Niceville (34 page)

On the other hand … Rainey Teague.

Awake.

She was still trying to decide what to do when she noticed that someone was standing at the bottom of her lawn, down by the pines, half in the shade of the slender trees. A girl, a full-grown girl, not a child, her arms down at her side and staring up at the windows of the conservatory. Quite still, her expression solemn and remote.

Kate set the phone aside and stood up, going around to the glass doors that opened onto the lawn. She stepped out on the edge of the grass, shading her eyes against the afternoon sun, looking at the girl, who was about a hundred feet away, just standing there. She was wearing a sundress, pale green, dappled with what looked like poppies or roses or maybe strawberries.

Just like the girl in her dream
.

Or she was changing her memory to fit the girl, which people tended to do. She suppressed a superstitious shudder and stiffened herself. She wasn’t going to cower in her house like a frightened child.

“Hello,” she called, opening the door and coming down the lawn, half afraid that she would frighten her away. “Are you lost, honey?”

Kate was barefoot and she could feel the green grass, still moist from the rains, cool and wet between her toes. She was less than fifty feet away from the girl, who was looking at her with cool hazel-colored eyes, her full red lips slightly parted, as if she were … hungry. Now
that she was nearer, Kate could see that the girl was old enough to have a full figure, curved and ripe and sensuous.

The girl in her dream had been just a child.

Hadn’t she?

Kate was also close enough to see that the flowers on her pale green sundress were not flowers at all but stains, red irregular stains. She had seen enough pretty young women with those kinds of stains on them to know dried blood when she saw it.

“What’s your name, honey? Has somebody hurt you? Come with me, we’ll get you all cleaned—”

The girl—the young woman—turned away abruptly and stepped into the shade of the forest, a pale green flicker in the violet shadows.

Dammit
, thought Kate, looking at her bare feet.
I can’t chase you in my bare feet
.

Kate paused there for a moment, trying to decide whether to go back to the house and get some shoes or just to plunge into the woods and get hold of the girl, who quite obviously needed help.

There was nowhere for her to go in there, just the creek, which was full of slippery stones and mossy roots, and then the hill on the other side, which was much too steep to climb.

“Honey, please come out of there, will you?”

Kate saw a shape deep in the tree shadows. The girl was still in there, inside the woods, watching her.
Waiting
for her?

Kate heard a voice that seemed to come from inside her own head—a familiar voice, although silent for years.

Lenore’s voice.

Kate
, said her dead mother,
don’t go in there
.

Unable to help herself, and angry at this sudden attack of female hysteria on her part, Kate spoke out loud.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Mom. I’m not a child.”

And the answer came back, in a voice less like her mother’s and more like her own.

Neither is that
.

Deitz was waiting in the fading sunlight outside Kwikky Kleen Kar Kare on Long Reach Boulevard, watching the Tulip River, at full flood, boiling past the muddy banks, the broad back of the river mud brown, the surface of it rippling and roiling with the current.

Deitz was drinking a lime slushy and waiting for a wiry Filipino kid to scrub Mr. Thad’s nose blood off the leather passenger seat of the Hummer.

He had a new BlackBerry and was trying to get it to dial a number for him, but it didn’t really want to. He had to use his thumbs to type the number in manually. He had extremely large thumbs. Things were not going well.

Finally he got through to his IT section.

“Andy there?”

A moment of silence, and Deitz had time to wonder again where the hell that walnut-cracking sound was coming from.

“Sir?”

“Andy. You got anything yet for Tig Sutter?”

“I’m afraid not yet, sir. It is very complicated. The sender was—”

“I need something for Tig, Andy,” he said, literally in a growl. “Something fucking soon. I need Tig to owe me big. I need it fast. This is
not
the time for you to fuck up again, kid.”

“I will most definitely not fuck up again. I am on it very hard.”

“How long?”

“End of the day, I hope.”

The walnut-cracking sound inside Deitz’s head got very loud and the Tulip River went all reddish.

