The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

  Smoles had completely signed on to the stunt, since he knew as well as they did that if they didn’t find a powerful excuse for secure medical custody right here in Niceville, Deitz would be swallowed up on a national security finding, never to be seen again by mortal men.

  And then where would Warren Smoles be?

  So he was in top form this afternoon.

  “As clear a case of evidence planting as I have ever encountered,” he was saying, in his rolling baritone, his eyes alight with righteous fury, his expression one of outrage and indignation. “We have the savage killing of law enforcement officers at the hands of unknown felons—an abominable act that I decry with every fiber of my soul, as does my client—but instead of launching a serious professional investigation, the FBI and local agencies, having utterly failed to crack this heinous case, have conspired together to lay the guilt at the feet of an innocent man—by the way, a very sick, no, a critically ill innocent man—he has only now been diagnosed by a doctor as suffering from atherosclerotic ischemic heart disease and severe hypertension—he has been medevacked only two hours ago—as you all witnessed—to the intensive care unit of Lady Grace Hospital in Niceville, where I will make sure that he receives the critical care that will be needed to save this poor man’s life, a man who, I might add, is a pillar of the community and a highly decorated member, now retired with honor, of the very same agency, the FBI, that is now deliberately scapegoating—”

  Nick clicked the set off, stood up, and faced the Niceville police officers.

  “Okay. You all have your assignments. Nobody gets near the custody wing, let alone the lockdown where Deitz is. And that includes any and all state and county guys. And I’m going to have to ask you guys to stay out of his room. I don’t want Smoles to have any pretext for a beef against any of us. His room is as good as a cell, he’s shackled down, and the male nurses up there are used to prisoners. I know you all feel like seeing this guy dead, but there’s more to it than that. A lot more. You got any questions, any doubts about your ability to carry out your duties, you go explain it to Staff Sergeant Crossfire and she’ll reassign you.”

  “What about Smoles?” a cop asked from the back of the room.

  “By law Warren Smoles must have free access to his client, within reason, especially if we’re going to ask Deitz any questions about the case. But I want to know when he arrives. As you can see, Smoles is still up in Gracie shooting his face off. But he’ll be down here tomorrow morning, just in time for the morning news feed. Until then, other than his docs and the nurses, nobody gets to see Byron Deitz.”

  Everybody nodded, everybody seemed to get it, and Nick broke up the meeting. Beau was leaning against the back wall, and they both watched in silence as the cops filed out of the room.

  Beau pushed off the wall.

  “What about us?”

  “We’re going to go talk to Deitz right now.”

  “You just told everybody that nobody but the medics could get in to see him. How are we going to get around that?”

  “They’re guarding the lockdown wing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Deitz isn’t in the lockdown wing.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s in the underground parking lot, sitting in Mavis Crossfire’s Suburban.”

  “Jesus. Who’s watching him?”

  “Mavis is watching him.”

  “All by herself?”

  “Yes.”

  Beau nodded.

  “I hope he doesn’t pull something on her.”

  “I hope he does. He could use another beating.”

  They found Mavis Crossfire’s Suburban parked in an out-of-the-way corner of the subbasement parking level, backed into a narrow slot with concrete walls on both sides. Mavis was at the wheel, eating one of the Krispy Kremes that had originally been intended for Edgar Luckinbaugh. She looked up, a wary flicker, as Nick and Beau came out of the gloom, her hand going down to her sidearm. But then her face brightened into a cheerful smile and she opened the driver’s-side door.

  “Hello, boys. Busy day?”

  “Yeah. How’s Deitz?”

  “See for yourself.”

  She stepped around to the passenger-side door, popped it. Deitz was stretched out on the rear bench seat, still in his prison jumpsuit, shackled at the waist and ankles, the chains run through a ringbolt in the floor of the backseat.

  He was sound asleep.

  “Man,” said Nick. “Did you slip him something?”

  “He wanted a smoothie. I popped an Ativan into it. He hasn’t had any sleep in twenty-four hours.”

  “How long’s he been out?”

  “He went out as soon as I parked. How’s it going upstairs? I can’t get any radio down here.”

  “Smoles is all over the news. According to him, local law enforcement is the Antichrist.”

  “Is Smoles coming in tonight?”

  “No. He’ll want a fresh news cycle in the morning. Change into a better suit. Get his makeup redone. It’ll take CNN and Fox a while to get their trucks down here and set up. Smoles wants us to do a perp walk for the cameras around two. He asked us to get a couple of Deputy U.S. Marshals lined up for that.”

