He was going to give her a complicated reply, but something about her made that seem a low and greasy thing to do, so he just said, “Yes, I did.”
“I see. Who’d you kill?”
“Police officers.”
Her face hardened.
“Federal men?”
“No. State policemen.”
“Over the money?”
“Yes.”
“A bank?”
“Yes.”
“The one in Sallytown?”
“No. The First Third in Gracie.”
“I don’t know that bank. Is it national?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“So it’s a federal matter. Where’s the money now?”
“The man who shot me has it.”
“Are the federals after you?”
“Yes. I think there’s probably a reward, if you call them.”
She seemed to be puzzled by the suggestion.
“Call who? The federals? The federals killed my husband with their stupid war. The federals can all go to hell. And I have no sympathy for bankers. Are you going to try to get the money back from this man who shot you?”
Merle looked at his hands, and then leaned back into the chair, tensing as he put weight on his wound, and then easing himself into it.
“Yes,” he said, deciding right then. “I am. But not right now. They have no way to spend it. The idea was to keep it hidden for a couple of years. I know who they are. I have time.”
“Good. I like a man with patience. In the meantime, you need a safe place. There is a lot of work to do here. If I help you, will you help me?”
He studied her delicate but uncompromising features, the lines around her eyes, the forceful set of what was quite a lovely mouth. She stared back at him, her gaze level and unwavering, waiting with a stillness he admired,
She had what his mother used to call Chinese Silence.
“Yes,” he said. “I will.”
This seemed to seal some kind of pact.
She smiled at him, and for a few seconds he felt a cold ripple come up from the floor, and then it was gone, and she was touching his hand with her warm, dry fingertips and looking at him in a direct unblinking way that felt like a silent interrogation and there was something sensual humming in the coffee-and-cider-scented air between them.
“Then I’ll do what I can to help you. I won’t call the federals and I don’t want any of their blood money. But there is something, Merle, something that I would like you to do for me. I would try to do it myself, but there are some things I cannot do, and I find this is one of them. I would try again, perhaps to fail again. I hesitate to ask such a thing of you …”
“Just name it, Glynis. Whatever it is.”
“Thank you. I need you to kill someone.”
Saturday Afternoon
Danziger Consults with the Feds
Boonie Hackendorff and Charlie Danziger belonged to the same National Guard unit and so the first few minutes in Hackendorff’s FBI offices on the sixty-second floor of the Bucky Cullen Federal Complex in downtown Cap City were spent in going over the chances of either of them being called up to go fight the Ayatollahs of Iran anytime soon.
The final verdict came down somewhere between slim and damn slim. In celebration, Hackendorff poured Danziger a couple of fingers of Jim Beam and leaned back in his old leather chair, propping his size twelve boots on his desk.
The shining spires and glass towers and castellated condos of downtown Cap City spread out behind him beyond a wall of tinted windows, all the city lights turned on against the gloom and mist of a dark and rainy afternoon. The Feebs did themselves proud in Cap City, with a big suite of corner offices in the best complex in town.
Danziger stared out at the city lights for a second, thinking about what he was going to say, and then he considered Boonie, who was grinning back at him through one of those damned ugly sharp-trimmed full-face beards that big round guys like Boonie Hackendorff delude themselves into thinking give their faces an actual jawline.
They were wrong, but that didn’t mean Boonie Hackendorff was any kind of a fool. He watched with a thinned-out smile and suddenly narrowed eyes as Danziger eased himself into a more amiable position on the stuffed couch across the room, lifted the glass in answer to Boonie’s salute, and they each pulled a good bit of it down. Glancing at his boots, Danziger saw the spatters of his own blood on the blue leather and hoped that Boonie was far enough away to miss that detail.
“What’s that on your boots, Charlie?”
Danziger shook his head sadly, looking down at the boots again.
“Blood,” he said. “My blood. I stabbed myself cutting chum.”
“Stabbed yourself? Where?”
Charlie tapped his chest, right on top of the bullet wound.
“I was using a filleting knife. Slipped and stuck myself right here in the tit. Bled like a bitch. Still hurts like stink.”
Boonie started to snicker, and ended up laughing so hard he had tears in his eyes. He was enjoying himself so much that even Charlie started to smile, if only because when Boonie laughed it was oddly contagious.
“You dumb-ass old bastard. I never heard of such a thing.”
“Fuck that noise,” said Danziger. “You hooked your own self in the ass two years ago, when you and me and Marty were fly-fishing up on the Snake.”
“My ass is a hell of a lot bigger than your tit, Charlie. It was hard to avoid. You always wear cowboy boots while you’re fishing?”
“Boonie, I wear cowboy boots while I’m fucking. I plan to die in cowboy boots. While fucking.”
Boonie nodded, looked at his own boots.
“I would too, if I could get anybody to fuck me. You’re moving funny too. That because you stabbed your own tit?”
“Damn right,” said Danziger. “Chest muscle hurt so much I could only use my left arm, so I was rowing around in fucking circles, fucking rowed that damn pirogue against the wind for two hours.”
“Doesn’t the thing have a motor?”
