Whole thing looked like a setup, otherwise who would be taking the video in the first place?
Bad provenance, bad spelling, bunch of wing nuts. Lousy video. No source cited.
Better set the Nick and Kate thing aside for now, at least until his skills improved. Make a mistake with that guy, from what Bock had heard about him, it was going to end in tears.
Start out small.
Stay away from the obvious targets, the fucking lawyers, that sanctimonious prick of a judge, the Effin Cee and her bastard bitch, while he figured out how to manage this.
His theory was that everybody had a crime or a sin or something shameful and disgusting buried in his past, something that could shame or even ruin him.
Or her.
It was an interesting proposition, and proving it could be a lot of fun.
But he had to be … subtle.
Start with someone totally unconnected.
He had to pick a name out of a hat, totally at random, then do the homework, find out all there was to know, circle around like a tiger, stay in the long grass and work it all out. Find out how to ruin a life by remote control.
He already had some possibles, people whose dirty secrets he had “happened upon” in the course of his day job. Risky to use too many of them, because a smart cop, given enough incidents, would figure out what the linkages were.
No, stick to random, and be anonymous. Implacable. Do a few dry runs to warm up, take on people no one would ever be able to connect to him, while he studied and adapted and improved. That way, if he made some early mistakes—and everybody did—he wouldn’t be on anybody’s list.
But where to start?
He sat back in the chair, had some more of his Stella Artois. Where to start?
He needed a victim, somebody he had no connection with, but somebody who was … vulnerable. Somebody with secrets hidden away. He sat there and stared at the screen for a while, his rat-mind nibbling away at the problem.
Where was there an obvious nexus between the information universe and people with secrets?
Criminals.
Criminal records required access to the National Crime Information Center, which he did not have and could not easily get.
How about employment records?
Human resources files?
Hard to get at those without leaving a trace.
Come on, Tony.
Think.
Secrets.
Okay.
Sex offenders had secrets.
Was there a National Sex Offender Registry?
A couple of taps showed him a site called the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website. If he agreed to accept the terms, he could enter any name and the website would tell him if that name had ever been on any city, state, or federal sex offender list.
He sat back and looked at it, thinking hard. There was no point in just entering random names from the Niceville phone book and hoping to get lucky. He had to start at the other end.
Sex offenders liked to be around kids, didn’t they? So how many guys in Niceville worked around kids? Social workers. Cops. Playground supervisors. Coaches. Teachers.
But they’d all have been checked out, right? As a city employee he knew that everyone who was bonded and everyone who applied for any kind of license to work with kids or in schools or in hospitals or church groups had to be checked out for anything criminal.
But how well?
How far back?
How … carefully?
Worth a shot, he decided.
Worth a shot.
How Things Were Going for Merle Zane
For a long time Merle just ran, through the brush and the branches, over deadfalls and under boughs, getting his face lashed and his hands bloody as he put as much distance between himself and Charlie Danziger as he could manage in as short a time as possible.
A few hundred yards into the forest the dense underbrush gave way to a padded carpet of dry pine needles. The trunks of the trees were spaced much farther apart in this section of the forest and even in the dim light he found he could cover the open ground much more easily.
He was vaguely aware that the forest had changed in some indefinable way, and now the golden twilight that poured down from the canopy and shimmered in between the upright pillars of the trees and spread itself on the red carpet of pine needles reminded Merle of being inside a huge silent temple.
His vision was blurry and his head was light, but all in all he felt better than he would have expected to after getting shot in the back. He didn’t take too much comfort from this. Although he had never been shot before, he knew that in the long run, unless he could get some medical attention, he was in pretty big trouble.
He could see that the wound in his right shoulder was just a glancing one. It occurred to him that only someone who had actually been shot was qualified to use the word just when describing it.
But other than being ugly and bleeding like a stiff punch in the nose would bleed, he wasn’t too worried about it. It was the bullet hole in his back that sort of preyed on his mind.
For the first few minutes after he got hit there wasn’t a whole lot of pain. It was more like somebody had smacked him in the small of his back with a baseball bat. Everything around the impact area had gone numb, as if it had been frozen.
Then the cold and the numbness began to fade away and the pain had set in. And this was serious pain. Ten minutes after it first started in on him he was sitting on the ground gasping and sweating with his back up against a tree and his legs splayed out in front of him, and he was, as the saying goes, in a world of hurt.
He looked up at the sky, pale glowing gold and blue through the black tracery of the branches. It was early spring yet, so the trees hadn’t fully leafed out. The first of the stars glittered up there and a crescent moon was gliding through wisps of cloud.
He put his head back on the rough bark of the pine and stared up at the evening sky for a while, trying to will the pain away, which he had heard from his karate instructor that you could do if you tried hard enough and had the mental strength to go all Zen on the very idea of pain, which was really nothing but an illusion manufactured by your corporeal body and could easily be controlled and overcome by the forceful application of a truly transcendental mind. This turned out not to be true.
A Problem Arises for Byron Deitz
Byron Deitz looked exactly like a guy with his name ought to look—a thick-necked heavy-bodied no-neck sort of guy with a shaved skull and a hard, unfriendly face and small, mean black eyes.
