Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  What was the point?

  A difficult silence followed.

  Deitz knew what Phil wasn’t saying, but he didn’t give a damn about that. He was still a cop, no matter what that U.S. attorney said about it.

  And cops were like family.

  On the far end of the line Phil Holliman was thinking there was some irony in Deitz using a word like family considering the state of his own, but Deitz wasn’t a guy you could say was all loaded up with insight and awareness and all that shit.

  So he just kept his mouth shut and listened to Deitz rant and rave.

  “Anyway, whatever we’re doing, we got to do it fast. We got some serious Chinks flying in Saturday, to look at the item. And the window at … the source … closes on Monday night. It’s gotta be back in their inventory by then, or the black choppers will be flying up our ass. Go get this done.”

  He snapped the call off, tried some deep breathing to calm himself. He could see the lights of Niceville coming on down in the valley, see the microwave masts blinking red on the top of the limestone bluffs that overlooked the town. This was his town and he had built himself a good life here and these pukes who took his fucking item were going to sincerely wish they hadn’t.

  Friday Night

  Merle Zane Meets the Woman in the Forest

  After giving up on all that transcendental horseshit, Merle came up with the much simpler alternative plan of passing out from the pain. This had its risks, such as shock and death, but Merle decided that being dead, while inconvenient in many ways, had the advantage of being painless.

  He closed his eyes and rolled his head back and started to slip his cables, as the sailors like to say, when they mean to drift quietly out of the harbor without troubling to raise their anchors.

  “You all right?” said a voice in his head, but not the nasty grating voice that was always criticizing and accusing him, a voice that, he had realized a long while back, belonged to his maternal grandmother, Murielle, who had always disapproved of him, and not entirely without reason.

  Merle opened his eyes.

  The dark was almost complete and the last of the golden temple light was leaving the forest. But he could see well enough to make out a shape standing in front of him, looking down at him.

  Caught, he said to himself, almost with relief. Now I’ll get some medical attention. Anyway, technically, if you died during the getaway then you weren’t really getting away, were you?

  Finding this argument persuasive, Merle forced himself to sit up, blinking at the silhouetted figure. As he moved, the pain sheeted through him with terrible intensity and he flinched a bit. The figure, slender, too slender for a cop, stepped quickly back and leveled what looked like a small-caliber rifle at him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” said the voice, a woman’s voice, in a soft Virginian accent, wary but not actively hostile.

  “I’ve been shot,” said Merle, trying to get his legs to work, trying to get the world to stop tilting crazily to the left. “In the back.”

  “Who shot you?” asked the woman. “Federals?”

  “No,” said Merle, realizing from the suspicious way she said “Federals” that whoever this woman was, she probably wasn’t with the cops.

  “Not the Feds. A business partner.”

  “Shot you in the back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sounds like a bad partner.”

  Merle tried for a smile.

  “I’m leaning that way.”

  She might have smiled back. It was too dark to tell, but there was a flash of white in her face.

  “I heard you thrashing around in the valley. I thought you might be a hurt deer. Can you get up?” she asked in a flat, careful tone. She stepped back, holding the rifle steady, not aiming it right at him, but close enough.

  “I think so.”

  “You do it, then.”

  Merle got a palm on the ground, which helped to stop the earth from turning over underneath him, turned to his right, got a knee braced, and managed to get to all fours.

  He put a hand on the tree trunk, readied himself, and pushed himself upright, feeling the world spin and then slow. His jeans were soaked with blood and his boots squelched as he turned to face the woman with the rifle.

  In the dying light he could see that she was shapely, with shoulder-length hair, some dark color, possibly black, wearing jeans and heavy boots, a plaid shirt. Her skin seemed to glow in the last of the twilight.

  “Let me see the wound.”

  Merle twisted, lifted his bloody shirt. She leaned down to peer at the black hole in his body, straightened up.

  “Ugly. Don’t see an exit wound. If the slug’s in there, I guess it’ll have to come out. You got any cash money?”

