Niceville (24 page)

He walked over and stood in front of the doors, looking through the glass, and was about to reach for the gilt handle to open them when he felt something grating under his foot.

He looked down and saw a small lump of what at first looked like
red coal, jagged and misshapen, about the size of a thimble. He picked it up and turned it in his hand. It was blood-warm, almost hot, and it wasn’t coal.

He knelt down and ran his hand over the floorboards, which were also blood-warm, for some odd reason. Maybe a hot-water pipe ran under the doorway here?

He felt another tiny lump under his searching palm, and picked that up as well, a star-shaped fragment with rough, twisted edges, as if it had at one point been ripped from something much larger, and by a powerful explosive force. To his military mind these lumps looked exactly like shrapnel.

He stood up, pocketing the metal fragments, and looked more carefully around in the doorway. The varnish on the flooring near here was marked, discolored, almost as if it had been scraped or burned away. Whatever it was, the discoloration ran under the closed doors.

He opened both doors wide.

The dining room was neat, spacious, and elegant, the tall lyre-backed chairs lined up in close-order drill, the huge expanse of inlaid wood shining like topaz, reflecting the brilliance of the crystal chandelier above it.

The corroded stain—the burned-out mark—whatever the hell it was—ran for another three feet into the dining room, as if whatever had been spilled here—something strong enough to eat away at layers upon layers of very old varnish—had run out across the flooring and then had been left there long enough to ruin the finish.

This did not fit with the rest of the house, which was beautifully cared for. He stood there, looking down at the stain, and it came to him that the mark, the burn, whatever, was roughly in the shape of a human figure. The head was lying in the bandbox room, the waist across the threshold, and the legs stretching out into the dining room.

Not a small figure either, from the size of the mark, a tall person, six feet at least. He got the impression that the figure—if it had been a man—had been lying on his back with his legs bent over to one side, as if something heavy was lying on top of him, pressing him into the floor.

Well, this was ridiculous.

It is a
stain
, Nick.

A mark. There was no blood, no heel marks to suggest a struggle, no signs of violence at all.

He knelt down again, and touched the floor in the middle of the stain. It
was
definitely warm, several degrees warmer than the surrounding floor.

Check for a hot-water pipe
, he thought,
under the boards
. He rubbed at the surface, feeling the raw grain of the old wood. The varnish had been taken off right down to the wood. In the shape of a man. He lifted his fingertip and smelled the residue on his skin. A sharp scorched smell, like burned cloth, and underneath that a bitter coppery reek.

What in the hell happened here?

His radio beeped, and then Beau’s voice, crackling with static, a tight hoarse whisper.

“Nick, where are you?”

“In the living room. Where are you?”

“I’m in the basement.”

“What are you doing down there?”

“Up until a minute ago, I was tracing the camera cable. There’s something down here, I don’t know what it is, but, Nick, you got to see it.”

The robot Frisbee with the Raytheon GNS logo sat in a blue-velvet-lined cutaway inside its stainless-steel casket on the dining room table between Coker and Danziger, bathed in a circle of hot white light from a halogen desk lamp that Coker had brought in from his office.

A bottle of Jim Beam was set at Coker’s right elbow, and a glass, fruity juice-glass-type thing with oranges and grapes all over it, sat at each man’s right hand. In the background some smoky music was playing, Jerry Goldsmith’s trumpet solo from the
Chinatown
movie.

Coker sucked the last hit off his cigarette, stubbed it out in an ashtray that looked like a NASCAR racing slick, sat back in the chair, making it groan like a rusted gate, and considered Danziger’s complexion as Charlie inhaled another drag of his own cigarette.

“You
do
recall you got a bullet hole in that lung you’re choking up right now?”

Danziger gave him a squint-eyed look through his personal fogbank.

“I’m not using
that
one. I’m redirecting.”

“Redirecting what? Like into the other lung?”

“Yep.”

“You die, Charlie, I get to keep it all.”

“What about Merle Zane? He call back?”

Coker shook his head, wondering about that.

