Niceville (10 page)

How about Miss Barrow, his dozer-dyke lawyer?

Hell no.

She’d probably taken a bribe to lose his case. And there were lurid rumors about her private life circling the town.

How about Judge Monroe?

Everybody thought he was a pillar of the judicial community. But nobody was a pillar, not if you looked close enough. Every pillar had cracks around the base.

The Kavanaugh woman?

There walked the woman he
really
wanted to nail, another Effin Cee he was going to totally fuck with, the bitch who was going to pay for messing with Tony Bock. Bock didn’t know much about her—her husband, Nick, was some kind of plainclothes cop with a reputation for being a hard-ass.

Thinking about her, he got onto Google and typed in her name, Kate Kavanaugh, born a Walker, found a bunch of links to sites like Court News and Niceville Who’s Who, along with a whack of citations in law journals and law clerk for appeals court cases. A busy little beaver, this chick.

A link to her father, Dillon Walker, a big-shot professor up at VMI,
and then a whole lot of irritating crap about how the Walkers went way back in the history of the state, all the way back to what these redneck crackers around here still called the War Between the States—slave-trading cotton-dealing slime-balls—more crap about the Founding Four, the Cottons, the Teagues, the Haggards, and the Walkers—nothing he could really mine for deep shit to shovel on her head. But nobody was innocent, not in this tight-ass town.

Hell, even the name was a lie.

Niceville
.

How about the guy who was laying pipe to her?

Her husband, the cop, Nick Kavanaugh.

Bock googled him, got links to some newspaper articles about his service in Special Forces—Silver Star, Bronzes with a Vee, whatever that was, couple of Purples. Interesting that he was out of the Army so soon, after all that glory … guy was only thirty-two … lots of war left for a glory-sucker like this asshole … wonder why he’s out …

Bock tried a link into Army Records, found it firewalled, tried a few tricks, and managed to get into a level seven infolink maintained by an antiwar website called WikiLeaks.

It was called www.fukthawarpigs.org, and now it got more interesting.

In the middle of all the sixties rhetoric and anti-American raving, there was a mention of an incident in Yemen, filed by somebody from Doctors Without Borders, involving a Fifth Special Forces unit, headed up by a guy named Cavanah—
Cavanah?
First name initial only, an
N
. These guys were deployed around a place called Wadi Doan—several women had been killed because … because why?

Hard to figure it out.

Something to do with suicide bombers dressing up in full-body burkas and getting too close to coalition soldiers … there was some kind of video file attached to the site. Bock hit it and watched forty-seven seconds of a grainy digital mpeg of three women in black walking single file down a narrow alley in between low mud-brown walls, a Humvee at the far end of the alley, five U.S. Army soldiers standing around it, watching them come on, the troopers as taut as Dobermans in a junkyard.

There was no sound, just the fixed images of these Arab broads in head-to-toe black, walking like zombies—some sort of action at the far
end, by the Humvee, the military figures spreading out, one man coming forward, hand raised, the women keep coming, the soldier is clearly shouting at them—he lifts a weapon of some sort—the film jumps a bit, as if the guy taking the video is startled by something—when he gets back on the alley the three women are down and the soldiers are coming up on them …

No.

Fuck it.

The site was too crazy.

Whole thing looked like a setup, otherwise who would be taking the video in the first place?

Bad provenance, bad spelling, bunch of wing nuts. Lousy video. No source cited.

Better set the Nick and Kate thing aside for now, at least until his skills improved. Make a mistake with that guy, from what Bock had heard about him, it was going to end in tears.

Start out small.

Stay away from the obvious targets, the fucking lawyers, that sanctimonious prick of a judge, the Effin Cee and her bastard bitch, while he figured out how to manage this.

His theory was that everybody had a crime or a sin or something shameful and disgusting buried in his past, something that could shame or even ruin him.

Or her.

It was an interesting proposition, and proving it could be a lot of fun.

But he had to be … subtle.

