Niceville (20 page)

Merle, not being a huge fan of that particular president either, didn’t disagree with her. But since he was an accessory to the murder of four cops he didn’t feel that a detailed discussion of service to country
and how it had affected her family was a subject he should get into. Her next question drove it off his list entirely.

“Are you a man of violence, Mr. Zane?”

Merle was going to say no, since he had never thought of himself that way, but given the events of the past couple of days, and what it had been necessary to do to survive Angola, he felt he needed to think about that again. Mrs. Ruelle watched him do it, patient, contained, seeming to have no particular expectations.

“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t intend to go that way, but I guess that’s where I am.”

“You had a pistol with you. From what you told me, you stood your ground while another man was shooting at you. With one bullet in you already and a grazing wound on your shoulder.”

“Things happened fast. I did what I had to. I can’t say I shot well, since I emptied my gun and I think I only hit him once.”

She frowned and made a dismissive gesture.

“Not the point. That happens to everyone, even in a disorderly mêlée such as yours. Even in a formal duel, attended by seconds, it happens. John Gwinnett Mercer, my grandfather, exchanged seven pistol balls with London Teague in an encounter having to do with the untimely passing of London’s third wife, Anora Mercer. Anora was John’s godchild, and held in high regard by all who knew her, so I am told. I do not like to retail private family matters, but it is true that the Teague family and our line, the Mercers and the Ruelles, have had a very long-standing enmity, going back many generations, all the way back to Ireland. The Teagues conspired with Major Sirr during the Irish rising in 1798. This has never been forgotten, although the Teagues have given many new offenses since then.”

Here she broke off again, and studied Merle’s face in silence for a time, as if trying to come to a decision about him.

“Well, about that fight, London and my grandfather came to their stand at Johnny Mullryne’s plantation in Savannah, pistols being the weapons, since London, being challenged, had the selection. The New Irish Code requires that, once leveled, the pistols must be discharged within three seconds, aiming longer than that being considered unworthy of a gentleman. You must also remember that these old smoothbore pistols were not accurate weapons, which in a way explains the way the fight went.”

She stopped here, took a sip of her cider, shaking her head, as if grimly amused. Merle, caught up in the story, sat motionless.

She went on.

“Seven rounds were exchanged this way, at twenty yards, a very drawn-out affair for a pistol duel, since after each exchange of fire the seconds are required to step in and urge the gentlemen to concede that honor has been served …”

She paused here, smiled at him, went on.

“But oh no. Not them. Not
those
two. So on and on it went.”

She stopped again here, and went away somewhere, and Merle had the absurd feeling that she was remembering a fight she had seen herself. In a moment, she came back.

“Well, both men lived, although John was scored by a ball along his cheek that blinded his eye and he got another in his thigh and London received a ball in the left hip—his leg withered all that winter and he never walked again. By the Irish rules, honor had been fully satisfied with such serious wounds, and the seconds should have ended the matter right there.”

She sighed, ran a hand through her shiny black hair, and sat back, giving him a long look over the rim of her cider glass, a cool sea green appraisal.

“Well, I can go on, can’t I? I do apologize. On the subject of the Teague family, I am afraid I can be a bit of a bore. As I said, there is a long and bitter history between our families, as this old story shows. It came down through the decades, and it lives on with us today, all these years later, while the modern world spins all around us like a top, and we Ruelles stand unmoving, a fixed point, stuck in the past. So. Enough of this. My point is, Mr. Zane, you stood your ground.”

Merle, stung by her compliment, feeling unworthy of it, had a sudden urge to come clean with her.

“You have a radio on, Glynis. I can hear it. You
must
have heard what happened in Gracie yesterday. You have a phone too, I think.”

“Yes. I have one. I don’t like the telephone very much. The bell is disconnected. If I want to call out, I do. I don’t like the idea that somebody can ring a bell in my home anytime they like and expect me to come running and answer it. I do get the news from the radio, but it’s all about the wars and buildings falling down and hurricanes in the
Gulf and how the economy is going bust again and what some celebrity whore is doing for the holidays. You do have the air of a man on the run, Mr. Zane. Did you kill someone for money?”

