The Reckoning (9 page)

“You're gonna have to explain all this shit to me, Frank. You just don't tell a guy he's dead and get him to throw a stiff into the river for you and then we fuck off for donuts.”

Barbetta thought that over. “Okay. Tell you what. We get this Ollie thing handled, you and me will go to Blue Eddie's, have some steak and eggs, some coffee—”

Danziger realized that he had come out for coffee, that coffee was how this all got started.

Shoulda sat quietly in your room, Charlie, like that Pascal guy was always saying.

“So, do we have a deal?” Barbetta asked.

Danziger thought it over, Barbetta tapping the wheel, Gordon wheezing in the back, rain drumming on the roof of the squad car. “Okay. What the hell. Deal.”

Barbetta banged the steering wheel, reached over, shook Danziger's hand, grinning like a wolf. “Good man. I knew you'd back me up!”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. One last thing, Frank.”

“Another fucking last thing?” Barbetta closed his eyes, dropped his head down. “Jesus wept. What is it now?”

“Is Gordon gonna go into the Tulip after Ollie?”

Barbetta glanced in his rearview, saw Gordon snorting and chuffing, still out cold.

“Well, he does look kinda…
depressed
.”

It was almost four in the morning when Nick pulled up in front of their house on Beauregard, in the Garrison Hills section of Niceville.

Garrison Hills was a nice part of town, leafy blocks lined with Spanish and French Colonial houses, prewar houses with wrought iron galleries and curved staircases that led up from the street to the main doors, a holdover from when Niceville streets were simply dirt and stone and the dust kicked up by horses and wagons was always in the air. Live oaks that had shaded Beauregard Avenue from the sun when Confederate troops were passing through on their way north had now grown so large that their branches met in the air over the street, making it a kind of leafy green cave. Wisps of Spanish moss fluttered from the heavy oak branches, like the ghosts of hanged men.

The house had been in the Walker and Mercer family line for a hundred and fifty years. Dillon Walker, Kate's father, a history professor at the Virginia Military Institute, had asked Kate to take over the house after the death of his wife Lenore seven years ago.

And it was a lovely house, a tall French town house with tall casement windows, a delicate black wrought iron staircase that rose up from the street level in a graceful curve, ending at a large double door, also black, shaped in an arch, with stained-glass window lights above and around it. The walls were a soft butternut stone that, in the late afternoon sun through the trees, made the house glow with an inner light.

Tonight, at four in the morning, the house was dark, except for a dim lantern shining above the door and a soft yellow glow from an upstairs bedroom. Their bedroom, which meant Kate was home after three days down at Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital in Cap City, home and awake and waiting up for him. She must have heard him at the door because she was coming down the staircase when he walked into the wood-lined front hall.

He watched her come down, feeling the weight coming off his heart. Kate was a beauty, full-bodied and elegant, fine-boned and long-necked, a Black Irish rose with green eyes and long black hair that was shining in a liquid fall around her shoulders as she passed by the landing light.

She was smiling, but he could see the worry lines around her mouth and eyes, the weariness in the way she was moving.

She reached him, gave him a full-body embrace and a kiss that radiated out from his lips and warmed him all the way down to his hips. She was naked under her white cotton nightgown. He could feel her hips and the muscles along her spine, her breasts and her slightly rounded belly against him.

She pulled away, looked up at him. “God, Nick, you look awful.”

“Thank you. I've earned it.”

“You've been smoking.”

“Mavis held me down and forced one on me.”

She laughed, pulled him through the hallway and into the kitchen at the back of the house. The kitchen, old-fashioned country style in pale yellow and creamy white, was lit only by a night-light in the stove hood.

Beyond the kitchen was a glass-walled solarium with wicker chairs, a huge yellow couch, bright blue pillows, and flowering plants, all in the dark now, with the pin lights in the backyard glimmering in the rain. He had a flash of the lanai at the Morrison house and pushed it down.

Kate was at the fridge, the door open, light pouring out around her, her body a pale pink vision through the paper-thin cotton.

Transparency,
he thought.
It's not just for governments.

“Eufaula made a pitcher of juleps,” she said, pulling out a silver decanter, cold and dew-covered, and setting it down on the bar counter, along with two crystal glasses. “Sit.” She indicated one of the leather-topped bar chairs next to the countertop, and he sat while Kate poured out two mint juleps, adding a sprig of mint from a glass bowl. She put the pitcher back in the fridge, sat down opposite him, smiled at him.

