Niceville (11 page)

But he had pulled it off somehow, and he was rocketing through the rolling brown slopes of the Belfair Range, with Lady Gaga’s volume set on
STUN
and a nervous but lovely wife and two nervous kids waiting for him in his mansion in The Chase, and he was thinking that all was right with the universe when his truck phone rang.

The phone was linked through the Hummer’s OnStar system, so the call shut Lady Gaga up in mid-screech with a gentle bell-like tolling.

Deitz glanced at the caller ID on the Hummer’s LCD screen—
PHIL HOLLIMAN
—frowned, shook his head, and touched the
ANSWER
button on the steering wheel.

“You’re not supposed to use this number.”

“Had to. We got an issue.”

“I’m waiting.”

“You heard about the bank thing in Gracie?”

“How could I miss it? It’s everywhere. They know about it on the moon.”

“Yeah. Well. I heard from our guy.”

Deitz felt his belly go cold and take a slow roll to the left. Because the First Third in Gracie handled all the payroll and banking for Quantum Park, Deitz had a man inside the bank.

Deitz swallowed twice.

“Yeah?”

“Our guy in Gracie,” the voice said, with an edge.

“I got that part, Phil. What’d he say?”

“The guys—two of them—went through the vault, jamming shit in their bags. The Fargo truck had just dropped off all the cash for the ATMs in the sector, plus all the migrants working on the ADM farms, also the draw for Quantum Park.”

“Coincidence?”

“I doubt it. Shit like that is never luck.”

“So they got … what?”

A pause.

Giving Deitz bad news was best done over a phone. “Fuck of a lot of cash, mainly. They figure over two mill.”

“Mainly cash? What the fuck is
mainly
?”

A silence, during which Byron Deitz heard a sound in his skull like walnuts cracking. He was grinding his teeth, an irritating habit that drove his wife and family bats. He had no idea he was doing it, and often wondered where the hell that weird walnut-cracking sound was coming from.

“They got into some of the lockboxes—”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah. After they’re gone, there’s an inventory. Our guy can’t find the—”

“Don’t say another fucking thing.”

Silence while Phil Holliman, on the other end of the line, didn’t say another fucking thing.

“Okay,” said Deitz, focusing. “Is he sure?”

“Oh. I can talk now?”

Sarcasm.

Phil Holliman was like that, a sarcastic prick. With a nasty temper. But good at his job.

“Don’t be a dick.”

“The drawer is open but not totally cleaned out. Only thing they got was some bonds and … the … ahh, item.”

Deitz was watching the road uncoiling at him, a long black snake with a white streak down its back.

A skunk snake
, he was thinking. Just what he didn’t need right now.

“Fuck. We gotta
find
those fucking pukes.”

“Mind you, might be random,” said Phil. “Might be nothing to worry about. I figure it was the stainless-steel jewel case that caught their—”

“Random? Know what, Phil? I don’t believe in
random
. Why take the item at all? And when they open it and they see what’s inside it, with that Raytheon logo all over it, you think that’s going to make them say, hey, move on, nothing to see here. No. This is enemy action. We
move
on this. First thing you do, you get our guy in Gracie a box somewhere and take him apart. No way anybody knew the thing was
there unless he shot his fucking mouth off. I wanna know to who. Got that?”

“Does he get
out
of the box?”

“Up to you.”

“Be best if he did. Him not being around wouldn’t look too good. It would be, like, lousy optics.”

“Yeah. Okay. I got that. Maybe I’ll go see him myself. But you should drop by his place—tomorrow morning, early—throw one of your monkey-rangs and scare the living shit out of him. Tell him I’ll be by the bank at noon, for a chat. Tell him he better be in a talky mood.”

“Right there at the bank?”

“Why not? It was a Quantum Park payroll? I got every right to ask questions. Also, look into the Fargo guys, the drivers, see if they were talking too much, and if so, to who. Go up the ladder at Fargo and see who in management had the day off. Look for the one guy with a real good alibi, because that’ll sure as shit be the perp. If it was an inside job, other than somebody in the bank, Fargo is the best bet. Another thing, I hear some asshole laid his rig down up on the interstate, just before the robbery. Is that right?”

