Niceville (15 page)

“No. The Feds don’t want us tracking mud all over this cluster-fuck. It belongs to the State CID and the Feebs. I’m off until Monday.”

“Okay—you call Zane, set up a meet.”

Coker thought it over.

“Do the split—or the hit, if he gives us a chance do it all at once?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

“Even me?” asked Donny, walking back in the room carrying a crisp white shirt and jeans and a big soft suede jacket. “I mean, the split, not the hit.”

“Yeah,” said Coker, shooting a glance at Danziger and then cutting away, which Danziger correctly interpreted as
maybe we’ll hit Donny too, just to be safe
.

“Yeah, even you.”

Then he had a final thought.

“Hey, what if it goes all wrong at Boonie’s? Say you
do
pass out, or you start bleeding all over the carpet, some crazy shit. What about the money then? Maybe I should go get it now?”

Danziger went back a long way with Coker, knew him pretty well, which was why he was giving the answer a long thought. If Coker decided that Danziger was jerking him around, he was just as likely to shoot him right now.

“It’s at your place.”

Coker was not delighted by this news.

“My place? Where at my place? On my front porch, all wrapped up in a black bag with
LOOT
on the side, maybe a big red ribbon and a note with teddy bears on it?”

“It’s lying on the rafters in the roof of your garage. Black canvas bags. No teddy bears.”

Coker watched as Danziger got himself into Donny’s shirt and the leather jacket.

“You’re an unpredictable son of a bitch, Charlie. I’ll give you that.”

“Yeah?” said Charlie, pulling a cigarette out of Coker’s pack and lighting it up, squinting at him through the smoke. “Well, there it is.”

“Yeah,” said Coker, grinning back at him. “There it is.”

“Ecco la cosa,”
said Donny.

They both looked at him through the smoke. Donny shrugged his shoulders.

“What did you just say?” asked Coker.

“I said,
ecco la cosa
. There it is.”

A thoughtful pause.

“Well, don’t,” said Coker, after a moment.

“Yeah,” put in Danziger. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” asked Donny in a hurt tone.

Danziger and Coker exchanged looks.

“Because it just sounds …”

“Weird,” said Danziger.

“Yeah,” said Coker. “Weird.”

Beau Norlett, back from a week’s leave, caught Nick as he came in through the door, the office reeking of burned coffee, the weekend crew sitting around in their shirtsleeves, holsters and cuffs showing, everyone talking low, a cold gray rain streaming down the windows.

“Nick,” said Beau, with a broad smile. “How was Savannah?”

Nick gave him a look.

Had he heard about what had happened in Forsyth Park? Probably not.

“Nice town. A little buggy. But pretty.”

“Yeah? I never been there. May wants to go. Says it’s really romantic, like Paris. You ever been to Paris, Nick?”

“Yes.”

Beau, forgetting himself, sat looking up at Nick, expecting something more. Then he remembered that Nick hardly ever said something more.

“Okay. Hey, that was some bad shit, up in Gracie, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

“Tig says you walked the scene with Marty Coors?”

“I did.”

Beau waited.

Nick said nothing.

“Yeah. Well. Uh, Tig wants to see you. Asked me to say.”

Beau Norlett was a nice kid, blue-black, solid as a bridge abutment, with a round bald head, sloping shoulders, great hands, as light on his
feet as a tango dancer, but he could hit a crack-house door like a runaway freight.

He had been a famous linebacker when he was at Saint Mary’s, might have made Notre Dame or Ole Miss with some luck. If you were looking for somebody to take a door down, he was your guy. If you were looking for cop smarts, you were still looking. But Nick thought the kid had potential.

Nick smiled, went down to the coffee room, poured himself a hot bitter cup and walked on through the crowded office to Tig’s hideout, a corner glassed-in cubby with a view across the motor pool to the marble dome of the city hall. Rain was sleeting straight down and the dome looked like a round wet rock sitting on a pile of bricks.

In the northeast, looming high over the town like a storm front, blurred by the rain, he could just make out Tallulah’s Wall, which made him think of Crater Sink, which brought the Teague case back in full HDTV.

Even before Sylvia Teague went into Crater Sink—if she really had—Nick had always thought that Tallulah’s Wall had a kind of sickness cloud floating over it, and if anybody had told him that even the Indians who used to live here had stayed away from the place he’d have believed it.

