Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  Coker, always ready to help Mother Felker have a bad day, helped him chew on his fat furry mike for a good long while until Jimmy Candles and Mickey Hancock finally got him to let go. They left Felker lying on his back with blood running from his mouth, screaming something about lawsuits and damages and freedom of the press, in the middle of a glare of lights and mikes, surrounded by all the other hapless media mooks—including his own camera guys—who had done nothing at all to stop what Coker was doing but had somehow managed to get it all on tape.

  Inside the hospital it was all white lights and the smell of Lysol and diapers and stale coffee and cigarette smoke and a crowd of red faces and a lot of uniforms—state, county, Niceville PD, even some guys in suits who looked federal, a little apart from the others—and of course everybody crying and weeping and wailing or sitting around with that dead-eyed stunned look that people always got when something deeply massive has slammed into their lives. Four cops dead, one of them county. It was like an asteroid had smacked into the place.

  Coker and Jimmy Candles and Mickey Hancock stiffened themselves, took a deep breath, and waded into the crowd and manfully did all they could manfully do to comfort people who could not be comforted and to promise to smite a mighty smiting upon the killers.

  Reed Walker was there too, still wearing his black SWAT-style rig and a Kevlar vest, a long, lean blade of a guy over six feet, with shiny black hair and movie-star good looks, except for the cool flatness of his eyes and the hard line of his mouth.

  Walker drove a chase car for the State Patrol and had never wanted to do anything else. He was an adrenaline addict, crazy-brave, and, in Coker’s opinion, probably doomed. Reed saw Coker in the press and came across, threading through the crowd like a matte black barracuda.

  “Reed,” said Coker, “I’m sorry about Darcy.”

  Coker knew Reed Walker wasn’t going to mist up over Darcy. If anything, he had gone colder. Coker recalled that Darcy Beaumont and Reed Walker had gone through chase school together. Darcy was driving the blue Magnum that had caught Coker’s second round. Too bad. What’s writ stays writ.

  Reed shook his hand, looked around the room.

  “You’re a shooter, sir,” he said, in a low voice, his deferential tone as thin as window frost. “What do you make out of a guy who could take out four guys with four shots?”

  Coker gave it some thought. Walker wasn’t asking about training or background. That the shooter had to be a pro went without saying. A lot of amateurs can stitch up a shooting dummy neat as pins. Killing men requires something special. Killing four in cold blood, that requires a pro.

  “I figure a rogue cop,” said Coker, telling the kid the truth, “or maybe a Delta-level sniper home from the wars. Somebody used to killing humans.”

  Walker turned to look at him.

  “Sir, if it ever comes around that you have these guys in your sights, you know, like in a standoff or a takedown? Just kill them, okay?”

  “Son, if these guys ever get caught in something like that, you can bet they’ll never get out of it alive. A guy chilly enough to do what he did, that guy will not be coming in standing up. They’ll have to kill him. If they can. He won’t give them a choice. He’ll go down hard.”

  Generally, Coker hated to lie to anybody. Not because he had a moral objection. It was just that lying to somebody was a sort of cowardice, like you couldn’t handle what they might do if you gave it to them straight. So, as much as he could, he was telling this kid the truth.

  Walker seemed to get this.

  “If it ever happens, sir, I hope I’m there.”

  “If I can manage it, I’ll see that you are.”

  Walker smiled.

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll look forward to it.”

  So will I, thought Coker, smiling at the guy, thinking that if he had a clean shot at Reed Walker he’d sure as hell take him out first.

  Be careful what you wish for, Reed.

  Reed moved off into the crowd again, part of it but not in it, as if he had a space around him that no living person was ever going to fill.

  Looking at his back, Coker thought Reed was a cop born to die young. Somebody recognized Reed, an ER nurse he used to date, and she wrapped him up in a hug. The crowds closed around them like a wave, and Coker got pulled into the undertow himself.

