Niceville (25 page)

“Icky junky poop?”

“I’m trying to be colorful.”

“Well, don’t.”

Coker’s phone rang, an old black number sitting behind him on a sideboard.

Coker leaned back, snagged it.

“Coker.”

Danziger could hear some sort of soft buzzing sound from the earpiece, a female voice. Coker’s expression changed as he listened to the caller.

“Hey Mavis … no, I’m good … sitting here having a glass with Charlie Danziger … yeah, I know, all over the news right now, I can see it—”

He set the phone aside, pointed at the television set, where the Live Eye Seven coverage of the standoff at Saint Innocent had gone national.

“Charlie, can you un-mute that?”

Danziger did, and the room was filled with the overheated breathless coverage of the Live Eye Seven field reporter, a plastic-coated blond chick with helmet hair who looked to be about fourteen.

“And as of this hour there seems to be no progress as Kevin David Dennison is refusing to answer the negotiator’s calls—”

Coker and Danziger watched the screen for a moment, and then Coker made a slicing move across his throat and Danziger hit the
MUTE
button. Coker was back on the phone, listening hard, making a few terse replies, suddenly all business.

“Okay. I got that. What about Marty’s guys? … Well then call Glynco and get a—what? Benning? Well, that’s fucked. No, I get it … no, I got no problem with it … how soon? Yeah … yeah … we got an okay from Mauldar to do this? On paper? Right. Good. Relax, Mavis, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I got the gear in the truck. Yeah. Good.”

Coker put the phone down, looked across at Danziger, cracked into a broad grin.

“That was Mavis Crossfire—”

“Yeah. You can see her in the background there, by the squad cars. She needs a police sniper, am I right?”

“Just in case.”

“What about Marty’s SWAT guys?”

“At Benning, in a competition.”

“Bad time to be drawing attention to your sniping skills, Coker.”

“What am I going to do, Charlie? Tell her I don’t feel like it?”

Coker stood up, killed the last of his JB, set the glass down, his mind already on the job.

“I gotta go change. You wanna come along on this job? Might be interesting.”

“And do what? Hold your dick? Fetch coffee and donuts? I’m not a cop anymore. I’m going to go do something about this bionic Frisbee here.”

“Like what?”

“Like fuck with Byron Deitz’s mind.”

“How?”

“We’re gonna get him to buy it back, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, first we gotta get him off balance.”

“You got any idea how?”

“I’m gonna dance him all around Tin Town, one damn place after another, Helpy Selfy, Piggly Wiggly, Winn-Dixie, Lowe’s, every second peeler bar. By the time I’m through jerking him around, he won’t know his ass from a tuna fish sandwich. Then we’ll do the deed.”

“Yeah? Still be more fun holding my dick.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?”

“Ask your mom.”

Byron Deitz, a guy with a limited emotional range, was finding his limitations sorely tested today as he sat in his yellow Hummer in the rain-misted parking lot of the First Third Bank in Gracie. He was staring out through the rainy ripples on the Hummer’s tinted window and waiting for a Mr. Thad Llewellyn, the Assistant Commercial Accounts Manager for the First Third Bank in Gracie, to come out and get in the truck and respond to a few simple fucking questions.

However, Llewellyn was not all that anxious to come out and respond to a few simple fucking questions from Byron Deitz.

Nor had he particularly savored his earlier interlude with Phil Holliman, Byron Deitz’s Second in Command, his Two IC, as Holliman called himself, which had taken place around daybreak on the front steps of Mr. and Mrs. Llewellyn’s rambling ranchero property in a shady glen a mile off Side Road 336, a few short miles south of Gracie, and generally—make that
formerly
—felt by the Llewellyn family—all two of them—to be a safe haven from the dizzying delights of Gracie’s social whirl, of which there weren’t any.

Sadly, this had not been the case at six this morning, when Mrs. Llewellyn—born Inge Bjornsdottir—had her hatha yoga session forcefully derailed by a hammering din on or about the front door, followed by the stumble-tumble sound of her husband coming down the hall stairs two at a time and shambling towards the front door with a look of utter panic on his pinched and birdlike features, his furry lambskin slippers slip-sliding on the polished parquet.