Most small towns would have made a feature like Tallulah’s Wall and Crater Sink a theme park and put ads in
USA Today
trying to drum up tourism, but not Niceville.

Early on, Nick had asked Reed Walker why Tallulah’s Wall had everybody in Niceville so spooked. Reed had stared at his hands for a while and then started up a story about something that was said to have happened at Crater Sink back in the twenties, or maybe earlier, or later, he wasn’t sure, then he seemed to think better of it, ordered two more beers, and managed to change the subject.

Nick stood in the hall outside Tig’s office for a while, turning the memory over, his mind in neutral, watching the cloud banks get caught on Tallulah’s Wall, spilling their cargo of gray rain down on the town.

On the far side of the Dome of the Rock, as they called City Hall, because the mayor’s name was Little Rock Mauldar, Nick could see a section of the Tulip River, running mud brown and churning fast after
two hours of hard rain. He shook himself loose from the dull gray landscape, the dull gray morning, and walked into Tig Sutter’s office.

Tig looked up as Nick came in, an up-from-under over the rim of his steel gray reading glasses. He leaned back in his wooden swivel chair, making the thing creak like a cellar door in a horror movie.

“Nick. How’s the Lovely?”

“Still with me.”

“Probably just hanging around to see what the heck you’ll do next. I hear she nailed that Bock asshole.”

Nick smiled at that.

“She did.”

“I always liked Ted Monroe. He’s a damn good judge of character. Kate say how Bock took it?”

“Poorly.”

“Screw him.”

“Metaphorically?”

“Either way. Take a pew, Nick.”

Nick plucked a wooden chair from under a picture of the president. The president, his chin cocked just so, his eyes all squinty, a thin-lipped smile like a gunfighter, was staring off into the middle distance, as if he could see some sunny green uplands that he was going to lead you to.

Nick sat, lightly, on the chair’s forward edge, his forearms on his knees, the plastic cup turning in his long-fingered hands. Tig had some of his, Nick had some of his, and they sat there for a time in a companionable silence. Tig was shifting around in his chair a bit and Nick realized the man was nervous about something.

“Okay, well, first some hard news. Nick, I got a letter from a Colonel Dale Sievewright, down at Benning. It was about your request to re-up for combat deployment with the Fifth SF again …?”

Nick looked at him but said nothing.

Tig shrugged.

“You were gonna pull out on me?”

“I was,” said Nick. “No offense, Tig.”

“None taken. I hired you, I didn’t buy your ugly white ass down at the Wally Mart. I know you miss the action. I was worried a little that maybe you and Kate were having some trouble at home?”

Nick was quiet for a time. When he spoke there was something
moving under the tight skin over his cheekbones, a pale glimmer in his eyes.

“No. Kate is … Kate. She couldn’t be better. When she comes in the door, she makes my day. It’s just …”

Tig set the cup down, creaked back in the chair again.

“Pale?”

Nick sipped at the cup, said nothing for a time.

“Yes. That’s a good word. Like all the color went away. I mean, Kate wants me to put a deck on the back. So I go down to Billy Dials, I walk around, look at the cedar, I can’t seem to figure out why in the hell Kate would want a cedar deck. I mean, what’s a cedar deck for?”

“You know. Beer. Football. Barbecues.”

“Barbecues,” said Nick, looking into his cup. “Barbecues make me think of Fallujah, those contractors hanging from meat hooks on that bridge.”

Tig looked out the window at the rain sheeting down. There was thunder rolling around in the distance, getting closer, and lightning flaring up inside the cloud mass. A crappy morning if there ever was one.

“I have spent considerable time trying to forget that, Nick, so thanks for the reminder. You think Fallujah smelled like barbecue, try watching an Abrams burn up with a whole crew inside. You talk this over with Kate before you sent the letter?”

Nick shook his head.

“Okay. Well, no need to spook her with it now. I’m sorry to say this, I really am, although I’m happy not to be losing you, but Sievewright turned you down.”

Nick nodded, took it in, his face closing up.

“The Wadi Doan?”

Tig nodded, his expression kindly.

“The Wadi Doan. Al Kuribayah. Yemen. That’s not going to go away, Nick. Not your fault, nobody ever thought that. They were okay with JAG, but another combat deployment … I guess not.”

“The optics.”

“And that video.”

Nick said nothing.

Tig let it slide.

