Niceville (36 page)

He cooked himself a huge bloody steak and poured himself a massive jug of cold Pinot Grigio, consumed both with real enjoyment, lit himself up a borrowed Camel—he owed Coker three packs by now—and then, rested and reasonably calm, he sat down at his computer to see how well the flash drive that he had given to Boonie Hackendorff had actually worked.

Because, aside from the names of all his Wells Fargo associates, the flash drive he had given to Boonie had also carried a program, available on CopNet, which, when the flash drive was plugged into the mainframe, did some cyber-voodoo thing that gave Danziger a backdoor
look at everything that was going on in Boonie Hackendorff’s desktop computer.

His PC got all warmed up and he typed in a few keystrokes, listening to the cross talk between the Niceville PD and the State Patrol on a police scanner set on a sideboard in his dimly lit office, the walls of which were covered with very nice oils showing various scenes of the Snake River country and the Grand Tetons where he had grown up and the Powder River country where he hoped to be buried if the circumstances of his demise left enough of him to justify the trouble and expense.

The screen flowered into cool blue light, and he was looking at the crest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, over a red-lettered warning bar letting it be known that all ye who enter here had better have their shit together or else.

A few minutes later, he was looking at Boonie Hackendorff’s notes on the Gracie Bank robbery, Incident Number CC 9234K 28RB 8766.

Boonie’s notes on the Gracie robbery were clear, concise, well organized, very professional, in Charlie’s view a credit to the service. By the time he had gotten to the end of them, he had concluded that he did not have nearly enough Pinot Grigio in the house to drown this ugly-ass bad news, or enough cigarettes to smoke it away.

He and Coker needed to talk.

He called Coker and told him so.

Coker replied that he was very glad to have heard from Charlie because he, Coker, had a pretty young Indian woman named Twyla Littlebasket lying on the leather sofa in his living room and sobbing great racking tear-loaded sobs into the cushions in a way that would very likely be the ruin of them—meaning the cushions.

“My place or yours?” asked Danziger, when Coker had brought his narrative to a natural pause.

“My place,” said Coker. “You may recall I still got the proceeds here.”

“Shit. Holy shit. Twyla see it?”

“Yep.”

“How the fuck how?”

“She has a key. She was here when I got home.”

“It was still on the fucking
counter
?”

“You left after I did, Charlie.”

“Shit. I never thought.”

“You’re slipping, son.”

“Is that why Twyla’s crying?”

“Nope. She’s got more important shit to deal with than what’s sitting on my kitchen counter.”

“Like what?”

“That you got to see to believe. You hear from Deitz yet?”

“Didn’t I say I was spending the rest of the afternoon fucking with Deitz’s head?”

Charlie, already up and looking for his gun and his jacket and his boots, pulled the pay-as-you-go cell out of his hip pocket. There was a text message, badly spelled, as if the guy doing the texting had really large thumbs.

“I guess it slipped my mind, Charlie. You may recall I was kinda busy not shooting a Barricaded EDP. This what you did after you left us at the church?”

“My labors never cease my wonders to perform.”

“Yeah yeah. Is it really from Deitz?”

Danziger looked at the text message again.

“Well, the guy can’t spell
motherfuckers
.”

“That’s Deitz.”

On the way back down Gwinnett, Merle passed the same appliance store where the crowd had been watching some sort of police standoff at a church on Peachtree. The television sets were all showing the same loop, a small chubby man in a green work shirt and matching pants, cuffed and bleeding, being duck-walked along the sidewalk by an impressive-looking redheaded female cop who was grinning hugely and talking to a tall silver-haired man in a charcoal suit, who was leaning back on the patrol car with his arms folded across his chest.

The man in the suit was Coker, Merle realized with a jolt, and, some distance away, looking on with a big grin, was Charlie Danziger, with a group of uniform cops, smoking a cigarette and looking right at home.

Merle stood and took that in for a time and was surprised to find that, in some strange way, and by no means all at once, he had gradually ceased to give a rat’s ass about what those two were doing there. It was as if they were part of another life, an old life that he used to have, and they had ceased to have any meaning in his new one.