“Yeah. It was a full load of rebar, came off a Steiger Freightways flatbed. A rollover. Some of the rebar got rammed straight through a minivan, laid some heavy pipe right through a coupla old church ladies. Hey, probably the stiffest rods they ever got to ride their whole lives.”

Phil Holliman thought that was pretty funny, but it was totally wasted on Deitz.

“Thing like that,” said Deitz, oblivious, “it woulda tied up all the state guys, including their choppers, medevac, traffic management, right?”

“Yeah. That’s exactly what happened.”

“And then somebody hits the First Third?”

“Yeah. Are you thinking—”

“I am. Did the driver live?”

“Yeah. At least I think so.”

“Find out. Get his name. Find out where he is right now. Find a way to get to him. I’ll bet my left nut that puke knows something.”

“Yeah. Okay, I’ll do that. But the Feds are all over this. This is about dead cops. We start poking into it, they’ll wanna know why.”

“Like I said, they took a lot of money belonging to Quantum Park,
and that’s sure as shit
our
business. Anyway, that’s a risk we gotta take. The main thing, I don’t want this … item … out there, hanging over our heads. You listening?”

“The Feds won’t like it. Not smart to get them fired up. They’ll come sniffing.”

Deitz thought it over.

“Kavanaugh. Nick Kavanaugh. I’ll start there. Maybe I can get close enough to the case to get one move ahead. Meantime, you work the angles, get some money on the street. Anybody asks, say we’re showing solidarity with our fallen brothers. Trying to help, you follow? One way or another, we gotta find these pukes, burn them down to the bone, get the thing back.”

“Nick’s County. Dead cops. A national bank. That’s Fed. County won’t be near this case.”

“No. But State CID will and he’s in real tight with State CID. And the Feds, that Boonie Hackendorff guy, the Agent in Charge, they all love him in Cap City. Nick’s a war hero. He’ll hear stuff.”

“Maybe. But will he tell
you
?”

A good question.

Deitz thought this over.

So did Phil Holliman, who had locked horns with Nick Kavanaugh a while back and gotten a piece of himself snapped clean off.

“Yeah,” said Deitz, finally. “He’s family, isn’t he? My brother-in-law, remember? I married his wife’s sister?”

Holliman knew Beth, Deitz’s wife and Kate Kavanaugh’s older sister. Also the older sister to Kate’s brother, Reed, a pursuit cop for State who was colder than outer space and crazier than a wolverine on meth. Both men knew that Deitz was smacking Beth around on a pretty regular basis. Knowing Nick and Reed the way he did, in Nick’s case from bitter personal experience, Holliman figured someday soon Byron Deitz was going to open his front door and find two off-duty cops there and then Deitz’s lights would get duly punched out. But he said nothing.

What was the point?

A difficult silence followed.

Deitz knew what Phil wasn’t saying, but he didn’t give a damn about that. He was still a cop, no matter what that U.S. attorney said about it.

And cops were like family.

On the far end of the line Phil Holliman was thinking there was some irony in Deitz using a word like
family
considering the state of his own, but Deitz wasn’t a guy you could say was all loaded up with insight and awareness and all that shit.

So he just kept his mouth shut and listened to Deitz rant and rave.

“Anyway, whatever we’re doing, we got to do it fast. We got some serious Chinks flying in Saturday, to look at the
item
. And the window at … the source … closes on Monday night. It’s gotta be back in their inventory by then, or the black choppers will be flying up our ass. Go get this done.”

He snapped the call off, tried some deep breathing to calm himself. He could see the lights of Niceville coming on down in the valley, see the microwave masts blinking red on the top of the limestone bluffs that overlooked the town. This was
his
town and he had built himself a good life here and these pukes who took his fucking
item
were going to sincerely wish they hadn’t.

After giving up on all that transcendental horseshit, Merle came up with the much simpler alternative plan of passing out from the pain. This had its risks, such as shock and death, but Merle decided that being dead, while inconvenient in many ways, had the advantage of being painless.

He closed his eyes and rolled his head back and started to slip his cables, as the sailors like to say, when they mean to drift quietly out of the harbor without troubling to raise their anchors.

“You all right?” said a voice in his head, but not the nasty grating voice that was always criticizing and accusing him, a voice that, he had realized a long while back, belonged to his maternal grandmother, Murielle, who had always disapproved of him, and not entirely without reason.