Mrs. Thad had listened, rapt and avid, to a short but memorable
exchange between Thad and the Unexpected Caller, from what she could see of him over her husband’s cringing figure, a monstrous black man in a charcoal suit not quite up to containing him.

The words were indecipherable to her, but the tone was pretty clear—malice and threats have their own unique cadences—and the interview ended with Thad having his own front door slammed in his face hard enough for the sidelight windows to rattle in their custom-built frames.

Inge oozed out into the hall in her sky blue one-piece yoga suit and her hot-pink bunny-eared slippers and the couple stood there staring at each other as the sound of a big sedan wheeling around in their circular drive and spraying pricey quartz gravel all over their Arts and Crafts front porch gradually faded into a pressure-filled silence.

“
Who
was that
awful
man?” Inge had asked, in tones of brass, while Thad stood in the front hall, drooping before her like an under-watered fern.

“His name was Phil Holliman, Inge,” Thad had replied, in a small scorched voice. “He works for Byron Deitz.”

“What did he want at this ungodly hour?”

Thad, who had not been totally frank with Mrs. Thad on the matter of the supplementary income which was allowing them to maintain this shady retreat, was at a bit of a loss how to reply.

Watching his eyes dart to and fro while his nose twitched and his lips quivered, Inge, no slouch herself when it came to calculations of self-interest and knowing her husband pretty well, had decided that what she didn’t know wasn’t going to get her indicted.

She harrumphed at him twice, her lips pursed, and then turned sharply around on her suffering bunnies and swept regally back into her yoga room, slamming the door behind her and leaving her husband to contemplate the finer points of domestic discord.

What that awful man had wanted at that ungodly hour, Thad was now trying to cope with, was that he should be ready to pop like a jack-in-the-box out of his cubicle at the First Third Bank in Gracie within a few heartbeats after he saw Byron Deitz’s yellow Hummer lurch into the bank’s parking lot.

This, according to Phil Holliman, would happen around noon this day.

And it had just now come to pass, exactly at noon, exactly as the unpleasant Mr. Holliman had predicted it would.

Not surprisingly, the sight of Deitz’s Hummer had nearly given the excitable banker a stroke of his own, and he took himself off to the bathroom to have a drink of water and pop a couple of what he called his Happy Caps as a way of girding his loins for the fray.

Deitz, sitting in the Hummer and grinding his molars in that way he had which filled his bony skull with those mysterious walnut-cracking noises he was always at a loss to explain, got another phone call on his OnStar system, which made him jump a yard and swallow his gum.

The call display read
BELFAIR CULLEN COUNTY CID
, so he punched
CALL ANSWER
and said, “Deitz here.”

“Byron, this is Tig Sutter.”

Jeez. Now what?

“LT, how are you, sir?”

“I’m good, Byron. I’m good. You got a minute?”

Deitz looked out the window as the glass doors of the First Third swung open and out popped the reedlike figure of Mr. Thad, holding a red umbrella over his head and scooting in pixie steps across the wet pavement towards the Hummer.

“About to go into a meeting, Tig, but anything I can do—”

“Nick was going to call you about this, but he’s sorta tied up on a Missing Persons case—”

Thad Llewellyn had reached the passenger door and was now standing outside, peering in through the tinted glass, blinking at him, looking mournful but resigned, and even a little bit dreamy-eyed.

Deitz reached out and popped the locks and Thad scooted inside, settling into the passenger seat with his back up against the door.

He nodded weakly at Deitz as Deitz held a finger up to his lips, letting Thad know that he was to remain silent until required to speak.

“Always happy to hear from you, LT. How is Nick?”

“He’s good,” said Tig, in a distracted tone. “Look, you following this hostage thing at Saint Innocent?”

Deitz, who had been following nothing but his own doom-laden lines of thought ever since yesterday evening, had to admit that he had no idea what Tig Sutter was talking about.

Tig laid it out for him, the anonymous e-mail accusing the custodian, Tig’s decision to wait for Maryland to get back to him, and then
the sudden explosion of publicity, the Live Eye Seven truck and the newspapers and the subsequent cluster-fuck now taking place on Peachtree.

Deitz listened, aware of Thad Llewellyn’s rapid breathing and smelling his minty-fresh cologne. He buzzed a window down while wondering where Tig was going. He was sensing an incoming request which he might just be able to exploit for reciprocal info on the bank job, so he was paying close attention.