Maybe for now, he decided, he would side with Glynis, because he needed a place to stay, and she was a damn good-looking woman, and there was still the matter of Coker and Danziger to be handled.

He took a long last look at Coker and Danziger on the television screens, both of them smiling and talking with the cops, looking pleased as punch with themselves, and he locked them away in his heart under
unfinished business
.

Down the street he plucked some peaches off a rack outside a grocery
store, tossed a five-dollar bill onto the pile without stopping, and strolled around Niceville with as easy a heart as he had managed to have since before he got sent to Angola.

Later that evening, as the dark was coming on, he rested his bones on a park bench in the shadows of the town square, lit up a cigarette, and sat there watching the people of Niceville come and go.

Around ten the man from the Blue Bird, the sad guy in the seat beside him, came and sat down beside him again. Merle offered him a cigarette, which, after some thought, the man accepted without a word, and they both went back to watching the strolling citizens in an odd but companionable silence. By ten thirty the park was full of silent figures gathered under the trees. Merle counted at least fifty people, some of them women, no kids, but far more people than the two dozen or so silent men who had arrived on the bus that afternoon.

Some of the men and women smoked cigarettes and some of them had small silver flasks that they shared in silence.

Fireflies sparked and glimmered in the summer night and the city lights grew brighter. Stars glittered high above and the evening magnolias gave off their scent.

Spanish moss shivered in the scented breeze and the live oak branches creaked and groaned in the blue velvet darkness over Merle’s head.

At fifteen minutes to eleven, the Blue Bird bus wheezed around the corner, lurched to a halt in a squeal of brakes. The driver came down and stood on the steps, smiling as all the riders lined up politely. The man greeted each person with a kind word. When they had all taken their seats, he got back behind the wheel, put the bus in gear, and drove away into the darkness beyond the edge of town.

Coker maintained a kind of informal pharmacy in his house, as a defense against an accidental overdose of reality, which was sure as hell the case with Twyla Littlebasket. She had cried herself into a puddle on his leather couch and was now lying there curled up into a ball of inconsolable grief, staring up at Coker and Danziger with a wounded look in her wide brown eyes.

She was wearing her version of a dental hygienist’s outfit, a tight powder blue smock that buttoned down the front, and it had ridden up her thighs as she lay there.

Looking at a pretty young girl in that state of semi-erotic-undress made it sort of hard for either man to pull out a pistol right there and shoot her, which they had both agreed was the only sensible thing to do, considering what she had seen piled up on the kitchen counter. But there was a limit to what even a hard man could do, at least without a couple of hits of Jim Beam under his belt.

So instead of shooting her, Coker had drawn on his pharmacy for a few Valiums, sharing them equally with Twyla and Danziger. He watched as Danziger covered her up with a soft blanket and smoothed her cheek with a gentle hand until she drifted off to a fitful sleep.

When she was asleep, Coker and Danziger looked at each other, shook their heads, and walked out into the golden afternoon light, going all the way down to the bottom of Coker’s driveway for a smoke and a consultation.

They lit up and stood there together, looking out at all the civilians
up and down the tree-shaded block, with their gardens and their lawns and their uncomplicated lives.

“Bet none of these folks have to kill a dental hygienist this evening,” said Coker, watching a slightly wavy dad teaching his toddler how to pull-start a gas-powered weed whacker.

“Guess they don’t,” said Danziger.

A pause, while they inhaled and exhaled and generally felt the nicotine and the Valiums and the Jim Beam doing their holy work.

The sun was warm on their cheeks and the air was hazy with glowing mist. The Glades smelled like flowers and cut grass and barbecue smoke.

“How would
you
do it?” asked Coker.

Danziger sipped his Jim Beam, looked down at his bloodstained navy blue boots, which reminded him that he had yet to fill Coker in on just how much plug-ugly trouble they were looking at.

“You mean Twyla?”

Coker nodded.

“Right now, I’m thinking she overdoses after finding those nudie shots on her e-mail.”

“I sure would,” said Coker, thinking about those shots. “What a twisted old motherfucker. Good old Morgan Littlebasket, pillar of the Cherokee community.”