Start with someone totally unconnected.

He had to pick a name out of a hat, totally at random, then do the homework, find out all there was to know, circle around like a tiger, stay in the long grass and work it all out. Find out how to ruin a life by remote control.

He already had some possibles, people whose dirty secrets he had “happened upon” in the course of his day job. Risky to use too many of them, because a smart cop, given enough incidents, would figure out what the linkages were.

No, stick to random, and be anonymous. Implacable. Do a few dry
runs to warm up, take on people no one would ever be able to connect to him, while he studied and adapted and improved. That way, if he made some early mistakes—and everybody did—he wouldn’t be on anybody’s list.

But where to start?

He sat back in the chair, had some more of his Stella Artois. Where to start?

He needed a
victim
, somebody he had no connection with, but somebody who was … vulnerable. Somebody with secrets hidden away. He sat there and stared at the screen for a while, his rat-mind nibbling away at the problem.

Where was there an obvious nexus between the information universe and people with secrets?

Criminals.

Criminal records required access to the National Crime Information Center, which he did not have and could not easily get.

How about employment records?

Human resources files?

Hard to get at those without leaving a trace.

Come on, Tony.

Think.

Secrets.

Okay.

Sex offenders had secrets.

Was there a National Sex Offender Registry?

A couple of taps showed him a site called the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website. If he agreed to accept the terms, he could enter any name and the website would tell him if that name had ever been on any city, state, or federal sex offender list.

He sat back and looked at it, thinking hard. There was no point in just entering random names from the Niceville phone book and hoping to get lucky. He had to start at the other end.

Sex offenders liked to be around kids, didn’t they? So how many guys in Niceville worked around kids? Social workers. Cops. Playground supervisors. Coaches. Teachers.

But they’d all have been checked out, right? As a city employee he knew that everyone who was bonded and everyone who applied for any
kind of license to work with kids or in schools or in hospitals or church groups had to be checked out for anything criminal.

But how well?

How far back?

How … 
carefully
?

Worth a shot, he decided.

Worth a shot.

For a long time Merle just ran, through the brush and the branches, over deadfalls and under boughs, getting his face lashed and his hands bloody as he put as much distance between himself and Charlie Danziger as he could manage in as short a time as possible.

A few hundred yards into the forest the dense underbrush gave way to a padded carpet of dry pine needles. The trunks of the trees were spaced much farther apart in this section of the forest and even in the dim light he found he could cover the open ground much more easily.

He was vaguely aware that the forest had changed in some indefinable way, and now the golden twilight that poured down from the canopy and shimmered in between the upright pillars of the trees and spread itself on the red carpet of pine needles reminded Merle of being inside a huge silent temple.

His vision was blurry and his head was light, but all in all he felt better than he would have expected to after getting shot in the back. He didn’t take too much comfort from this. Although he had never been shot before, he knew that in the long run, unless he could get some medical attention, he was in pretty big trouble.

He could see that the wound in his right shoulder was just a glancing one. It occurred to him that only someone who had actually been shot was qualified to use the word
just
when describing it.

But other than being ugly and bleeding like a stiff punch in the nose would bleed, he wasn’t too worried about it. It was the bullet hole in his back that sort of preyed on his mind.

For the first few minutes after he got hit there wasn’t a whole lot of
pain. It was more like somebody had smacked him in the small of his back with a baseball bat. Everything around the impact area had gone numb, as if it had been frozen.

Then the cold and the numbness began to fade away and the pain had set in. And this was serious pain. Ten minutes after it first started in on him he was sitting on the ground gasping and sweating with his back up against a tree and his legs splayed out in front of him, and he was, as the saying goes, in a world of hurt.

He looked up at the sky, pale glowing gold and blue through the black tracery of the branches. It was early spring yet, so the trees hadn’t fully leafed out. The first of the stars glittered up there and a crescent moon was gliding through wisps of cloud.

