Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  Kate did, and said so.

  “Yeah, well, Tony Branko looked into it, asked him what the connection was. Featherlight just said he felt sorry for the kid. Branko figured there was more, but Featherlight can close down pretty tight when he wants to, and Branko didn’t see the harm in it anyway. What you’re telling me, things get a little clearer, don’t they? Branko’s too damn soft on Featherlight, because he was Corps himself and he thinks Featherlight got royally screwed by the MPs. Wait till he hears this news. Is Lemon Featherlight saying he knows anything useful about what happened to Rainey?”

  She shook her head, still watching him to see where he was going to come down on this. “No idea. Lacy just says, come by and see her.”

  Nick was silent for a while longer. This wasn’t the time to bring up the other thing. Anyway, what Kate was saying had pretty much driven it out of his mind. He’d figure out what to say later.

  “Damn. Lemon Featherlight and Sylvia—”

  “And Miles. You can handle it, Nick. You’re a tough guy. Whatever it is Lemon Featherlight has to say, you should probably go and listen.”

  “I liked the Teagues. I liked thinking well of them. Maybe I won’t want to hear it.”

  “I know,” said Kate, touching his hand. “Who does? But that’s what you do, isn’t it?”

  Coker and Danziger Have a Frank Exchange of Views

  When Danziger came to that Saturday morning, his first impression was that he was lying at the bottom of a swimming pool staring up through ten feet of clear blue water at a match-head sun that was floating in a sky of pale green. It was lovely and warm and relaxing down here and he was giving some thought to staying put for the rest of the day when a dark shadow fell across the sun and he heard a deep booming voice that must have been coming from the pool drain because it seemed to be all around him. The voice was vaguely familiar and he closed his eyes trying to place it.

  “Hey, Charlie, you dickhead. Wake the fuck up.”

  That helped. Coker.

  He opened his eyes.

  He was looking up at Coker, who was looking down at him, silhouetted against a bright halogen lamp of some sort. Coker’s face, never a kindly one, looked like a death mask, staring down at him with a cold yellow glitter in his pale brown eyes.

  “And don’t you for fuck’s sake say where am I,” growled Coker, who had a cigarette in his mouth. His silhouette was wreathed in smoke, and ashes from the tip were drifting down onto Danziger’s face.

  “Where am I?” said Danziger.

  Coker stepped back.

  “You’re at Donny Falcone’s place.”

  “How’d I get here?”

  “Last night at my house. I get home; you’re in the garage. You stick a pistol in my ear and then pass out on the floor like a mall-rat on roofies. I carried you inside, patched you up a bit, figured you needed to get that slug outta your chest, so I called Donny.”

  Danziger thought that over.

  “Donny’s a dentist. I was shot. I needed a medic, Coker, not a dental flossing.”

  A voice from farther away, somebody else in the background. The low drawling voice of Donny Falcone himself, not at all friendly.

  “I was medic enough to put you out and pull a nine-mil slug out of your fucking chest, Charlie. And sew you up nice and neat afterwards.”

  Danziger lifted himself up in the chair. It took awhile and hurt like hell. The room swirled a bit and went pale. He looked around, saw Donny Falcone looking back at him. Donny was a big black-eyed young Sicilian with George Clooney good looks and teeth so white that when he smiled you just wanted to smack him. Donny wasn’t smiling right now.

  In fact, he looked like a man who had just become an accessory after the fact to four—no, six—counts of felony murder, if you counted the two people in the news chopper.

  This was a pretty accurate précis of his situation, and it was a situation he would never have allowed himself to be in if he hadn’t indulged himself in a sexual fetish that involved using his anesthetized female patients as unwitting models in erotic photo-essays on the motif of partly naked and very attractive women posed shamelessly in dental chairs while gassed out of their gourds.

  This form of artistic expression, which, had it involved crucifixes stuck in buckets of rhino poop or naked dead lesbian nuns floating in glass tanks full of formaldehyde, would have gotten him a nude lap dance with a happy ending from the head of acquisitions at the Tate Modern.

