Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  The corroded stain—the burned-out mark—whatever the hell it was—ran for another three feet into the dining room, as if whatever had been spilled here—something strong enough to eat away at layers upon layers of very old varnish—had run out across the flooring and then had been left there long enough to ruin the finish.

  This did not fit with the rest of the house, which was beautifully cared for. He stood there, looking down at the stain, and it came to him that the mark, the burn, whatever, was roughly in the shape of a human figure. The head was lying in the bandbox room, the waist across the threshold, and the legs stretching out into the dining room.

  Not a small figure either, from the size of the mark, a tall person, six feet at least. He got the impression that the figure—if it had been a man—had been lying on his back with his legs bent over to one side, as if something heavy was lying on top of him, pressing him into the floor.

  Well, this was ridiculous.

  It is a stain, Nick.

  A mark. There was no blood, no heel marks to suggest a struggle, no signs of violence at all.

  He knelt down again, and touched the floor in the middle of the stain. It was definitely warm, several degrees warmer than the surrounding floor.

  Check for a hot-water pipe, he thought, under the boards. He rubbed at the surface, feeling the raw grain of the old wood. The varnish had been taken off right down to the wood. In the shape of a man. He lifted his fingertip and smelled the residue on his skin. A sharp scorched smell, like burned cloth, and underneath that a bitter coppery reek.

  What in the hell happened here?

  His radio beeped, and then Beau’s voice, crackling with static, a tight hoarse whisper.

  “Nick, where are you?”

  “In the living room. Where are you?”

  “I’m in the basement.”

  “What are you doing down there?”

  “Up until a minute ago, I was tracing the camera cable. There’s something down here, I don’t know what it is, but, Nick, you got to see it.”

  Coker and Danziger Complicate Things

  The robot Frisbee with the Raytheon GNS logo sat in a blue-velvet-lined cutaway inside its stainless-steel casket on the dining room table between Coker and Danziger, bathed in a circle of hot white light from a halogen desk lamp that Coker had brought in from his office.

  A bottle of Jim Beam was set at Coker’s right elbow, and a glass, fruity juice-glass-type thing with oranges and grapes all over it, sat at each man’s right hand. In the background some smoky music was playing, Jerry Goldsmith’s trumpet solo from the Chinatown movie.

  Coker sucked the last hit off his cigarette, stubbed it out in an ashtray that looked like a NASCAR racing slick, sat back in the chair, making it groan like a rusted gate, and considered Danziger’s complexion as Charlie inhaled another drag of his own cigarette.

  “You do recall you got a bullet hole in that lung you’re choking up right now?”

  Danziger gave him a squint-eyed look through his personal fogbank.

  “I’m not using that one. I’m redirecting.”

  “Redirecting what? Like into the other lung?”

  “Yep.”

  “You die, Charlie, I get to keep it all.”

  “What about Merle Zane? He call back?”

  Coker shook his head, wondering about that.

  “I got three calls in about ten minutes. Each time it was his cell number on the display, each time I picked up the call, and all I’m hearing is some sort of hissing, scratching sound, like steam or maybe like leaves or grass being blown around. I’m thinking, maybe some kind of animal, even. Like a raccoon or a possum? I wait for Merle to say something, but nothing comes, the hissing and scratching goes on for about fifteen maybe twenty seconds, and then the call cuts off.”

  “You phone him back?”

  “After the third call. The cell rings a couple of times, and then his voice mail picks up—”

  “You leave a message?”

  “I said we wanted to meet, straight across, repair the situation, make it right, and all he had to do was name a place.”

  “And he never called back?”

  Coker shook his head, going inside himself for a moment, trying to figure out Zane’s game, gave it up for insufficient data.

  “No, he didn’t. So now I’m giving the Merle Zane matter some additional thought. I come up with anything brilliant, I will let you know.”

  Coker leaned forward, tapped the steel box.

  “Now. About this cosmic-gizmo-Frisbee that lies before us … you got any suggestions?”

  Danziger was quiet for a while.

