Niceville (30 page)

“Coker, Little Rock thinks we can’t let this run on. He’s not cooperating at all, he’s just fired a warning shot into the ceiling, the kids are going nuts, the priest just peed himself, and the guy’s getting freakier every second.”

“If you want him, Jimmy,” said Coker, in a flat, businesslike tone, looking through the scope at the target, and then looking harder. “I got him. Anytime. But maybe you want to put a pair of binoculars on that Llama .32 he’s waving around, before you green-light this thing.”

“Just a minute,” said Jimmy, clicking off. Coker looked away from the scope and watched as Jimmy Candles, the tall blond guy in the black fatigues standing in the middle of the platoon ring, raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and stood there for a while, focused, silent.

Coker went back to his scope and steadied his crosshairs on the janitor’s left hand, which was not being waved around so much while the guy was on the phone to the negotiator.

The small steel pistol, a semi-auto with a slide on the left-hand side of the frame, had a small brass tube sticking straight up from the ejector slot. Coker spent some time making sure of that brass tube, and then he watched the janitor talking on the phone.

He had studied the backstop and come to the tactical conclusion that even through the glass of the office window he could still put a nice neat hole in the guy’s temple without hitting the folks on that butt-ugly couch.

Then he went back and made sure of the brass casing sticking up out of the ejector slot, sighed, and waited. Jimmy Candles was back in a minute.

“Am I seeing a stovepipe round, Coker?”

“That’s what I’m seeing. Little piece like that, you don’t hold it steady when you fire it, the slide won’t come back far enough, and the spent casing gets jammed right there, sticking up out of the ejector slot.”

“Does he look like he sees it?”

“No,” said Coker, after checking. “He’s busy with the phone. But that ain’t going to last.”

Coker heard a muttered side-talk conference over the headset, muted and muffled by Jimmy Candles’ hand. Then he was back.

“Hold on, will you?”

“I’m here. But hurry up. I got to piss.”

A silence, and then Mavis Crossfire came on.

“Coker, you sure about this?”

“I’m sure it’s a stovepipe jam, Mavis.”

“He doesn’t come across like a guy knows weapons. How long you figure it would take an amateur to clear that jammed casing, rack a round, and fire at somebody coming in through the door?”

“Jeez, Mavis. Where are you? I can’t see you. I can hardly hear you.”

A silence, then a whispered reply.

“We’re right outside the office door. In the hallway. We got a ram with us.”

Coker really liked Mavis Crossfire.

Everybody did.

She was a stand-up and a cop’s cop. He’d rather see that moron janitor get his ticket punched than have anything happen to Mavis Crossfire.

He leaned into the scope, zeroed the crosshairs on the guy’s temple, slipped his finger inside the trigger guard, eased the blade back a hair … another faint tick he could feel in his finger … as the sniper he had the right to make a judgment shot … he could do it now … tick … tick …

Shit
.

He pulled his finger out, softened a bit.

“Okay, how about this? I keep the scope on him, we count down from five, you take the door, come in fast but keep out of my line of fire. I want to have a clear head shot if he manages to un-jam that thing. You know where I am?”

“We do,” she said, a faint whisper now. “You’re across the street, the second floor, the open window above Perky’s Pizza Palace.”

“Okay. We’re going to do this? You sure?”

“Long as you’re right about that stovepipe. ’Cause if you’re wrong and I get killed, my ghost is going to come haunt your belfry.”

“I don’t have a belfry. You’ll have to haunt my garage. You ready?”

In his mind Coker could see them, out in the hall, looking at each other, doing a gut check.

“Okay. We’re ready.”

“Okay. Here goes, Mavis. Countdown. Start. Five … four … three …”

He put his eye to the scope, settled into calm, finger on the trigger, let out a slow breath …

“Two … one …”

On his way to the lab with Delia’s cat, Nick got on the phone to Kate, catching her on her way back to the house.

“Kate, where are you?”

“Almost home. Where are you?”

“On the way to the crime lab with a cranky bloodstained house cat that’s gotta weigh in at fifty pounds.”

“So just another day at the office, then?”

