Niceville (7 page)

Her pale and heart-shaped face was solemn, her pale hazel eyes unsmiling. She was holding Delia’s Maine Coon cat, Mildred Pierce, in her arms, the huge animal almost too much for her to lift, struggling in her grip, the cat’s dense striped fur matted and wet-looking.

Blood?

Delia touched a button by her chair.

Her voice, coming from a speaker by the door, seemed to startle the girl.

“Child, what are you doing with my cat?”

The girl jumped, and Mildred Pierce writhed in her arms, but she did not release her. Delia, knowing Mildred Pierce, thought the girl was stronger than she looked.

“Miss Cotton? I’m Clara, from across the way? I think your cat got in a fight?”

Delia knew the people across the way only as recent arrivals, renters, from out of state, a young married couple who had taken over the old Freitag place on Woodcrest after the last of that uppity bunch of stiff-necked Prussians had finally died two months ago. Delia did not know the renters at all, did not know they had a child, but since each house in The Chase sat on almost two acres of lawn and forest, well back from the road, the houses often gated and walled, it was quite usual for even longtime neighbors to know little if anything about the people living near them.

Delia looked at the image in the television, saw what looked like blood on the girl’s arms and on her pretty green dress. Delia had no affection for Mildred Pierce, a cranky and disputatious cat with imperious ways, but her heart went out to the girl, who was getting the cat’s blood on her pretty green dress.

“Wait there …”

“Clara,” said the girl, lifting her chin and shifting the weight of the cat in her arms.

“Clara,” said Delia, softly repeating the name as if trying to remember other Claras she had known, feeling a slight flutter of something strange, something
wrong
, in the back of her mind, a fleeting wisp of an ancient sin, a shameful family event buried somewhere in the distant past, connected to the girl’s name. But the memory, or the thought, or the fancy, slipped away from her like a koi in a pond. She sighed, turning off the TV and getting slowly to her feet.

“I’ll be right there.”

“Good,” said Clara, smiling sweetly up into the camera now, although Delia could no longer see her. Which was too bad, because if Delia had seen Clara smile and seen the light that was in her hazel eyes she might not have opened the door.

Two and a half miles into the brown foothills of the Belfair Range, as you run south on the winding pitted asphalt of Route 311, there’s a rutted track on the right, hidden in the brush, that leads off the highway and into the cool green darkness of the old forest, a dense mix of alders and oaks and pines. The track curves away around a bend and seems to dissolve into the trees.

After a few hundred yards, the track breaks out into a clearing, in the middle of which stands—or stood—an old pale blue barn, sagging under the weight of all the years since the Great Depression, during which it finally ceased to operate as the Belfair Pike General Store and Saddlery.

The sheet-metal roof of the barn had collapsed in several places, exposing square-cut beams a hundred and fifty years old, slick with mold and rot. The interior was dim and hot and reeked of spilled oil and manure and decades of accumulated bat scat.

Merle Zane and Charlie Danziger had been sitting inside this barn for three hours, breathing through their mouths, patiently waiting for the manhunt to pass over.

Although a critical part of the plan, this was also a tense period, a necessary risk to run with a chance that a state chopper flying over would notice this obscure patch of blue deep in the old forest and send a squad car in for a closer look.

The only warning they would get, if this were to happen, would be a short cell phone call from Coker, who, as a sergeant with the Belfair
County patrol, was out there in the hunt with the rest of the posse. So far this call had not come.

Merle Zane was a craggy-faced Franco-Irish guy in his middle forties with a shaved head and a flame scar on the left side of his neck. Merle was extremely fit, a martial artist, calm and self-contained. The turnings of fate and the fact that his father was a mechanic and auto body man who had specialized in stolen car parts had led him into stock car racing until, one day in a Louisiana town called Cocodrie, a couple of pit mechanics started yapping at him about how he was hogging the wall on the off-side turn. Zane’s forceful counter argument included the deployment of a tire iron.

A Cocodrie judge whose view of the exchange differed from Merle’s invited Merle to attend the notorious Angola prison, which was essentially a gladiator school granting any survivor an advanced degree in sheer brutality. Merle had survived it somehow, getting an early release seven years ago.

