Niceville (26 page)

Shit
, thought Deitz.
Guy’s much too quick. Just shut the fuck up, will you?

“No. Nothing like that. Just trying to narrow the field, see if there was anything that stood out.”

“Well, now you know what I know. I hear anything, I’ll give you a call. And I’ll get that e-mail stuff to you right away.”

Tig clicked off, and for a moment the two of them—Thad and Deitz—sat there listening to the rain pattering on the roof and to each other breathing. Deitz suppressed the urge to call Phil Holliman right then, and turned to the banker.

“Okay, Thad, we gotta—holy shit, you okay? You look kinda fuzzy.”

Mr. Thad, now almost completely zoned out on his Happy Caps, a few minutes away from being totally blotto and feeling quite serenely invincible, gave Deitz a Buddha-like smile.

“You, my Byronic friend, my … my Byronic Man … are far too intense.”

Thad blinked in slow motion, giving Deitz a slow and clinical once-over.

“Look right there,” he said, pointing languidly. “A vein is popping out on your forehead. Your complexion is dangerously flushed. You need to relax, Byron, you really do. Would you like one of my Happy
Caps? They are bliss in a bottle, Byron my boy. Bliss in a bottle. Try one?”

Thad held out his bottle, his loving spirit rising to the moment, the Brotherhood of Man welling up in his drug-saturated soul.

Deitz blinked down at the bottle, read the label—
ATIVAN
—and then looked over at Thad.

“Shit. How many of these have you had?”

“I,” said Thad, giving the matter some thought, blinking back at Deitz. “I may have had three. Yes. Three it is.”

Deitz reached over, plucked the bottle out of Thad’s palm, held it up—it was half full of little beige nuggets—frowned censoriously at Thad—Deitz disapproved of drugs, particularly when used by other people to blunt the Byron Dietz effect. He tossed the pill bottle into the cup holder on the seat divider.

Stared at it for a moment.

A kind of Zen pause here.

Then he backhanded Thad across the right cheek so hard Thad’s head bounced off the passenger window with a musical
bonk
. The pink clouds in Mr. Thad’s mind parted briefly and a bolt of clarity pierced the rosy mist.

Deitz saw his opening.

“Just one fucking question, Thad. Did you tip anybody off to what was in my lockbox?”

Thad put a hand up and touched the red mark on his cheekbone.

“No. How could I? I didn’t know what was
in
the lockbox. You only told me to keep an eye on it. You never said what was in it. Why? What was it?”

Deitz chewed that thought for a while. Thad was right. He’d never told the banker what was in the box. Why the hell would he?

“None of your fucking business. The guys who did the bank, any idea who they were?”

Thad labored to bring his mind to bear upon this question.

“No. There was nothing … two white men, both with those masks on … one large, with blue eyes, and another, dark eyes and … and …”

His voice trailed off and Deitz reached out, pinched the man’s nose between his index finger and his thumb, twisted it hard, and let it go, wiping the blood off on Mr. Thad’s shirt. Then he took him by the throat and started squeezing.

“Give me something to go on,” he said in a grating snarl, his eyes slitted almost shut and his look inhuman, a hot glare his family knew pretty well. “Or I’ll snap your fucking neck right here.”

Thad, tears of pain on his cheeks, eyes welling up, a trickle of blood running from his red-tipped nose, stared back at Byron Deitz with the totally absent look of a man with less than three brain cells still firing. He could no longer feel his toes and a warm numbness was creeping up his torso.

Deitz shook him like a rag mop, but even Deitz could see that the banker had left the building.

The guy blinked a few times, and then his lids closed and his head fell forward, held up only by Deitz’s rigid forearm. After a long silence, and in a dreamy murmur, Mr. Thad said, quite distinctly, “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius.”

Deitz grunted in disgust, let go of his throat, and Thad commenced to pour himself down into the passenger footwell.

“Boots,” he muttered, a moment later, from the depths of the footwell. “The big man wore navy blue cowboy boots. I have never seen navy blue cowboy boots …”

His voice receded into a sighing whisper. The rest was silence, broken only by the sound of one man seething.

Boots?
thought Deitz, picking Thad’s pill bottle up again and, almost absentmindedly, turning it in his hands.

