

  A stir from his lawyer, framing an objection.

  The judge lifted a hand, bony fingers spread out, his head turning from side to side.

  “No, Miss Barrow, with all respect, please do not offer a comment, if you will, at this time. I have just one final statement for the record, and then we may all go about our daily lives in peace. Let the record show that I am now directly addressing Mr. Bock. Do you hear me, Mr. Bock? Are you paying close attention?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” said Bock, in an artificially small voice, but with a grating undertone, like stone sliding on stone. For a short, almost dwarfish man he could radiate a lot of mulish resentment, which he generally did only when he was alone in a room with someone or something smaller and weaker. But today, for the first time, he showed it to the whole court, and Kate Kavanaugh took careful note.

  “Good. I do not approve of you, Mr. Bock. Not at all. Were it in my power to see you out of Niceville, out of the state entirely, I would do it. You have depths, Mr. Bock, and are not at all what you present to the world. I have encountered your like before, in my long life, and I imagine I will again before I go to my Maker. But I wish you to know, Mr. Bock, that I have seen you, and I have noted you, and that for as long as I am on the bench and you are within my jurisdiction, I shall have my eye upon you. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Mr. Bock?”

  A long, strained silence during which Mr. Bock struggled to find an acceptable face to put before the world. To Kate Kavanaugh, who deeply loathed the nasty little man for what he had done and had tried to do to Anna Marie and her mother over the last eight months, it was like watching one of the minor demons trying on various freshly skinned human faces.

  The one Bock finally picked was only half human and when she saw it a deep chill raced through her body. Bock was careful to show it to her only, in a flash of a sidelong scowl, and had a more human one in place as he faced Judge Monroe.

  “I do, Your Honor,” he said, in a penitent voice, inserting a tactical throat catch and blinking his eyes rapidly. “And may I say that I will try very hard to spend whatever time I have left in my life doing everything in my power to make you feel very different about me. You. My wife. My child. All of you.”

  Judge Monroe considered him for a time, his blue lips tight and his fingers steepled on the desk in front of him.

  “Will you now, Mr. Bock?”

  Bock nodded, his hands hanging down at his sides, his eyes averted from the shining disks of the judge’s glasses, now trained upon him.

  “I will, sir. I promise you all that I will.”

  Judge Monroe said nothing for a long moment.

  “I believe you, Mr. Bock. I believe that for the first time in my courtroom you are speaking the literal truth. Duly noted. Court is now adjourned.”

  Delia Cotton’s Afternoon Was Hard to Explain

  Delia Cotton lived alone, quite happily alone, right up until the evening of her disappearance. She was an erect, full-figured, and elegant lady with soft brown eyes, once a heartbreaker and even now a rare beauty with a pale autumnal glow and a full head of rich silvery hair swept high and held in place with a Cartier diamond pin, bought for her in Venice by a long-dead lover.

  She had enjoyed a long and complicated life filled with personal and professional success, and she had known many charming and brilliant and utterly engaging people who, by the time she had reached eighty-four, bored her to distraction.

  Except for the ones who were dead and therefore could be depended upon not to grate on a woman’s nerves. She was now down to two regular visitors, aside from the ladies in her book club: Alice Bayer, who drove over from The Glades five times a week to clean, bring groceries, restock her bar, and tend to Mildred Pierce, her Maine Coon cat, and Gray Haggard—his real given name, God bless him—who came around occasionally to do some gardening and routine maintenance and, from a safe distance, in a tastefully unobtrusive way, quietly adore her.

  Delia cherished her privacy, and her memories, many sweet, some bitter, and all far enough in the past to have lost either their savor or their sting, and she dearly loved Temple Hill, her rambling old Victorian pile buried deep inside the tree-shaded privileges of The Chase.

  Tonight, around sunset, with a lance of sunlight shining through the oaks and laying a golden glow on the rolling lawn, she was sitting in the ornate octagonal window-walled room that her husband had liked to call the bandbox when the front doorbell bonged softly in the outer darkness of the great hall.

  She did not hear it right away, because up until a few minutes ago, she had been watching, with deepening depression, the urgent reporting of some hideous atrocity that had been inflicted earlier in the day upon several young highway patrol officers, up in the northern part of the state. Four dead, slaughtered in their cars. Not to mention two newspeople in a helicopter who had been killed when their machine crashed.

  The cop killings had driven another story, a fatal truck rollover on the interstate, right off the television.

  Watching all this, she recalled … who was it?

  Hannah Arendt?

  Dorothy Parker?

  Someone such as that, who said, “One should not be required to know of events over which one could have no hope of influence.”

  Finally, heartsick, she had turned the television off and was now listening to Ofra Harnoy play a series of Vivaldi sonatas—glacial, precise, and perfectly depressing—music to slice your wrists to, but oddly soothing.

