Niceville (41 page)

Why?

As I have said. To complete my files. Deitz plans to leave the country and go to live in Dubai. He’s rich but he needs to be much richer if he is to live safely in Dubai. So he is stealing all he can—

Did he rob that bank in Gracie?

No
.

Do you know who did?

I could find out, if I cared. I have cloned his BlackBerry. I infer from what I hear and see that Deitz is dealing with someone over an item taken from the bank during the robbery, an item belonging to Slipstream Dynamics, an item he has promised to deliver to a man named Mr. Dak. But I am concentrating only on Byron Deitz. If I have all the details of his betrayals, including the full story of his dismissal from the FBI, the names of those four men, it will help
me control him. With a complete dossier, I can compel him to give me a large share of BD Securicom. Then as the co-owner of a security corporation I will qualify for a green card
.

What if he just has you killed instead?

The game is worth the risk. He will know I have taken steps to protect myself
.

You’re nuts
.

No. I am angry. He is a very bad man. I wish to own him. I wish him to know that I own him. So. You will go there on a service call as I have planned and you will find some way to gain access to his records and his personal computer—

It’s not necessary—you said so yourself—you said you had enough to break him already
.

I wish to complete my dossier. You will assist
.

I can’t—

Yes. You can, and you will
.

Chu had him, and that was that.

But, if he did this thing right, no one would ever connect him to the stunt, and he’d be free of Andy Chu. And after eight years he knew the NUC system as well as anyone in the commission.

Besides, playing at Jason Bourne again was going some distance to restoring his shredded ego.

“Good,” said Vangelis, turning to his screen and typing Bock’s name in on the R2R list—short for Ready to Roll. Over his shoulder he asked Bock about how things had gone at family court on Friday.

“I got screwed blue by the judge,” said Bock, feeling the burn again in his lower belly. “Lost custody, lost access, got a no-go order, plus in front of everybody he as good as calls me a cockroach and says he’s going to be keeping his eye on me. My head almost exploded.”

“That’s the way it always goes,” said Vangelis, whose domestic situation was no better than Bock’s. “The broads always win. Ask my bitch wife. Whole game is rigged. Bitches. All of them, all ages. The young ones are only BITs.”

“BITs?”

“Bitches in Training,” he said, which always got him a laugh. “What
did that rocker dude say—Mick Jagger, I think, about giving away a house?”

“Keith Richards. He said, ‘Forget marriage. Next time I’m just going to find a woman I hate and give her a house.’ ”

“That’s it. Who was the judge?”

“Monroe. Teddy Monroe.”

“Jeez. He’s a hard guy. You lip off at him? I mean, after he calls you a cockroach?”

“I gave him some edge. You know, in a cold kind of way. Told him that with all due respect I felt he had crossed a line and the way he was talking to me was bringing justice into disrepudiation. I said I was an honest citizen and as such I deserved a basic level of respect.”

Vangelis swiveled around in his chair.

“No shit. You said that?”

“Couldn’t just lay there like a punk, all those people watching. You gotta stand up. It’s like Glenn Beck says. Respectful resistance. Question with boldness. That’s what America’s all about.”

Vangelis was duly impressed, and they tossed around a few more dumb-ass clichés about dozer-dyke broads and cold-assed effin cees.

After a while they gradually settled down to the plodding pace of the graveyard shift in America’s heartland, the only light in the electric glow of computer screens and the beep of phones ringing in empty offices.

Back in familiar surroundings, Bock felt his nerves begin to settle. He logged on to a website for streaming audio and found some classical music—Ofra Harnoy doing Vivaldi cello sonatas—and his panic and his shame and his dread of Andy Chu and his fear of the immediate future ebbed slowly away.

Back at his flat over Mrs. Kinnear’s garage his phone was registering a fifth call from an unknown number. Every time his phone rang Mrs. Kinnear’s little dog would throw a hysterical rang and run around the backyard yapping like a castrated hyena and Mrs. Kinnear would shuffle to the screen door in her house smock and her rabbit-ear slippers and scream at it to shut the hell up, and then shuffle back to her movie—
Gigi
—and her bucket of Zinfandel and when
she did she’d always let the screen door slam, which drove her neighbors nuts.