He was going to give her a complicated reply, but something about her made that seem a low and greasy thing to do, so he just said, “Yes, I did.”

“I see. Who’d you kill?”

“Police officers.”

Her face hardened.

“Federal men?”

“No. State policemen.”

“Over the money?”

“Yes.”

“A bank?”

“Yes.”

“The one in Sallytown?”

“No. The First Third in Gracie.”

“I don’t know that bank. Is it national?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“So it’s a federal matter. Where’s the money now?”

“The man who shot me has it.”

“Are the federals after you?”

“Yes. I think there’s probably a reward, if you call them.”

She seemed to be puzzled by the suggestion.

“Call who? The
federals
? The federals killed my husband with their stupid war. The federals can all go to hell. And I have no sympathy for bankers. Are you going to try to get the money back from this man who shot you?”

Merle looked at his hands, and then leaned back into the chair, tensing as he put weight on his wound, and then easing himself into it.

“Yes,” he said, deciding right then. “I am. But not right now. They have no way to spend it. The idea was to keep it hidden for a couple of years. I know who they are. I have time.”

“Good. I like a man with patience. In the meantime, you need a safe place. There is a lot of work to do here. If I help you, will you help me?”

He studied her delicate but uncompromising features, the lines
around her eyes, the forceful set of what was quite a lovely mouth. She stared back at him, her gaze level and unwavering, waiting with a stillness he admired,

She had what his mother used to call Chinese Silence.

“Yes,” he said. “I will.”

This seemed to seal some kind of pact.

She smiled at him, and for a few seconds he felt a cold ripple come up from the floor, and then it was gone, and she was touching his hand with her warm, dry fingertips and looking at him in a direct unblinking way that felt like a silent interrogation and there was something sensual humming in the coffee-and-cider-scented air between them.

“Then I’ll do what I can to help you. I won’t call the federals and I don’t want any of their blood money. But there is something, Merle, something that I would like you to do for me. I would try to do it myself, but there are some things I cannot do, and I find this is one of them. I would try again, perhaps to fail again. I hesitate to ask such a thing of you …”

“Just name it, Glynis. Whatever it is.”

“Thank you. I need you to kill someone.”

Boonie Hackendorff and Charlie Danziger belonged to the same National Guard unit and so the first few minutes in Hackendorff’s FBI offices on the sixty-second floor of the Bucky Cullen Federal Complex in downtown Cap City were spent in going over the chances of either of them being called up to go fight the Ayatollahs of Iran anytime soon.

The final verdict came down somewhere between slim and damn slim. In celebration, Hackendorff poured Danziger a couple of fingers of Jim Beam and leaned back in his old leather chair, propping his size twelve boots on his desk.

The shining spires and glass towers and castellated condos of downtown Cap City spread out behind him beyond a wall of tinted windows, all the city lights turned on against the gloom and mist of a dark and rainy afternoon. The Feebs did themselves proud in Cap City, with a big suite of corner offices in the best complex in town.

Danziger stared out at the city lights for a second, thinking about what he was going to say, and then he considered Boonie, who was grinning back at him through one of those damned ugly sharp-trimmed full-face beards that big round guys like Boonie Hackendorff delude themselves into thinking give their faces an actual jawline.

They were wrong, but that didn’t mean Boonie Hackendorff was any kind of a fool. He watched with a thinned-out smile and suddenly narrowed eyes as Danziger eased himself into a more amiable position on the stuffed couch across the room, lifted the glass in answer to Boonie’s salute, and they each pulled a good bit of it down. Glancing at
his boots, Danziger saw the spatters of his own blood on the blue leather and hoped that Boonie was far enough away to miss that detail.

“What’s that on your boots, Charlie?”

Danziger shook his head sadly, looking down at the boots again.

“Blood,” he said. “My blood. I stabbed myself cutting chum.”

“Stabbed yourself? Where?”

Charlie tapped his chest, right on top of the bullet wound.

“I was using a filleting knife. Slipped and stuck myself right here in the tit. Bled like a bitch. Still hurts like stink.”