  The doorbell had a low vibrating bronze note, rather like a cello, so it took a moment for the sound to register.

  She sighed, looked at the clock above the fireplace, set her scotch down carefully, picked up the television remote, turned the set on, and switched the input to CAMERA ONE.

  A pretty young girl of an indeterminate age, late teens or perhaps older, perhaps not, auburn curls, nicely curved, unlike the current crop of praying-mantis girls. She was wearing an old-fashioned light cotton sundress, pale green, and shiny red slippers like Dorothy’s. She was waiting on the verandah, lit by the glow of Delia’s porch light, staring intently at the front door, apparently unaware of the camera.

  Her pale and heart-shaped face was solemn, her pale hazel eyes unsmiling. She was holding Delia’s Maine Coon cat, Mildred Pierce, in her arms, the huge animal almost too much for her to lift, struggling in her grip, the cat’s dense striped fur matted and we
t-looking.

  Blood?

  Delia touched a button by her chair.

  Her voice, coming from a speaker by the door, seemed to startle the girl.

  “Child, what are you doing with my cat?”

  The girl jumped, and Mildred Pierce writhed in her arms, but she did not release her. Delia, knowing Mildred Pierce, thought the girl was stronger than she looked.

  “Miss Cotton? I’m Clara, from across the way? I think your cat got in a fight?”

  Delia knew the people across the way only as recent arrivals, renters, from out of state, a young married couple who had taken over the old Freitag place on Woodcrest after the last of that uppity bunch of stiff-necked Prussians had finally died two months ago. Delia did not know the renters at all, did not know they had a child, but since each house in The Chase sat on almost two acres of lawn and forest, well back from the road, the houses often gated and walled, it was quite usual for even longtime neighbors to know little if anything about the people living near them.

  Delia looked at the image in the television, saw what looked like blood on the girl’s arms and on her pretty green dress. Delia had no affection for Mildred Pierce, a cranky and disputatious cat with imperious ways, but her heart went out to the girl, who was getting the cat’s blood on her pretty green dress.

  “Wait there …”

  “Clara,” said the girl, lifting her chin and shifting the weight of the cat in her arms.

  “Clara,” said Delia, softly repeating the name as if trying to remember other Claras she had known, feeling a slight flutter of something strange, something wrong, in the back of her mind, a fleeting wisp of an ancient sin, a shameful family event buried somewhere in the distant past, connected to the girl’s name. But the memory, or the thought, or the fancy, slipped away from her like a koi in a pond. She sighed, turning off the TV and getting slowly to her feet.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “Good,” said Clara, smiling sweetly up into the camera now, although Delia could no longer see her. Which was too bad, because if Delia had seen Clara smile and seen the light that was in her hazel eyes she might not have opened the door.

  Charlie Danziger and Merle Zane Disagree

  Two and a half miles into the brown foothills of the Belfair Range, as you run south on the winding pitted asphalt of Route 311, there’s a rutted track on the right, hidden in the brush, that leads off the highway and into the cool green darkness of the old forest, a dense mix of alders and oaks and pines. The track curves away around a bend and seems to dissolve into the trees.

  After a few hundred yards, the track breaks out into a clearing, in the middle of which stands—or stood—an old pale blue barn, sagging under the weight of all the years since the Great Depression, during which it finally ceased to operate as the Belfair Pike General Store and Saddlery.

  The sheet-metal roof of the barn had collapsed in several places, exposing square-cut beams a hundred and fifty years old, slick with mold and rot. The interior was dim and hot and reeked of spilled oil and manure and decades of accumulated bat scat.

  Merle Zane and Charlie Danziger had been sitting inside this barn for three hours, breathing through their mouths, patiently waiting for the manhunt to pass over.

  Although a critical part of the plan, this was also a tense period, a necessary risk to run with a chance that a state chopper flying over would notice this obscure patch of blue deep in the old forest and send a squad car in for a closer look.

  The only warning they would get, if this were to happen, would be a short cell phone call from Coker, who, as a sergeant with the Belfair County patrol, was out there in the hunt with the rest of the posse. So far this call had not come.

  Merle Zane was a craggy-faced Franco-Irish guy in his middle forties with a shaved head and a flame scar on the left side of his neck. Merle was extremely fit, a martial artist, calm and self-contained. The turnings of fate and the fact that his father was a mechanic and auto body man who had specialized in stolen car parts had led him into stock car racing until, one day in a Louisiana town called Cocodrie, a couple of pit mechanics started yapping at him about how he was hogging the wall on the off-side turn. Zane’s forceful counter argument included the deployment of a tire iron.

  A Cocodrie judge whose view of the exchange differed from Merle’s invited Merle to attend the notorious Angola prison, which was essentially a gladiator school granting any survivor an advanced degree in sheer brutality. Merle had survived it somehow, getting an early release seven years ago.