He put his head back on the rough bark of the pine and stared up at the evening sky for a while, trying to will the pain away, which he had heard from his karate instructor that you could do if you tried hard enough and had the mental strength to go all Zen on the very idea of pain, which was really nothing but an illusion manufactured by your corporeal body and could easily be controlled and overcome by the forceful application of a truly transcendental mind. This turned out not to be true.

Byron Deitz looked exactly like a guy with his name ought to look—a thick-necked heavy-bodied no-neck sort of guy with a shaved skull and a hard, unfriendly face and small, mean black eyes.

If he was in the movies he’d have to play one of the evil baldheaded guys with black goatees who always end up getting a balsa-wood chair broken over their heads by the curvy chick in a thong bikini who’s only trying to stop him from pounding on the good-guy hero with the long blond hair.

Byron Deitz would have totally deserved this treatment since he was a guy who spent a lot of his time looking at people and things he didn’t like and working out how to drive right over them.

As a matter of fact, Deitz was driving right now, in his supercharged bright yellow Hummer, and listening to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” with the volume set to
STUN
, doing a scary one-forty down Side Road 336, taking a shortcut through the Belfair Range, heading for hearth and home—his very big damn hearth and home—in The Chase, as it happened, just a few blocks away from Delia Cotton’s old Victorian, where, right at this exact same moment, something odd and deeply disturbing was happening.

Byron Deitz figured he could get away with doing a slick one-forty down SR 336 because every cop in the known universe was everywhere else looking for those outrageous pukes who had cherry-popped the First Third in Gracie and then eighty-sixed four cops and a news chopper over there on 311.

Deitz had to admit that whoever they were, these pukes, they had
serious balls. That was shit-house-rat-crazy-fucking-brave. He’d have loved to have seen the look on the faces of the other cops in the chase when the first guy took a full-metal round straight up the beezer.
Holy Freaking Shit
wouldn’t quite have done justice to that moment.

Deitz figured the sniper had to be military or an elite federal sharpshooter.

And stony cold.

A deeply ruthless prick.

A guy like that, Deitz would be proud to walk him all the way to the execution chamber and pour him three fingers of bourbon before they strapped him down. Part of him was hoping they’d get away with it. But they wouldn’t.

Pukes, even crazy-brave pukes, never got away with shit. Byron Deitz, who was ex-FBI, knew something about pukes. The “ex” part of Deitz’s career with the FBI wasn’t entirely his idea, but he’d gone along with it because the alternative was five to nine in Leavenworth.

So now his career jacket was hermetically sealed by the order of a federal court judge, as part of a plea agreement, and therefore his professional reputation remained relatively unstained, other than in the long and darkly brooding memories of those four unfortunate men who had made the mistake of going into business with him. They were now pulling what should have been Byron Deitz’s five to nine in Leavenworth.

Anyway, that unhappy time was all in the misty past, in his rearview mirror, as he liked to say, and all those grumpy former henchmen were just speed bumps on the four-lane interstate of his career. So, all in all, on this honey-colored Friday evening Life Was Good for Byron Deitz.

Life Was Good partly because Deitz was making an outrageous amount of money running BD Securicom, an outfit providing perimeter security and on-site counterespionage services to several of the high-tech research firms that had established themselves in the northwestern suburbs of Niceville, in a gated high-security compound known as Quantum Park, home to a number of very anonymous feeder firms that subcontracted R and D for more well-known outfits with names like Lawrence Livermore, Motorola, General Dynamics, Raytheon, KBR, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin.

The sprawling park in which these firms resided featured perimeter sensors and infrared trip wires and motion detectors and transplanted
sago palms and overflight interdiction systems and rolling lawns and a private golf course and countersurveillance jammers and an artificial lake where a large flock of trumpeter swans whose wing bones had been professionally snapped were required to glide gracefully about amidst the koi and the water lilies. How the hell a gaboon viper like Byron Deitz had managed to insinuate himself into this lucrative gig was a question that kept his competition awake at night.