  In a corner of the room Coker’s big flat-screen Samsung television, muted, was showing cop cars clustered randomly around a large redbrick building next to an Art Deco church, and a female broadcaster with helmet hair was talking into the camera in the foreground.

  There was a crawl along the bottom of the screen reading: STANDOFF AT SAINT INNOCENT ORTHODOX CUSTODIAN TAKES TWO HOSTAGES THREATENS SUICIDE POLICE NEGOTIATING …

  “I got a question, first,” said Danziger finally, taking a sip of his JB, wincing as he choked it down. He hated Jim Beam but in this part of the state it was what got drunk if you were drinking with cops. When he was alone he drank Italian Pinot Grigio so cold it hurt his teeth, but he wouldn’t want that to get out and around.

  “Shoot,” said Coker.

  “What was this thing doing in a lockbox at the First Third in Gracie?”

  “That’s easy,” said Coker. “Waiting for you to come along and get us rat-fucked.”

  “Yeah, well, aside from that.”

  Coker gave it some consideration.

  “Off the top of my head, I’d say there was no good reason at all for it to be sitting there. If it really is some sorta high-tech classified shit, then it would be in a lockdown at the Raytheon HQ in … where the fuck?”

  “Waltham. That’s in Massachusetts.”

  “Or in whatever the fuck subsidiary in Quantum Park is doing R and D for Raytheon.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Do you know what is the Raytheon subsidiary in Quantum Park?”

  “Looked it up. Company called Slipstream Dynamics.”

  “Slipstream Dynamics? Okay, so you figure Slipstream Dynamics might have a problem with one of their super-secret Frisbees lying around in a lockbox at the First Third Bank in Gracie?”

  A slow incline of Danziger’s head as he glared down at the thing.

  “When you were rooting around in the vault, did you happen to notice whose lockbox it was?”

  “No,” said Danziger. “They never have names. Only numbers.”

  “So you just picked it …”

  “Because it was there.”

  “So … if it wasn’t supposed to be there …?”

  “Then this would also explain why nobody on the news has said anything about some high-tech gizmo being stolen from the First Third in the first place, which means that whoever was keeping it there was doing something the good folks at Raytheon probably would not …”

  “Smile upon?”

  “Yeah.”

  Coker worked that out. Danziger watched him do it. Watching Coker think was always interesting.

  “You’re thinking, maybe they’d like it back?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  Coker was quiet for a time, so Danziger poured them both some more Jim Beam and lit himself another one of Coker’s Camels, thought briefly about giving up smoking, at least until his right lung healed, rejected that idea, and sat back with a contented sigh to watch Coker think some more.

  “Risky,” was what Coker finally said.

  Danziger nodded.

  “So’s killing cops for money. How much did we get, by the way?”

  Coker waved, absently, in the direction of the kitchen counter, where thirty-nine neat stacks of bundled bills were lined up with OCD-level precision next to a smaller heap of rings, jewe
ls, and negotiable bonds taken from the various lockboxes that Danziger and Merle Zane had found the time to pry open after they’d loaded up the currency.

  “Comes to two million one hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars, plus the miscellaneous shit.”

  Danziger was visibly shocked.

  “Man. I knew it was a shitload.”

  “Bank is saying they lost two point five.”

  “They always do that in a robbery.”

  “Well, we got two mil one sixty-three plus the miscellaneous shit. How come you don’t look happy?”

  “It’s too much money, Coker. That much money, people go nuts looking for it. It’s too much.”

  “Whaddya wanna do? Give some back?”

  Danziger looked like he was thinking about it.

  “I guess not. But we gotta keep our heads.”

  “Mine’s fine. Hell of a take, Charlie.”

  “Yes it is. And the Frisbee,” said Danziger, privately dividing two mil one sixty-three plus the miscellaneous shit by one and liking the result.

  “Yeah. And the Frisbee. You’re thinking we ransom this sucker back at ’em? Who would we talk to about that?”

  “Probably Byron Deitz. He’s the head of security for the whole place.”