After eight rings, the line would switch over to voice mail and the machine delivered Christian Bock’s recorded voice, pretty wise-ass, saying,
“This is a machine, you know what to do”
and then the beep. No message was left.

Charlie was a patient man.

It was Saturday night. Maybe Bock was out having a few beers with the boys.

Maybe Bock was just a regular guy.

Maybe Bock had nothing to do with screwing Twyla Littlebasket and her entire family in the ear.

Maybe Bock was a Cub Scout who helped old ladies across the street whether they wanted to cross or not.

Maybe Charlie Danziger was just an ugly-ass old coot with a suspicious mind.

Fuck that
, Danziger was thinking.

He’s the one
.

Danziger set the cell phone down, yawned, stretched, looked at the clock on Coker’s wall, looked across at Coker and Twyla, both sound asleep on the couch, Twyla all curled up in Coker’s lap like a big tawny kitten, Coker’s silver-haired head flopped back and his mouth wide open.

No formal decision had been made, but neither Coker nor Danziger had any stomach, right now anyway, for punching Twyla’s ticket, so it looked like they had acquired another partner.

She’d probably be okay.

The way she’d handled the Donny Falcone thing had called for a streak of cold-ass larceny as tough as boot leather.

And she knew she was in business with people it was risky to fuck with, at least in the metaphorical sense.

God, look at Coker
.

How the fuck old was he?

Coker was fifty-two, the same age as Danziger, but he looked about eighty, lying that way. He wasn’t snoring yet, but Danziger knew he was going to start any minute. You didn’t want to be around for something like that.

Danziger pulled the blanket up over both of them, shut off the cable news—apparently the Rainey Teague kid had come out of his yearlong coma and started yapping about some guy named Abel—some biblical shit, sounded like—anyway, how nice for the kid—welcome back to reality, you poor little bastard—and they were
still
running a loop of the sniper takedown at Saint Innocent Orthodox, including that long shot of Coker and Mavis Crossfire and Jimmy Candles and Danziger having a good laugh by the cruiser.

So far nothing more about the cop killings from Friday
—the investigation continues
was the phrase—Boonie Hackendorff and Marty Coors, the State guy, had given a press conference—Boonie looking like a club bouncer in a nice blue suit and the tie around his neck all askew—saying that they were
following breaking leads
and
expected to make multiple arrests very soon
. Coker snuffled, swallowed, and then began to snore.

Oh Christ, there he goes
—sounds like somebody pulling a rubber boot out of a bucket of mud.

Adenoids probably.

Well, as Dandy Don Meredith used to say on
Monday Night Football, Turn out the lights, the party’s over
.

Danziger got his jacket and his boots and the last bottle of white wine and tiptoed out Coker’s front door, locking it softly behind him. The night was dark and smelled of cut grass and flowers and leftover barbecue smoke.

Stars were out.

The long day was done.

And tomorrow promised to be interesting as hell. Way it looked right now, he’d either end it a rich man or a dead man. Maybe Boonie Hackendorff and his boys would come calling. Maybe Coker would wake up early and decide that he needed to do some preventive maintenance on his life, this time including Charlie Danziger.

Either way, he intended to be up before dawn and ready for whatever
came down the road. One thing he knew, anybody wanted a slice of him, they’d have to pay for it in a couple quarts of their own blood.

This was the sort of life-or-death drama that gave a lonely man some spring in his step, put some jalapeños in his chili. Maybe it was even the reason he’d planned the First Third robbery in the first place. One thing for sure, he wasn’t bored.

So, all in all, he figured, a good two days of work. He particularly enjoyed imagining the look on Byron Deitz’s face when he read the text message telling him where the cosmic Frisbee actually was.

Deitz had one of those faces where it was easy to picture it going all veiny and bulgy and knotting up purple while he was reading that the fucking thing had been in the back of his Hummer all afternoon.

He tippy-toed halfway down the drive, sat down on Coker’s garden wall to slip his boots on—his super-lucky blue boots—got slowly to his feet—damn, he was tired—getting too old for sucking chest wounds and all that shit—walked stiffly the rest of the way down to his truck, favoring his ribs, the bullet wound really throbbing now.

