Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  Maybe it was just that he was spooked and bone-weary and ramped up on fear and painkillers, but to Merle it felt like Niceville had some kind of strange vibe going on, like there was some power running through it, or behind it, or under it, like a live wire, or an underground river, and this power wasn’t a kindly one. Whatever it was, it didn’t like people. There was something just plain wrong with Niceville, Merle thought, and that was all he could say about it. He’d be glad to get the hell out, once this was all over.

  Whatever this was.

  While he stood there all the Blue Bird riders drifted off, going their separate ways, no two together. There had been no talk between the riders during the bus trip.

  The man sitting next to Merle, a tall skinny white-haired old man with a forlorn look, wearing beige slacks and a plaid shirt, had spent the whole trip staring out the window, his thin blue lips working soundlessly and a puzzled look in his eyes.

  Merle asked him his name, but the old man just turned to blink slowly at Merle, as if trying to make him disappear, and then went back to watching the fields and towns tick by, radiating a deep sadness.

  A Niceville PD patrol car rolled slowly past, two cops inside, neither of them showing any interest, either in Merle or in much else.

  This made him feel easier. If there was a description of him floating around, he obviously didn’t match it. After the patrol car turned a corner, Merle moved out into the streets, heading into the town square towards City Hall, unmistakable with that huge round dome.

  The redbrick pile next to it would be the library, just where Glynis Ruelle had said it was going to be. Lady Grace Hospital, according to Glynis, was on the far side of the library, about a block along a street called Forsythia.

  The rest is up to you, Glynis had said.

  He touched the back pocket of his jeans, where there was a wallet that Glynis had given him, stuffed with cash, as well as a driver’s license with a black-and-white picture that could actually have been any middle-aged white male without a beard, identifying Merle as John Hardin Ruelle, address Ruelle Plantation, 2950 Belfair Pike Road, Cullen County Side Road 336.

  He shouldered the bag, moved out into the crowds, who paid him no mind at all, heading in the direction of Lady Grace. A navy blue and bright gold streetcar rumbled past him, shiny as a kid’s toy. People inside were staring straight ahead, faces fixed and blank.

  They looked like corpses.

  A block later, at the intersection of Forsythia and Gwinnett, he saw a bank of television screens flickering in a large shop window, and a group of people gathered on the sidewalk, staring at multiple images of the same picture.

  Merle stopped at the outside edge of the crowd, tall enough to look over the heads of the other people. From what he could see, some sort of police emergency was going on, squad cars and uniformed cops clustered around a church, and an EMS van waiting in the background.

  The sound was off, or too low to be heard through the plate glass of the shop window, but a blond newswoman was talking into the camera, and a crawl along the bottom read HOSTAGE STANDOFF CONTINUES AT SAINT INNOCENT ORTHODOX.

  Merle watched the action for a while, which seemed to be at some sort of stalemate, and then moved off up Gwinnett as the sun finally broke out completely. He glanced up past the uneven rooflines of the shops on the street and saw, in the luminous haze, a large stand of trees on top of a high wall of pale limestone, a sheer cliff face that seemed to bend over the town.

  Merle vaguely recalled Coker talking about Tallulah’s Wall and a limestone sinkhole supposed to be on top of the wall. Crater Sink. Merle got the impression that this sinkhole was a bad place, haunted by something nobody wanted to think about.

  If some stupid hole in the ground could spook a hard case like Coker, it was just another good reason to get out of town as soon as possible.

  The sunlight was shining on the stand of trees and he could see a cloud of tiny black specks circling the upper branches of a taller tree poking up right in the middle of the forest—crows, a huge flock, he decided, and all stirred up, trying to frighten something away, a hawk or an eagle. He heard a harsh croaking call, this one very close.

  Following the sound, he saw a group of crows perched on a sagging power line no more than fifty feet away, on the sunny side of Gwinnett.

  They were looking directly at him, their black wings flaring as they shifted and cocked their heads sideways to peer down at him, black beaks sharp-edged in the sunlight, their feathers glittering like glass as they shifted from leg to leg, croaking at him, glaring down at him, as if outraged to see him there, as if personally offended by his presence.

