The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

  “Was it signed?”

  “Father didn’t say.”

  “Has anyone called the police?”

  Gert recoiled at the idea.

  “Goodness no. The police? We all figure she’s gone to see a friend.”

  “Let me understand this. Alice has been missing for two weeks on the strength of a single e-mail and all you’ve done is send somebody over to read a note on her door? What if she’s lying dead on the other side of that door? Why are you all taking this so calmly?”

  “Dear me, Miz Kavanaugh, you are an excitable girl, aren’t you?”

  Kate managed not to pound on the glass.

  The woman rolled on, oblivious, admiring her hands on the desk in front of her.

  “No, Alice Bayer is much loved. We all feel she’s entitled to a little fun in life. She works so hard, you know? Everybody around her admires the way she runs Attendance, the interest she takes in the boys. She knows them all by name, and where they like to hang out, places like Patton’s Hard—God knows that’s a bad place, what with the river there and the whirlpool and all, but they all go there, the school skippers, Rainey and Axel too, and if they start in to skipping classes, well, Alice has been known to go down there, drive down to Patton’s Hard, and bring them back to school by their ears, and that’s certainly what I call taking the mickey out of those—”

  “How do you know that Rainey and Axel go down to Patton’s Hard?”

  Patton’s Hard was a mile-long stretch of parkland that ran along the Tulip. The willows there were the oldest trees in Niceville. It was a dank, dark, and dangerous place. Kate and Beth had hated Patton’s Hard since they were children.

  “Why, they told the other kids, didn’t they? Bragged about it. Told the Green Jackets. The little kids in Junior School. Said they have a fort down there. They’ve been telling those little boys all about the ghosts that live there, on Patton’s Hard, under the willows, daring the kids to go there with them. Father Casey had to—”

  There may have been more, but Kate was already on her way to the Envoy.

  She kept the note.

  Deitz Guns Up

  Deitz came out of Andy Chu’s shower wrapped in one of Andy Chu’s bath towels. One of his best bath towels, but if he was still alive after this was over, Chu was going to burn it in his backyard barbecue.

  He was waiting for Deitz in the kitchen, picking away at what was left of lunch—kung pao chicken, which he hated, because he hated all Chinese food. He was staring out the window at a tan Toyota that was parked up the street. It had been there for a while now. No one was in the car, but now that he was harboring a fugitive he had developed a level of situational awareness that bordered on painful.

  Speaking of painful, he was aware of Deitz looming at his shoulder, smelling lemony fresh.

  “You get the stuff?” said Deitz, speaking in a more normal voice now that the swelling in his nose had gone down. His black biker goatee was gone.

  “Yes, I did. It’s all in my—in your—room—in the master bedroom.”

  “What about the wig?”

  “That too. I got a large, since all they had was women’s stuff.”

  “They have what I was looking for?”

  “They did. Exactly what you ordered.”

  Deitz grunted, turned, and lumbered out of the kitchen. Chu considered just making a run for it, opening the kitchen door and bolting down the street. There were drawbacks.

  The main one was the Blackmailer’s Dilemma.

  It had been implicit, although unspoken, in Chu’s deal with Deitz about the shares in Securicom that Chu knew about the scam with the Chinese to copy the Raytheon module. He had followed Deitz around during those two days and he had videotape of Deitz meeting with that Dak guy down in Tin Town. Therefore, the corollary was, Chu Knew Too.

  And failed to report it.

  As a matter of fact, quite the opposite. He attempted to benefit from the knowledge by blackmailing his boss.

  As a person here on an E-1 visa, Chu knew that if any of this came to light, he’d be lucky to get away with ten years in a federal lockup, after which he’d be put on a plane back to Shanghai. What might be waiting for him in China did not bear thinking about, especially since he was involved—however peripherally—in the death of Mr. Dak and his associates, all of whom were sure as hell guangbo, which was the Chinese secret police.

  Hence, the Blackmailer’s Dilemma, and therefore no headlong dash down the sidewalk crying out for succor.