He started up the truck, slipped in a Caro Emerald CD, rolled down the window and lit up a cigarette, unscrewed the cap on the bottle of white wine and washed down two OxyContins and one of Donny’s bootleg Heparins. He swallowed hard, sucked in some smoke, dialed the AC up, put her in gear, and rumbled off into the dark.

When Danziger’s truck reached the corner and braked at the Stop sign, the red glow of the truck’s brake lights was reflected in Coker’s pale brown eyes, two tiny red points of light flickering in his irises, as he stood there at the picture window, smoking a Camel, watching Danziger make the left turn and disappear.

Glynis woke Merle up at midnight. He came up out of a nightmare with a snap that almost broke his neck. He was in his attic room, lying on top of the sheets, sweating with the heat. Outside his window the moon was gliding through a field of stars. Cicadas were humming in the pines and the generator was muttering away beyond the barn. Glynis was naked, poised at the foot of his bed. “It’s time,” she said.

Merle reached for her, and she came softly into his arms. Afterwards, in the peace and stillness of that moment, she turned to him and asked him if he would do what he was going to do at dawn under another name. He looked at her, stroked her cheek.

“Yes. If you want it. What name?”

“When you reach him, if you reach him, will you say your name is John?”

“John? Your husband?”

“Yes. His name was John. Can you do that?”

“Of course,” he said, drawing her in again.

In the early morning they dressed in silence, and shared cigarettes and a cup of her cowboy coffee in the kitchen, and she walked him to the Belfair Pike gate, where they watched Jupiter for a while, out in the field of dewy grass, cantering, his hoofbeats shaking the earth under their feet.

The Blue Bird bus was already there, idling by the gate, the old black man leaning on the door and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

Glynis handed Merle the canvas bag, heavy with the Colt and the spare magazines, kissed him, this time with heat, broke away and buried her face in his neck. And then she turned and walked back down the lane to the farmhouse.

Jupiter trumpeted from the far end of the fields, tossing his huge head. Halfway along the path Glynis turned to wave, but he was already climbing up the Blue Bird steps and he didn’t see her. By the time he was seated, she was gone into the shadow of the live oaks.

“Niceville?” said the old man, putting the bus in gear.

“No. Not that way. You go by Sallytown?”

The old man nodded towards the house.

“Mrs. Ruelle hired us for the whole day, me and the Blue Bird. Take you all the way down to New Orleans, you want. How about that? Have us a real Houlihan and we can come back in a Black Maria.”

Merle smiled.

“Wish I could. Maybe next week. Right now I’m going to Sallytown.”

“Any particular place in Sallytown?”

“Gates of Gilead Palliative Care Center. You know it?”

“Oh yes. I know it,” said the old man, more to himself than to Merle, and he didn’t speak again for several miles. After a while the Belfair Pike broke out of the old forest and uncurled into the rolling grasslands that spread out to the north of the Belfair Range.

The rising sun was a sliver of bright red fire above the eastern hills when the old man spoke again.

“I don’t believe I know your name, sir?”

“My name is John Ruelle.”

“The lady’s husband?”

“Yes.”

“It’s good you came back, Mr. Ruelle. Mrs. Ruelle, back there, she is a very fine lady. That plantation is cruel hard work, and her running it all alone since Mr. Ethan got shot by the Haggard man … well, folks have all admired her for her courage. She’s like that Penelope lady whose husband had to go off and lay siege to Troy. Been alone for a long time. Since the war. I’m glad to see you safely home.”

“Thank you.”

The driver shook his head.

“My son got killed over there.”

“Did he? I’m very sorry.”

“Damn fool war. No offense, sir.”

“None taken.”

“My son was conscripted.”

Since he was reasonably sure the draft had been ended by Congress in 1973, Merle decided to change the subject.

“I didn’t catch
your
name, sir?”

“My name is Albert Lee, like in the general, not like in the Minnesota,” he said, with a grin, obviously repeating an old line.

“Mr. Lee. Good to meet you,” said Merle.