Since then Zane had been in the employ of a pair of car dealers who ran auctions up and down the eastern seaboard, mainly dealing in muscle cars from the sixties and seventies. Since the muscle car auction business often blurred the line between simple fraud and grand theft auto, the owners of the business, two Armenian American kids whose family motto was “Your money and my experience will become my money and your experience,” needed someone like Merle Zane around the office, where his duties covered the spectrum from Corvettes to personal security.

Although working with the Bardashi Boys was like sharing a hot tub with anaerobic algae, the job paid reasonably well. But Zane hoped one day to have his own charter boat service on Florida’s Gulf coast and had been quietly on the lookout for a business opportunity that would make that happen.

This opportunity came along one day in the form of Charlie Danziger, a tall cowboy-looking older man with a big white handlebar mustache, an easy smile, and a hoarse, whispery voice. Danziger, born in Bozeman, Montana, at the other end of the state from his old friend Coker, was an ex–highway patrol officer, cashiered early due to a job-related disability—addicted to OxyContin after being injured on the job—who was now working as a regional manager for a Wells Fargo unit doing business along the eastern seaboard.

Charlie Danziger and Coker had met in the Marine Corps, so long ago that neither man could quite remember where, although they sort of recalled that they were being strafed at the time. They were both stationed at Quantico, Virginia, by the end of their time in the Corps, and since they had both come to like the Deep South a lot better than the Far West, they eventually ended up in different law enforcement agencies down around Niceville.

Charlie Danziger and Merle Zane had met at a used-car auction in Atlanta. Danziger was looking to buy a Shelby Cobra Mustang, and they soon discovered some mutual acquaintances among the Angola Gladiator School Alumni. After some background checking, Danziger invited Merle to take part in a confiscatory enterprise involving the First Third Bank in a rural supply town called Gracie. Four men were needed, including a good wheelman.

The fourth man, not directly involved in the robbery, had been paid—anonymously—to create a diversion in another part of the state, which, it was felt, he either would or would not do.

As it turned out, he had succeeded in creating the diversion in a way that approached catastrophic.

At any rate, back in the planning stage, Danziger’s scheme, including the part involving his friend Coker and Coker’s Barrett .50, had struck Merle Zane as totally ruthless but tactically sound, and since the cops who had arrested him at Cocodrie and his keepers at Angola had not endeared the law enforcement community to him, he had come on board for a 33 percent share in the operation, the most dangerous part of which—the actual sharing—had yet to take place.

So now the two men were waiting, with declining patience, in the humid and ammonia-stinking confines of the Belfair Pike General Store, a good quarter mile into the tangled old forest south-southeast of Route 311.

Since both men were chain-smokers and neither of them was ready to step outside the barn to have one and since the hay-dust-and-bat-guano-fueled explosion that would have immediately followed lighting one up inside the barn would likely attract the wrong sort of attention, the two were reduced to sitting a few yards apart, Merle on an overturned oil drum and Charlie Danziger on a rickety three-legged stool, both staring into the middle distance as the light outside slowly changed from greenish yellow to pink to gold.

Now and then they heard the mutter of a helicopter in the distance, and the Doppler wail of a passing patrol car as the state and county guys raced back and forth and up and down and, when the opportunity presented itself, sideways.

There was a definite sense inside the barn, unspoken but growing, that the hunt had peaked and passed over and was now moving outwards, expanding the perimeter to include larger sections of the county and then the state.

The take, the haul, the
proceeds
, not yet inventoried, were contained in four large black canvas duffel bags and temporarily concealed in a concrete subbasement in a far corner, the hatch hidden under a pile of barn boards and car tires.

The black Magnum, wiped down and stripped clean of every possible identifier, had been rolled into an empty horse stall, covered with a tarp, and left to gather dust.

Two nearly identical beige sedans, one a recent Ford and the other an older Chevy, sat just inside the barn doors, equipped with plausible plates and papers, ready to take Merle and Danziger away in opposite directions.

Now that the adrenaline was ebbing and a leaden fatigue was setting in, both men were ready to take their cut and go, Merle to return to his job with the Bardashi boys and Charlie Danziger to finish up the details here and go back, for a while at least, to his life with Wells Fargo. In the vernacular, it was long past Miller Time, and the waiting was hard.