  “And you’re saying that Deitz is already sniffing around this thing. Boonie say why?”

  “Deitz is saying he just wants to help. Brotherhood of the badge and all that shit. And also part of the Quantum Park cash draw is sitting in there on your kitchen counter, so he’s saying that a professional obligation is involved.”

  “Deitz doesn’t give a rusty fuck about anything other than Byron Deitz. Boonie and the Feebs aren’t going to let a mutt like him stomp all over their investigation. Nor is Marty Coors. I wouldn’t either. You say Deitz is asking about Lyle Crowder?”

  “That he is,” said Danziger.

  “That I don’t like. What’s our exposure with Lyle?”

  Danziger shrugged.

  “Even if he rolls, which I don’t think he will, because he’s looking at death for being an accessory, now that he’s killed two old ladies, and anyway nobody around here will let him plea-bargain while he’s standing on the graves of four dead cops, and besides he doesn’t know who we are.”

  He took a sip, puffed at his cigarette, ran a hand through his hair, making a bristly burring sound, his eyes on the middle distance.

  “No. I mean, all he can say is he got a fat FedEx envelope with five thousand dollars in fifties in it and a note saying what he had to do to get another five thousand, which was to fuck up traffic big time on the interstate at a certain point in time. From what he said to me, I figure Boonie’s almost all the way convinced the kid is clean. That’s fine with me. We just leave it be. We don’t want to change Boonie’s mind about any of that. Anyway, killing Crowder will just convince Boonie that he’s closer to the guys who did the bank than he thought he was. He’ll go back over everything Crowder ever did. They’ll find out he got a FedEx delivery, start tracing it backwards.”

  “Won’t lead to us, will it? You used gloves when you packed it, gave a phony address?”

  “Yeah. But killing the guy, it’s just one of those tricky things that people do in robberies, the one-step-too-far that ends up getting them fucked. Look what happened with Merle. Tried to shoot him, and now he’s out there somewhere doing God only knows. We simply paid him off, he’s back home with the Bardashi boys happy as a rabbit in rhubarb. We try for Lyle, maybe one of his guards gets in the line of fire? Or we only wing him and now he knows his only chance is to come clean with the Feds. Nope. When in doubt, sit tight. When there’s nothing to be done, do nothing. You follow?”

  Coker, after some thought, nodded.

  “Works for me, if you say so. What you wanna do about the proceeds?”

  “Best thing there is to stick to the plan, leave it alone for a year or so, then piece it out careful-like, not doing anything too showy. Which reminds me, what’d you do with the Barrett?”

  “Switched out the barrel and the firing pin. Cleaned it up and now it’s back in storage, at the depot, where it belongs. Threw the old barrel into Crater Sink. It sleeps with the fishes.”

  “You’ll find no fishes in that black hole, my friend. Place gives me the willies, always has. What about the Python you used to mop up the dead?”

  “Also sleeps with the fishes.”

  “And my shit-box Chevy?”

  “Drove it to Tin Town and left it on Bauxite, next to the needle exchange. Left the keys in. Waited around. It was gone in fifteen minutes.”

  “Damn, Coker. Had my blood in it.”

  “So what? Don’t mean a thing unless they want the DNA. DNA doesn’t have a microscopic label saying ‘I belong to Charlie Danziger.’ Anyway, by the time those hypes get through with it, your blood’ll be underneath sixteen layers of icky junkie poop. No crime scene guy in the world is going to get inta that vehicle. It’ll be FIDO by the time the NPD even notices it.”

  “Fuck It Drive On.”

  “Yep.”

  Charlie shook his head, smiling at Coker.

  “Icky junky poop?”

  “I’m trying to be colorful.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  Coker’s phone rang, an old black number sitting behind him on a sideboard.

  Coker leaned back, snagged it.

  “Coker.”

  Danziger could hear some sort of soft buzzing sound from the earpiece, a female voice. Coker’s expression changed as he listened to the caller.