Nick, ready to change the topic, said, “Anything for us on what happened yesterday?”

Tig rubbed his cheeks with both hands, looking suddenly old.

“You walked the site. What’d you think?”

Nick told him.

Tig nodded, having come to the same conclusion on his own. Cold-assed murder, plain and simple.

“We getting a piece of anything?” Nick asked.

“There’ll be one hell of a funeral, for one thing,” said Tig, looking out the window at the rain coming down. “There’ll be uniforms coming in to Cap City from all over the country, far away as Canada, England. Christ, four guys. Plus the two people in the Live Eye chopper.”

“The hell with the people in the chopper. Media vultures.”

Nick didn’t like the media. Tig, who felt the same way but had to work with them, liked to keep Nick far away from people with cameras and microphones. He changed the subject.

“I’d really like you to go, if you would. Next Friday? For our unit? Maybe you could take Beau?”

Nick looked down at his hands.

“I’ve had it with military funerals, Tig.”

“So have I,” said Tig, lowering his voice and leaning across his desk. “But I don’t want us represented by some of these here younger guys, God love ’em, none of them know how to wear dress blues. Don’t even know how to wear a business suit, for that. You do. And Beau will do whatever you tell him. He wants to be you when he grows up. Come on. I’m asking here.”

Nick was quiet, remembering all the funerals he had been to, not all of them in crisp dress blues with taps playing, some of them just six guys in ragged BDUs standing around a smoking crater, shoveling gravel over what was left of a friend.

“Okay. I’ll go. One of the guys was a friend of Reed’s, so he’s going. Kate’d like me to go too.”

Nick’s mind went back to the bank robbery.

“About Gracie, anybody looking at the rollover on the interstate?”

“The eighteen-wheeler?”

“Yeah. It bothers me. A full load of rebar, spreads it all over six lanes
of traffic, spears a van full of church ladies. Two killed, but the driver walks.”

Tig looked at Nick, thinking it over.

“You’re thinking about the timing?”

“I am. When’d it roll over?”

Tig shuffled some papers, picked up a printout, riffled through it.

“Fourteen forty-one hours.”

“There you go. These people hit the bank in Gracie, what, forty minutes later? Worked out pretty good for them, didn’t it, since almost every available unit, ground and air, was tied up with the rollover? Anybody looking into the driver?”

Tig shook his head.

“Not that I know of.”

“What’s his name?”

Tig flipped up the edge of a printout, ran a finger down the paragraph.

“Lyle Preston Crowder. Six years with Steiger Freightways. No criminal sheet and no record of DUI or anything else. Other than a lousy credit history, which nowadays who doesn’t have, he’s shiny as a new dime.”

“Where is he now?”

“He was banged up. Pretty hysterical. They’ve got him sedated and under guard at Sorrows down in Cap City.”

“Guard? Guard from what?”

“The people in the minivan had husbands and fathers. People around here like to settle their own beefs. There’s been some talk.”

“Okay. I get that. Anyway, you might say something to Boonie.”

Tig nodded, made a note on a yellow pad.

“I will. So. Work. How’s your sheet?”

Nick sat back, drained his cup.

“I have a meet with Lacy Steinert, over in Tin Town. She says one of her clients wants to talk about the Rainey Teague case. Might know something.”

“What client?”

“Lemon Featherlight.”

“Yeah. I heard he got flaked for ecstasy by the goddam DEA. What’s he want?”

“A deal on the DEA bust, be my guess.”

“You think Lemon’s worth looking at?”

Nick shrugged.

“Lacy’s good people. If she thinks there’s something in it, can’t hurt to go have a coffee. I’d like to clear that one.”

“Yeah. So would I.”

There was no need to say anything else. They felt the same way about the Rainey Teague thing, and they both knew it.

“A year back, isn’t it?” said Tig, as if he wasn’t aware of that down to the hour.

“To the day,” said Nick.

“How’s the kid doing?”

“Still at Lady Grace. Still in a coma.”

“Rainey was adopted, if I remember? Kate still acting as guardian?”

“She is. She’s related to Sylvia, and she knows family law. The original adoption thing was handled by a lawyer name of Leah Searle—dead now—had a practice up in Sallytown. Rainey was in some sort of foster home up there. Birth parents apparently died in a barn fire. Kid was made a ward of the county and put into foster care. Kate got the papers from Sylvia’s place after she …”