“Plugs fouled. I nearly jerked my left arm off trying to pull-start it, had to give it up, and then I one-arm-rowed that slug bucket five miles to the fucking dock. I’m thinking of giving up fishing entirely. Too fucking dangerous.”
“Catch anything?”
“Crabs.”
“You already got those.”
“Old joke, Boonie.”
“Yes, it is. I find they’re the best.”
“How you doing with this Gracie thing?”
Boonie patted his shirt for the cigarettes he didn’t smoke anymore, winced the way he always winced when he remembered that he didn’t smoke them anymore.
“I was hoping you could help us out there, Charlie.”
Danziger smiled back at him through his big white handlebar mustache, showing tobacco-yellow teeth.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it was an inside job.”
“Hard not to,” said Boonie.
“No, it ain’t. I think so too.”
He leaned back, groaned a bit from the pain, and pulled out a USB flash drive from an inside pocket of the suede jacket he had borrowed from Donny Falcone, handed it across to Boonie.
“I downloaded this from our Personnel office. It’s a complete list of every employee we got who was in a position to have any knowledge of what was on that route truck, or who was going to be driving. Basically, everybody who could have ratted us out.”
Boonie twirled the drive in his fat pink hands.
“Thanks, Charlie. We usually have to subpoena this kinda shit.”
Danziger made a hard face, sighing heavily.
“Not from me, Boonie. Four cops dead. Fuck due process. If any of my guys had anything to do with this, I’ll bring the shotgun and you bring the shovel and we can bury what’s left.”
“Your name on this list?”
“Hell yes. I’m a suspect too. I get that. You gotta look at everybody, Boonie, be a fool not to.�
��
“You not nervous?”
Danziger tried to shrug, decided against it, lifted his big hands instead.
“You’re a good cop, Boonie, in spite of being a lousy flycaster. I figure I can trust you to catch the right guys. You always do, I ’collect. Is there anything else I can do to help this thing along?”
Boonie thought about it.
“You ever hear of a guy named Lyle Crowder?”
“Yeah. He was the driver of that rollover on the interstate. Dumb fuck. I hope he’s hurting.”
Boonie was quiet for a while.
Danziger let him be quiet. His chest was throbbing and he needed to take an OxyContin. And sleep for a week. Boonie looked up again, sighed.
“We got him under a suicide watch, actually.”
Danziger blinked at that.
“Suicide watch?”
“Yeah. He feels pretty bad about it. Those dead ladies. He’s, I mean, like … despondent? Is that the word?”
“Sounds about right.”
“He’s also heard, dumb guards told him, the dinks, that the families of the ladies in that van, they’re all talking ugly stuff, what they’re going to do to him, he ever gets out.”
“Remorse is a terrible burden. Or so I’m told. Never tried it myself. Are you going to charge him?”
“Don’t know yet. Witnesses all saw something different. We’re looking at the truck to see if anything mechanical went wrong. Crowder says a blue Toyota cut him off on the downgrade, says he overcorrected, the flatbed started to come around, he turned into that, caught the shoulder—and it all went to shit. He’s banged up pretty bad, ribs and hips, but he’ll pull through.”
“When’d the trailer go over?”
Boonie didn’t have to look this up.
“Fourteen forty-one hours, roughly.”
“And they hit the bank when?”
“Forty-two minutes later.”
“While every law enforcement officer in three states was farting around the wreckage playing grab-ass and talking on their radios. Yes?”
Boonie had to smile at that.
“I’m not admitting to any personal grab-ass.”
“I’m speaking metaphorically, Boonie.”
“Well, if you think we haven’t looked at Lyle Crowder, you’d be wrong. We’re looking at him right now. And all we’re seeing is an amiable young guy with no family who worked real hard for Steiger for six years and before that did a lot of freelance trucking with his own Kenworth until the recession came and the bank took his rig away.”
“Yeah? What bank was that?”
“Not the First Third, Charlie.”
“So credit-wise, he’s a fuckup?”
“Hey, this economy, so’s Jesus Christ. Why are you picking on this poor damn driver, Charlie?”
Danziger’s expression got more stony.
“Because no matter how this comes out, Fargo’s going to look like shit. My division especially. Even if we all show up as clean as a rubber ducky’s dingle. Fargo’s still going to take the hit with the general trade. And so will I. Remember, I washed out of State—”
Boonie sat up, waved a finger in the air.
“No. You got injured in the line of duty, Charlie, and got all tangled up with hillbilly heroin on account of the pain. Nobody blamed you for that.”
“I don’t see a badge on my fucking chest,” Danziger said, flushing red.
Boonie sympathized with him for a while, and Danziger’s mood cooled down. Everybody knew that Charlie Danziger had been screwed by the Internal Affairs guys. Boonie lived in fear of it happening to him. So did everybody in law enforcement. Criminals occasionally showed mercy. IAD did not. If they set out to rat-fuck you, you could consider yourself rat-fucked.
“Sorry I blowed up a bit,” said Danziger, after Boonie had topped up their glasses. His anger had been very real but he never liked to let it show, especially since the Gracie bank robbery had been his way of getting back at IAD and all the rest of those Rear Echelon Motherfuckers at HQ.
