Niceville (9 page)

Nick, true to his word, had done a full year’s course at Glynco in six weeks and four days, a record for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, making a solid friend out of Kate’s brother, Reed, while
they were there together, and coming out third in his class. They had finally gotten married two years ago, and he was
still
here, still in Niceville, still with her, her husband, the capstone of her life, right now a soothing baritone rumble at the other end of the line, still talking about the shooting, patient, as he always was with her, laying the thing out for her.

“The shooter was probably ex-military, but other than that, not much. Pretty cold killing. I figure the weapon was a Barrett, a .50-caliber rifle anyway, but instead of it just disabling the engine, the block blew up and a hunk of shrapnel killed the driver. Then he picked them off one by one as they drove into his sights. It’s possible that he killed the other three because once the first man was dead, it was just the orderly thing to do. Like housekeeping.”

“Because once anyone dies in a robbery, the penalty in this state is always death?”

“That’s it. But it’s just as likely that the shooter meant to kill them right from the start. He had already killed the two people in the chopper.”

“But why kill the cops too? If he could just disable the cars?”

“From a military point of view, it’s just more efficient. No survivors, no witnesses, no risk.”

“Oh, Nick—such an ugly thing.”

“Not really. Just military.”

“You coming home?”

“Be there in a while.”

“How long’s a while?”

“Before dark. You really still have that Glock?”

“I do. It’s right here in the glove box.”

“Is it loaded?”

“If it isn’t it’s a paperweight.”

“Honey, please take it with you.”

“Do I
look
like Dirty Harriet?”

“I don’t know. Squint, and say, ‘Do you feel lucky?’ ”

“I’ll take the gun.”

“Good. Love you.”

“Love you back. Stay safe. Bye.”

After a long interlude during which he gave some thought to the caprices of fate, Danziger came carefully out of the barn, his legs unsteady, his fingers bloody on his shirt, his face white and slick.

He dropped to his knees, pulled out his cell. His mouth was dry and a weary weight was dragging him down.

The cell was buzzing as he put it to his ear.

“Shut up,” he explained, in a hoarse, growling whisper. “I’m shot. Yeah. Shot. Like with bullets?”

A pause while he listened to Coker.

“Lung, I think. It’s sucking.”

More listening.

“Yeah, I have some plastic in the car. But I’m going to have to get to a medic.”

Coker talking again.

“A through-and-through? I can’t tell. I gotta find a mirror.”

More talk from Coker.

“No. Merle’s gone. But I hit him. I saw him take the round.”

A crackle from the cell.

“Small of the back. Lower right. He went through the barn boards and it all went to shit.”

He listened for a time, his craggy face white and his lips blue.

“Yeah, well, I’m not used to shooting a guy in the back. I guess you have to practice.”

More buzzing from the cell phone speaker.

“No,” said Danziger, shaking his head. “Not by myself. We’ll deal with him later.”

More heated talk, this time with swearing. Danziger listened for a while, said no again a couple of times, added a
fuck you
for emphasis, and clicked off.

He got to his feet and staggered back into the barn. With his free hand, he riffled around in the Chevy until he found the plastic bag the manual had come in. There was duct tape on a nail next to the door. He used the edge of an old wood-saw to rip off three long strips.

Then he tried to take his shirt off with one hand while using the other to press down on the bullet hole in his chest. After a time he gave that up and just ripped the fabric away, tearing the shirt to pieces and exposing an ugly purple-black hole in the fleshy part of his chest about three inches below his right nipple. Every time he breathed out, pink bubbles of blood would foam up out of the hole.

It wasn’t bleeding that much, which meant most of the blood was staying inside his chest. Given enough time, his chest cavity would fill up and he’d drown in his own blood. Unless it had nicked an artery, in which case the same thing would happen, only at warp speed, and he’d have about three minutes to live. He’d have to wait and see.

Coker had asked him if the wound was a through-and-through. This would be a good thing to know, he decided, so he opened up the shreds of his shirt, trying to figure out which shred had been part of the back of the shirt. Far as he could see, there was no exit hole in any of these pieces.