Nick laughed, but there was still something odd in his voice, and she could hear it.

“You okay, babe?”

Nick was going to tell her
yes
, but then he thought, what the hell. She wouldn’t have asked if she hadn’t heard very clearly in his voice that he was far from okay.

Beau was staring at him sideways, obviously still shaken and upset by what he had seen in Nick’s face at Delia’s house in The Chase.

Nick figured Beau was seeing the first hairline crack in his idol. Good. Beau needed to be his own man, not somebody else’s sidekick.

Kate was still waiting for an answer.

So Nick gave her the basics, telling it without any editorial spin, or any attempt to play it down. She asked a couple of good questions but mainly she just took it in.

The fact that Beau had been through it too made the whole thing easier to tell, and now, as Nick came to the end of the story, they were both hanging on Kate’s answer, as if she could make some sense out of it, maybe because she was a woman.

“The black figure you saw in the glass—?”

Nick’s chest closed up.

She was going right for the heart of it.

“That sounds like something you might have seen in the Middle East, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Nick, staring out at the traffic, very aware of Beau in the seat beside him, holding the cat as if she were about to bite him. For her part, the cat seemed pretty calm. She had curled up in Beau’s lap and gone straight to sleep.

“I mean, women in burkas, that’s what they look like, just shapes in black. So it makes sense that you might interpret a black reflection that way.”

“True,” said Nick, hoping she’d leave it there.

“But you think there’s more, don’t you?”

“Like what?”

“From the sound of your voice, I’d say you think the house itself was to blame. That the house was making you see things from your past, things that upset you.”

Nick was quiet for a time.

“Yeah. That’s what it felt like.”

“Is there anything about a figure in a burka that would upset you?” Silence.

“Yes. There is.”

The Wadi Doan, a leafy little gorge carved out of the horny brown hide of central Yemen, a chain of villages as old as the world. Three figures in head-to-toe burkas, walking all wrong, shoes all wrong, stumbling on the stones, eyes fixed on the middle distance, heedless staring robots, coming closer and closer to their idling Humvee
.

Exactly the profile of suicide bombers
.

The Wadi Doan
.

“I’m not going to ask you about it—”

“Thanks, Kate. Just the war, I guess. We used to call them BMOs. Black Moving Objects.”

This unknown thing that had happened back in the war, it was still the one unsayable thing between them. Maybe someday Nick would talk about it. Tig had said so himself, when she was plying him with multiple mojitos at the Moot Court bar.

She doubted it, and it was true that part of her didn’t really want to know about it in the first place.

“But this BMO thing, it does explain how a reflection like that would get to you, especially if you’re all keyed up, looking for a missing woman. Did Beau see anything?”

Nick looked over at Beau, asked him the question. Beau shook his head.

“No. Not Beau. Just me. Mavis Crossfire said she saw something; but she wouldn’t say what. And there was a guard there, Dale Jonquil; he said he saw a young woman in a green dress, holding a cat.”

That shook Kate.

She remembered her dream, the young woman in a green dress. Holding a cat.

So did Nick.

“Didn’t you have a dream last night about a girl in a green dress and a cat?”

She hesitated.

There was no point in saying no.

“Yes. I did.”

“Okay. Now
that’s
a tad freaky, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It is. Did the guard, this Dale Jonquil guy, did he see the cat you have with you?”

“Yes. We showed it to him on the way out. It’s the same one he saw in the mirror. But then he knew the cat from before. Her name is Mildred Pierce. She’s Delia’s cat, and Dale works security in her neighborhood, so that makes sense. But he doesn’t like Delia’s house much either.”

He glanced across at Beau, checking him out, seeing the expression on his face.

“Neither does Beau.”

“Did Beau see a girl with a cat?”

“You see a girl with a cat?”

Beau shook his head.

“No.”

“But he did see the image on the basement wall. Did you try to take a picture of it?”

“Yes. Beau took some shots with his cell phone camera.”

“Did he get anything?”

“Yeah. A short video.”

“Can you make anything out of it?”

“We haven’t tried yet. Beau’s going to transfer it to a computer and pull off an mpeg.”

