Niceville (37 page)

“It is. It always does, at least in this town.”

Danziger looked out at the sky, saw a slice of the old forest on top of Tallulah’s Wall.

“You ever wonder, Coker, about that?”

Coker’s smile gradually went away, and he cut a sideways glance at Danziger.

“What? Wonder about Niceville?”

Danziger folded his arms across his chest, kicked at a tuft of saw grass.

“Neither of us was born here. I’m from Bozeman and you’re from Billings. Before we got here, neither of us ever did anything like we just did yesterday, did we?”

“Regrets are for losers, Charlie.”

“I’m not talking regret. I
like
money, Coker, and I intend to enjoy every fucking dime. It’s just that, this job, killing those cops, you get right down to it, it was sorta out of character for us. Both of us.”

Coker gave it some thought.

“You, maybe. You’re basically a nicer guy than I am. Hell, I was twelve when I kicked my old man to death in the backyard.”

“Your old man deserved it, what he was doing to your mom. Hell, even the Bighorn county deputies said he had it coming.”

“What the fuck are you saying, Charlie? Like, Niceville put some sorta
spell
on us? Jesus, Charlie. We saw a business opportunity, we took it. End of story. Don’t go all mystical on me now.”

Danziger was staring up at Tallulah’s Wall.

“Them old Cherokee, Coker, they thought this place was cursed, before ever a white man got here. Said there was something evil … living up there.”

Coker followed his look.

“You mean Crater Sink?”

“I guess.”

“Something evil lives up there, that it?”

“You don’t like the place yourself, Coker. I heard you talking to Merle about it.”

A silence.

“Well, maybe I don’t.”

He threw his cigarette onto the road, lit another, sucked the smoke in deep.

“Hell, maybe I
am
getting meaner since I got here. Maybe something came outta Crater Sink one cold winter night and slithered into my ear and it’s eating through my brain right now. You think?”

Another pause while Danziger thought it over.

“If all it had to eat was your brain, Coker, then the fucker died of starvation a while back.”

“Fuck you, Charlie.”

“Thank you, Coker. And fuck you too.”

“Well, one thing,” said Danziger, after a another long pause and in a thoughtful tone, “I don’t wanna shoot poor young Twyla in there without we have a good reason. I mean, why add to my sins?”

Across the street the weed-whacker episode was ending, as it had to, in tears. Somebody called their names.

“Charlie. Coker.”

They turned around and saw Twyla Littlebasket framed in the open door, her powder blue semi-porno hygienist’s outfit askew, half the buttons all undone, her hair in a tangle, and her pretty nose as red as a rosebud.

“You guys got a minute?” she said, her voice hoarse from crying and her big brown eyes rimmed with runny mascara. She looked like that sexy Betty Boop doll, only with two black eyes.

“We sure do, sweetie,” said Coker.

“We need to talk,” said Twyla.

Danziger and Coker looked at each other.

“Oh shit,” said Danziger.

Beau and Nick stood back from the bed, letting Lemon take the lead. Nick was wishing that Kate were there. She still hadn’t called back.

Two young doctors, one a black woman in a Muslim head scarf and the other a Somali man with horn-rimmed glasses and a disapproving frown, stood far enough apart from everyone else to signal their professional objection to this intrusion.

The boy was on his back, skeletal, his lips cracked, his pale cheeks raw from the sheets, but his large brown eyes were wide open and he was looking at Lemon Featherlight with a sweet, slightly drugged expression that was touching in its vulnerable affection for Lemon Featherlight.

Lemon was leaning over the bed, holding Rainey’s hand in his.

“There are some men here with questions, Rainey. Can you think about answering some questions?”

“I … was awake … some of the time. I could hear people in the room. I remember you would come and talk to me. I smelled smoke. It smelled nice. I tried to answer you but I couldn’t make my voice work. I couldn’t move. But you were there. Then you were gone. Then everything would go away again.”

So much for catatonia
, Nick was thinking, glancing over at the docs, who had their heads well down and were busily whispering to each other in magical medical mystery words.

The boy was still speaking.

“I want to see my mom,” he said.

“I know. You love your mom.”

“Is she here?”

“Not here, no,” said Lemon, refusing to lie to the boy.