  There was a lot of banging of drawers and slamming of closets—as a roommate Deitz was pretty loud—and a few minutes later Deitz came back into the kitchen. Chu was waiting for him, feeling that whatever the hell Deitz looked like, Chu had to approve. This turned out to be a challenge.

  Deitz didn’t walk into the room so much as manifest into it. He was carrying a black leather valise and wearing an off-the-rack Hugo Boss suit in charcoal over a pale gray shirt, no tie. On his feet he had a pair of glossy black Allen Edmonds wing tips over dove gray socks. He had even requested a scarlet pocket square.

  In short, from the ground up, he looked pretty damn good, like a designer refrigerator or like one of those retired NFL linebackers who get jobs as halftime commentators on Fox and CBS—hyper-snazzy in a vaguely alarming way.

  But all this ended at the neck, or that slightly narrower part of his body where most men would usually have a neck.

  Deitz’s connection between his shoulders and his skull was a thick cone of sinew and muscle and bone that tapered upwards just enough to blend into his skull, which narrowed a bit from there on in, although not enough to come to an actual point.

  Deitz had addressed the goatee issue by hacking it off with Chu’s Braun waterproof electric razor, a process that the razor did not survive. He dealt with the bruising around his eyes and the disorderly state of his nose by putting on a bit of cosmetic cover-up that Chu had bought at Walgreens.

  It was thick and chalky and while it did hide the bruises, it made Deitz look like a French mime. The problem of his blackened eyes—now more of a yellowish green—was neatly solved by a pair of those bug-eye wraparound sunglasses that all the highway cops were wearing. So far, so good.

  Where this all fell apart was the wig. Deitz had been specific.

  He wanted a long shiny blond wig, long enough for the hair to come down to his shoulders.

  “Like one of those guys on the WWF, okay?”

  Chu, asking no questions—every man’s sexuality is his own business—had paid two thousand dollars for the thing that was resting uneasily on the summit of Deitz’s skull right now, a luxurious sweep of golden hair—guaranteed human, all the way from Denmark, he had been assured—cut into an artfully ragged fall across the forehead, the rest hanging down in a long blunt wave that pooled on his shoulders.

  There was no way to get around it.

  Deitz looked like Anna Wintour.

  Or at least like Anna Wintour’s head stuck on the body of a gigantic troll in a Hugo Boss suit.

  Please don’t ask me what I think.

  “What do you think?”

  Chu was silent for a time.

  If he let Deitz go out in that wig they wouldn’t get half a mile before kids on the side of the road would be throwing stones at the car as they drove by. Dogs would chase the car down the street, yapping and snapping. This would attract the attention of the cops, who would not pass up the chance to have a chat with a large ugly guy wearing an Anna Wintour wig, if only just to have something to tell everybody back at the station.

  At that point, the jig, as these Americans like to say, would be up, and not just for Byron Deitz.

  “Have you looked in a mirror?”

  Deitz said nothing for a bit.

  “Yeah. I did. I thought I looked pretty good.”

  “Do you know who Anna Wintour is?”

  “No fucking idea.”

  “Well, you look just like her.”

  Deitz got much redder than normal.<
br />
  “Make your fucking point.”

  “She’s a famous fashion broad. Gay guys dress like her on Halloween. If you had a tiny black dress on, and stiletto heels, the look would be complete.”

  Deitz calmed down a bit, breathed out.

  “Shit. You’re sure?”

  “I am.”

  “Fuck. I thought I looked sort of like Arnold back when he was playing Conan the Barbarian. Or maybe a football player. They’re all wearing their hair long these days.”

  Chu shook his head.

  “Not Conan. Not football. Anna.”

  Deitz thought about it.

  “Lose the wig?”

  “Lose the wig.”

  Deitz took it off, flipped the lid of Chu’s garbage can, and dropped it in on top of the kung pao chicken.

  Two thousand dollars.

  Gone.

  “Fuck it then. We’ll go with what we got.”

  “Where are we going to go?”

  Deitz opened his suit jacket. He had a large gray steel pistol shoved into his belt.

  “We’re gonna go see a guy about my money.”