  Since then Zane had been in the employ of a pair of car dealers who ran auctions up and down the eastern seaboard, mainly dealing in muscle cars from the sixties and seventies. Since the muscle car auction business often blurred the line between simple fraud and grand theft auto, the owners of the business, two Armenian American kids whose family motto was “Your money and my experience will become my money and your experience,” needed someone like Merle Zane around the office, where his duties covered the spectrum from Corvettes to personal security.

  Although working with the Bardashi Boys was like sharing a hot tub with anaerobic algae, the job paid reasonably well. But Zane hoped one day to have his own charter boat service on Florida’s Gulf coast and had been quietly on the lookout for a business opportunity that would make that happen.

  This opportunity came along one day in the form of Charlie Danziger, a tall cowboy-looking older man with a big white handlebar mustache, an easy smile, and a hoarse, whispery voice. Danziger, born in Bozeman, Montana, at the other end of the state from his old friend Coker, was an ex–highway patrol officer, cashiered early due to a job-related disability—addicted to OxyContin after being injured on the job—who was now working as a regional manager for a Wells Fargo unit doing business along the eastern seaboard.

  Charlie Danziger and Coker had met in the Marine Corps, so long ago that neither man could quite remember where, although they sort of recalled that they were being strafed at the time. They were both stationed at Quantico, Virginia, by the end of their time in the Corps, and since they had both come to like the Deep South a lot better than the Far West, they eventually ended up in different law enforcement agencies down around Niceville.

  Charlie Danziger and Merle Zane had met at a used-car auction in Atlanta. Danziger was looking to buy a Shelby Cobra Mustang, and they soon discovered some mutual acquaintances among the Angola Gladiator School Alumni. After some background checking, Danziger invited Merle to take part in a confiscatory enterprise involving the First Third Bank in a rural supply town called Gracie. Four men were needed, including a good wheelman.

  The fourth man, not directly involved in the robbery, had been paid—anonymously—to create a diversion in another part of the state, which, it was felt, he either would or would not do.

  As it turned out, he had succeeded in creating the diversion in a way that approached catastrophic.

  At any rate, back in the planning stage, Danziger’s scheme, including the part involving his friend Coker and Coker’s Barrett .50, had struck Merle Zane as totally ruthless but tactically sound, and since the cops who had arrested him at Cocodrie and his keepers at Angola had not endeared the law enforcement community to him, he had come on board for a 33 percent share in the operation, the most dangerous part of which—the actual sharing—had yet to take place.

  So now the two men were waiting, with declining patience, in the humid and ammonia-stinking confines of the Belfair Pike General Store, a good quarter mile into the tangled old forest south-southeast of Route 311.

  Since both men were chain-smokers and neither of them was ready to step outside the barn to have one and since the hay-dust-and-bat-guano-fueled explosion that would have immediately followed lighting one up inside the barn would likely attract the wrong sort of attention, the two were reduced to sitting a few yards apart, Merle on an overturned oil drum and Charlie Danziger on a rickety three-legged stool, both staring into the middle distance as the light outside slowly
changed from greenish yellow to pink to gold.

  Now and then they heard the mutter of a helicopter in the distance, and the Doppler wail of a passing patrol car as the state and county guys raced back and forth and up and down and, when the opportunity presented itself, sideways.

  There was a definite sense inside the barn, unspoken but growing, that the hunt had peaked and passed over and was now moving outwards, expanding the perimeter to include larger sections of the county and then the state.

  The take, the haul, the proceeds, not yet inventoried, were contained in four large black canvas duffel bags and temporarily concealed in a concrete subbasement in a far corner, the hatch hidden under a pile of barn boards and car tires.

  The black Magnum, wiped down and stripped clean of every possible identifier, had been rolled into an empty horse stall, covered with a tarp, and left to gather dust.

  Two nearly identical beige sedans, one a recent Ford and the other an older Chevy, sat just inside the barn doors, equipped with plausible plates and papers, ready to take Merle and Danziger away in opposite directions.

  Now that the adrenaline was ebbing and a leaden fatigue was setting in, both men were ready to take their cut and go, Merle to return to his job with the Bardashi boys and Charlie Danziger to finish up the details here and go back, for a while at least, to his life with Wells Fargo. In the vernacular, it was long past Miller Time, and the waiting was hard.

  On the other hand, a payday of 33 percent of an estimated two and a half million dollars was a consoling thought, and both men were professionally resigned to the situation.

  And if all went well, Merle Zane was thinking, this could be the beginning of a beautiful—or at least profitable—friendship.

  At this taut point, Danziger’s cell phone rang, a muted chirp in the pocket of his brown leather jacket. Merle straightened up on his oil drum, reaching instinctively for the mid-sized Taurus nine-mill in his belt. Danziger held up a hand, his callused leathery palm out, shaking his head.

 

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