  Merle considered the irony of having committed a wild-ass daylight bank robbery at gunpoint, escaping a statewide dragnet after being accessory to the assassination of four cops, in the process taking a bullet in the back from one of his own guys, only to end up being mugged like a patsy by a gypsy-looking girl-woman with what looked like a cap-and-ball squirrel gun about a hundred and fifty years old. Life is an ever-unfolding panoply of marvels, he was thinking.

  “I have maybe two hundred dollars in my wallet. All I have. I doubt there’s an ATM around here.”

  “Give it up,” she said, a hard note, but not threatening. Merle extracted his blood-soaked wallet, handed it over to her. She kept the muzzle centered on his belly as she snatched the wallet away. Merle, swaying, watched her think things over.

  “You got a gun on you there. I see it sticking out. Hand that over too.”

  He pulled his Taurus out of his belt, held it out to her. She took it, turned it in the dim light.

  “What kind of a gun is this? Colt .45?”

  “It’s a Taurus. A nine-millimeter.”

  She frowned at it, and then shoved it into what looked like a canvas bag hanging from her shoulder.

  “Can you walk?”

  Merle gave it some thought, pushed himself free of the tree, did not immediately fall on his face.

  “I think so.”

  “I have a place up the valley. It’s about a quarter mile. Think you can walk that far?”

  “I can. You really think you can deal with a bullet wound?”

  She showed her teeth.

  “I board horses, sir. Breed ’em too. I guess if I can pull a breech foal live out of a dead mare, I can see to your bullet holes.”

  The thing seemed to be decided.

  Somehow Merle covered the ground, a long, unsteady walk up a generally rising slope covered in those soft pine needles, weaving his way without the girl’s help through a towering stand of old pines and beeches and live oaks, putting one foot in front of another with the woman always a few feet behind him. He could feel the muzzle of her rifle zeroed on his back and was wondering if he was being helped or taken prisoner. Probably both. At this point, he didn’t give a damn.

  He just wanted something for the pain and to get that goddam slug taken out of his back. If she did that, she could call the cops and collect the reward, whatever it was, and the hell with it. He’d get the needle for his part in the shooting of those cops but that was a long way off and therefore, at this point anyway, purely hypothetical.

  The woman seemed pretty calm, all things considered, but this was the South, and she was obviously country, not city, and he had observed that they grew a different kind of woman down here.

  During the last few hundred yards, Friday evening came down to full dark and the only light around was what looked like a big wood-frame white-painted farmhouse at the top of the rise.

  A string of large clear-glass electric bulbs, yellow and flickering, lit up the grounds like a used-car lot. There was a big rickety-looking barn beyond the house, with a rusted corrugated iron roof. He could smell horses, and hay, and fresh manure. No dogs around, which was odd, for a farmhouse. There was a pockety-pockety sound coming from the far side of the barn.

  It to
ok him a moment to figure out it was some kind of gas-driven generator. The interior of the house was glowing with a warm yellow light, and a thin ribbon of smoke was rising straight up into the starry night.

  The woman stopped him at the gate, turning to look back down the long valley. There was a red glow in the east, and an acrid whiff of burning oil.

  “A fire, down by the Belfair Pike,” she said, turning around to look at him. “Looks like the Saddlery is going up. You and your partner have anything to do with that?”

  “I think my partner may have.”

  She shook her head, watching the glow light up shreds of cloud in the night sky.

  “Bad things happened there, a while ago. But it was too bad you had to burn it down. It was a useful place, in its time.”

  Merle felt a look of humble contrition was the safest response, so he gave her one. He could see her better now. In the harsh electric glare of the yard lights, her eyes were a pale shade of green and her skin was tanned that coffee-with-cream color Gaelic or Scottish people get if they’re out in the sun a lot. Her black hair was thick and long and Merle saw that she was not pretty—too strong-featured for that—but certainly very attractive.

  No makeup at all. Her hands on the rifle were rough and red and she had what looked like dried blood under her fingernails.