  “Why U.S. Marshals?”

  “They make better TV, he says. I guess we better wake Byron. We’re going to have to get him tucked away in lockdown.”

  Mavis took out her ASP baton, poked Deitz in the side. He moaned, twitched, opened his eyes.

  “Shit,” he said. “Where am I?”

  “In the basement at Lady Grace. Nick here wants a word with you.”

  Deitz sat up, his chains clanking, leaned into the rear seat, closed his eyes, and put his head back on the neck rest.

  “I got nothing to say to Nick, Mavis.”

  “Maybe,” said Nick. “But I have something to say to you. You’re going to want to hear it.”

  Deitz opened his eyes and looked at Nick. There had been a tone in Nick’s voice. It sounded like an opening. An angle he could work.

  “How’s Beth and the kids? I figure they’re with you.”

  “They are. Beth is leaving you.”

  “Jeez. There’s a bulletin. Alert the media.”

  “You stepped in it pretty good here.”

  Deitz closed his eyes.

  “Fuck you, Nick. I’m tired. Go away.”

  “In a minute. I said I had something to say.”

  “I’m not telling you one fucking thing. Where’s that asshole Smoles?”

  “He’ll be back here tomorrow morning.”

  “What’s all this shit about me having a heart condition? All I got is high blood pressure, and who the fuck wouldn’t, they were in my shoes?”

  “We’re just trying to keep you local, keep you out of the hands of the federal government. Saying you’re too sick to be transported is how we’re doing it. Smoles signed off on it. He knows that national security will be all over you for the Chinese thing—”

  Deitz grinned.

  “Those fucking Chinks. They really all dead?”

  “Yes. We’re still looking for the item.”

  Deitz was just a bit too still and his face just a bit too blank.

  “What item?”

  “The one you and Holliman were so worked up about this morning at the Marriott.”

  Deitz thought this over.

  “I hear that Lear went straight in at five hundred miles an hour.”

  “Nowhere near. Maybe two.”

  Deitz laughed, opened one eye.

  “Good luck trying to find jack shit in a smoking crater like that. Even if there was jack shit to find.”

  “We don’t need to find the item, Byron. We just have to figure out what’s missing from Quantum Park. All that takes is a thorough inventory check.”

  “Still doesn’t prove I had dick to do with it.”

  “The government isn’t going to want to prosecute you, Byron. They just want to use you. You go down that rat hole on a national securit
y finding, you’ll never see blue sky again. You might even end up in a Chinese prison.”

  “Why the hell would that happen?”

  “Five Chinese nationals died this morning, died while trying to leave the country with a top-secret device—”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Okay. I only suspect it. I’ll bet my 401(k) that you damn well know it. So the State Department can claim it was an accident until their lips fall off. Chinese government won’t believe that, not for a minute. And if you think Zachary Dak didn’t use your name to his bosses, you’re kidding yourself. Five of their guys are down, in a ten-million-dollar plane. We have information that says they were guangbo—spies. Secret police. Their bosses lost face and they’ll need your ass to get it back. Washington will give you up in a flash. They’d rather hang it on you than run the risk that the Chinese would think they had something to do with it. The country needs Chinese money a lot more than it needs you. So you need to think about it.”

  From the expression on his face, Deitz was.

  “Well, that’s all I wanted to say,” said Nick, straightening up. “This is the last time we’ll get a chance to talk like this. Once you get into that lockdown ward upstairs, it all runs on auto. Eventually the spooks will arrive, and you’ll be gone. You have a nice night, Byron. I’ll kiss the kids for—”

  “Fuck the kids. Are you offering me something or not?”

  “I think somebody planted that money on you—”

  “No shit? You should be a detective.”

  “And I think there’s a reason they picked on you. It’s pretty obvious that whoever planted it has a connection to the robbery. So if you help us with that, maybe we can do something about the Chinese angle.”

  Deitz opened both eyes.

  “You don’t really give a fuck about the Chinese thing, do you?”

  “Not really. Not my jurisdiction. I just want the people who killed those cops. I think you might even know who they are.”

  Nick could see the cartoon thinks bubble floating above Deitz’s head.

  “If I had information about who they were and didn’t report it, I’d be an Accessory After. Draws the same penalty as if I actually did the bank.”

