“Looks like this other guy had a better method for calling the kid. What’s this name Rainey was saying again?”
“He was asking for somebody named Abel Teague.”
“Abel Teague? You sure?”
“Yeah. He was also talking about a woman named Glynis Roo … something. Glynis Ruelle. I don’t know what this all means,” said Lacy, “but you better go find out.”
“I will,” said Nick. “Thanks, Lacy.”
“Keep me in the loop, will you?”
“When I know, you’ll know. Bye.”
He switched off, hit AUTO-DIAL. The phone rang six times, and then went to voice mail.
“Kate, when you get this, call me on my cell. You sitting down? Great news. Rainey Teague just woke up. Yes. Woke up. He’s responsive, whatever that means, but he’s got a ways to go to be all right. Still great news. Anyway, I wanted you to be the first to know. Love you, babe. Call me.”
“Not home?” asked Beau.
“Probably out in the yard,” said Nick, hitting a speed-dial number. Tig Sutter answered on the second ring.
“Nick—you heard?”
“I heard. We’re on our way to Lady Grace now. Do we still have the jurisdiction here?”
“Oh yeah. Case is still open. I’ve already called the doctors down there. They’re saying the kid’s not coherent, but he’s definitely conscious. They’re going to do a bunch of tests on him, but I told them to keep him alert until you got there.”
“Incredible, Tig,” said Nick, his heart lightening in a way it hadn’t ever since the case kicked off. “You know I’ve never even talked to the kid?”
“Yeah, well, remember, he doesn’t know his parents are dead. That’s going to be a tricky call.”
“He’s not going to hear it from me. Not today, anyway—”
“He’ll be asking.”
“Yeah. I can’t reach Kate. She’s his legal guardian. She ought to be there, see to what he needs, sign whatever has to be signed.”
“Nick, this is going to sound crazy, but the docs are saying the kid calmed down when he heard Lemon Featherlight’s voice. If Kate’s not available, maybe you could go in that direction?”
“We should think about that, Tig. Guy’s a CI, a drug dealer—”
“Lemon connected with the kid last year. Even Tony Branko at Vice thought Lemon’s heart was in the right place. I think it’s worth a shot.”
Nick thought it over.
“Okay. I’ll give him a try. Did you hear from the lab yet?”
“You mean that goddam cat? What’d you do to her, anyway? Yaztremski says the thing’s crazy.”
“He get anything off her coat?”
“Not much, so far. Blood, and it was definitely human, but it had broken down a lot. Yaz thinks it might have come from a body been dead quite a while. Not the same blood type as either Delia Cotton or Gray Haggard. We’ve got a forensic team going over the house now—”
“Yeah? How they liking the house?”
“What? Liking the house? Like how?”
“They talk to the Armed Response guy? Dale Jonquil? He said he saw some weird shit in the mirrors there. So did Mavis Crossfire.”
So did I.
Skulls.
Coffins.
Slaves.
“CSI didn’t say anything useful, Nick, but those people never say anything useful. You follow that thing down at Saint Innocent?”
“From a distance. I hear Mavis did good.”
“Yeah. I talked to her a few minutes ago. They’re going to give her a commendation. Giving Coker one too, for spotting that stovepipe round. Saved that man’s life, between the two of them. They’ve got Dennison in Psychiatric for now, but all in all, he may not even do much time.”
“You getting anywhere with the snitch?”
“I asked Byron Deitz to put one of his IT guys on it, but so far no word back. I’m hoping, though. Deitz says the guy’s the best there is.”
“I saw Deitz a minute ago, going northbound on Long Reach in that gigantic Hummer. He was gunning me like he wanted to talk, but I had the lights on. He and Phil Holliman still stomping all over Boonie’s investigation?”
“I told him to jerk Holliman’s chain. He said he would. You wanted to know about that metal shit you found in the dining room at Temple Hill?”
“I thought it was shrapnel. Was it?”
“First take from Metallurgy was that it was shell fragments from … get this … a German .88.”