  Instead, it brought him into Coker’s gravitational field in a roundabout way, beginning with the fact that Donny Falcone had—briefly—employed a young and very pretty Cherokee dental hygienist named Twyla Littlebasket, who had stumbled onto one of Donny’s “hobby shots” while borrowing his office computer.

  After some heated negotiations, Twyla Littlebasket had been very well paid to go suddenly deaf and blind. This turned out to be a short-term fix. After cashing Donny’s generous check and blowing half the money on a first-class tour of Europe and a scarlet Beemer, Twyla, upon reflection, decided that it was a matter of feminist duty to take this whole squalid story to her father, Morgan Littlebasket. Chief of their clan, a highly respected Niceville resident, and a man who was seen by all as a figure of adamantine integrity. Daddy would know what to do about Donny Falcone.

  But Daddy, otherwise a kindly old man, was also puritanically austere in matters touching upon sexuality. His manner around Twyla and her older sister, Bluebell, had, during their teenage years, grown ever more frigidly distant and had verged on grimly disapproving as their bodies had blossomed into ripe young womanhood.

  The fact that she had so befouled herself—and her clan—by accepting a bribe from a criminally deviant Italian dentist was a moral failure he might eventually forgive but he would never forget.

  So Twyla, faltering in her resolve, ended up going with the only other independent and strong male connection she had, namely Coker, who was her part-time lover.

  Coker elected to try the Donny Falcone case in Coker’s Court of No Appeal, where Donny Falcone was duly pronounced Guilty as Sin and sentenced to pay a hefty monthly fine, in cash, to an account Coker had established in a galaxy far, far away, the proceeds of which Coker felt it only right to share with Twyla Littlebasket. Having some extortionate leverage on a perverted Sicilian dentist may not seem, at first glance, all that useful, but it had just saved Charlie Danziger’s life.

  Coker stubbed out his cigarette in the ceramic spit-up thingie next to the dentist chair and leaned down into Danziger’s face, breathing cigarette fumes and something minty-zesty fresh all over Danziger’s face.

  “I see the proceeds aren’t in your fucking car, Charlie. Can you enlighten me as regards to this unhappy eventuation?”

  “There’s no such word as ‘eventuation,’ you ignorant cracker. And yes, they are not in the car because you damn well know why. You’d have done the same, you were in my position.”

  Coker pulled back out of Danziger’s face and lit up another Camel, offering one to Danziger and lighting it up for him with a gold Zippo bearing a worn-down crest of the United States Marine Corps.

  Danziger sucked in the smoke, winced a bit at the pain in his side, glancing down at the sewn-up incision in his chest with quiet satisfaction and then back up at Coker, whose craggy hard-bitten face wreathed in cigarette smoke was making him look like Clint Eastwood’s ugly older brother.

  Coker breathed the smoke out through his nostrils, the two plumes drifting into the downlight from the halogen lamp.

  “Yeah,” he said, flashing a wolfish grin, “I guess I woulda. I gotta say I’m also a tad pissed at you for not dealing with Merle.”

  Danziger winced at the recollection and shook his head sadly.

  “He’s a nimble little fucker, I’ll give him that. Flitted into the undergrowth like some kind of magical pixie and disappeared. Got any suggestions?”

  Coker sighed, looked down at his cigarette, twirled it between his index finger and his thumb like a tiny baton—a
signature trick he had—and flicked it back into his mouth.

  “Way I see it, he’s either dead in the woods or he got himself doctored up and now he’s laying back in the tall grass getting ready to even things up. We can’t afford to just hope for him being dead. The guys who showed up at the barn fire said they saw some blood at the edge of the forest, but the dogs got nothing after a few yards. So I’m thinking he’s still out there.”

  “You’re a gun-hand, Coker. Saddle up and go git him.”

  Coker shook his head.

  “That’s not going to fly now. I can’t be loping about the woodlands yelling, ‘Come out come out dear Merle come out come out wherever you are’ and firing randomly into the undergrowth. Only thing we can do is reopen negotiations.”

  “Yeah? How we planning to do that?”

  Coker held up his cell phone.