They touched glasses, a tiny bell ringing.

“So,” she said, putting the glass down carefully on the quartz counter, “I'm not going to ask you about your day.”

“Tig called?”

“Yes. He gave me the basics. So we're not going there right now. Unless you want to?”

“No, babe, I don't.”

“That bad?”

“That bad.”

“Bad enough.” She took that in. “Okay,
my
day then?”

“Is Rainey asleep?”

Rainey had a bedroom on the second floor, but he had a tendency to wander, possibly sleepwalking, possibly something else. On the bad nights, they locked his door from the outside.

“I checked. He's out cold. They put him through a lot, and Dr. Lakshmi gave me some Ativans to see that he slept well. And I locked his door. So, do you want to hear?”

“What about Beth and the kids?”

Beth was Kate's older sister. Her husband, Byron Deitz, ex-FBI and a bad man, had been killed in a hostage taking at the Galleria Mall, along with mafia boss Frankie Maranzano.

Nick had done some of the shooting, and Staff Sergeant Coker, the best police sniper in the state, had done the rest. Part of the mayhem was caused by a boneheaded bystander with a Dan Wesson .44 Magnum, who inserted himself into the fire fight and got his ticket punched for his troubles.

The upshot of Byron Deitz's timely departure was that Beth and her two kids, Hannah, five, and Axel, nine, were now living in the Coach House at the back of the property.

“They're out back, sound asleep. But, Nick, it's not like Beth and I don't talk about all of this. Or with Eufaula, for that matter.”

“I know. I just want some time alone with you. Hear about your week. You do look tired.”

“I am. It was long. Three days and nights long. Sometimes I got to nap on a couch in the nurse's room while they were doing the prep stuff. And I was half asleep when I heard you come home.”

Nick looked down at his glass, watching the light glimmer in the ice. Head still down, he said, “So, what's the word?”

“The word is…inconclusive.”

“All the tests came back as…what's the word they had? Not
normal
?”

“Nominal?”

“That's it. Nominal. MRI, CAT, spinal tap, the whole calliope parade, pink elephants and all. The only thing they didn't do was a colonoscopy.”

“So, if there's no…”

“Anomaly,” said Kate.

“Yeah, no anomalies, then…what?”

“They're talking therapy.”

“What, physio? Kid's as strong as I am.”

“You know what I mean, and no, he's not.”

“Not yet. But he's growing fast. He's going to be a real large boy by the time he gets to eighteen. What kind of psychotherapy?”

Kate took a sip of her julep. The way she did it told Nick that she had to tell him something that neither of them was going to be happy about.

“Okay, well, the way they're thinking now is that whatever Rainey's got, it might respond to a kind of psychological counseling called CBT.”

“Which is?”

“Cognitive behavioral therapy. It's supposed to help a person focus on his problem patterns, on the way he thinks about what he's doing or saying, on the way he processes the world around him…You look skeptical.”

“No. If I am, I don't mean to.”

“So stop going all stony and coplike on me.”

“Is that what I'm doing?” This was dangerous ground for them. Disagreeing about Rainey's destructive effect on their marriage a while back had ended up with Nick living in a hotel for a couple of weeks.

“Okay, to cut to the bottom line here, they think Rainey might have a form of…”

She sighed, and her lip trembled a bit. Nick reached out for her and put his hand on hers.

“Of schizophrenia. They think that's where these ‘voices' are coming from—”

“Doesn't schizophrenia mean medication?”

“Yes…antipsychotic medications. They were talking about something called Risperdal, or Zyprexa—”

“Don't these medicines have a lot of weird side effects?”

“Yes. They do. Tremors, something called tardive dyskinesia, they're these uncontrollable facial tics. Weight gain. And they can also make the patient sleepy or depressed…Look, Nick, this isn't good, I know, but it's not the worst it could be. If we can get Rainey's…situation…under control, get him stabilized…he could have a normal life. Remember that man, John Nash—Russell Crowe played him in
A Beautiful Mind
?”

“I remember the movie, anyway. The guy was seeing people who weren't there, a roommate, a little girl.”

“That's right. He was schizophrenic, so he was having these visions, these hallucinations—”

“Which never went away.”