  “Hey Mavis … no, I’m good … sitting here having a glass with Charlie Danziger … yeah, I know, all over the news right now, I can see it—”

  He set the phone aside, pointed at the television set, where the Live Eye Seven coverage of the standoff at Saint Innocent had gone national.

  “Charlie, can you un-mute that?”

  Danziger did, and the room was filled with the overheated breathless coverage of the Live Eye Seven field reporter, a plastic-coated blond chick with helmet hair who looked to be about fourteen.

  “And as of this hour there seems to be no progress as Kevin David Dennison is refusing to answer the negotiator’s calls—”

  Coker and Danziger watched the screen for a moment, and then Coker made a slicing move across his throat and Danziger hit the MUTE button. Coker was back on the phone, listening hard, making a few terse replies, suddenly all business.

  “Okay. I got that. What about Marty’s guys? … Well then call Glynco and get a—what? Benning? Well, that’s fucked. No, I get it … no, I got no problem with it … how soon? Yeah … yeah … we got an okay from Mauldar to do this? On paper? Right. Good. Relax, Mavis, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I got the gear in the truck. Yeah. Good.”

  Coker put the phone down, looked across at Danziger, cracked into a broad grin.

  “That was Mavis Crossfire—”

  “Yeah. You can see her in the background there, by the squad cars. She needs a police sniper, am I right?”

  “Just in case.”

  “What about Marty’s SWAT guys?”

  “At Benning, in a competition.”

  “Bad time to be drawing attention to your sniping skills, Coker.”

  “What am I going to do, Charlie? Tell her I don’t feel like it?”

  Coker stood up, killed the last of his JB, set the glass down, his mind already on the job.

  “I gotta go change. You wanna come along on this job? Might be interesting.”

  “And do what? Hold your dick? Fetch coffee and donuts? I’m not a cop anymore. I’m going to go do something about this bionic Frisbee here.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like fuck with Byron Deitz’s mind.”

  “How?”

  “We’re gonna get him to buy it back, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, first we gotta get him off balance.”

  “You got any idea how?”

  “I’m gonna dance him all ar
ound Tin Town, one damn place after another, Helpy Selfy, Piggly Wiggly, Winn-Dixie, Lowe’s, every second peeler bar. By the time I’m through jerking him around, he won’t know his ass from a tuna fish sandwich. Then we’ll do the deed.”

  “Yeah? Still be more fun holding my dick.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?”

  “Ask your mom.”

  Byron Deitz and Thad Llewellyn Disagree

  Byron Deitz, a guy with a limited emotional range, was finding his limitations sorely tested today as he sat in his yellow Hummer in the rain-misted parking lot of the First Third Bank in Gracie. He was staring out through the rainy ripples on the Hummer’s tinted window and waiting for a Mr. Thad Llewellyn, the Assistant Commercial Accounts Manager for the First Third Bank in Gracie, to come out and get in the truck and respond to a few simple fucking questions.

  However, Llewellyn was not all that anxious to come out and respond to a few simple fucking questions from Byron Deitz.

  Nor had he particularly savored his earlier interlude with Phil Holliman, Byron Deitz’s Second in Command, his Two IC, as Holliman called himself, which had taken place around daybreak on the front steps of Mr. and Mrs. Llewellyn’s rambling ranchero property in a shady glen a mile off Side Road 336, a few short miles south of Gracie, and generally—make that formerly—felt by the Llewellyn family—all two of them—to be a safe haven from the dizzying delights of Gracie’s social whirl, of which there weren’t any.

  Sadly, this had not been the case at six this morning, when Mrs. Llewellyn—born Inge Bjornsdottir—had her hatha yoga session forcefully derailed by a hammering din on or about the front door, followed by the stumble-tumble sound of her husband coming down the hall stairs two at a time and shambling towards the front door with a look of utter panic on his pinched and birdlike features, his furry lambskin slippers slip-sliding on the polished parquet.

  Mrs. Thad had listened, rapt and avid, to a short but memorable exchange between Thad and the Unexpected Caller, from what she could see of him over her husband’s cringing figure, a monstrous black man in a charcoal suit not quite up to containing him.