Authors: Carsten Stroud
“Byron won’t like that. He’ll get right in Nick’s face.”
“I hope he does. Then he can get a piece of what he’s been giving you. If he actually assaults Nick, Nick will put him in a hospital, and then he’ll arrest him for assaulting a police officer, he’ll go to jail for that, and for domestic assault on you. I have digital proof of that. Maybe he’ll even do
county time. I’d love to see him deal with the people in Twin Counties Correctional. Ex-FBI? A wife beater? They’d corner him in a storage shed and have a party. He’d be lucky if they didn’t geld him.”
This was said in a flat voice, without inflection or a trace of melodrama.
Beth stared at her.
“It’s happened,” said Kate. “Just ask Nick.”
“God. You really are angry, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am. And you should be too.”
Beth sighed and leaned back into the sofa, sipping at her scotch.
There was a silence.
Kate drank a bit of her iced tea and studied Beth’s face, seeing the hardness go out of it and traces of her old life come flowing back in.
“He was trying to kill you, Beth. I hope you understand that. Maybe not your body. But you. They want to suck the soul out of you. That’s what guys like Byron do.”
Beth let out another shaky sigh, put her head back, closed her eyes. After a moment she said, “I always thought Byron had an empty place inside him and he was desperately trying to fill it and no matter how much I tried I just couldn’t help him.”
Kate leaned over, put her hand on Beth’s arm, gently, moved in to give her a soft kiss on her bruised cheek. Then she pulled back, smiled sweetly, and said, “What utter crap.”
The phone rang.
“Hey, Kate, it’s Reed. You hear about Byron?”
At around the same time that Kate was getting the latest on Byron Deitz from Reed Walker, Staff Sergeant Coker of the Belfair and Cullen County Sheriff’s Department was rolling northbound on Highway 311 about ten miles south of Gracie, smoking a cigarette and enjoying the way the sunlight was making the sweetgrass glow on the slopes of the hills rising up all around him.
He was in his main ride, a black-and-tan Crown Victoria Police Interceptor
with large gold six-pointed stars on the doors and an LED light bar on the roof that was visible from Mars when it was turned on. Staff Sergeant Coker was in a very good mood, all things considered, because it was a lovely morning and he was all gunned up and armored to the teeth and he was cruising along in his favorite vehicle and, to cap it off, he and his good friend Charlie Danziger had just gotten away with a bank robbery in Gracie a couple of days back that had netted them around two million dollars in cash and valuables.
He and Charlie Danziger went all the way back to the Marine Corps, and Charlie, up until a few years ago, had been a sergeant in the State Highway patrol. More recently, Charlie had been the Route Manager for Wells Fargo Armored Trucks, a position that had given him a lot of insider knowledge about large cash deliveries to local banks.
Such as a delivery last Friday of over two million to The First Third Bank in Gracie.
Danziger and the wheelman, a burn-scarred hardcase named Merle Zane, had done the actual robbery, and Coker, the best police sniper in the state, had taken care of the inevitable police pursuit with a Barrett Fifty.
Results: four wrecked squad cars, four dead cops, two dead media types who were in a Live Eye chopper following The Chase, and, sadly, a little later, the regrettable necessity of shooting Merle Zane in the back, just to keep things tidy. Merle Zane had last been seen stumbling into a pine forest with one of Charlie Danziger’s nine-mill rounds buried in his right kidney.
All in all, it had been a hectic afternoon, but in the end very profitable for Coker and Charlie Danziger.
Coker was idly turning over in his mind the various ways in which these newfound assets could be deployed for maximum sensory stimulation when his radio came to life and his cell phone rang.
He checked the call display—
C DANZIGER
—flicked it to voice mail, and picked up the police radio handset.
“Coker.”
“You’re supposed to say your car number, Staff Sergeant Coker.”
“I forgot it, Bea. What’s up?”
“I’m not Bea. I’m
Central
.”
Coker grinned, which seamed up his wolfish face and made him look even meaner than he already looked.
“Okay, Central. What’s happening?”
“Citizen is calling in a 10-38 at 2990 Old Orchard, wants immediate assistance.”
“That’s Ernie Pullman’s ranch, isn’t it? He can handle a damn dog call himself. He’s got more guns than the Bass Pro Shop.”
“It’s not a mad dog call. It’s a mad bear call. I only said it was a 10-38 because we don’t have a radio code for a mad bear. Can you take this, Coker? We got nobody else in the sector.”