“I got three calls in about ten minutes. Each time it was his cell number on the display, each time I picked up the call, and all I’m hearing is some sort of hissing, scratching sound, like steam or maybe like
leaves or grass being blown around. I’m thinking, maybe some kind of animal, even. Like a raccoon or a possum? I wait for Merle to say something, but nothing comes, the hissing and scratching goes on for about fifteen maybe twenty seconds, and then the call cuts off.”

“You phone him back?”

“After the third call. The cell rings a couple of times, and then his voice mail picks up—”

“You leave a message?”

“I said we wanted to meet, straight across, repair the situation, make it right, and all he had to do was name a place.”

“And he never called back?”

Coker shook his head, going inside himself for a moment, trying to figure out Zane’s game, gave it up for insufficient data.

“No, he didn’t. So now I’m giving the Merle Zane matter some additional thought. I come up with anything brilliant, I will let you know.”

Coker leaned forward, tapped the steel box.

“Now. About this cosmic-gizmo-Frisbee that lies before us … you got any suggestions?”

Danziger was quiet for a while.

In a corner of the room Coker’s big flat-screen Samsung television, muted, was showing cop cars clustered randomly around a large redbrick building next to an Art Deco church, and a female broadcaster with helmet hair was talking into the camera in the foreground.

There was a crawl along the bottom of the screen reading:
STANDOFF AT SAINT INNOCENT ORTHODOX CUSTODIAN TAKES TWO HOSTAGES THREATENS SUICIDE POLICE NEGOTIATING
 …

“I got a question, first,” said Danziger finally, taking a sip of his JB, wincing as he choked it down. He hated Jim Beam but in this part of the state it was what got drunk if you were drinking with cops. When he was alone he drank Italian Pinot Grigio so cold it hurt his teeth, but he wouldn’t want that to get out and around.

“Shoot,” said Coker.

“What was this thing doing in a lockbox at the First Third in Gracie?”

“That’s easy,” said Coker. “Waiting for you to come along and get us rat-fucked.”

“Yeah, well, aside from that.”

Coker gave it some consideration.

“Off the top of my head, I’d say there was no good reason at all for it to be sitting there. If it really is some sorta high-tech classified shit, then it would be in a lockdown at the Raytheon HQ in … where the fuck?”

“Waltham. That’s in Massachusetts.”

“Or in whatever the fuck subsidiary in Quantum Park is doing R and D for Raytheon.”

“Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Do you know what
is
the Raytheon subsidiary in Quantum Park?”

“Looked it up. Company called Slipstream Dynamics.”

“Slipstream Dynamics? Okay, so you figure Slipstream Dynamics might have a problem with one of their super-secret Frisbees lying around in a lockbox at the First Third Bank in Gracie?”

A slow incline of Danziger’s head as he glared down at the thing.

“When you were rooting around in the vault, did you happen to notice whose lockbox it was?”

“No,” said Danziger. “They never have names. Only numbers.”

“So you just picked it …”

“Because it was there.”

“So … if it wasn’t
supposed
to be there …?”

“Then this would also explain why nobody on the news has said anything about some high-tech gizmo being stolen from the First Third in the first place, which means that whoever was keeping it there was doing something the good folks at Raytheon probably would not …”

“Smile upon?”

“Yeah.”

Coker worked that out. Danziger watched him do it. Watching Coker think was always interesting.

“You’re thinking, maybe they’d like it back?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

Coker was quiet for a time, so Danziger poured them both some more Jim Beam and lit himself another one of Coker’s Camels, thought briefly about giving up smoking, at least until his right lung healed, rejected that idea, and sat back with a contented sigh to watch Coker think some more.

“Risky,” was what Coker finally said.

Danziger nodded.

“So’s killing cops for money. How much did we get, by the way?”

Coker waved, absently, in the direction of the kitchen counter, where thirty-nine neat stacks of bundled bills were lined up with OCD-level precision next to a smaller heap of rings, jewels, and negotiable bonds taken from the various lockboxes that Danziger and Merle Zane had found the time to pry open after they’d loaded up the currency.

“Comes to two million one hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars, plus the miscellaneous shit.”

Danziger was visibly shocked.

“Man. I knew it was a shitload.”

“Bank is saying they lost two point five.”

“They always do that in a robbery.”

“Well, we got two mil one sixty-three plus the miscellaneous shit. How come you don’t look happy?”