“But you both saw it?”

“Yeah. Both of us.”

“What did you see?”

Nick hesitated.

People working in a field
.

Coffins
.

Skulls
.

“The picture shifted. First a farm, and then it turned into the street outside the Cotton place.”

“I’d love to see it.”

“I’ll get a copy and bring it home.”

Silence.

“Kate, I have to say, that house is …”

“Weird?”

“No. More like insane.”

They were at the lab.

“We’re here, Kate. Gotta go. Love you.”

“Love you too, babe.”

She was turning into her driveway, into the home her father and mother had lived in for thirty years.

Dillon and Lenore
.

Niceville
.

She climbed out of the SUV, remembering to take her Glock out of the glove box. The house was warm and musty, and the clouds were breaking up. The house was dim but pierced everywhere with afternoon light shining in through the tall sash windows.

She thought about Nick’s experiences at Delia’s mansion in The Chase for a while, looked at the clock. It was the middle of the afternoon, a Saturday. Her dad would be in his office at the library, watching the cadets drill on the VMI parade square. She picked up the
phone—held it in her hand, listening to the dial tone—and put it back down again.

Getting Dillon Walker to give her a straight answer to anything about the Niceville abductions had been like chasing fireflies. Ever since Rainey had been found, her dad would happily talk to her about anything at all—football, politics, the military, chocolate chip cookies, Beth’s marriage, Nick’s war fever, why red wine drinkers live longer. Anything at all, except the Niceville disappearances.

Even the news that Sylvia had disappeared, and that Rainey had been found—alive—sealed inside an ancient grave, hadn’t been enough to shatter his reserve. He listened politely to the news, offered no comments, and wished the boy a speedy recovery.

Miles’ suicide a few days later hadn’t seemed to surprise him at all. If anything, it had sealed the matter for him, as if a kind of blood debt had been paid. When Kate, as Sylvia’s cousin, had been appointed Rainey’s guardian, her father had approved of it, but in a distant and guarded way, limiting himself to what seemed at the time to be a cryptic comment about making sure Rainey’s adoption papers were kept somewhere safe, just in case.

“In case of what?” she had asked at the time.

“In case they’re … needed.”

“Why would they be needed, Dad?”

“No idea. Just being a worrier, I guess.”

She was in the sunroom, a glassed-in conservatory addition to the house. She sat there in the yellow and white room, surrounded by lush ferns and bougainvillea, looking out at the ancient pine forest that crowded the lower end of the lawn. A little stream ran through it, and a steep hill rose up on the far side of the forest, the rocky ground covered with red pine needles. Even with the afternoon light lying over it, the pine forest seemed to have a rich violet darkness inside it that looked deeper and more solid than simple shadows. Just like Niceville.

This had gone on long enough.

Clearly her father was keeping something from her. Knowing
him as she did, Kate was sure he thought he was doing it for her own good.

Lovely man, Dillon Walker, but he could also be a condescending, stiff-necked …

She let it go.

She was a grown woman, and now the strangeness of Niceville seemed to be closing in on her own family. That was the point here. Rainey Teague was in a coma. Nick was seeing mirages on a basement wall. She was dreaming of green-eyed girls in sundresses. Delia Cotton and Gray Haggard were missing.

Something was terribly
wrong
in Niceville, and she was convinced her dad knew something about it. It was time to drag it out of him.

She pulled in a breath, held it, let it out slowly, sat up straight on the couch.

Reached for the phone.

Dialed the number.

It rang twice, and then she heard her father’s whiskey baritone, his soft Virginia accent. She saw him at his desk at VMI, in his book-lined study, a fine-featured man with a weathered face, intelligent, calm, deep lines around his eyes.

“Kate, you’re calling early.”

She usually called him at the end of the day, a ritual as comforting to him as it was to her.

“Is this a bad time?”

“Never a bad time to hear from my favorite daughter.”

“I thought Beth was your favorite daughter.”

“She is when I’m talking to her. How are you?”

Kate went through the formalities, but her father knew her pretty well.

“Okay. Something’s wrong, honey. I can hear it in your voice. What is it? Is it Beth?”