“Where is everybody?”
“Most of our units are assisting State. Looks like the State guys have made some huge bust on Arrow Creek and everybody’s rolling on it.”
“Who got busted?”
“State’s not saying. Some guy in a big yellow Hummer. Shots fired.”
Coker worked that through and decided not to ask any more questions about a big yellow Hummer.
“Okay. Who was the caller?”
“Ernie himself. He sounds pretty upset.”
“Ernie can shoot a bear as well as I can.”
“He says there’s a problem with that.”
Coker sighed.
“Okay, I’m rolling. Is he still on the line?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him to gimme five minutes. Out.”
Coker sighed, flicked on the light bar, and hit the accelerator. He also scooped up the cell and flicked the voice mail button.
“Coker, this is Charlie. Where you at. Call me. It’s important.”
So Coker did.
“Charlie?”
“Coker. Where are you?”
“I got a 10-38 at Ernie Pullman’s ranch—”
“Ernie can’t handle a mad dog?”
“It’s not a—look, Charlie, what’s up?”
“I’ll meet you at Ernie’s.”
“You sound a little spooked, Charlie.”
“I am.”
Ernie Pullman’s Rocking Bar Ranch was more of a county dump than a ranch, with a big fenced-in yard littered with old tractor parts and rusted-out car bodies and assorted useless junk. Ernie’s double-wide
slumped down in the middle of this, looking like it had been dropped there from a great height. As Coker pulled into the drive he heard a horn beep, and a large white Ford F150 pickup filled up his rearview mirror.
Coker got out of the cruiser, stretched out his legs, waited while Charlie Danziger extracted his six-foot-something frame from behind the wheel.
Charlie had long white hair and a big white handlebar mustache. He was from Montana and looked it. Coker was from Montana, too, but he looked more like a Marine Corps DI, which made sense, since he used to be one.
“What’s up, Charlie?”
“Where’s Ernie?”
“Bea says he’s out back, dealing with a mad bear.”
“Pissed-off mad or crazy mad?”
“We’ll have to go see.”
“We gotta talk.”
“I hate it when you say that.”
“First off, let’s see where Ernie is. It’s not something I want to go gabbing about in front of the worst damn drunk south of Sallytown.”
They made their way around to the back of the double-wide. There was another yard back there that ran down a muddy slope to a large stand of mixed timber—oaks and pines and alders in the main, with a few soaring poplars sticking up above the rest. There was a very large black clump about three-quarters of the way up the tallest poplar, and a smaller blue and white clump a few yards higher. The smaller blue and white clump was yelling at them and waving a hand.
The bigger black clump didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. Coker and Danziger stood there for a minute, taking it in.
“That you, Ernie?” Coker shouted.
“Who the fuck else?” yelled Ernie Pullman. “Shoot the fucking bear, will ya.”
Coker looked at the bear. It wasn’t moving at all. He looked at Danziger.
“You bring your Winchester?”
“It’s in the truck.”
“The carbine or the long gun with the scope?”
“The carbine.”
“Think you can hit that bear with a carbine? All I got is my shotgun and this sidearm.”
“I can hit the bear with a thrown stone, Coker.”
And then, in a lowered voice, “You want to hear what I got to say?”
Ernie was still yelling at them.
“How long you been up there?” Danziger called.
“Almost an hour.”
“How’d you call 911?”
“My cell, you asshole. I had it with me when the bear showed up. Charlie, shoot the fucking bear, will you?”
“Bear looks dead to me,” said Coker.
Ernie did not find this amusing.
“Well, he was pretty fucking lively when he chased me up this poplar.”
“Maybe he’s just napping,” said Danziger, in a soft aside to Coker. “Is it legal to shoot a napping bear?”
“Have to look it up,” said Coker.
He looked up at Ernie Pullman, who was a good fifty yards away, and then looked at Danziger.
“Okay. He’s far enough away. What’s on your mind, Charlie?” he said, in a quiet voice.
“You haven’t heard yet?”
“Well, I heard the State guys made a hostile stop on a big yellow Hummer near Arrow Creek. Only one big yellow Hummer in this part of the state.”
“You’re right about that.”
“They popped Deitz?”
“Yep.”
“He dead?”
“Not yet.”
“They find the cash you stuck in the back of his ride?”
“They did. Plus that Rolex.”