“Right, but with the help of some therapy and the right kind of medication, he learned how to cope with them, to live with them. So the thinking is that, with drugs and CBT, Rainey can be taught how to cope with…his condition.”

“Kate—”

“He can have a normal life.”

“Kate, his behavior when he's hearing this voice, the things the voice wanted him to do—”

“If you're talking about Alice Bayer—”

“I am sure as hell not talking about Alice Bayer. Or about Warren Smoles. That's in the past, and that's where it can stay. But you're the one who thought he had something…something very real—let's call it an
entity
—living in his head. In his mind. Lemon Featherlight saw those creatures on the front porch of Rainey's old house. I can understand Rainey having hallucinations, but Lemon? And didn't you see them too?”

Kate was closing down. “I was half crazy then. I don't know what I saw. A couple of shadows, that's all. It had been a bad week, with Rainey sneaking off, going to Warren Smoles…I wasn't myself. Christ, maybe I'm the one with the condition.”

“Honey, you're not crazy. Neither am I. We saw what we saw. It was real.”

Kate shook her head, not in negation, but in confusion. She forced herself into the appearance of calm, and Nick realized how close she was to cracking wide open. So he kept his mouth shut.

“Nick…I'm not sure what we saw. Maybe we saw a cloud of dust or leaves, and maybe what we saw in that old mirror—Glynis Ruelle—maybe that was a trick of the light, like that camera obscura image you saw in Delia Cotton's basement. We were all exhausted…it was a terrible time, that awful bank robbery in Gracie, Dad going missing, Byron and Beth and the kids. Remember
that
? In the middle of all that, who knows what we saw?”

Denial
, Nick was thinking. And
Be gentle here.
“And Lemon Featherlight?”

She looked down, which she tended to do when she was telling him something she was having trouble believing herself. “Lemon thinks he might have been mistaken.”

Nick's reply was gentle, noncommittal. “He does? And when did he start thinking that?”

“He came to Sorrows two days ago. He was in Cap City to register his helicopter license with the FBI and then he was flying up to UV to see that Dr. Sigrid person about those bone-basket things you two found near…near where Alice was. He was on his way to the airport. He and Rainey used to be close. He looked in on Rainey, came and sat with me in the parent's lounge. We talked about everything, and he said maybe he might have been wrong too, that maybe he was just stressed out.”

Nick worked that through. Lemon Featherlight was an ex-Marine, a full-blood Mayaimi Indian, irritatingly handsome in a piratical sort of way, a condition made even more grating because all the women loved him, and made even more so because he was actually a decent guy, and nobody needed that.

He was one of the two people Nick knew who felt the way he did about “that wasp thing” in Rainey's head, because Lemon had seen it in action. Later, Lemon had talked about the “thing” being something called a Kalona Ayeliski, a Raven Mocker demon, something out of an old Cherokee legend. The folk who used to live around this part of the world believed the female demon lived in Crater Sink, on the crest of Tallulah's Wall.

If Lemon Featherlight was backing off in front of Kate, it was probably because he could see the effect all of this was having on her.

Kate was tight, but she was keeping it under control. “So you see, if even Lemon thinks Rainey can have a normal life…” She reached out and took his hand.

“Look, Nick, I've…I've decided that was all…mass hysteria. Fatigue. The power of suggestion. We all had it, one way or another, but now it's
over
.”

She teared up here. “It has to be over. Because if it really was something…”

“From
outside
?”

“Yes. From
outside
…like that Raven Mocker demon that Lemon was talking about, then it cannot be fixed or figured out or defeated and we're all of us just…fucked. Totally and completely fucked, and we might as well just shoot ourselves now and get it over with. I think that's why I lost the baby. All that stress. And I am so
done
with it!”

Kate had suffered her third miscarriage a month ago, only eight weeks into her pregnancy. Nick didn't think it was just stress—perhaps the
thing
, whatever it was, that was “wrong” in Niceville, maybe it had caused it somehow. He had no idea how, but he knew that Kate was not a woman who needed a lecture about Niceville's insane history.

Kate gathered herself, took in a shuddering breath, dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. “So,” she said, “if we follow through on this, help Rainey cope with his condition, with drugs and therapy—”

“I worry some about the drug thing.”

“I don't like it either. But what else can we do? Call in an exorcist? Kill a white chicken by the light of a crescent moon?”

Nick smiled, tried for a lighter note. “Might be worth a try?”