If he was in the movies he’d have to play one of the evil baldheaded guys with black goatees who always end up getting a balsa-wood chair broken over their heads by the curvy chick in a thong bikini who’s only trying to stop him from pounding on the good-guy hero with the long blond hair.
Byron Deitz would have totally deserved this treatment since he was a guy who spent a lot of his time looking at people and things he didn’t like and working out how to drive right over them.
As a matter of fact, Deitz was driving right now, in his supercharged bright yellow Hummer, and listening to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” with the volume set to STUN, doing a scary one-forty down Side Road 336, taking a shortcut through the Belfair Range, heading for hearth and home—his very big damn hearth and home—in The Chase, as it happened, just a few blocks away from Delia Cotton’s old Victorian, where, right at this exact same moment, something odd and deeply disturbing was happening.
Byron Deitz figured he could get away with doing a slick one-forty down SR 336 because every cop in the known universe was everywhere else looking for those outrageous pukes who had cherry-popped the First Third in Gracie and then eighty-sixed four cops and a news chopper over there on 311.
Deitz had to admit that whoever they were, these pukes, they had serious balls. That was shit-house-rat-crazy-fucking-brave. He’d have loved to have seen the look on the faces of the other cops in the chase when the first guy took a full-
metal round straight up the beezer. Holy Freaking Shit wouldn’t quite have done justice to that moment.
Deitz figured the sniper had to be military or an elite federal sharpshooter.
And stony cold.
A deeply ruthless prick.
A guy like that, Deitz would be proud to walk him all the way to the execution chamber and pour him three fingers of bourbon before they strapped him down. Part of him was hoping they’d get away with it. But they wouldn’t.
Pukes, even crazy-brave pukes, never got away with shit. Byron Deitz, who was ex-FBI, knew something about pukes. The “ex” part of Deitz’s career with the FBI wasn’t entirely his idea, but he’d gone along with it because the alternative was five to nine in Leavenworth.
So now his career jacket was hermetically sealed by the order of a federal court judge, as part of a plea agreement, and therefore his professional reputation remained relatively unstained, other than in the long and darkly brooding memories of those four unfortunate men who had made the mistake of going into business with him. They were now pulling what should have been Byron Deitz’s five to nine in Leavenworth.
Anyway, that unhappy time was all in the misty past, in his rearview mirror, as he liked to say, and all those grumpy former henchmen were just speed bumps on the four-lane interstate of his career. So, all in all, on this honey-colored Friday evening Life Was Good for Byron Deitz.
Life Was Good partly because Deitz was making an outrageous amount of money running BD Securicom, an outfit providing perimeter security and on-site counterespionage services to several of the high-tech research firms that had established themselves in the northwestern suburbs of Niceville, in a gated high-security compound known as Quantum Park, home to a number of very anonymous feeder firms that subcontracted R and D for more well-known outfits with names like Lawrence Livermore, Motorola, General Dynamics, Raytheon, KBR, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin.
The sprawling park in which these firms resided featured perimeter sensors and infrared trip wires and motion detectors and transplanted sago palms and overflight interdiction systems and rolling lawns and a private golf course and countersurveillance jammers and an artificial lake where a large flock of trumpeter swans whose wing bones had been professionally snapped were required to glide gracefully about amidst the koi and the water lilies. How the hell a gaboon viper like Byron Deitz had managed to insinuate himself into this lucrative gig was a question that kept his competition awake at night.
But he had pulled it off somehow, and he was rocketing through the rolling brown slopes of the Belfair Range, with Lady Gaga’s volume set on STUN and a nervous but lovely wife and two nervous kids waiting for him in his mansion in The Chase, and he was thinking that all was right with the universe when his truck phone rang.
The phone was linked through the Hummer’s OnStar system, so the call shut Lady Gaga up in mid-screech with a gentle bell-like tolling.
Deitz glanced at the caller ID on the Hummer’s LCD screen—PHIL HOLLIMAN—frowned, shook his head, and touched the ANSWER button on the steering wheel.
“You’re not supposed to use this number.”
“Had to. We got an issue.”
“I’m waiting.”
“You heard about the bank thing in Gracie?”
“How could I miss it? It’s everywhere. They know about it on the moon.”
“Yeah. Well. I heard from our guy.”
Deitz felt his belly go cold and take a slow roll to the left. Because the First Third in Gracie handled all the payroll and banking for Quantum Park, Deitz had a man inside the bank.
Deitz swallowed twice.
“Yeah?”
“Our guy in Gracie,” the voice said, with an edge.
“I got that part, Phil. What’d he say?”
“The guys—two of them—went through the vault, jamming shit in their bags. The Fargo truck had just dropped off all the cash for the ATMs in the sector, plus all the migrants working on the ADM farms, also the draw for Quantum Park.”
“Coincidence?”
“I doubt it. Shit like that is never luck.”
“So they got … what?”
A pause.
Giving Deitz bad news was best done over a phone. “Fuck of a lot of cash, mainly. They figure over two mill.”
“Mainly cash? What the fuck is mainly?”