“It’s too much money, Coker. That much money, people go nuts looking for it. It’s too much.”

“Whaddya wanna do? Give some back?”

Danziger looked like he was thinking about it.

“I guess not. But we gotta keep our heads.”

“Mine’s fine. Hell of a take, Charlie.”

“Yes it is. And the Frisbee,” said Danziger, privately dividing two mil one sixty-three plus the miscellaneous shit by one and liking the result.

“Yeah. And the Frisbee. You’re thinking we ransom this sucker back at ’em? Who would we talk to about that?”

“Probably Byron Deitz. He’s the head of security for the whole place.”

“And you’re saying that Deitz is already sniffing around this thing. Boonie say why?”

“Deitz is saying he just wants to help. Brotherhood of the badge and all that shit. And also part of the Quantum Park cash draw is sitting in there on your kitchen counter, so he’s saying that a professional obligation is involved.”

“Deitz doesn’t give a rusty fuck about anything other than Byron
Deitz. Boonie and the Feebs aren’t going to let a mutt like him stomp all over their investigation. Nor is Marty Coors. I wouldn’t either. You say Deitz is asking about Lyle Crowder?”

“That he is,” said Danziger.

“That I don’t like. What’s our exposure with Lyle?”

Danziger shrugged.

“Even if he rolls, which I don’t think he will, because he’s looking at death for being an accessory, now that he’s killed two old ladies, and anyway nobody around here will let him plea-bargain while he’s standing on the graves of four dead cops, and besides he doesn’t know who we are.”

He took a sip, puffed at his cigarette, ran a hand through his hair, making a bristly burring sound, his eyes on the middle distance.

“No. I mean, all he can say is he got a fat FedEx envelope with five thousand dollars in fifties in it and a note saying what he had to do to get another five thousand, which was to fuck up traffic big time on the interstate at a certain point in time. From what he said to me, I figure Boonie’s almost all the way convinced the kid is clean. That’s fine with me. We just leave it be. We don’t want to change Boonie’s mind about any of that. Anyway, killing Crowder will just convince Boonie that he’s closer to the guys who did the bank than he thought he was. He’ll go back over everything Crowder ever did. They’ll find out he got a FedEx delivery, start tracing it backwards.”

“Won’t lead to us, will it? You used gloves when you packed it, gave a phony address?”

“Yeah. But killing the guy, it’s just one of those tricky things that people do in robberies, the one-step-too-far that ends up getting them fucked. Look what happened with Merle. Tried to shoot him, and now he’s out there somewhere doing God only knows. We simply paid him off, he’s back home with the Bardashi boys happy as a rabbit in rhubarb. We try for Lyle, maybe one of his guards gets in the line of fire? Or we only wing him and now he knows his only chance is to come clean with the Feds. Nope. When in doubt, sit tight. When there’s nothing to be done, do nothing. You follow?”

Coker, after some thought, nodded.

“Works for me, if you say so. What you wanna do about the proceeds?”

“Best thing there is to stick to the plan, leave it alone for a year or
so, then piece it out careful-like, not doing anything too showy. Which reminds me, what’d you do with the Barrett?”

“Switched out the barrel and the firing pin. Cleaned it up and now it’s back in storage, at the depot, where it belongs. Threw the old barrel into Crater Sink. It sleeps with the fishes.”

“You’ll find no fishes in that black hole, my friend. Place gives me the willies, always has. What about the Python you used to mop up the dead?”

“Also sleeps with the fishes.”

“And my shit-box Chevy?”

“Drove it to Tin Town and left it on Bauxite, next to the needle exchange. Left the keys in. Waited around. It was gone in fifteen minutes.”

“Damn, Coker. Had my blood in it.”

“So what? Don’t mean a thing unless they want the DNA. DNA doesn’t have a microscopic label saying ‘I belong to Charlie Danziger.’ Anyway, by the time those hypes get through with it, your blood’ll be underneath sixteen layers of icky junkie poop. No crime scene guy in the world is going to get inta that vehicle. It’ll be FIDO by the time the NPD even notices it.”

“Fuck It Drive On.”

“Yep.”

Charlie shook his head, smiling at Coker.