Tig reached the end of the narrative, and there was a hesitant silence.

Deitz made the leap.

“You want this anonymous creep traced, Tig?”

“Well, that was where we were going. I mean, we could send it down to Cap City, but everybody down there is involved in what happened yesterday, and we just don’t have the technical resources—”

“Tig, we have a whole IT section at our disposal. I gotta brilliant guy, name of Andy Chu, he’s just sitting around on his butt playing Grand Theft Auto. I’d be happy to offer whatever help you need to follow this thing. Pro bono. of course. I admit we’re kinda caught up in doing whatever we can do to find out who pulled that bank job—”

“Well, that’s a federal thing now, Byron—”

“True, but a lot of the funds belonged to Quantum Park and as you know—”

“Yes, I do, that’s your client, and of course if your guys hear anything—”

“Cap City got any leads yet?”

“Like I said, CID’s not in on this. From where I’m sitting, they had insider info, so Boonie Hackendorff is looking at that, at the bank staff and the people at Wells Fargo. And it’s pretty obvious the shooter was a pro, and the likely weapon was a Barrett .50—”

“That ought to narrow the list, sir, you know, cross-check Barrett sales with military and professional shooters?”

“Yeah,” said Tig, with a sigh. “And that narrows it down to a couple of thousand people, even if we stick with the continental United States. And that’s not even counting private civilian shooters, some of whom are as good as any pro. Speaking of that, your guy Holliman is giving us a hell of a headache.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Well, from what I’m hearing, he spent most of last night going through Tin Town and the club district like General Sherman, putting people up against walls and raising holy hell with all our snitches and CIs. He’s back at it right now, down by the Pavilion—apparently it’s all about the robbery—which I totally get—like we said—but I gotta tell you, Byron, his methods really suck. Boonie Hackendorff is going to be calling you about him, and Marty Coors is ready to have State CID bust him on interfering with police, so maybe you’ll wanna jerk his chain some?”

“Jeez, Tig. I’m real sorry about that. I did tell him to get on the street and talk to people, but not like that. I’ll get him to back off, okay?”

“Yeah, well, that would be good. He’s getting people all stirred up and too scared to talk. Anyway, this is not why I called. You really think you can help us trace this e-mailer sleazebag?”

“You can confirm it was the same guy who contacted you who sent the e-mails to the press?”

“Yes. I mean, that’s the way it looks. We asked for the
Niceville Register
copy, and the one sent to Channel Seven, and the one sent direct to the church. They’re all identical. The one we got was sent last night around two in the morning. The other three went out this morning before ten.”

“Maybe the guy got impatient. Was looking for something to happen.”

“He got the reaction he wanted, in spades, once it got to the television guys. They contacted the church, the pastor was already looking at his copy of the e-mail—had just sent for Dennison, who was already in the building—they were talking about it, still pretty calm—and the news guys started showing up, Dennison freaked, and things went straight to shit. I want this asshole taken down, Byron. When can you get a guy here?”

“Don’t need to. Just forward everything you’ve got to—you got a pen?—okay, write this down
—techserve
—one word
—techserve at Securicom dot com slash AndyChu
. Got that?”

“Yeah,” said Tig, reading the address back. “And the name again? Andy …?”

“Andy Chu, only it’s one word,
AndyChu
, in the e-mail address. Okay?”

“Got it.”

“I’ll call Andy right away, give him a heads-up. Andy’s the best there is, could have something for you by the end of the day, maybe even sooner.”

“Thanks, Byron. I really appreciate this.”

“Happy to help. And you know, while I got you, if you think of it, anything you can let me know, how the investigation into the Gracie thing is going—you know, way off the record, cop to cop?—well, I’d take it as a professional kindness. My clients are pretty spooked and I’d like to be able to reassure them. So far, it’s just the money, right? Nothing else you’re hearing about?”

There was a silence, during which Mr. Thad secretly swallowed his third Happy Cap of the day and Byron ground his molars some more, thinking that he had pushed this too far.

“Don’t know what else there could be, Byron. It was a straightforward bank job. Why, has one of your companies reported anything missing?”