Gotta make sure
, he thought.

He walked back over to the Chevy and tried to get a look at his back in the passenger-side mirror. He used that side because the mirror was convex and gave him a wider view.

Aside from learning that objects in this mirror were closer than they appeared, he saw nothing but unbroken skin on his back.

No through-and-through. The slug was still inside him. This was not good news. If the slug took some of his shirt inside with it, which they usually did, then that dirty bit of cloth was going to make the wound septic.

So, what with a sucking chest wound, a dirty nine-mill slug stuck
somewhere inside him, and the related internal bleeding, Charlie Danziger was in a bad place.

Danziger used what was left of his shirt to press down on the wound again. This hurt a lot, so he stopped doing it and settled for just getting the area around the wound dry enough so the duct tape would stick to it. He managed, after several tries, to tape the plastic film down on three sides, remembering to leave the fourth side open.

As soon as he got the plastic in place, the sheet flattened out against his ribs as the lung contracted. The plastic being open on one side meant that it worked like a valve, closing to allow the lung to get some negative pressure going and pull in some air, but opening back up to allow air out so the lung could expand again. People who do not have sucking chest wounds call this process breathing. Being able to breathe made a few other things more feasible, like getting the hell out of Dodge. It took him ten painful minutes to get the duffel bags into the trunk of the beige Chevy. Money might be the root of all evil, but two million in stolen cash was mainly a hernia risk.

He started the car, rolled it out into the clearing, got out, scanned the forest all around looking for any sign of Merle Zane. The light was fading quickly. Or maybe he was dying.

Didn’t guys say in those old movies,
Wyatt, everything’s getting dark
when they were dying of a gunshot wound? He looked down at his cowboy boots—his best navy blue Lucchese cowboy boots—and noticed that they were spotted with blood.

It was a comfort to him that if he was about to die, at least he’d be doing it with his boots on, in the tradition of all the great gunfighters.

But, since he wasn’t quite dead as of yet, there was nothing left to do but light up a road flare and toss it into the barn. He was two hundred yards down the track when the twilight sky behind him turned into red fire.

Lanai Lane was one avenue in a long, spreading fan of interlacing streets, each of them lined with identical small yellow brick Art Deco bungalows alternating with identical ranch-style homes, all built back in the early fifties as part of a housing development called The Glades.

The Glades once stood apart from Niceville, cherishing an air of suburban exclusivity, but over the years Niceville had slowly grown out to envelop it and now even the name—The Glades—was remembered only by what remained of those bright young families, fresh from the Second World War, who had moved in to do their part in the construction of the Great American Dream.

Most of these postwar families had flourished along with their hope-filled nation, planted trees and gardens, built fences and watered lawns and walked across those green lawns on soft summer evenings to meet the neighbors and share some iced drinks and watch their kids grow up through the Eisenhower years, the Nixon years, the Vietnam War, the counterculture, the nineties, Reagan, Clinton, September 11, and the wars that followed on.

During the inexorable progression of these times, the original Glades families had grown old and lost their mates and were seeing less and less of their kids while their friends and neighbors died off steadily, names being ticked off a list.

Now, in a brand-new century, the live oaks planted as skinny saplings before the Civil War were large enough to reach across the narrow roads and touch branches, a broad green canopy draped in Spanish moss and sheltering a sun-dappled timeworn community composed
mainly of solitary old women living on pensions, a few renters escaping from Tin Town, and here and there a black or Hispanic or Muslim family passing through on their way up the reasonably steady achievement ladder of Niceville society.

In a few of the old Glades houses, where the elderly solitaries who owned them were willing to take a chance on a stranger, for the money or the company or the safety, some lone male would take up residence in a basement suite or an apartment over a garage, usually someone new to Niceville and trying to find a job, or a businessman just transferred in and scouting out a place to set up his family.

At 3156 Lanai Lane, the solitary man in the flat over the garage, resident there for eight months, ever since he had been forcibly removed from the family home on Saddle Creek Drive, was a newly divorced man by the name of Tony Bock.