  She felt him looking at her hands and smiled. When she did, Merle raised her age from mid-twenties to maybe early thirties. Her teeth were uneven, with a slight gap between the two front ones.

  “I was killing chickens when I heard you crashing around down the valley. Strip down and come into the kitchen. I’ll see what we can do.”

  Merle hesitated.

  “Well, you’re not tracking all that blood and gore into the parlor, my friend.”

  She set the rifle and her khaki-colored canvas bag down by the door. In the light from the overhead bulbs Merle saw that the bag had some markings on the side, faded but still legible.

  1ST INF DIV AEF

  She straightened up, looked at him for a time in the light of the porch, her expression puzzled.

  “What are you, anyway? You look French.”

  “My dad’s from Marseille,” said Merle. “My mother’s Irish, from Dublin, and I was born in Harrisburg, so I don’t know where that leaves me.”

  “Guess you’re an American,” she said, a half smile flitting across her careworn features.

  “Well, don’t be shy,” she said, indicating his shirt. “I’ve seen a naked man before.”

  With her help he was able to peel his bloody boots off. She used a skinning knife she had tucked into her belt to slice off whatever clothing wouldn’t come off any other way. She stepped back, looked him over with a cool, critical eye.

  “What the devil have you got on your neck there?” she said, indicating the dark purple flame scar that ran up from Zane’s left pec and wound itself around the left side of his neck.

  Zane reached up and touched the thing, something he had acquired after a long and drunken evening in Phuket, when he had stumbled on his way up a staircase while following a whore and dropped the lantern he was carrying, setting the bamboo house on fire.

  Specifically, he got the burn itself when he went back into the flames to get the whore, who, once he had set her down safely outside, attacked him with her fingernails for setting her business on fire.

  “I got burned. In a fire,” he added redundantly. She shook her head, opened her mouth to say something, said nothing, and carried on with her cold-blooded assessment of his body.

  “You keep yourself up okay,” she said, giving him a slow up and down. “No fat on you. Good muscles. You got a rip in your shoulder there, looks like a grazing wound. He shot at you twice?”

  “More than twice.”

  “Did he? You manage to get any shots off while he was doing that?”

  “Fifteen rounds. I hit him at least once.”

  This seemed to please her.

  “Good for you. Although one hit in fifteen is pretty poor shooting. You need some practice, I guess.”

  “He was shooting back at me at the time. That tends to spoil your concentration.”

  “I guess it does. That’s a mean big hole in your back. Put your hands up on the wall there.”

  Merle did as he was told. Although he didn’t like the position—it reminded him of getting busted by those cops in Cocodrie or getting a cavity search from the yard bulls at Angola—he found he needed the support.

  She went inside and he heard the sound of a tap running. Over behind the barn the generator picked up speed, which meant that the water pump was electric and it was powered by that generator.

  He hadn’t seen any phone or power wires running into the house either. Or anything like a satellite dish on the roof.

  She came back out through the screen door carrying a large wooden bucket and some rough towels, which she dipped in the water and then used to wipe him down, as if he were a horse that had been rode hard and put away wet.

  The water was ice cold, as if it had been pumped up from glacier melt. She did the work without shyness, as brisk and thorough as an ER nurse, her expression turning grim as she studied the wound in his back, finally touching it with a fingertip, but gently.

  “Not a big slug, I guess. You’re lucky it didn’t nick your spine. Okay, you’ll do.”

  She straightened up, handing him a towel to dry off with. While he dabbed at himself she opened the door and stepped back to let him go through.

  The house looked as if nothing had been done to it since the Depression. It was sparsely furnished, mostly bare wood pieces, oval hooked rugs here and there, in rust and green and gold, one large brown leather couch in front of a big stone fireplace, a wood fire blazing on the hearth, a few framed photos set out along the top of the mantel.