  After a confusing flurry of hugs and tears and bleary red eyes and a lot of listening and nodding, Coker found himself by the water cooler with Billy Goodhew’s wife crying into his badge and his two girls, Bea and Lillian, staring up at him with their big blue eyes and their pale white faces and their open, shocked mouths.

  Looking down at them over the top of Billy Goodhew’s wife’s green-apple-shampoo-smelling blond hair—her husband’s dead less than a full day and she takes the time to shampoo her hair?—Coker tried to feel something like guilt, or even pity, but he couldn’t quite get there.

  Feeling things had always been a problem for him, even back in the Corps, but he had learned to fake it pretty well, since faking empathy was a basic job requirement in uniform police work.

  The closest he got to feeling anything tonight was feeling Georgia Goodhew’s luscious tits pressing up against him—she had a real fine chassis—and feeling that maybe he should make it a point to drop by her house later in the week and see if he could comfort her some more. Coker hugged her in close and let her smear her black eyelash crap all over his number three service tunic, wondering if he could actually nail her, wondering what she’d be like when she really got her siren on, and also wondering whether that greasy black mascara crap would ever come out of his shirt.

  Later, when he finally got home to his big old rancher in The Glades and rolled his duty car into his garage and climbed out, he was not at all surprised to find the muzzle of Charlie Danziger’s pistol shoved hard into the back of his skull.

  Saturday Morning

  Nick and Kate Wake Up to Storms

  By the morning, as if sensing that Niceville needed a good shower, the clouds had rolled in from the southwest and a blood-warm rain was hammering against Nick’s bedroom window. He was already awake, had been lying in the growing gray light listening to the tidal ebb and flow of Kate’s breathing, the warmth of her body along his left side, the scent of her on his skin and on his lips and in his hair. Considering how the night had passed, he should have been warmed by a sensual afterglow, calmly adrift in the blessed memory.

  But Nick was not drifting.

  Nick was lying there waiting for the alarm to go off and trying to find the nerve to talk to Kate about something so volatile that he was afraid to start, having to do with an old Army friend and the favor Nick had asked of him. He was wondering whether he would still be living at home by the time they finished talking about it.

  Kate, a lovely woman and one of the sweetest-natured girls Nick had ever met, also had a volcanic temper, and when she started to heat up a wise man got the hell out of range. It had taken Nick a while to get this straight and he still had a small scar on the side of his temple where he’d zigged when he should have zagged and caught a high-velocity coffee mug on its way past his head. She had been terribly sorry she’d drawn blood, but not sorry that she’d hit him.

  Kate stirred at his side and he felt that subtle but palpable change in her aura as she slowly woke up to this gloomy Saturday morning.

  “Nick,” she said, reaching for him, “how long have you been awake?”

  He rolled onto an elbow and stroked a strand of auburn hair out of her eyes, looking down at her. She smiled up at him, her expression soft and full of trust and affection.

  They had a good marriage, a very good marriage, and Nick knew he was a lucky man.

  “Awake? Maybe an hour. You were having a dream.”

  “Was I?”

  “Yes. You remember it?”

  She closed her eyes, thought.

  “Yes. Something stupid about a woman in a green dress and her big ugly cat. She wanted to come inside the house
and for some reason I didn’t want her to come inside.”

  She looked up at him.

  “You don’t look all that rested either. Were you thinking about the shootings?”

  Nick’s face hardened up for a moment, and then softened again.

  “For a while, yeah.”

  “Will you have to do anything more about them? Other than walking the site with Marty and Jimmy?”

  “Probably not. The Feds will take it over, because the First Third is a national bank. We won’t get much of it, other than some stuff around the edges.”

  “I guess Reed will be going to the funerals. Will you?”

  Nick shook his head, looked away.

  Kate remembered that Nick had probably seen enough military funerals to last him a lifetime.

  She changed the subject.

  “You went for a run, after I fell asleep, didn’t you?”

  She gave him an up-from-under look.

  “I’m amazed you had the strength.”

  Nick smiled down at her.