“No harm done,” said Boonie, looking carefully at Charlie over the lip of his glass. “When are you back at work?”
“Monday morning,” said Danziger, looking past Boonie’s shoulders at the glittering sweep of towers and pillars that made up Cap City, thinking maybe when all this blew over he’d come down here and buy himself a real nice condo with a high-up view of the Tulip and the Cap City skyline.
“While you’re here, can you think of anybody can put you in Metairie yesterday?”
Danziger gave it some thought, or at least he looked like he was giving it some thought.
“Not right off. I moor the pirogue at Canticle Key. People were coming and going. You could ask Cyril—wait a minute. Wait a minute.”
Boonie looked happy to wait until Judgment Day.
“I bought gas. Couple of times on my way back up. I likely got the receipts in my car. That’ll have the time date, the location on it. I mean, doesn’t put me in the car, but it’s something.”
Danziger wouldn’t have been offering gas receipts at all if he hadn’t made a point of buying gas on his way home from Metairie the week before and then changing the dates with a scanner and Photoshop and printing them out again. He’d bought the gas from two little mom-and-pop stations three hundred miles apart, knowing that the receipts were printed on scrap paper and that neither mom nor pop kept any kind of accurate records. Risky, but offering them didn’t mean that Boonie would remember to actually collect them. What Boonie would remember was the offer, which was all Danziger really wanted.
“Got any credit card receipts?”
“Don’t use credit cards anymore, Boonie. I mean, I got ’em, but I don’t like ’em.”
Boonie leaned over, scribbled something on a sheet, hesitated, looked up with a frown.
“Can-tik—what? How you spell that?”
Danziger spelled out Canticle Key and then gave him the phone number of the gas tender, Cyril Fond Du Lac, an amiable old Cajun who would quite probably back up Danziger’s story because his days and nights were all a blur of marijuana and whiskey anyway. Nothing Cyril could say would hurt Danziger, and might even help. In the meantime, what with drawing attention to Crowder and offering up the flash drive and the gas receipts and generally being up-front and cooperative, Danziger felt he was looking as innocent as a man could look.
“Well, thanks for coming in,” said Boonie, lifting the flash drive. “Okay if I call you, I see anything on this that looks interesting?”
“Yeah. I’ll be on my cell, anytime you need me, don’t care when, day or night. I want these assholes as much as you do. You sure you don’t wanna go sweat that Crowder puke a bit, just to see what comes out?”
“You’re not the only guy thinks we should look harder at him. I got a call from Tig Sutter—”
“That old warthog. How’s he doin’?”
“Sounded busy. They got a whack of shit happening in Niceville. Some wealthy old broad gone missing, they caught that rapist who did those two girls on Patton’s Hard, and Nick Kavanaugh thinks he might have a lead in the Rainey Teague case.”
“Good for him. It don’t surprise me. You were on that Teague thing too, weren’t you?”
Boonie’s shining face dimmed.
“I was.”
“Ever make any sense of it?”
“You don’t want to know what I think about that case, Charlie.”
“Sure I do.”
Boonie looked up at the president’s picture as if he could see an answer there.
“It’s complicated. You sure you want to know?”
“I got nothing better to do. You got any more bourbon?”
Boonie poured them each a hefty splash, brought Danziger his, and sat back down.
“Okay. Here goes. Brace yourself for some stats I been putting together—”
“You been putting together?”
“I’m not as dumb as I look, Charlie.”
“I never thought yo
u were, Boonie.”
Boonie ignored that.
When he spoke, it was in the voice of a completely different Boonie, Boonie the solid FBI investigator under the good-old-boy facade.
“Okay. This is the backgrounder. Your average town the size of Niceville, population between twenty and thirty thousand people, once you set aside the custody dispute kidnaps and the occasional incident like a teen having a fight with her dad over a curfew and taking Greyhound Therapy and being found six weeks later at her ex-boyfriend’s house in Duluth—”
“Lyla Boone.”
“Lyla Boone, exactly. So the average American town has maybe one or two suspected stranger abductions every five years, most of which turn out, after some digging, to have some connection between the victim and the perp. Like, say, a gang banger who gets kidnapped and murdered by a member of a rival gang, a guy he doesn’t know, then his case would get tagged by us as a case of stranger abduction, but then, once the facts get worked out, the file would later get amended—”
“But it never does get amended, does it?”
“Nope. Least hardly ever. Human error. Not enough resources. So it goes into the stats as a stranger abduction. Along with thousands more just like that across the country. So all the civilians and all the media dinks are thinking, fuck, our children aren’t safe, the streets are fulla pervos slavering after every little Binky and Boopsie. But the fact is, Charlie, real honest-to-God stranger abductions are extremely rare. A one in a million shot. So how many stranger abductions you figure Niceville has?”
“I don’t know. I did wonder about it. When I was on the job, I figured we had a lot more than made any kind of sense.”
“Damn right. Niceville has logged one hundred and seventy-nine confirmed and completely random SAs since records first started being kept back in 1928. This is a disappearance rate of, like, a little over two a year, Charlie, which is completely whacked. It’s so far above the national average that Niceville gets cited every year at the FBI training courses at Quantico—”
Niceville Page 16