  Endicott was parked a quarter of a mile away, in the black Cadillac, listening to Chu and Deitz talk in Chu’s kitchen. He had his Toshiba open on the passenger seat, the screen showing the sound and video feed from the surveillance gear in the Toyota Corolla he had parked down the street from Chu’s house at 237 Bougainville Terrace.

  About the size of a GPS module, and stuck to the Toyota’s windshield as they always are, the device had an attached laser sound detector mounted on the left side mirror that focused on the glass windows of Chu’s living room. By detecting nano-sized variations in the glass, the laser could translate the vibrations into sound. In this case, the sound of Chu and Deitz talking about Anna Wintour. The device also had a camera, so Endicott could track, from a safe distance, who was coming and going at Chu’s house.

  Earlier he had watched as Chu drove away, alone, according to the device’s infrared camera, which read body heat signatures inside houses and vehicles. Since Deitz and not Chu was the focus of Endicott’s attention, he stayed put.

  Chu had come back about two hours ago, and now—judging by the conversation—they were about to go see a guy about his money.

  Excellent.

  “We’re going?”

  Deitz took off his glasses, giving Chu the full Deitz glower. In his head he could hear a sound like somebody cracking walnuts. It was coming from somewhere very close. Deitz had not yet figured out that the walnut-cracking sound was Deitz grinding his teeth. He ground his teeth when he was angry or frustrated or tense. Since he was hardly ever anything else, the walnut-cracking sound was in his head quite a bit.

  “We are. I got a spare piece. You ever fire a gun?”

  “Byron,” said Chu, summoning all his persuasive powers, “I cannot go off and get into a gunfight. I’ll just freeze up, like that translator dweeb in Saving Private Ryan.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “What about Phil Holliman? He’s your muscle guy.”

  “I’m not sure I can count on Phil. He’s sitting pretty right now, running Securicom. If they let Securicom keep the Quantum deal when the contract runs out this month—and they might—he’ll be in clover. I show up on his radar, the best way he clears himself with the Feds is to rat me out. There’s no percentage in this for Phil.”

  “Can’t you use one of the guys? There are mean guys in the outfit. Ray Cioffi, for instance?”

  “I don’t need a bunch of mean guys, Chu. I just need a driver, a guy to get me there and cover my back while I go in.”

  He leaned down and fumbled in the valise at his feet, brought out another huge steel pistol, dropped the mag, racked the slide back, held it so Chu could watch as he shoved the mag back in, smacked it home, and released the slide. He thumbed the de-cocking lever and held it out to Chu.

  “There you go. It’s ready to rock, so don’t blow your foot off. I got this from Shaniqua. It’s a Sig. Point and shoot. Fifteen rounds. Use both hands.”

  Chu took it from Deitz. It was as heavy as a bowling ball and as far as Chu was concerned about as useful.

  “Byron—”

  “No. Fuck that. You’re going. I’ve given the thing a lotta thought. I’m not leaving you sitting around back here, going all pale and shaky on me. You’re in a spot here, Andy. You fucking did it to yourself. You put yourself right here in the fucking ten ring. For a while there, sitting in the slam, I thought about all the ways I’d like to fuck with you. But then I realized you weren’t the problem. The assholes who set me up, those guys are the problem. You know I didn’t steal that fucking money. Nick and Boonie and all the local guys know I didn’t steal that money. They’re just squeezing me with the Chink thing because they think I know who did steal that fucking money. And I do. I know exactly who did that fucking bank and I’m gonna go take the money away from them. Then I’m gonna kill them. Both of them. Then I’m gonna call Warren Smoles and he’s gonna set up a deal with the Feds and if I handle it right—recover the money—kill the cop killers—I’ll be a fucking hero and the Raytheon beef will disappear.”

  “Who are they? The guys who really did it?”

  “Haven’t figured that out, hah? I’ll give you a hint. Go find out who I paid five large to so I could get my Raytheon thing back.”