Merle opened his eyes.

The dark was almost complete and the last of the golden temple light was leaving the forest. But he could see well enough to make out a shape standing in front of him, looking down at him.

Caught
, he said to himself, almost with relief.
Now I’ll get some medical attention. Anyway, technically, if you died during the getaway then you weren’t really getting away, were you?

Finding this argument persuasive, Merle forced himself to sit up, blinking at the silhouetted figure. As he moved, the pain sheeted through him with terrible intensity and he flinched a bit. The figure, slender, too slender for a cop, stepped quickly back and leveled what looked like a small-caliber rifle at him.

“What’s
wrong
with you?” said the voice, a woman’s voice, in a soft Virginian accent, wary but not actively hostile.

“I’ve been shot,” said Merle, trying to get his legs to work, trying to get the world to stop tilting crazily to the left. “In the back.”

“Who shot you?” asked the woman. “Federals?”

“No,” said Merle, realizing from the suspicious way she said
“Federals”
that whoever this woman was, she probably wasn’t with the cops.

“Not the Feds. A business partner.”

“Shot you in the back?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds like a bad partner.”

Merle tried for a smile.

“I’m leaning that way.”

She might have smiled back. It was too dark to tell, but there was a flash of white in her face.

“I heard you thrashing around in the valley. I thought you might be a hurt deer. Can you get up?” she asked in a flat, careful tone. She stepped back, holding the rifle steady, not aiming it right at him, but close enough.

“I think so.”

“You do it, then.”

Merle got a palm on the ground, which helped to stop the earth from turning over underneath him, turned to his right, got a knee braced, and managed to get to all fours.

He put a hand on the tree trunk, readied himself, and pushed himself upright, feeling the world spin and then slow. His jeans were soaked with blood and his boots squelched as he turned to face the woman with the rifle.

In the dying light he could see that she was shapely, with shoulder-length hair, some dark color, possibly black, wearing jeans and heavy boots, a plaid shirt. Her skin seemed to glow in the last of the twilight.

“Let me see the wound.”

Merle twisted, lifted his bloody shirt. She leaned down to peer at the black hole in his body, straightened up.

“Ugly. Don’t see an exit wound. If the slug’s in there, I guess it’ll have to come out. You got any cash money?”

Merle considered the irony of having committed a wild-ass daylight
bank robbery at gunpoint, escaping a statewide dragnet after being accessory to the assassination of four cops, in the process taking a bullet in the back from one of his own guys, only to end up being mugged like a patsy by a gypsy-looking girl-woman with what looked like a cap-and-ball squirrel gun about a hundred and fifty years old.
Life is an ever-unfolding panoply of marvels
, he was thinking.

“I have maybe two hundred dollars in my wallet. All I have. I doubt there’s an ATM around here.”

“Give it up,” she said, a hard note, but not threatening. Merle extracted his blood-soaked wallet, handed it over to her. She kept the muzzle centered on his belly as she snatched the wallet away. Merle, swaying, watched her think things over.

“You got a gun on you there. I see it sticking out. Hand that over too.”

He pulled his Taurus out of his belt, held it out to her. She took it, turned it in the dim light.

“What kind of a gun is this? Colt .45?”

“It’s a Taurus. A nine-millimeter.”

She frowned at it, and then shoved it into what looked like a canvas bag hanging from her shoulder.

“Can you walk?”

Merle gave it some thought, pushed himself free of the tree, did not immediately fall on his face.

“I think so.”

“I have a place up the valley. It’s about a quarter mile. Think you can walk that far?”

“I can. You really think you can deal with a bullet wound?”

She showed her teeth.

“I board horses, sir. Breed ’em too. I guess if I can pull a breech foal live out of a dead mare, I can see to your bullet holes.”

The thing seemed to be decided.

Somehow Merle covered the ground, a long, unsteady walk up a generally rising slope covered in those soft pine needles, weaving his way without the girl’s help through a towering stand of old pines and beeches and live oaks, putting one foot in front of another with the woman always a few feet behind him. He could feel the muzzle of her rifle zeroed on his back and was wondering if he was being helped or taken prisoner. Probably both. At this point, he didn’t give a damn.