On the other hand, a payday of 33 percent of an estimated two and a half million dollars was a consoling thought, and both men were professionally resigned to the situation.

And if all went well, Merle Zane was thinking, this could be the beginning of a beautiful—or at least profitable—friendship.

At this taut point, Danziger’s cell phone rang, a muted chirp in the pocket of his brown leather jacket. Merle straightened up on his oil drum, reaching instinctively for the mid-sized Taurus nine-mill in his belt. Danziger held up a hand, his callused leathery palm out, shaking his head.

“Yeah?”

Merle could not hear what was being said on the other end, only that whatever it was made Danziger’s face tighten up.

Danziger put the cell phone to his chest.

“Go check the perimeter. Coker says there may be civilians inside the fence line.”

“Not cops?”

“Says no. Maybe hunters. Go look. Be careful.”

Merle pulled out his Taurus and stepped softly over to the barn doors, leaning down to look out through the gaps in the boarding. All he could see was weeds and the top of the lane where it opened up into the clearing. He was reaching for the door handle when Charlie Danziger shot him in the back, a rushed shot, hitting Merle in the lower back instead of the spine, a complication which proved to be quite troublesome later on.

The impact slammed Merle up against the barn doors and he crashed through the rotten wood, turning as he fell, landing on his back in the dust outside. He rolled to his left as a second shot scored the dirt a foot away from his thigh.

The barn wall was now between Zane and Danziger. He heard Danziger’s boots scraping on the concrete floor of the barn. Merle fired four quick shots in a horizontal line at roughly chest height along the wooden slats.

He heard Danziger cry out, a startled grunt, followed by the satisfying tumble of a body hitting the floor hard. A second later the barn boards began to shred as Charlie Danziger, apparently still very much in the game, began firing blind, straight through the wall. One stray round caught Zane in the right shoulder, a glancing impact, but the blunt shock threw him back to the ground again.

He rolled, got back up, stumbling backwards as he emptied the Taurus into the barn, concentrating his shots in and around the area where he thought he could see the dim outline of Danziger’s body through the bullet holes in the barn boards.

He stitched up the boards in a Charlie Danziger–shaped pattern—eleven more rounds—and then the slide locked back and he was out of ammunition. Merle turned and stumbled into the woods, lungs on fire and head spinning, crashing through the brush like a gut-shot buck, thinking,
So much for the beautiful friendship
.

Gray Haggard had once been briefly and happily married, but the young Margaret Mercer whom he had adored beyond words was so long in the past now that he had trouble bringing her image to mind, other than her soft brown eyes and her auburn hair and her round full body and that she had been a daring and sometimes astonishing lover.

But Margaret Mercer was long gone from the world and it had always seemed to him unfair that he should manage to survive the Kasserine Pass and that god-awful landing at Gela in Sicily and finally go through the abattoir of Omaha Beach and come out of it with nothing more than a chest full of shrapnel, while back in Niceville his heart’s desire had fallen prey to a female mosquito loaded up with the encephalitis virus.

His relationship with the Almighty had been a distant one ever since and now that he was closing in on eighty-five he often gave thought to what he was going to say to God should they ever end up on speaking terms again.

These were the sorts of thoughts he was thinking as he drove his 1952 lime green and hot pink Packard around the curve of the tree-shaded lane that led up to Temple Hill. It was late in the day to tend to Delia’s garden—the light of the evening was almost gone—but his alternative had been to drive all the way up to Sallytown to the Gates of Gilead Palliative Care Center and watch an old friend named Plug Zabriskie descend deeper into his terminal dementia.

So a bit of shuffling around in Delia’s forsythia bushes and perhaps some time spent fiddling with her malfunctioning sprinkler system—that
is, the
house’s
malfunctioning sprinkler system—he had an idea that Delia’s sprinkler system was in tip-top shape … now there was another thing he needed to take up with God, if they’d ever let him get close enough. One of the benefits of age was supposed to be a certain easing of the more frantic carnal imaginings and yet here he was having sinful thoughts about Delia Cotton’s sprinkler system. Haggard slowed to a halt, the sinful ideas dying slowly away as he stared at the entrance to Delia’s estate. The wrought-iron gates were wide open. Delia always kept them closed.