“
End of the day?
Fuck
that
. Get it now. Get it right
fucking
now. Be back to me in one hour or start clearing out your desk. You follow?”

A long silence, while Deitz wondered where he was going to get an IT guy as good as Andy Chu, deciding finally that the woods were full of IT geeks just as good as Andy Chu. Maybe better. In the meantime, like any good manager, you had to motivate your people.

Andy’s voice again, cool and calm.

“I follow, sir.”

“I’m fucking clear?”

“Yes sir. You are … extremely clear.”

“Good. Get it done,” said Deitz, clicking off.

He stood there, staring down at the screen, thinking, as had been his habit lately, black and complicated thoughts, including an inventory of everyone he had ever met who owned a pair of navy blue cowboy boots—not many—when he heard his name called, in a strange lisping accent.

He turned to watch as a long black Lincoln Town Car—the one that looked like a turtle in a tuxedo—came to a stop at the curb by the car wash, a lean and sallow face peering at him out of the rear window—
another goddam zipperhead
—an Asian man with narrow wrinkled eyes as black as buttons, the too large head completely bald, on closer examination, a distinctly unpleasant look, with a large misshapen forehead, bumpy irregular cheekbones, a squashed mushroom of a nose, and a thin-lipped slash of a mouth with an incongruous soul patch under the lower lip.

Deitz threw the slushy into the Tulip and came over to the curb, his expression not welcoming and his mood unimproved by this unexpected arrival.

“I’m Byron Deitz. Who the fuck are you?”

The head bobbed and showed its teeth, tiny, even babyish, stained with tobacco, fencing off a fat white tongue that bobbed around inside the man’s bloodred mouth like a moray in a cave.

“Will you join me?” he said, opening the door and pulling back inside the rear seat to give Deitz some room to slide in. “It is much cooler inside.”

Deitz looked at the man for a moment, feeling the weight of his Sig in his belt holster, considering the man’s expensive pearl gray suit, his satiny shirt, a much paler gray, the lavender silk tie, and the gold collar bar, the slender Italian shoes, the lavender silk socks.

The man made an ingratiating head bob and flashed those teeth again, and the name came to Deitz out of an old black-and-white film with Humphrey Bogart.

Joel fucking Cairo
, he said to himself.
In the flesh. What next? A fat man with a black bird?

“Who are you and who you with?” he said, in a steely snarl, staying firmly planted on the sidewalk.

“I’m sorry. My name is …” Here he mumbled something that sounded to Deitz like
Hickory Dock
.

“Come again?”

“I am Zachary Dak,” he said, more carefully. “Here is my card.”

He reached into his suit jacket and brought out a silver card case, extracted one, offered it to Deitz with both hands, palms up, smiling at him.

Deitz took the card, read it.

Deitz slid the card into his suit jacket, looked around the place, giving each car and every person in the area a careful appraisal.

He slipped into the car, leaving the door open, keeping one foot on the curb. The interior of the car smelled of Chinese cigarettes, which smelled exactly the way he figured they would smell.

“We’re supposed to meet at the Marriott.”

Dak nodded his head, glancing briefly at the back of the driver’s head, a cannonball head that rode on a hairy neck as wide as a tree stump.

“Yes. That was the arrangement. And I am sorry to alter it. May I ask, do you have the item with you at this time?”

Deitz looked around the black leather interior of the car, thinking mikes and wires.

“I have no knowledge of any
item
, Mr. Dak.”

Dak squirmed in his seat, indicating his extreme embarrassment and discomfort.

“Quite right. I misspoke. I refer only to the meeting which we have arranged. As you know, time is important here. Our Learjet waits at Mauldar Field. We must take flight on Monday morning.”

“What if we’re going to need more time than that?”

“Sadly, not possible. The deadline is fixed. Urgent business takes us to Dubai. Accordingly, my people are anxious to have this … consultation … take place as soon as it can.”

“How did you find me?” asked Deitz, cutting in.

“Your car is most singular, Mr. Deitz.”

“Horseshit. I don’t get this. Why show up here, and why show up now?”