  There was a four-slot gun rack above the fireplace, with two Winchesters, one carbine, and a long rifle with a tubular scope, both browned, with octagonal barrels, he noticed. Antiques, but in mint condition. Under that, one very old fowling piece, also cap-and-ball, resting on the bars.

  And on the top bar, a long angular and mean-looking weapon that Merle thought might be a BAR, a Browning automatic rifle, a 30.06 full-auto monster that hadn’t been used in the field since the end of World War II.

  The darker side of Merle’s nature figured he was looking at about fifty thousand dollars’ worth of antique weapons on that rack alone. He put the thought aside. He figured he was already in enough trouble.

  It looked like the eating got done in the kitchen, at the big trestle table. There was a woodstove and some kind of icebox from the thirties. There was no formal dining room. A flight of plain wooden stairs rose up into the darkness at the turning of the landing. Music was coming from somewhere, thin and scratchy, some kind of jazzy number with a lot of horns in it. The name of the song floated unbidden into his mind. “Moonlight Serenade,” by Glen Miller.

  He had a couple of seconds to take it all in and was looking down at the worn-out floorboards just inside the kitchen door when the wooden slats just sort of rose up at him, at first quite slowly and then a hell of a lot faster. He felt her hands pluck at him, but she wasn’t quick enough. He went down like a man diving off a cliff, hit hard, bounced once, passed out cold, and that was the official end of Merle Zane’s Friday.

  Coker’s Shift Ends Dramatically

  Coker’s shift ran a lot later than he wanted it to, but all the off-duty guys had come in to help look for the shooters and provide moral support for the survivors, so bailing on all that gung-ho Semper Fi brotherhood-of-the-badge horseshit, and the holy righteous wrath that went with it, would have looked pretty cold-assed.

  Around eleven he and a couple of his platoon mates, Jimmy Candles and Mickey Hancock, the shift boss, dropped over to Cedars of Lebanon to see the families of the guys who had gotten killed that day.

  This was where the bodies had been taken for the final ME’s report, which was being prepared right now, the forens
ic autopsies, and all that CSI poodle-fakery.

  Coker wasn’t too worried about them finding anything they could use. The only place CSI clues ever solved anything serious was on television.

  Even if they figured out the weapon, the good old U.S. of A. was jam-packed with Barrett .50s in civilian hands, thanks to the NRA.

  There was Billy Goodhew’s sexy young wife over there, looking weepy, her nose running. Billy Goodhew had been in the county car following right behind the dark blue interceptor, a kind of goofy but brave and highly motivated guy with two tiny girls named Bea and Lillian. Billy had gotten Coker’s second round smack in his kisser. Coker had seen him take it—he liked the kid but it had to be done, and what’re you going to do?

  Money for the taking?

  Take it.

  The world was a mean place and people had to look after their interests, and one of Coker’s interests was in not ever being as dirt-poor and utterly miserable as his alcoholic parents had been.

  Taking a long view, for cops, and for combat soldiers, it was Coker’s firm belief that the major glory of the job, and most of the thrill of it, was that you could get killed doing it.

  Every now and then somebody actually died on the job. Coker felt that line-of-duty death was like the jalapeños on a chimichanga; it added spice to patrol work that could be pretty damn boring most of the time.

  Anyway, there it was: Billy Goodhew was going to his grave without a head and his casket welded shut and Coker and Mickey Hancock and Jimmy Candles, as the senior vets in the platoon, felt they ought to go around and see the families, who were sitting in the lobby of Cedars with about fifty other people, mostly relatives, a few friends.

  No newspeople allowed inside.

  The newspeople were flitting around out there in the parking lot like a circling cloud of vampire bats, maybe ten or eleven satellite trucks from all the local affiliates and the national cable outfits.

  On the way from his patrol car Coker got blocked by a wispy but loudmouthed and universally loathed Cap City news guy named Junior Marvin Felker Junior—known to the cops for reasons lost in time as Mother Felker—who stepped up sprightly and stuck a fat furry mike in Coker’s face and asked him how it felt to have all those dearly beloved cop buddies shot dead in one day.