“So they’re thinking what we want them to—”
Ernie, who had been watching them talk quietly together about God knew what, felt the need to draw their attention back to the matter at hand.
“For Chrissakes, shoot the fucking bear!” Ernie screamed. “My hands are slipping.”
“They are too,” said Danziger, quietly, to Coker. “You can see him sliding down a bit there.”
“Shoot the bear!” screamed Ernie, now verging on the repetitive.
Coker lit up a cigarette, smiled at Danziger.
“So they’ve got Deitz,” he said, still in hoarse whisper. Danziger nodded.
“I guess we’ll haveta see how it plays out.”
“We will.”
Ernie was now sliding faster. He had stopped saying anything coherent and was just sort of shrieking and crying.
The bear still wasn’t moving.
“Stop screaming, Ernie,” Danziger yelled. “You’ll wake him up. Maybe you can just sorta slip around him.”
Ernie said several unkind things in a very loud and excited tone. He was about ten feet from the bear, sliding down toward it by inches, and it looked as if the bear was now wide awake.
It let out a low moaning growl and shifted its position and growled again, this time with much more authority. Ernie stopped screaming, but he was still slipping down the tree trunk.
“Pretty sure that bear’s not dead,” said Coker, in an aside to Danziger. “Looks real active now.”
“He does, doesn’t he?” said Danziger. “Maybe I should go get the Winchester?”
“Probably should,” said Coker.
The Quantum Park Marriott Hotel and Convention Center occupied ten acres of rolling grasslands about halfway between the Belfair County Regional Airport—known locally as Mauldar Field—and Quantum Park itself, an enclosed, razor-wired, and well-guarded research and development center set out on the northwestern edge of Niceville.
Quantum Park was the base for a selection of anonymous feeder firms that did peripheral R and D for prominent outfits with names such as Lawrence Livermore, Motorola, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, KBR, and Raytheon.
Through no coincidence at all the security firm handling the complex needs of Quantum Park was an outfit called BD Securicom, the
BD
standing
for
Byron Deitz
, who, until his recent transfer to a new position as the lead suspect in a bank robbery, had been its CEO and sole proprietor.
With a facility such as Quantum Park nearby, and an airport right at hand, the Niceville Marriott was doing a brisk trade in business travel, its success reflected in the elegant Frank Lloyd Wright–style complex of residential suites, the wave pools, the workout areas, the huge convention hall next door, and particularly the low-ceilinged central foyer clad in yellow limestone and floored in highly polished slabs of oak stained a rich, glassy auburn the color of a horse’s eye.
Along one side a huge gas fire flickered behind a forty-foot glass wall, and on the opposite side an equally giant aquarium glimmered in tones of tourmaline and teal set off by schools of scarlet fish that drifted and flashed under the downglow of tiny halogen lamps.
Behind the fire wall was a Starck-style restaurant known as SkyLark—surprisingly good French fusion and a major draw from as far north as Gracie and Sallytown. Behind the aquarium was a brass-and-hardwood long bar known as the Old Dominion, where, on any weekday evening, you’d have to work damn hard to avoid all the local players who gathered under a huge panoramic oil painting of the Battle of Chickamauga.
Holding court there were men such as Bucky Cullen Junior, whose family owned most of Fountain Square, in the heart of Cap City’s financial district, or Billy Dials, who ran Niceville’s largest hardware and lumber supply store, or Niceville’s Mayor-for-Life, Dwayne “Little Rock” Mauldar, the only son of Daryl “Big Rock” Mauldar, who had graduated as a Four-Letter Man from Regiopolis Prep, survived two combat tours in Vietnam, and gone on to play six years as a starting linebacker with the St. Louis Cardinals.
They were Great White Sharks, all three of them, with dead-fish eyes and jolly airs and graces, with rolls of fat at their collars and diamond pinky rings and loud voices, and they heartily approved of anyone who heartily approved of them.
These creatures were usually surrounded by a school of human moray eels and mud cats and lampreys. Maybe it was the aquarium.
All in all, the Marriott was a pretty snazzy place and not in any way tarnished by the arrival at the main entrance of a gleaming navy blue Crown Vic that, although referred to as “unmarked,” could not have screamed
cop
any louder if the word had been spray-painted in red all over the hood. Beau Norlett was at the wheel with Nick riding shotgun as he pulled to a stop under the stone canopy.