This warm Friday evening a joyless Tony Bock parked his lime green Toyota Camry in the tiny space allotted to him by his landlady, a Mrs. Millie Kinnear.

Bock gave her a sardonic wave as she twitched the curtain open to scowl at him—they were not on good terms—as he passed down the lane to the rear of the house, where he pushed the rusty chain-link gate open, stepping carefully through the random clumps of dog crap that stuccoed Mrs. Kinnear’s scruffy patch of backyard.

Then, and slowly, with a bitter burn in his belly, he climbed the creaking wooden stairs to his three-room flat above Mrs. Kinnear’s garage.

Home again home again hippity-hop
, he said to himself, opening the door. He’d always said this to the Effin Cee when he got home from work. She used to smile when he said this, but after his coming home started to mean she was going to get smacked around some more she stopped smiling when he said it. But he kept right on saying it anyway.

Bock was that sort of guy.

The apartment smelled of stale coffee and the Chinese takeout he’d had for breakfast but was otherwise very neat and orderly, if rather severely overstuffed, being packed full of everything the Effin Cee had let him take, mainly what had been in his private gentleman’s retreat in the basement back at Saddle Creek Drive.

What he had been
allowed
to take, under the watchful eyes of a couple
of plus-size Niceville cops, consisted of a large brown leather sectional sofa with a matching ottoman, a brand-new forty-two-inch flat-screen Sony Bravia on a black lacquer sideboard, a bar fridge right beside the sectional, well stocked with Stella Artois beers, a narrow desk along the window wall with a Dell PC and a twenty-six-inch HD monitor, a ham radio set, a CB radio, a Direct TV satellite dish, a second computer, a silver Sony laptop actually owned by the NUC—the Niceville Utility Commission—his employer, but his to use as he pleased on his off hours, and a high-speed broadband Internet connection that, after losing a long and vexatious argument with Mrs. Kinnear, who was tighter than a gerbil’s colon, Bock had personally paid to have installed.

There was a small galley kitchen, a cramped and windowless bedroom barely big enough to hold his singleton cot, a bathroom that was not much of an improvement on a Porta-Potty, and a porch overlooking Mrs. Kinnear’s gruesome backyard, where, if he was so inclined, he could sit on a soft summer evening with a cold Stella in his hand and watch Mrs. Kinnear’s demented shi-tzu—a perfect name for the little rodent, since his capacity for fecal production seemed inexhaustible—do his business all over the lawn, in between random episodes of high-pitched yapping.

However, tonight Bock did not choose to do so, because, on the way home from the courthouse, still writhing under the lash of Judge Monroe’s scathing words, he had experienced a kind of dark-side epiphany.

Bock was a proud man, and not utterly uneducated. He was, after all, a graduate of East-Central-Mid-State-Poly and held an Advanced Degree in Eco-Sustainable Energy Systems with a minor in Information Technology. Therefore Judge Monroe’s complete dismissal of his entire person had bitten deep into his soul and the marks remained there still, a festering sore that would have to be cauterized in the fires of retributive justice.

The question was how, and his recent epiphany revealed the first stirrings of an answer. A lone man seeking justice against an oppressive system had to move with subtlety and guile. Since they were all so damned sure of their better angels, maybe that was where they were most vulnerable. The central idea of his epiphany was to attack them
obliquely. How? He had the resources right in front of him, the computers and the Internet.

Therefore, tonight, instead of his usual hectic interlude with Internet porn, he popped himself a frosty Stella, sat down at his desk, opened up a Word document, and began to type.

A few letters.

A beginning.

THE INNOCENCE PROJECT

He sat back, stared at the words floating in the middle of a glowing white field, pulsing with possibilities, gathering himself, feeling a hot rush in his lower belly.

Innocence
was exactly the word.

Bock’s short but memorable experience of the world had led him to conclude that no one was
innocent
. Certainly not the Effin Cee, and that little bitch of a daughter—who probably wasn’t even his—was not much better.