“How’d they figure that?”
“One of the guys at Metallurgy is a fragments freak. Has cans and boxes full of various bits of shell casings, debris from car bombs, whatever—he’s compiling a sort of reference library about it. He takes one look at the bits, scrapes some shavings, puts them under a scope, looks up and says German .88. Here’s the thing. Haggard was at Omaha, and he got a chest full of shrapnel when he got to the top of the cliffs. From a German .88, according to the After-Action Reports.”
Nick thought about that. “Okay, well, if that shrapnel came out of Haggard’s chest, I’d say we’ve gone from a disappearance to a homicide.”
“That’s what I think too. We’re declaring Temple Hill a crime scene. And we’ve got everybody we can spare out looking for any sign of either of them. Are you going to go back to Delia’s house after you see Rainey?”
I’d rather stick hot needles in my eyes.
“I don’t think so. We’d just get in the way. But keep me in the mix, will you?”
“I will. I talked to Mavis, a while ago. She called in to ask exactly the same thing you asked. ‘How did Nick like the house?’ What the hell went on up there, anyway?”
Nick was quiet for a moment, watching Lady Grace fill up the windscreen. He realized, abruptly, that he had not heard back from Kate, and for some reason that bothered him more than it should have.
“I don’t know, Tig. Beau and I saw some crazy stuff, hard to explain. Got to run, Tig. We’re at Lady Grace.”
“Okay. Check back.”
“I will.”
Beau pulled the cruiser to a stop at the main entrance to Lady Grace. Lemon Featherlight was waiting outside, under the arch, smoking a cigarette and watching them, looking jumpy and spooked. He came up to the passenger window as they cracked their doors.
“Nick, they won’t let me back in to see Rainey! Talk to them. I really think I can help.”
“So do I,” said Nick. “Let’s go.”
Saturday Night
Danziger Checks In
After a very hectic but productive afternoon during which he worked out and executed a seriously entertaining way to manage the Cosmic Frisbee Exchange with Byron Deitz, Charlie Danziger was back at his home, a mid-sized horse farm he ran a few miles up into the rolling countryside just north of Niceville, a large log-framed rancher furnished mainly in bare wood, Mexican rugs, gun racks, and saddle-leather chairs with steer-horn arms—Danziger, like Ralph Lauren, was a man of simple cowpoke tastes—and some brand-new pine-board stables, beside a fenced-in paddock for breaking and training, a few acres of rolling grassland, enough to keep eight quarter horses happy.
He showered, shaved, showered again to be on the safe side, replaced his bandages—he had to admit for a Sicilian pervert dentist, Donny Falcone knew how to sew up a chest wound—changed into clean clothes, burned his old ones, with the exception of his navy blue boots. A prudent cowboy never threw away his lucky boots.
He cooked himself a huge bloody steak and poured himself a massive jug of cold Pinot Grigio, consumed both with real enjoyment, lit himself up a borrowed Camel—he owed Coker three packs by now—and then, rested and reasonably calm, he sat down at his computer to see how well the flash drive that he had given to Boonie Hackendorff had actually worked.
Because, aside from the names of all his Wells Fargo associates, the flash drive he had given to Boonie had also carried a program, available on CopNet, which, when the flash drive was plugged into the mainframe, did some cyber-v
oodoo thing that gave Danziger a backdoor look at everything that was going on in Boonie Hackendorff’s desktop computer.
His PC got all warmed up and he typed in a few keystrokes, listening to the cross talk between the Niceville PD and the State Patrol on a police scanner set on a sideboard in his dimly lit office, the walls of which were covered with very nice oils showing various scenes of the Snake River country and the Grand Tetons where he had grown up and the Powder River country where he hoped to be buried if the circumstances of his demise left enough of him to justify the trouble and expense.
The screen flowered into cool blue light, and he was looking at the crest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, over a red-lettered warning bar letting it be known that all ye who enter here had better have their shit together or else.