“Wonder who sent them?” Danziger asked.

“And how did
that
puke get them?”

“These are good questions. We will address them later. I was thinking maybe we ought to kill old Morgan Littlebasket first? Maybe let her watch?”

“Maybe let her do him herself?” said Coker. “Give her the satisfaction? Then pop her afterwards, while she’s still on a high?”

He thought that over, and then shook his head. “Nope. I don’t think she has it in her to shoot her daddy, not even for taking nudie shots of her.”

“She had it in her to blackmail Donnie Falcone for fifty large,” observed Danziger after a moment.

“So she did,” said Coker.

“This is all getting a bit …”

“Complex?” suggested Danziger.

“I mean, we already got Donnie involved, now we got her—”

“Plus wherever the fuck Merle Zane is.”

“You heard back from him yet?”

“Not a peep,” said Coker. “Phone just rings three times and goes to his voice mail.”

“Any sign of him?”

“Nope.”

“You try getting a fix on where his phone is?”

“Haven’t had the time. You?”

“Me neither. You figure he’s still laying in the tall grass, waiting to make a move?”

“Or he’s laying in the tall grass stone dead and the crows are pecking out his eyes. Could go either way.”

“A guy wrote a movie once about these mutts who find a bunch of money and then they have to start killing each other over it. With that weird-looking actor in it, used to be married to Angelina Jolie?”

“Billy Bob Thornton.
A Simple Plan
.”

“Yeah. That was it. They started by just trying to keep the money, and then they had to start popping guys, ended up popping each other—”

“First one was Billy Bob. And he was the nicest guy in the film. What’s your point?”

“I’m just saying …”

A silence.

The weed-whacker dad was helping his kid whack weeds. Dad was blitzed to the eyebrows on beer, and the kid was waving the weed whacker around like he was Luke Skywalker. It wasn’t going to end well.

“All I was saying, Coker, was the way we’re going right now we’re going to end up having to shoot each other.”

“We’re not there yet.”

“Okay. Good to know.”

“Where are we on Deitz and the Frisbee?”

Danziger grinned. “I had him bouncing around Tin Town going from Piggly Wiggly to Winn-Dixie to the Helpy Selfy and back to the Piggly Wiggly. Coker, I tell you, it was a thing of beauty.”

“Where we going to make the exchange?”

“No exchange needed.”

“We gotta get the thing to him, don’t we?”

“He’s already got it.”

“He does?”

“He just doesn’t know it yet. I had a Slim Jim, popped the rear hatch on his Hummer while he was inside the Piggly Wiggly reading my note. Shoved it into the jack storage slot under his spare tire. Lest he has a flat, which Hummers don’t get, he’ll never find it on his own.”

Coker stared at him.

“What if Deitz doesn’t wire us the money?”

“Then we snitch him out to the Feebs. Make a call, we say Byron Deitz is diddy-bopping around Niceville with a top-secret Frisbee in the back of his Hummer. Either way, we’re not stuck holding something will get us in deep shit with the CIA.”

“Risky,” said Coker.

“No. It was
audacious
,” said Danziger, savoring the word. “Another thing. I also tucked a packet of bills from the First Third inside a cable hatch down behind the gas pump shutoff switch.”

“Jeez. How much?”

“One hundred thousand—”

“Holy fuck, Charlie. That’s a lot of cash.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not going to like this either, but I also threw in some of the shit we scooped out of the lockboxes.”

“Like what?”

“Like that antique gold Rolex and those emerald cuff links in the Cartier case and a string of—”

“
Fuck
, Charlie. I had my eye on that fucking Rolex—”

“Rolexes are out, Coker. Everybody’s wearing Movados now.”

“Says who?”

“Says
GQ
.”

“Fuck
GQ
. What did you do that for?”

“For verisimilitude,” said Danziger, savoring that word too.

“Verisimilitude?”

“Convincing supportive evidence. Just in case we need to dump this whole thing onto Deitz.”

“I know what
verisimilitude
means, Charlie. Getting that twitchy, is it?”