  For a moment Merle felt a strange sense of unreality flow over him, and under it a tremor of irrational fear. At that point, the flock, screeching and calling, exploded up into the sky, formed into a tight cloud, wheeled above the oaks that lined Gwinnett, and then fluttered into the high blue sky like scraps of blackened ash from a burning building. When Merle looked back down at the sidewalk, he was staring at Charlie Danziger. Danziger was on the far side of the street. Merle’s first impulse was to quietly close in on the man, tap him on the shoulder, and when he turned around, put two rounds through his forehead, smiling as he did so.

  He even swung the canvas bag off his shoulder at the same time that he moved back into the shadow of a theater marquee, edging behind the line of young people waiting to get inside—something about Rollerblading vampire spies. Merle stood there in the shade of the marquee for a moment, watching Danziger, who was moving pretty well for a guy who had stopped at least one of Merle’s 9 mm slugs yesterday. Up until now, Merle wasn’t sure how much damage he’d done to Danziger during their shoot-out. Not much, he concluded, with regret.

  Danziger was snaking through the crowds on the sidewalk, a big hard-looking cowboy wearing jeans and a suede jacket, those navy blue cowboy boots, walking fast, although obviously favoring his right side, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his attention fixed on something up ahead of him, Merle had no idea what, but from the look on Danziger’s face, even at this distance, he wasn’t having kind and loving thoughts. He looked pale, intent, focused, like a man about to do something risky.

  It occurred to Merle to get out his cell phone and call Danziger, just to freak him out, and then he remembered that he’d lost his cell phone while he was stumbling through the woods last night.

  And he also remembered what he had said to Glynis this morning—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—

  Hell, he didn’t even know exactly how much they took out of the bank, although Danziger had figured there was upwards of a million and a half to be had that day, if they pulled it off.

  No, he thought, coming off point as Danziger’s stalking figure started to get lost in the mist, only his shock of white hair showing above the milling crowd. What he had told Glynis was still a good decision. He would come after them when he was ready, six months from now, when they weren’t expecting him.

  He waited until Danziger was completely out of sight, came out into the sunlight again, and headed across Forsythia toward Lady Grace Hospital, threading through the streaming traffic as the afternoon sunlight began to slant through the trees, making their deep blue shadows stretch slowly out.

  The lobby of Lady Grace Hospital was a huge vaultlike open space with flying buttresses and arches covered in gilt running fifty feet up to a painted cupola in powder blue dotted with golden stars. A window wall on the right of the lobby as he came in shed a yellow light down on a random collection of couches and armchairs, with a few people sitting on them, slouched, limp, as if condemned to wait here for a bus that wasn’t coming.

  One of the figures, Merle realized as he walked past, was the craggy old man who had sat next to Merle on the Blue Bird.

  He was here, sitting in the sun, his plaid shirt bleached out in the afternoon light, his head slowly turning to track Merle across the flo
orboards, his pale eyes unblinking, his thin blue lips working, the same air of dull despair floating around him like a fog.

  At the far end of the black-and-white-checked marble floor a broad walnut counter stood between two darkened hallways. The chair behind the desk was empty, but on the stuccoed wall above the desk a black-ribbed sign with white lettering indicated the various wings and departments of Lady Grace.

  In a niche above the sign, a statue of the Virgin Mary, her arms stretched out in benediction, her drapery the same powder blue as the interior of the cupola, smiling a vapid simpering smile, her eyes oddly Chinese, stared directly down at Merle as he crossed the floor.

  Nurses in pale blue uniforms and sensible shoes, cleaning staff in red, and doctors in scrubs or wearing white lab coats milled around the main floor, clustered around a Starbucks.

  Others, waiting for elevators while studying their clipboards, stood in the dim shadows beyond the desk. The entrance hall looked like a church but instead of sandalwood incense it smelled of coffee and Lysol and wintergreen.