Something flitted across Dak’s face, and it changed in a subtle but memorable way. Deitz was suddenly glad he had one foot on the curb and a Sig Sauer in his belt. What Zachary Dak looked like was less than what he was.

“Please get in and shut the door,” he said.

Deitz got in and shut the door. The car immediately accelerated into traffic. Deitz was watching Dak’s hands but did not see how the Glock got there. It was just there.

“This is only a precaution,” said Dak, “so that you might listen with attention and do nothing rash. We are aware that you have had a problem with the item. We are aware that you cannot produce it.”

Deitz managed to keep his expression steady. Dak smiled and went on.

“This upsets you. I understand. This is upsetting to us as well. But there is no point in being disputatious, as our interests happily coincide. You wish to regain the item promptly. We wish it to be promptly regained.”

“OnStar,” said Deitz, having worked it through. “You’ve had my truck phone hacked. You’re inside the OnStar system. You heard me get a call about the … item.”

Dak looked pleased.

He literally beamed.

“The People’s Republic has made heroic strides in opening up certain areas of the communications systems of several of our trading partners. There is no hostility in this. It is simply prudent to know the positions of your good friends in business. To illustrate, we know that you are acting in perfect faith and that the theft of the object was as unexpected and distressing to you as it was to us. You share our sense of urgency. You are making energetic inquiries, as is your associate, Mr. Holliman.”

Christ
, thought Deitz.
They know how to turn on the OnStar microphone even if I’m not on it. They’ve heard everything I’ve said in the truck
.

“We are here to help, in any way we can, which is why we have come out into the field to assist you.”

“Moving around Niceville in this limo will just attract attention. The best thing you could do is to go back to the Marriott and wait. I’ll get the thing. You can count on it.”

“We do count on you, Mr. Deitz. But we must still have it in our possession by Sunday evening at the very latest. To properly analyze the device will take several hours, and its extraction from the Slipstream vaults must never be discovered. You must return it without discovery, or the entire project will lose much of its value. Many millions are in play. Much effort has already been expended. I must answer to my superiors. We have discussed this matter of the robbery among ourselves. Have you reached any conclusions?”

“Yeah,” said Deitz. “I have.”

Dak inclined his head, glanced at the driver, and then brought his attention back. “They are?”

“It was partly an inside job. I’m sure of it. So far I’ve eliminated the banker—”

“The unfortunate Mr. Llewellyn?”

“You heard that?”

Dak smiled.

“A most vigorous interrogation. We gather he had drugged himself? He is recovered, we hope?”

“I dropped him off at his house. He’ll live.”

“The matter of the blue boots. Was that useful?”

“Not a lot. But Phil found out that there was blood at the barn
where they were hiding. We figure one of the guys on the job was hurt.”

“So. Inside job, you think. One man hurt. You have only to determine who among the list of possible insiders has sustained an injury.”

“Not quite. The insider could have provided the info. That doesn’t mean he was actually on the job. Any two pros could have pulled that job.”

“We are assuming that either one or both of them was wounded by the police in pursuit—”

“Or the two of them had a fight.”

“A
pistolero
disagreement?” asked Dak, who was studying Spanish as a slight diversion from the toils of international espionage.

“They recovered several brass casings from the fire at the barn. Melted, but a lot of them.”

“So, many rounds? And blood on the ground?”

“Yeah. A real firefight.”

“But no hospital calls, naturally?”

“No. Not one.”

“It would be useful to know the current state of the official investigation.”

“Yeah. Fucking useful.”

“You can accomplish this?”

“Not easily. What about you?”

“We could do such a thing, given time. We do not have time. Our search must become more vigorous. We have only a few hours in which to succeed. However, we have great hopes of success. May I make a prediction?”

“Sure. Need a fortune cookie?”

Dak presented a smile which showed no amusement of any kind, only a flicker of impatience.

“The item was contained in a box of some sort? With identifying signs of some type?”

“Yeah. A steel box, with a Raytheon logo.”