“Soon?”

“She loves you very much,” said Lemon. “Can I ask you an important question, Rainey?”

The kid blinked up at Lemon.

“Yes, Lemon,” the boy said, yawning.

“When you woke up, was someone in this room?”

A silence, and then a whisper.

“You mean, just now?”

“Yes.”

“A man was here.”

“Did you know him?”

“His name is Merle.”

“Merle?”

“Yes.”

“Was he a nice man?”

Rainey hesitated, as if he didn’t know how to form an answer to that.

“He wasn’t mean.”

“Did he frighten you?”

“No. He woke me up.”

“He woke you up?”

“Yes. He called me.”

“That’s all? He just called you?”

Rainey tried to nod, didn’t have the muscle tone for it yet. He was looking at weeks of therapy just to sit up straight, Nick figured. Kate would see that he got it. Kate would see that Rainey got everything he needed. Under Kate’s care, Rainey’s estate was in better shape than the year before. Rainey Teague was a very wealthy young boy.

“He just called my name a couple of times. I heard him and I … came back.”

“Came back? Do you remember where you were?”

“I was at a farm.”

Lemon glanced over his shoulder at Nick, and then back to Rainey again.

“You mean like a park?”

Rainey tried to shake his head.

“No. A farm.”

“A farm?”

“Yes. There was a lady. And a really big horse, brown, with a long yellow mane and big white hooves. His name was Jupiter.”

Nick heard that, tried to take it in, thinking about the heavy horse he had seen last Friday night, running wild on Patton’s Hard.

A really big horse, brown, with a long yellow mane and big white hooves
.

The thought took him places where he disliked going, so he set it aside. Maybe he’d deal with it later, but not if he could avoid it.

Lemon went on.

“Do you remember the lady’s name?”

“Yes. Her name was … Glyn … Glynis.”

“Glynis. Was she nice?”

“She wasn’t mean. She was in charge. I don’t want to talk about her. She wouldn’t like it.”

“Okay. We won’t. When Merle woke you, did he say anything else to you?”

A pause.

The boy’s dry lips worked and Lemon held a glass of water with a bent straw up to him. The boy drank, softened into a sleepy state, his eyes closing. The doctors started to step forward but Lemon simply held up a hand and they stopped in mid-stride.

“Merle told me to ask for a man.”

“Did he say the man’s name?”

“Yes. His name was Abel. Like in the Bible.”

“Like Cain and Abel?”

“Yes. Abel was the good one.”

“Rainey, when you woke up, I heard you say some more of the man’s name. Do you remember what more you said?”

Rainey closed his eyes again. Nick wanted to step in but he wouldn’t have done half as well as Lemon was doing. And Lemon was being careful about his questions. He wasn’t leading the kid at all.

“It was my name. My last name. Teague.”

“Abel Teague?”

A shadow slipped across him and the boy flinched as if struck. Lemon straightened up and looked at the doctors, as if releasing them from his spell.

They stepped in, shoving them out of the way, the Somali doctor
hitting the red
CALL
button. Lemon moved away from the bed, his eyes on Rainey as the doctors started to poke and prick and stab. Nick touched Lemon on the shoulder, nodded at the door, and they all walked softly out of the room.

As the door hissed shut they could hear Rainey asking for his mother.

The three men stood together in the darkened hallway. Nurses were jogging towards them from down the hall, making squeaky sounds with their rubber soles, hissing at the men like geese.

They gave way and headed for the elevator. There was a Starbucks down in the lobby.

They got themselves three tall ones and sat down at a jiggly tin table while the towering temple-like lobby grew slowly less crowded and the light from the window wall over in the waiting area changed from bright gold to amber, slender needles of light shifting in the haze, giving the whole echoing space an underwater feel.

“Well, what did you make of that?” said Nick, leaning back, checking his cell phone to see if Kate had called yet. She hadn’t.

Lemon studied the surface of his coffee, and Beau waited in silence, feeling deeply blue and sad for the kid up there who was asking for his dead mother.

“A caller. This Merle guy was a caller.”

“And what’s a caller?” asked Nick.