Beth, his unsatisfactory wife, was always popping Ativans to counter the Deitz Effect. Her Ativans were sort of squared-off little white pills with a T-shaped notch pressed into the top. These looked different, like little beige nuggets, but what the hell. Maybe he could use one himself.

He was sure as hell stressed out enough.

He held the bottle in his thick fingers, listening to Thad Llewellyn wheezing away in the footwell. Obviously the little banker could not handle his meds at all. He sighed, felt a moment of pity for himself, for all the ways in which people in his life were disappointing him. He threw the pill bottle back into the cup holder and started up the truck.

What Deitz was unaware of, wheeling out of the parking lot with an unconscious banker in his passenger seat footwell, was that “the meds” the little banker was currently failing to handle well were not
lorazepam
, the chemical term for Ativan, but a substance known to
chemists as
3,4-methylene-dioxy-methamphetamine
and to overstressed bankers wheezing in footwells as Happy Caps. Its more general name in the wider world of recreational drugs was ecstasy.

In the meantime, round and round again, inside his head, to the accompaniment of that mysterious walnut-cracking sound, ran the little mantra:

Blue cowboy boots?

The Blue Bird school bus—painted, a long time back, a bright robin’s egg blue—wheezed into the Button Gwinnett Memorial Regional Bus Depot station in downtown Niceville, coming to a stop under the platform’s tin roof in a squeal of bad brakes.

The driver, an elderly but military-looking black man with yellow eyes and snow white hair, turned to smile a gold-toothed smile at the passengers, about two dozen roughly dressed leathery-looking workingmen of varying ages and races, who had either been on the bus when it pulled up to the gates of the Ruelle Plantation or had climbed on at Sallytown or Mount Gilead or had just flagged the bus down from the side of the road at various places along the rural routes to Niceville.

“Niceville, gentlemen,” he said, standing up and addressing the crowd in a practiced manner. “End of the line. Gathering is at eleven this evening, here at the dock, for those of you going back up the line. Most of the seats are taken, got us a full load, so you be sure to get your return ticket punched on the way out, otherwise you might not get a seat. It’s a long weary walk in the dark and many folk get themselves lost. God bless and you all have yourself a fine time in Niceville.”

Merle, his back aching and his wound throbbing from five hours of pounding along backcountry roads, got slowly to his feet and picked up his bag, the old Army kit bag that Glynis Ruelle had loaned him. He shuffled slowly down the aisle, following the other men, his boots clanking on the tin floorboards.

Inside the kit bag was a change of clothes, and a 1911 .45-caliber
Colt Commander, loaded, along with two spare magazines. Glynis Ruelle could find no ammunition for his 9 mm Taurus, but she had several boxes of .45 rounds for the Colt.

The weight of the bag hanging from his shoulders was comforting, since he was now back in Charlie Danziger’s home territory.

There had been heavy rain downstate, but the sky was clearing as he stepped off the bus. When his foot hit the wooden boards of the bus station platform, he could feel the powerful flow of the Tulip River on the other side of the station, now at full flood after all the rain.

The bus station reeked of damp and mold, of cigarettes and cigars and rotting garbage. Beyond the station doors, Niceville crowded around, a decaying old-fashioned city netted over with a black tangle of telephone and power lines.

It looked like a random city, full of narrow lanes, needle-tipped church towers spiking above the ragged rooflines, wrought-iron filigreed galleries held up by ornate cast-iron pillars creating shaded cloisters under them that ran for blocks along the street level.

The quality of the light as the clouds melted away was hazy and luminous, making Niceville look like a calendar shot of prewar America. The humid warmth of spring gave the whole town the earthy aroma of a freshly dug grave.

Maybe it was just that he was spooked and bone-weary and ramped up on fear and painkillers, but to Merle it felt like Niceville had some kind of strange vibe going on, like there was some power running through it, or behind it, or under it, like a live wire, or an underground river, and this
power
wasn’t a kindly one. Whatever it was, it didn’t like people. There was something just plain
wrong
with Niceville, Merle thought, and that was all he could say about it. He’d be glad to get the hell out, once this was all over.

Whatever
this
was.