A silence, during which Byron Deitz heard a sound in his skull like walnuts cracking. He was grinding his teeth, an irritating habit that drove his wife and family bats. He had no idea he was doing it, and often wondered where the hell that weird walnut-cracking sound was coming from.
“They got into some of the lockboxes—”
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah. After they’re gone, there’s an inventory. Our guy can’t find the—”
“Don’t say another fucking thing.”
Silence while Phil Holliman, on the other end of the line, didn’t say another fucking thing.
“Okay,” said Deitz, focusing. “Is he sure?”
“Oh. I can talk now?”
Sarcasm.
Phil Holliman was like that, a sarcastic prick. With a nasty temper. But good at his job.
“Don’t be a dick.”
“The drawer is open but not totally cleaned out. Only thing they got was some bonds and … the … ahh, item.”
Deitz was watching the road uncoiling at him, a long black snake with a white streak down its back.
A skunk snake, he was thinking. Just what he didn’t need right now.
“Fuck. We gotta find those fucking pukes.”
“Mind you, might be random,” said Phil. “Might be nothing to worry about. I figure it was the stainless-steel jewel case that caught their—”
“Random? Know what, Phil? I don’t believe in random. Why take the item at all? And when they open it and they see what’s inside it, with that Raytheon logo all over it, you think that’s going to make them say, hey, move on, nothing to see here. No. This is enemy action. We move on this. First thing you do, you get our guy in Gracie a box somewhere and take him apart. No way anybody knew the thing was there unless he shot his fucking mouth off. I wanna know to who. Got that?”
“Does he get out of the box?”
“Up to you.”
“Be best if he did. Him not being around wouldn’t look too good. It would be, like, lousy optics.”
“Yeah. Okay. I got that. Maybe I’ll go see him myself. But you should drop by his place—tomorrow morning, early—throw one of your monkey-rangs and scare the living shit out of him. Tell him I’ll be by the bank at noon, for a chat. Tell him he better be in a talky mood.”
“Right there at the bank?”
“Why not? It was a Quantum Park payroll? I got every right to ask questions. Also, look into the Fargo guys, the drivers, see if they were talking too much, and if so, to who. Go up the ladder at Fargo and see who in management had the day off. Look for the one guy with a real good alibi, because that’ll sure as shit be the perp. If it was an inside job, other than somebody in the bank, Fargo is the best bet. Another thing, I hear some asshole laid his rig down up on the interstate, just before the robbery. Is that right?”
“Yeah. It was a full load of rebar, came off a Steiger Freightways flatbed. A rollover. Some of the rebar got rammed straight through a minivan, laid some heavy pipe right through a coupla old church ladies. Hey, probably the stiffest rods they ever got to ride their whole lives.”
Phil Holliman thought that was pretty funny, but it was totally wasted on Deitz.
“Thing like that,” said Deitz, oblivious, “it woulda tied up all the state guys, including their choppers, medevac, traffic management, right?”
“Yeah. That’s exactly what happened.”
“And then somebody hits the First Third?”
“Yeah. Are you thinking—”
“I am. Did the driver live?”
“Yeah. At least I think so.”
“Find out. Get his name. Find out where he
is right now. Find a way to get to him. I’ll bet my left nut that puke knows something.”
“Yeah. Okay, I’ll do that. But the Feds are all over this. This is about dead cops. We start poking into it, they’ll wanna know why.”
“Like I said, they took a lot of money belonging to Quantum Park, and that’s sure as shit our business. Anyway, that’s a risk we gotta take. The main thing, I don’t want this … item … out there, hanging over our heads. You listening?”
“The Feds won’t like it. Not smart to get them fired up. They’ll come sniffing.”
Deitz thought it over.
“Kavanaugh. Nick Kavanaugh. I’ll start there. Maybe I can get close enough to the case to get one move ahead. Meantime, you work the angles, get some money on the street. Anybody asks, say we’re showing solidarity with our fallen brothers. Trying to help, you follow? One way or another, we gotta find these pukes, burn them down to the bone, get the thing back.”
“Nick’s County. Dead cops. A national bank. That’s Fed. County won’t be near this case.”
“No. But State CID will and he’s in real tight with State CID. And the Feds, that Boonie Hackendorff guy, the Agent in Charge, they all love him in Cap City. Nick’s a war hero. He’ll hear stuff.”
“Maybe. But will he tell you?”
A good question.
Deitz thought this over.
So did Phil Holliman, who had locked horns with Nick Kavanaugh a while back and gotten a piece of himself snapped clean off.
“Yeah,” said Deitz, finally. “He’s family, isn’t he? My brother-in-law, remember? I married his wife’s sister?”
Holliman knew Beth, Deitz’s wife and Kate Kavanaugh’s older sister. Also the older sister to Kate’s brother, Reed, a pursuit cop for State who was colder than outer space and crazier than a wolverine on meth. Both men knew that Deitz was smacking Beth around on a pretty regular basis. Knowing Nick and Reed the way he did, in Nick’s case from bitter personal experience, Holliman figured someday soon Byron Deitz was going to open his front door and find two off-duty cops there and then Deitz’s lights would get duly punched out. But he said nothing.
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