  “I—or maybe you—are going to call him up on his cell, ask for a meet. If he agrees, and we can manage it, we kill him. If we can’t, then we piece him off fair and square. He’s got as much skin in this cluster-fuck as we do.”

  Danziger pretended to think this over. What he was actually thinking was that being friends with Coker was kind of like having a python as a pet. You had to keep him well fed and amused all the time, and it would never do to let him think you were nervous around him. About Merle Zane, what Coker was suggesting was pretty much what Danziger had already decided was the only sensible solution.

  “We kill him if we can, and if we can’t, we piece him off?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Okay. I’m in.”

  Coker smiled, smacked the top of the dental tray, making the steel tools clatter.

  “Great. And now you got the slug out and you’re all doctored up, how about you go and get the proceeds and we divvy it up—Donny here’s going to get a taste, aren’t you, Donny?—and then we can all go about the Lord’s work with a clear conscience.”

  Danziger inhaled the smoke, let it out slow.

  “Nope.”

  “Nope? Why nope?”

  “I can’t go get it right now. I gotta be available to talk to the Feds today.”

  Coker looked a bit off balance.

  “Why are the Feds wanting to talk to you today?”

  Danziger gave him a sideways look.

  “Because I’m the regional manager of Wells Fargo and we popped that bank about a half hour after one of my trucks dropped off the payroll for half of Quantum Park. That’s why. The Feds don’t like coincidences.”

  Coker blinked down at him, pulling on his cigarette, sucking his cheeks in as he did it, which made his eyes look even scarier.

  “Did we think of this?”

  Danziger, who was getting tired of looking up at Coker looking down at him, pushed himself out of the chair and looked around the office for his shirt. Donny was a step ahead.

  “You didn’t have a shirt,” said Donny. “You can have one of mine. Also, I think you can fit into a pair of my jeans. Your boots are okay. Spotted up with blood some. You’re going to have to take a blood thinner in case you throw a clot. I have some OxyContin too. When that freezing wears off, you’re going to be in a lot of pain.”

  “I’m in a lot of pain right now.”

  Falcone nodded, got up, and walked back into his dispensary, fatigue in every line, a portrait of the dentist as a hanged man. While he was out of the room Danziger turned to Coker, who was leaning up against a rack of dental tools.

  “Where’s my cell phone? Not the one we used on the job. My own phone.”

  Coker reached into the pocket of his range jacket, tossed the cell to Danziger, who flipped it open and hit the ON button.

  He looked at the screen for a couple of minutes, and then held the screen up to Coker.

  “There you go. Seventeen calls, starting about ten minutes after the robbery. Nine from Cletus Boone at the depot—I left him in charge—four from Marty Coors at State, and the last three are from Boonie Hackendorff at the Feebs office down in Cap City. I called Boonie back last night around eleven—”

  “With a bullet in you?”

  “Had to. I knew they were going to wanna see me.”

  “Boonie ask you where you were calling from?”

  “Yeah. I said I was calling from Canticle Key, outside of Metairie, fly-fishing off a pirogue. Said my cell was off because I was on my goddam vacation and how the fuck would I know that somebody was going to hit the First Third in Gracie.”

  “Can you prove where you were?”

  “He can’t prove I wasn’t. Besides, if Boonie ever gets that suspicious, we’re fucked anyway.”

  “You use your cell? Because if you did—”

  Danziger was shaking his head.

  “No. I made a Skype call from my laptop. You can’t trace those to a cell tower.”

  Coker gave Danziger a look of approval.

  “Sharp, Charlie. Very sharp. Now what?”

  “I said I was driving up right away, going all night. I’m going to call in, say here I am, go see him at his office, as soon as I get a shirt.”

  Coker looked at Danziger’s bare chest, at the general color of the man, which, if Coker had been an interior decorator instead of a cop, he would have described as a cross between taupe and ecru.

  “How the hell are you going to get through a grilling with the Feds with a hole in your chest? You can’t afford to fall on your face right in the middle of a meet with the Feds, start barfing up blood and shit. And what about the proceeds?”

  “We’ll divvy up the proceeds after I’m done with Boonie, okay? You pulling duty tonight?”