A few minutes later, he was looking at Boonie Hackendorff’s notes on the Gracie Bank robbery, Incident Number CC 9234K 28RB 8766.
Boonie’s notes on the Gracie robbery were clear, concise, well organized, very professional, in Charlie’s view a credit to the service. By the time he had gotten to the end of them, he had concluded that he did not have nearly enough Pinot Grigio in the house to drown this ugly-ass bad news, or enough cigarettes to smoke it away.
He and Coker needed to talk.
He called Coker and told him so.
Coker replied that he was very glad to have heard from Charlie because he, Coker, had a pretty young Indian woman named Twyla Littlebasket lying on the leather sofa in his living room and sobbing great racking tear-loaded sobs into the cushions in a way that would very likely be the ruin of them—meaning the cushions.
“My place or yours?” asked Danziger, when Coker had brought his narrative to a natural pause.
“My place,” said Coker. “You may recall I still got the proceeds here.”
“Shit. Holy shit. Twyla see it?”
“Yep.”
“How the fuck how?”
“She has a key. She was here when I got home.”
“It was still on the fucking counter?”
“You left after I did, Charlie.”
“Shit. I never thought.”
“You’re slipping, son.”
“Is that why Twyla’s crying?”
“Nope. She’s got more important shit to deal with than what’s sitting on my kitchen counter.”
“Like what?”
“That you got to see to believe. You hear from Deitz yet?”
“Didn’t I say I was spending the rest of the afternoon fucking with Deitz’s head?”
Charlie, already up and looking for his gun and his jacket and his boots, pulled the pay-as-you-go cell out of his hip pocket. There was a text message, badly spelled, as if the guy doing the texting had really large thumbs.
OK HOW M UCH WEAR WHEN
GOT 2 B 2 NITE GOT 2 B
NO TRI X M OTH RFCKERS
“I guess it slipped my mind, Charlie. You may recall I was kinda busy not shooting a Barricaded EDP. This what you did after you left us at the church?”
“My labors never cease my wonders to perform.”
“Yeah yeah. Is it really from Deitz?”
Danziger looked at the text message again.
“Well, the guy can’t spell motherfuckers.”
“That’s Deitz.”
Merle Walks the Town
On the way back down Gwinnett, Merle passed the same appliance store where the crowd had been watching some sort of police standoff at a church on Peachtree. The television sets were all showing the same loop, a small chubby man in a green work shirt and matching pants, cuffed and bleeding, being duck-walked along the sidewalk by an impressive-looking redheaded female cop who was grinning hugely and talking to a tall silver-haired man in a charcoal suit, who was leaning back on the patrol car with his arms folded across his chest.
The man in the suit was Coker, Merle realized with a jolt, and, some distance away, looking on with a big grin, was Charlie Danziger, with a group of uniform cops, smoking a cigarette and looking right at home.
Merle stood and took that in for a time and was surprised to find that, in some strange way, and by no means all at once, he had gradually ceased to give a rat’s ass about what those two were doing there. It was as if they were part of another life, an old life that he used to have, and they had ceased to have any meaning in his new one.
Maybe for now, he decided, he would side with Glynis, because he needed a place to stay, and she was a damn good-looking woman, and there was still the matter of Coker and Danziger to be handled.
He took a long last look at Coker and Danziger on the television screens, both of them smiling and talking with the cops, looking pleased as punch with themselves, and he locked them away in his heart under unfinished business.
Down the street he plucked some peaches off a rack outside a grocery store, tossed a five-dollar bill onto the pile without stopping, and strolled around Niceville with as easy a heart as he had managed to have since before he got sent to Angola.
Later that evening, as the dark was coming on, he rested his bones on a park bench in the shadows of the town square, lit up a cigarette, and sat there watching the people of Niceville come and go.
Around ten the man from the Blue Bird, the sad guy in the seat beside him, came and sat down beside him again. Merle offered him a cigarette, which, after some thought, the man accepted without a word, and they both went back to watching the strolling citizens in an odd but companionable silence. By ten thirty the park was full of silent figures gathered under the trees. Merle counted at least fifty people, some of them women, no kids, but far more people than the two dozen or so silent men who had arrived on the bus that afternoon.