  No one paid the slightest attention to Merle as he studied the sign briefly and then walked around to Elevator Bank A, where he waited in silence, surrounded by a chattering cluster of pretty young girls who smelled of hair spray and bubble gum.

  While he waited, he sensed a presence behind him and turned around to see the old man from the Blue Bird standing there, staring at the needle indicator as the elevator descended.

  Merle looked at him, and the man looked back, blinked once, and then spoke for the first time.

  “He’s on the fourth floor,” said the man, his voice pitched low, a hoarse whisper, as if he didn’t want the girls to hear.

  “Who is?” asked Merle, cocking his head.

  “You’ll see,” said the man. “You’ll have to wake him. He’s sleeping. Clara will show you.”

  There was a low musical bong, and the elevator doors, ornate bronzed bars over a thick sheet of stained glass, pulled back with a groan and a flood of staff and visitors poured out. The man let the crowds push him back away from Merle, never breaking eye contact.

  “A major loon,” said Merle to himself, although the fourth floor was where he was supposed to start looking, according to Glynis.

  He rode up with the chattering girls, and got off on the fourth floor, stepping out into a shadowy darkness, a long narrow hallway lit only by tiny amber sconces set into the wall every few feet.

  At the far end of the darkened hall there was a pool of cool white light, and a nurse, at her desk, leaning over a computer, staring intently at something in front of her.

  Merle came down the hall, walking as quietly as his boots would let him, passing half-open doors with numbers on them, getting fleeting glimpses into darkened rooms where mounded figures huddled under blankets, shadowy spaces full of the beep and rush of machinery, all the drapes drawn tight against the sun.

  As he got close to the nursing station, the woman lifted her head and smiled at him. She was young and very lovely, with pale auburn hair and a full sensual figure.

  She wasn’t in a uniform, but she had on a pale green summer frock that emphasized her curves and reminded Merle of soft dreamy summer nights in exotic places he had never been to.

  Her large hazel eyes were full of pale white light. She had a name tag on her breast: CLARA MERCER RN.

  “Sir, I’m sorry, but visiting hours are from five until eight.”

  Merle came to a stop at her station, gave her his best smile, which was pretty good, considering his dark sharp-planed appearance and his beak of a nose. “I realize that, Miss Mercer—”

  “Oh please. I’m Clara.”

  “Nice to meet you, Clara. I’m Merle. I’m sorry to just turn up like this. It’s just that I’m only in for the day, got a bus from upstate.”

  “Did you come in on the Blue Bird?” she asked, giving his farmhand clothes a quick up and down. The question surprised Merle. It was as if she had been expecting him.

  “Yes. And I’m not sure how long I have.”

  “Well,” she said, glancing back up the long dark hallway behind him, “I think I know why you’re here. We’re not supposed to … but no one’s around right now anyway. Everybody’s in a staff meeting and I’m just here to answer the phones. Who would you like to see? Would it be Rainey?”

  Merle said yes.

  Clara’s expression changed, grew more solemn, and the cool light in her hazel eyes got cooler.

  “Oh yes. It’s his time, isn’t it? Such a sad thing. Are you a relative?”

  “Yes. Distantly, but I would like to see him, if I can?”

  “He won’t know you at all,” she said, her voice pitched low. “He’s almost not here … and you can only have a few minutes with him. There’s a danger of infection, too, so you’ll have to wear a smock.”

  She pointed to a rack of white coats set in an alcove a few feet away. Merle crossed to it, found one, and pulled it on as the girl ticked something off on a chart. She looked up as he came back, smiled again, full of sympathy.

  “He’s in four eighteen. It’s a private unit, just down this hallway and through the glass door. Remember, you can’t go any closer than the white line. I’d come with you, Merle, but I have to cover the phones.”

  “I’ll be careful,” said Merle, already moving away, his heart thudding in his ribs and his throat closing up. He got to four eighteen, and stopped outside, looking through the heavy beaded glass window set into the upper half of the door, with the words CRITICAL CARE PRIVATE SUITE. Through the glass he saw a dimly lit interior, blurry and distorted, with a row of green lights flashing above a large hooded white shape.