  “No. The Feds don’t want us tracking mud all over this cluster-fuck. It belongs to the State CID and the Feebs. I’m off until Monday.”

  “Okay—you call Zane, set up a meet.”

  Coker thought it over.

  “Do the split—or the hit, if he gives us a chance do it all at once?”

  “Yeah. Why not?”

  “Even me?” asked Donny, walking back in the room carrying a crisp white shirt and jeans and a big soft suede jacket. “I mean, the split, not the hit.”

  “Yeah,” said Coker, shooting a glance at Danziger and then cutting away, which Danziger correctly interpreted as maybe we’ll hit Donny too, just to be safe.

  “Yeah, even you.”

  Then he had a final thought.

  “Hey, what if it goes all wrong at Boonie’s? Say you do pass out, or you start bleeding all over the carpet, some crazy shit. What about the money then? Maybe I should go get it now?”

  Danziger went back a long way with Coker, knew him pretty well, which was why he was giving the answer a long thought. If Coker decided that Danziger was jerking him around, he was just as likely to shoot him right now.

  “It’s at your place.”

  Coker was not delighted by this news.

  “My place? Where at my place? On my front porch, all wrapped up in a black bag with LOOT on the side, maybe a big red ribbon and a note with teddy bears on it?”

  “It’s lying on the rafters in the roof of your garage. Black canvas bags. No teddy bears.”

  Coker watched as Danziger got himself into Donny’s shirt and the leather jacket.

  “You’re an unpredictable son of a bitch, Charlie. I’ll give you that.”

  “Yeah?” said Charlie, pulling a cigarette out of Coker’s pack and lighting it up, squinting at him through the smoke. “Well, there it is.”

  “Yeah,” said Coker, grinning back at him. “There it is.”

  “Ecco la cosa,” said Donny.

  They both looked at him through the smoke. Donny shrugged his shoulders.

  “What did you just say?” asked Coker.

  “I said, ecco la cosa. There it is.”

  A thoughtful pause.

  “Well, don’t,” said Coker, after a moment.

  “Yeah,” put in Danziger. “Don’t.”

  “Why not?” asked Donny in a hurt tone.

  Danziger a
nd Coker exchanged looks.

  “Because it just sounds …”

  “Weird,” said Danziger.

  “Yeah,” said Coker. “Weird.”

  Nick Kavanaugh Gets Some Disappointing News

  Beau Norlett, back from a week’s leave, caught Nick as he came in through the door, the office reeking of burned coffee, the weekend crew sitting around in their shirtsleeves, holsters and cuffs showing, everyone talking low, a cold gray rain streaming down the windows.

  “Nick,” said Beau, with a broad smile. “How was Savannah?”

  Nick gave him a look.

  Had he heard about what had happened in Forsyth Park? Probably not.

  “Nice town. A little buggy. But pretty.”

  “Yeah? I never been there. May wants to go. Says it’s really romantic, like Paris. You ever been to Paris, Nick?”

  “Yes.”

  Beau, forgetting himself, sat looking up at Nick, expecting something more. Then he remembered that Nick hardly ever said something more.

  “Okay. Hey, that was some bad shit, up in Gracie, wasn’t it?”

  “It was.”

  “Tig says you walked the scene with Marty Coors?”

  “I did.”

  Beau waited.

  Nick said nothing.

  “Yeah. Well. Uh, Tig wants to see you. Asked me to say.”

  Beau Norlett was a nice kid, blue-black, solid as a bridge abutment, with a round bald head, sloping shoulders, great hands, as light on his feet as a tango dancer, but he could hit a crack-house door like a runaway freight.

  He had been a famous linebacker when he was at Saint Mary’s, might have made Notre Dame or Ole Miss with some luck. If you were looking for somebody to take a door down, he was your guy. If you were looking for cop smarts, you were still looking. But Nick thought the kid had potential.

  Nick smiled, went down to the coffee room, poured himself a hot bitter cup and walked on through the crowded office to Tig’s hideout, a corner glassed-in cubby with a view across the motor pool to the marble dome of the city hall. Rain was sleeting straight down and the dome looked like a round wet rock sitting on a pile of bricks.