Some of the men and women smoked cigarettes and some of them had small silver flasks that they shared in silence.
Fireflies sparked and glimmered in the summer night and the city lights grew brighter. Stars glittered high above and the evening magnolias gave off their scent.
Spanish moss shivered in the scented breeze and the live oak branches creaked and groaned in the blue velvet darkness over Merle’s head.
At fifteen minutes to eleven, the Blue Bird bus wheezed around the corner, lurched to a halt in a squeal of brakes. The driver came down and stood on the steps, smiling as all the riders lined up politely. The man greeted each person with a kind word. When they had all taken their seats, he got back behind the wheel, put the bus in gear, and drove away into the darkness beyond the edge of town.
Danziger and Coker Consider the Lilies of the Field
Coker maintained a kind of informal pharmacy in his house, as a defense against an accidental overdose of reality, which was sure as hell the case with Twyla Littlebasket. She had cried herself into a puddle on his leather couch and was now lying there curled up into a ball of inconsolable grief, staring up at Coker and Danziger with a wounded look in her wide brown eyes.
She was wearing her version of a dental hygienist’s outfit, a tight powder blue smock that buttoned down the front, and it had ridden up her thighs as she lay there.
Looking at a pretty young girl in that state of semi-erotic-undress made it sort of hard for either man to pull out a pistol right there and shoot her, which they had both agreed was the only sensible thing to do, considering what she had seen piled up on the kitchen counter. But there was a limit to what even a hard man could do, at least without a couple of hits of Jim Beam under his belt.
So instead of shooting her, Coker had drawn on his pharmacy for a few Valiums, sharing them equally with Twyla and Danziger. He watched as Danziger covered her up with a soft blanket and smoothed her cheek with a gentle hand until she drifted off to a fitful sleep.
When she was asleep, Coker and Danziger looked at each other, shook their heads, and walked out into the golden afternoon light, going all the way down to the bottom of Coker’s driveway for a smoke and a consultation.
They lit up and stood there together, looking out at all the civilians up and down the tree-shad
ed block, with their gardens and their lawns and their uncomplicated lives.
“Bet none of these folks have to kill a dental hygienist this evening,” said Coker, watching a slightly wavy dad teaching his toddler how to pull-start a gas-powered weed whacker.
“Guess they don’t,” said Danziger.
A pause, while they inhaled and exhaled and generally felt the nicotine and the Valiums and the Jim Beam doing their holy work.
The sun was warm on their cheeks and the air was hazy with glowing mist. The Glades smelled like flowers and cut grass and barbecue smoke.
“How would you do it?” asked Coker.
Danziger sipped his Jim Beam, looked down at his bloodstained navy blue boots, which reminded him that he had yet to fill Coker in on just how much plug-ugly trouble they were looking at.
“You mean Twyla?”
Coker nodded.
“Right now, I’m thinking she overdoses after finding those nudie shots on her e-mail.”
“I sure would,” said Coker, thinking about those shots. “What a twisted old motherfucker. Good old Morgan Littlebasket, pillar of the Cherokee community.”
“Wonder who sent them?” Danziger asked.
“And how did that puke get them?”
“These are good questions. We will address them later. I was thinking maybe we ought to kill old Morgan Littlebasket first? Maybe let her watch?”
“Maybe let her do him herself?” said Coker. “Give her the satisfaction? Then pop her afterwards, while she’s still on a high?”
He thought that over, and then shook his head. “Nope. I don’t think she has it in her to shoot her daddy, not even for taking nudie shots of her.”
“She had it in her to blackmail Donnie Falcone for fifty large,” observed Danziger after a moment.
“So she did,” said Coker.
“This is all getting a bit …”
“Complex?” suggested Danziger.
“I mean, we already got Donnie involved, now we got her—”
“Plus wherever the fuck Merle Zane is.”
Niceville Page 28