Boonie started to snicker, and ended up laughing so hard he had tears in his eyes. He was enjoying himself so much that even Charlie started to smile, if only because when Boonie laughed it was oddly contagious.

“You dumb-ass old bastard. I never heard of such a thing.”

“Fuck that noise,” said Danziger. “You hooked your own self in the ass two years ago, when you and me and Marty were fly-fishing up on the Snake.”

“My ass is a hell of a lot bigger than your tit, Charlie. It was hard to avoid. You always wear cowboy boots while you’re fishing?”

“Boonie, I wear cowboy boots while I’m fucking. I plan to die in cowboy boots. While fucking.”

Boonie nodded, looked at his own boots.

“I would too, if I could get anybody to fuck me. You’re moving funny too. That because you stabbed your own tit?”

“Damn right,” said Danziger. “Chest muscle hurt so much I could only use my left arm, so I was rowing around in fucking circles, fucking rowed that damn pirogue against the wind for two hours.”

“Doesn’t the thing have a motor?”

“Plugs fouled. I nearly jerked my left arm off trying to pull-start it, had to give it up, and then I one-arm-rowed that slug bucket five miles to the fucking dock. I’m thinking of giving up fishing entirely. Too fucking dangerous.”

“Catch anything?”

“Crabs.”

“You already got those.”

“Old joke, Boonie.”

“Yes, it is. I find they’re the best.”

“How you doing with this Gracie thing?”

Boonie patted his shirt for the cigarettes he didn’t smoke anymore, winced the way he always winced when he remembered that he didn’t smoke them anymore.

“I was hoping you could help us out there, Charlie.”

Danziger smiled back at him through his big white handlebar mustache, showing tobacco-yellow teeth.

“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it was an inside job.”

“Hard not to,” said Boonie.

“No, it ain’t. I think so too.”

He leaned back, groaned a bit from the pain, and pulled out a USB flash drive from an inside pocket of the suede jacket he had borrowed from Donny Falcone, handed it across to Boonie.

“I downloaded this from our Personnel office. It’s a complete list of every employee we got who was in a position to have any knowledge of what was on that route truck, or who was going to be driving. Basically, everybody who could have ratted us out.”

Boonie twirled the drive in his fat pink hands.

“Thanks, Charlie. We usually have to subpoena this kinda shit.”

Danziger made a hard face, sighing heavily.

“Not from me, Boonie. Four cops dead. Fuck due process. If any of my guys had anything to do with this, I’ll bring the shotgun and you bring the shovel and we can bury what’s left.”

“Your name on this list?”

“Hell yes. I’m a suspect too. I get that. You gotta look at everybody, Boonie, be a fool not to.”

“You not nervous?”

Danziger tried to shrug, decided against it, lifted his big hands instead.

“You’re a good cop, Boonie, in spite of being a lousy flycaster. I figure I can trust you to catch the right guys. You always do, I ’collect. Is there anything else I can do to help this thing along?”

Boonie thought about it.

“You ever hear of a guy named Lyle Crowder?”

“Yeah. He was the driver of that rollover on the interstate. Dumb fuck. I hope he’s hurting.”

Boonie was quiet for a while.

Danziger let him be quiet. His chest was throbbing and he needed to take an OxyContin. And sleep for a week. Boonie looked up again, sighed.

“We got him under a suicide watch, actually.”

Danziger blinked at that.

“Suicide watch?”

“Yeah. He feels pretty bad about it. Those dead ladies. He’s, I mean, like … 
despondent
? Is that the word?”

“Sounds about right.”

“He’s also heard, dumb guards told him, the dinks, that the families of the ladies in that van, they’re all talking ugly stuff, what they’re going to do to him, he ever gets out.”

“Remorse is a terrible burden. Or so I’m told. Never tried it myself. Are you going to charge him?”

“Don’t know yet. Witnesses all saw something different. We’re looking at the truck to see if anything mechanical went wrong. Crowder says a blue Toyota cut him off on the downgrade, says he overcorrected, the flatbed started to come around, he turned into that, caught the shoulder—and it all went to shit. He’s banged up pretty bad, ribs and hips, but he’ll pull through.”