  He reached out, pushed the door open, and stepped into a small but well-equipped hospital room, where a contorted figure lay on its right side, a young boy, twisted into a fetal position, cheek flattened against a terry-cloth pillow.

  The boy was covered by a pale blue blanket, his eyes half-open, mouth drooling, and he was surrounded by beeping machinery and IV drips and tubes snaking into and out from under the blankets.

  The room was cool and silent, other than the machinery sound, and smelled faintly of urine. There was a white line painted on the floor, with the words PLEASE DO NOT CROSS stenciled along it.

  Merle stepped to the edge of the white line and stood looking down at the figure in the bed. The boy’s age was hard to tell—maybe twelve or thirteen. He was blue-skinned, emaciated, breathing on his own, but barely, and, other than the rapid rising and falling of his rib cage under the blanket, as motionless as death.

  Merle’s heart, not a particularly loving one, went out to the kid, but he had business to conduct.

  “Rainey,” he said, softly but clearly. “Can you hear me?”

  No change.

  “Rainey, Glynis needs you to wake up now.”

  On the cardiac screen, the numbers began to climb. The kid’s eyelids trembled but did not open.

  Merle watched the cardiac monitor as the numbers ticked upwards, worried that any significant change might trigger a visit from whoever was monitoring the machinery, possibly a computer somewhere else entirely, but perhaps a human close enough to get here in a hurry.

  He was pretty certain that he had the kid’s attention, although how a kid in a coma could have a quality called “attention” was a mystery to Merle.

  “You’ve been asleep, Rainey. Asleep long enough. You need to do something for Glynis, Rainey. Will you do a favor for Glynis Ruelle?”

  The eyelids fluttered and the boy’s lips began to work, and the small bony hand on the coverlet flexed convulsively. On the monitor, the cardiac rate had climbed to 136 and a red bar was flashing underneath the numbers.

  “When you wake up, you have to ask the doctors and nurses for a man named Abel Teague. Can you remember that name? The name is Abel Teague. He lives in Sallytown. Glynis Ruelle needs to talk to him, Rainey. Will you tell the doctors that it’s very important that Glynis Ruelle hears from Abel Teague very soon. Wi
ll you do that?”

  The boy’s eyes opened, and he stared into the darkness beside his bed, seeing nothing, hearing only a low soothing voice from the shadows, repeating the names Glynis Ruelle and Abel Teague.

  The cardiac monitor over the bed was now showing a solid red band under the heart rate indicator and the machine was beeping loudly.

  Merle watched the boy blinking into darkness, his cheeks twitching now, his twisted fingers jerking, and decided that he had delivered Glynis Ruelle’s lunatic message, which, against all his solid expectations, seemed to have been heard.

  He turned and stepped softly into the hallway, and walked quickly back towards the nursing station. Clara Mercer, the girl with the cool hazel eyes, was not there.

  The station was empty. It seemed that the whole floor was deserted. The silence pressed in on him and he felt a strong desire to get back out into the light before he found out what sort of people were in all those darkened rooms along the hall. He slipped off the lab coat, hung it up, and turned to his right to go back up the main hall, past the amber sconces, moving quickly and silently past the shadowed beeping rooms, his skin crawling and his breathing short and sharp.

  He got to the elevator bank, pressed the DOWN button, and the doors slipped open at once. There was a man inside the elevator, a tall dark-skinned man with long shiny black hair, in pleated gray slacks and a white shirt.

  He had pale sea green eyes, a hard-nosed aggressive air that notched up as soon as he saw Merle in the light from the elevator.

  “Who are you?” he asked, in a tight, wary tone.

  “Who am I? Who the hell are you?” Merle barked back, his nerves on edge, his temper short.

  The man stared at him for a long moment, as if trying to memorize his face, and then he slipped past Merle, turned, and stood in the hall watching as Merle got into the elevator, holding the door open with his left hand, his right hand shoved into his pocket.

  “My name is Lemon Featherlight,” said the man. “What are you doing here? Who are you? Why did you come here? What did you want here?”