  “I had to get out of the house. You were going to kill me. So I had a shower and then I went for a run along Patton’s Hard.”

  Nick didn’t feel like telling her that he had gone to Patton’s Hard to take care of some pressing business—what he liked to call a “no-warrant takedown.” Nick had some reason to believe there was a serial rapist operating in the area, a snake-mean sadistic pig who had, so far at least, been too smart to get caught.

  So Nick went out every night on Patton’s Hard, looking for him. And last night, there he was, large as life, in a track suit, squatting in the bushes a few feet off the running path, waiting for a victim.

  He never saw Nick coming.

  Afterwards, something very strange—while Nick was running homeward along the narrow track that ran through the woods by the Tulip, he had been overtaken and nearly knocked down by a huge runaway horse.

  In the brief glance he got as it flashed through the pools of lamplight along the path, it looked like some kind of workhorse, a Clyde or a Belgian, anyway a gigantic animal, golden brown, with a long pale mane and four massive white hooves.

  A horse big enough to shake the ground as it thundered past him in the dark, snorting and chuffing, its harness jingling and heavy hooves pounding the earth. It had disappeared into the night, hoofbeats fading into silence, and then, as he stood there in shock, staring after it, a sudden cold wind off the river had chilled him to the core.

  Later he’d wondered if it had happened at all. Either way, he wasn’t telling Kate about any of it. She hated Patton’s Hard, seeing it as nothing but a dark and dangerous path through a dense forest of hanging willows, a place that she avoided even in the daylight.

  Kate frowned.

  “I wish you wouldn’t run along the river late at night. It’s not safe. You know what happened there last month, those two poor girls.”

  Nick gave her a look.

  “Kate—”

  “I know. Hoo-Rah and Gitter Dun and Semper Fi and all that manly horseshit.”

  “Gitter Dun is Larry the Cable Guy and Semper Fi is Corps, babe. I was Army, remember? Special Forces is Army?”

  Kate knew that Nick craved the Special Forces the way a lifelong smoker craved his cigarette. It was a mystery to her how a man who already had eight years of front-line combat still hadn’t gotten himself enough war. But now that he was here in Niceville—by his own choice—it was time for him to show up and be present in their life together. She was going to bring him all the way back, one way or another.

  The moon clock on the bedside table began to flash, lighting up the dark attic room with a vivid yellow flare.

  She sat up, naked, tapped the SLEEP button, and turned to kiss him, a deep, searching kiss. She felt him respond, felt his heat, and smiled to herself.

  One way or another.

  Breakfast, a while later, was toast and juice and black coffee, and over the litter of toast bits and jam and cutlery Kate, dressed in a tight blue skirt and crisp white blouse and ready for work—she had a meeting with a Belfair County social worker—caught Nick’s hand as he raised his cup.

  “I almost forgot. I ran into Lacy Steinert at the courthouse. She wants you to go see her.”

  Nick set the cup down, ran a hand through his short black hair in that way he had. Kate thought he looked like a man with something on his mind. She had no idea what it was, but it was eating away at him. Maybe he’d get around to telling her what it was sometime soon.

  “What’s she want?” he said, a wary tone.

  Kate’s expression shifted, the humor and the light leaving it. Outside, the rain was sheeting down and a thick gray fog was lifting in the street, rising up to the treetops like a flood. There was a short silence while she listened to the thunder of rain on their roof and looked at her husband across their breakfast table.

  “Rainey Teague,” she said softly.

  Nick flinched, as she’d known he would, his gray eyes lowering for a second. The Rainey Teague case had put a large hole in Nick’s heart. Kate knew this as well as anyone and that’s why she had questioned Lacy pretty hard, and then thought long and deep about it before she brought it up with Nick this morning.

  “Did Lacy say what she had?”

  Kate shrugged, tried for a light touch.

  “You know Lacy. Always working the system.”