“Just a superstition. My mother believed in them. They were people who could live in some place between the worlds, not dead and not really alive, but sort of in both places at once. If a caller came to you in a dream, when you woke up you knew you had something important to do.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Tall, tall as me, shaved head, a hard-looking guy, like he had maybe been in prison. He had that yard boss look, or like a drill instructor, no looking away. Straight at me, eye to eye—”

“What was he wearing?” asked Beau, writing this down under block letters
MERLE—PRISON
?

“Farm clothes. Rough jeans, heavy boots—looked old—the boots—marked up and dirty—jeans with the cuffs rolled up. His belt was old and worn and cinched in tight, way past the last hole, as if he had lost a lot of weight, or it was borrowed from a bigger guy. Wide across the
shoulders, looked real strong, thick neck with what looked like a burn scar on one side, had on an old plaid work shirt, looked paper thin, like it had been washed too much. He was carrying some sort of canvas bag, on a strap over his shoulder. It looked heavy. It had markings on the side. Black Army stencil. First Infantry Division, and the letters
AEF
.”

“American Expeditionary Force,” said Nick. “First World War.”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought. It looked old enough. He moved … funny … as if he had a stiff back. He smelled of diesel fumes.”

Beau wrote down
BUS STATION
?

“This Glynis woman? Her name mean anything to you?”

Lemon shook his head.

“No. I’ve never heard of her. But the guy in the grave, his last name was Ruelle, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Ethan Ruelle.”

“Do you know a Glynis Ruelle, Nick?”

“I know a woman signed her name
GLYNIS R
. on the back of the mirror that Rainey was looking at in Uncle Moochie’s window.”

“Wasn’t that a real old mirror?”

“Yes. From Ireland, Moochie figured. Real old.”

Lemon shook his head.

“I don’t get any of this.”

“I don’t think we’re supposed to. I think someone is having a lovely time playing around with our heads. There are a lot of Teagues in this part of the state,” said Nick, flicking a look at Beau, who was scribbling fast. “We’ll run the names and see if anything comes up.”

Lemon had a question.

“Did the name Abel Teague ever come up back when you were looking for Rainey?”

“No. Look, Lemon, this morning you were saying that Sylvia Teague was looking into her ancestors a few days before she died. Maybe this Abel Teague is on her computer somewhere.”

Nick sipped his coffee, checked his cell again.

Kate. Where are you?

Nick looked back at Lemon.

“So what do you think?”

“I told you this morning, Nick. I thought this stuff was from …”

“Outside. Yeah. I remember.”

Lemon sat back, looked at them, said, “Whatever is going on here, I want in.”

“This is a
police
investigation,” Beau said.

“I’m a CI.”

“For the
drug
squad,” said Beau.

Nick held up a hand.

“I can’t let you all the way in,” he said. “But I think we can use you.”

“How?” asked Beau, looking at Nick. “Can you handle a computer?”

“I did quartermaster inventory and supply for the Corps. But how can I get access?”

“I’ll ask Tony Branko to let you come over to us for this case only. I’ll give him some reason. But this will get you off the hook with the DEA.”

Nick’s cell phone rang.

It was Kate.

“Kate? Where have you been?”

She was crying.

“Nick. Come home. Please.”

Nick sat up straight.

“Honey. What is it?”

“It’s Dad.”

Deitz was sitting in the parking lot of the Helpy Selfy Market on Bauxite Row in Tin Town, across from the needle exchange, watching a skinny Goth chick with spiky blue hair undress in the window of her flat over top of the needle exchange.

In the normal course of events Deitz’s sexual fantasies did not involve skinny Goth chicks with spiky blue hair. He ran more to the Large-Breasted Nordic Twins with Zero Gag Reflexes.

But seeing as how she was showing every sign of getting all the way down to naked and he had nothing else to do right now but wait for Zachary Dak to arrive so they could be cordially dishonest with each other, this was as good a way to pass the time as any other.

A swarm of addicts and gangbangers and dead-enders was circling the Hummer, some of them clearly trying to get up the nerve to hijack it, or at least to spray-paint a gang tag on it, or just to ask for a handout, but the fact that Deitz was sitting there with the windows wide open and a very large Colt Python sitting on the dashboard was creating a certain delicacy of feeling in this regard.