While he stood there all the Blue Bird riders drifted off, going their separate ways, no two together. There had been no talk between the riders during the bus trip.

The man sitting next to Merle, a tall skinny white-haired old man with a forlorn look, wearing beige slacks and a plaid shirt, had spent the whole trip staring out the window, his thin blue lips working soundlessly and a puzzled look in his eyes.

Merle asked him his name, but the old man just turned to blink
slowly at Merle, as if trying to make him disappear, and then went back to watching the fields and towns tick by, radiating a deep sadness.

A Niceville PD patrol car rolled slowly past, two cops inside, neither of them showing any interest, either in Merle or in much else.

This made him feel easier. If there was a description of him floating around, he obviously didn’t match it. After the patrol car turned a corner, Merle moved out into the streets, heading into the town square towards City Hall, unmistakable with that huge round dome.

The redbrick pile next to it would be the library, just where Glynis Ruelle had said it was going to be. Lady Grace Hospital, according to Glynis, was on the far side of the library, about a block along a street called Forsythia.

The rest is up to you
, Glynis had said.

He touched the back pocket of his jeans, where there was a wallet that Glynis had given him, stuffed with cash, as well as a driver’s license with a black-and-white picture that could actually have been any middle-aged white male without a beard, identifying Merle as John Hardin Ruelle, address Ruelle Plantation, 2950 Belfair Pike Road, Cullen County Side Road 336.

He shouldered the bag, moved out into the crowds, who paid him no mind at all, heading in the direction of Lady Grace. A navy blue and bright gold streetcar rumbled past him, shiny as a kid’s toy. People inside were staring straight ahead, faces fixed and blank.

They looked like corpses.

A block later, at the intersection of Forsythia and Gwinnett, he saw a bank of television screens flickering in a large shop window, and a group of people gathered on the sidewalk, staring at multiple images of the same picture.

Merle stopped at the outside edge of the crowd, tall enough to look over the heads of the other people. From what he could see, some sort of police emergency was going on, squad cars and uniformed cops clustered around a church, and an EMS van waiting in the background.

The sound was off, or too low to be heard through the plate glass of the shop window, but a blond newswoman was talking into the camera, and a crawl along the bottom read
HOSTAGE STANDOFF CONTINUES AT SAINT INNOCENT ORTHODOX
.

Merle watched the action for a while, which seemed to be at some sort of stalemate, and then moved off up Gwinnett as the sun finally
broke out completely. He glanced up past the uneven rooflines of the shops on the street and saw, in the luminous haze, a large stand of trees on top of a high wall of pale limestone, a sheer cliff face that seemed to bend over the town.

Merle vaguely recalled Coker talking about Tallulah’s Wall and a limestone sinkhole supposed to be on top of the wall. Crater Sink. Merle got the impression that this sinkhole was a bad place, haunted by something nobody wanted to think about.

If some stupid hole in the ground could spook a hard case like Coker, it was just another good reason to get out of town as soon as possible.

The sunlight was shining on the stand of trees and he could see a cloud of tiny black specks circling the upper branches of a taller tree poking up right in the middle of the forest—crows, a huge flock, he decided, and all stirred up, trying to frighten something away, a hawk or an eagle. He heard a harsh croaking call, this one very close.

Following the sound, he saw a group of crows perched on a sagging power line no more than fifty feet away, on the sunny side of Gwinnett.

They were looking directly at him, their black wings flaring as they shifted and cocked their heads sideways to peer down at him, black beaks sharp-edged in the sunlight, their feathers glittering like glass as they shifted from leg to leg, croaking at him, glaring down at him, as if outraged to see him there, as if personally offended by his presence.

For a moment Merle felt a strange sense of unreality flow over him, and under it a tremor of irrational fear. At that point, the flock, screeching and calling, exploded up into the sky, formed into a tight cloud, wheeled above the oaks that lined Gwinnett, and then fluttered into the high blue sky like scraps of blackened ash from a burning building. When Merle looked back down at the sidewalk, he was staring at Charlie Danziger. Danziger was on the far side of the street. Merle’s first impulse was to quietly close in on the man, tap him on the shoulder, and when he turned around, put two rounds through his forehead, smiling as he did so.