  Lacy Steinert was a parole and probation officer with County Corrections, a stand-up and a fine woman, but she was also a hustler for her clients and was always looking for pleas and deals for one hard-done-by perp or another.

  “I know her,” said Nick, his face still tight.

  Kate took a breath, then the plunge.

  “It’s about Lemon Featherlight—”

  “I know him. Ex-Corps. Two tours, Bronze with a Vee, Purple Heart, a war hero. Honorable discharge and it all goes south. Now he’s a confidential informant for Tony Branko at Niceville PD Drug Squad. He’s a Seminole from Islamorada, down in the Keys. Hangs around the club district south of Tulip Bend. Ecstasy, OxyContin, Percodan, Demerol—anything prescription, he can get it. Sells it to the carriage trade, when he can. Sells himself too, so we hear.”

  “Okay,” said Kate. “The carriage trade. That’s the connection. Lacy says he’s telling her he was selling Demerol to Sylvia Teague.”

  Nick said nothing, but she could see the words sinking in.

  “For the cancer?”

  “This is what she’s saying.”

  “Kate, Sylvia Teague was a very wealthy woman, and they get the best care there is. She could get whatever she needed from her doctor, up to and including heroin. Before Rainey went missing she had her own morphine drip. She could just press the button on the monitor whenever she wanted and get all the ease in the world. And how would she ever cross lines with a guy like Lemon?”

  Kate hesitated, and then went on.

  “He’s telling Lacy they met two years ago at the Pavilion on Tulip Bend. She was there with some friends—lunch or something—and Lemon Featherlight was walking through—he’s a good-looking man, dresses well—one of Lacy’s friends waved to him and he came over.”

  “Lacy get this friend’s name?”

  Kate shrugged.

  “You’ll have to talk to Lacy about that.”

  “I’m still not getting the point.”

  Kate paused, looked at Nick.

  “Lacy says Lemon got pretty close to Sylvia. Lemon says they became … friends.”

  Nick thought that over.

  “I’m still in the dark. Where does this go?”

  “Lemon Featherlight says Sylvia used to invite him home. Sometimes Miles would be there …”

  Kate let it hang there.

  Nick had some coffee, his gray eyes lowered. She could see his mind working.

  “The three of them?”

  Kate tilted her head to the left, gave him a wry look, older than her years.

  “This is not entirely unknown in Niceville, Nick.
Or in the rest of the world. Some pretty wild things went on in the twenties, and then again in the eighties. Even in the best families, so I hear.”

  “Not in mine.”

  “Sweetheart, your family’s in Los Angeles. You grew up surfing off Santa Monica pier with your sister. Your father is an entertainment lawyer and your mother runs a hospital and they’re both as frigidly unappealing as banana-flavored Popsicles. How they ever got you and Nora I’ll never understand. They must have been trying out a new yoga move when they fell over and accidentally had sex.”

  Nick had to smile at that. She was dead right. His parents got intensely passionate about the die-off in the delta smelt population, but they really didn’t give a damn about actual humans. They’d had two kids, Nick and his twin sister, Nora, reacted with quiet horror at the brute physicality of the birth process, cutesy-named the results Nick and Nora as if they were a pair of teacup Yorkies. Then they went out ASAP and got themselves vasectomies and tubal ligations, one each, and that was that for that. Kate smiled, touched his cheek.

  “Nick, I keep telling you, Niceville is different, even more than the way the whole South is different. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe there really is something weird in Crater Sink. Niceville has a strange pulse. Remember, I grew up here.”

  “That why your dad lives so far away from it?”

  Kate smiled at him. Ever since she had asked her father about the Rainey Teague disappearance a year ago, he had gracefully but continually managed to avoid talking about it at all, other than to ask her, now and then, in a careful tone, whether she still had “that damned old mirror” upstairs.

  Which they did.

  Kate didn’t answer Nick’s question, which was clearly rhetorical. He had moved on to Lemon Featherlight anyway.

  “Featherlight’s gone to see Rainey maybe twelve times in the last year. I guess you already know that?”