  Chu knew that Deitz had ransomed back his module, and that the only people who could have had it to ransom from were the people who robbed the bank. But the payment went to a Mondex card, and although he had tried, he had never been able to track the card all the way to an end user. He had gotten as far as the Channel Islands and hit a wall. He wasn’t going to tell Deitz this anytime soon.

  Anyway, Deitz had moved on.

  “So I figure, bottom line, you and I are in the shit together. So man up, put the fucking gun in your pants—no, not down the front, you dumb-ass—on the side there—good—now put your coat on, get the fucking car keys, and saddle up.”

  Chu made one last effort.

  “Look, Byron, the guys who robbed that bank killed four cops and two civilians doing it. Whoever they are, they’re serious people and they’re not going to be easy to get to. And they have to know you’re out. Won’t they be expecting you to come after them? You’ll be walking into a trap. They’ll probably kill us both.”

  Deitz said nothing for a moment, and Andy Chu’s heart began to beat again.

  Not for long.

  “Doesn’t matter. I can’t stay out that long. Every cop in the state is looking for me right now. Pretty soon the FBI will start thinking about who might be helping me. You’re not at work today. You just spent five thousand on clothes that are four times too big for you. Plus that fucking wig. Soon as they look at that, we’ll have the SWAT guys landing on your roof. I got a limited amount of time to take care of these pukes, and I’m not going to dick around with being fucking tactical. Okay?”

  Chu sagged into himself, found a trace of courage in there somewhere. What the hell. He was hip-deep in self-inflicted shit. Maybe he was about to get what he deserved.

  “Yeah,” he said. “What the fuck. Let’s go.”

  Deitz grinned at him.

  “Know what, kid? You got potential. Now let’s go kill something.”

  Endicott watched the computer screen as Chu’s garage door slid up and Chu’s blue Lexus rolled down the cobbles. The brake lights lit up, and then the car headed off up Bougainville.

  Endicott started the Cadillac, put it in gear, and glided silently down the road, now and then glancing at the Toshiba screen. He had attached a GPS transponder to the Lexus during the night—Chu’s alarm system wasn’t much better than a bunch of tin cans tied to a string—and now he could follow that Lexus wherever it went.

  Where it seemed to be going was north on River Road. Endicott sat back into the satiny leather seats—Cadillac. No better car in the world—you can keep your BMWs and Audis—and thought about what
he had just heard:

  You know I didn’t steal that fucking money. Nick and Boonie and all the local guys know I didn’t steal that money. They’re just squeezing me with the Chink thing because they think I know who did steal that fucking money. And I do. I know exactly who did that fucking bank and I’m gonna go take the money away from them. Then I’m gonna kill them. Both of them. Then I’m gonna call Warren Smoles and he’s gonna set up a deal with the Feds and if I handle it right—recover the money—kill the cop killers—I’ll be a fucking hero and the Raytheon beef will disappear.

  It had never occurred to La Motta or Munoz or Spahn—or for that matter to Endicott—that Deitz hadn’t stolen that money. In the world they all inhabited, innocence was not a word that tripped lightly off the tongue.

  Endicott looked at his cell phone, considered asking for advice from his source down here—Deitz’s own lawyer, Warren Smoles, as crooked a man as ever choked down a scruple with a double shot of Tanqueray. Another thought?

  Was it possible that Deitz knew he was being listened to? That this was all showbiz?

  No.

  It wasn’t.

  He’d only been on Deitz for two days and he had already decided that Deitz had the situational awareness of a mollusk.

  Shortly thereafter, Endicott reached a conclusion. No calling Warren Smoles, or Mario La Motta, or anyone else.

  All of this was just too damn interesting for that. He watched the red dot as it accelerated north on River Road, now just crossing Peachtree.

  He reached for a Camel, lit it up, rolled down the windows, and opened up the moon roof. If you smoked in a rental car, they charged you five hundred dollars to clean it. Endicott could afford it, but five hundred was outrageous.

  “You know I didn’t steal that fucking money.”

  The Chinese guy was probably right—and for a pencil-neck geek he had serious stones—but he and Byron Deitz were probably going to die this afternoon. It would be interesting to see who was going to do the killing.