  “Hard thing to prove when you figured it out. Could have been a minute ago, and here you are reporting it right away, like a good citizen. So. Do you know who they are?”

  Deitz said nothing for a while.

  “I don’t know who they are. I got a few theories.”

  “Now’s the time to talk, Byron.”

  Deitz looked at Mavis, then came back to Nick.

  “Can you really keep the government off me?”

  “I think so.”

  “How?”

  “If you’re assisting the police in a multiple-cop-killing case, even Jon Stewart would go nuts if a pack of nameless spooks stepped in and shut that down just so the president could keep the Chinese friendly.”

  “How would the media find out?”

  “Smoles would be happy to take care of that.”

  Deitz put his head back, closed his eyes.

  They waited him out.

  “I’m gonna want to talk to Smoles.”

  “You do that.”

  “I will.”

  “I’d do it soon.”

  What Dreams May Come

  Nick made it home long before moonlight. Beau dropped him off outside Kate’s town house in Garrison Hills just as the sun was going down. A golden light was slanting through the live oaks that framed the cream-colored facade of the house. Lights were on inside, a soft glow filling the tall French windows. He could hear voices, and music. The scent of steaks cooking on the barbecue grill in the back garden drifted on the air.

  Beat down, depressed, sleepless for almost twenty-four hours, Nick slowly climbed the curving steps that led up to the main floor landing.

  As he reached the doorstep he could hear children’s voices coming through the ornate black doors. Axel and Hannah, Beth’s kids. They sounded happy.

  He stopped for a moment, leaned his back against the wrought-iron railing, listening to the murmurs of life inside the house. The double doors had two arch-shaped stained-glass panels set into their rising curves. He could see silhouetted figures moving through the light.

  At that moment it came to him that his old life with Kate had ended yesterday, and that from now on everything would be different.

  They had been alone, quietly and happily alone. Now there would be Beth, and Axel, and Hannah.

  And in a while, when he got out of physio, they’d have Rainey Teague, and all of that poor kid’s troubles along with him—kidnapped—missing for ten days—discovered buried alive in a sealed crypt—both parents committing suicide—in a coma for a year. The prospect of having Rainey in the house was a stone in his heart. In Nick’s mind, Rainey was tied to the essential strangeness of Niceville.

  Even the disappearances of Delia Cotton, of Gray Haggard, and the unexplained absence of Kate’s father, Dillon, had barely registered with the people of the town. But they sure had with Nick.

  And only last night, right here where he was standing, right on these steps, Kate had opened these same black doors onto a thing that had no explanation, no framework, no reason to exist that fit into any of the outer world’s reality. It was utterly strange, and it was hostile—hate-filled, hungry, mindless—something out of a nightmare world, something alien and terrifying and inexplicable.

  They both saw it, Nick and Kate.

  And they both saw the woman—the image of the woman—who had stepped out of that old mirror in a haze of green light and confronted the thing in the doorway. They had recognized her from an old picture. It was a woman named Glynis Ruelle, who had died in 1939. This had actually happened last night.

  Or had it?

  Maybe none of it had been real.

  Neither he nor Kate had spoken about it since. Beth’s emergency call, her arrival in the middle of the night, the kids crying, all of this had driven the memory of the woman in the mirror, and the thing at the door, into the background.

  And in the morning, the call about the plane crash at Mauldar Field had taken his mind off everything but his work. Now he was back home, and it was all in front of him again.

  Hesitating on the landing, his hand on the latch, listening to the kids playing and the talk of the adults inside, Nick felt that he was an outsider in Niceville, that he didn’t belong, that whatever was going on in Crater Sink, in Niceville, whatever was going on with Rainey Teague and all the missing people, whatever had created that swirling black nightmare at their door, it had nothing to do with him, and it never had, and it was nothing he’d ever be able to understand, or ever hope to change.

  It was in his mind to turn away, to go back down the steps, to walk away up the hill, walk away from Beth and Axel and Hannah and Reed and even from Kate, walk away from Rainey Teague and all the inexplicable forces he represented.

  Just go quietly away under the branches of the live oaks, under the Spanish moss, vanish into the evening darkness, just keep walking until Niceville and all of its mysteries were miles behind him.

  Go home to California, find a way to get back into the Army, or even try for the Marine Corps. Find an ordinary life, a comprehensible life.

  Save himself.

  As if.

  He opened the door and Kate was there with a drink in her hand and a kiss for his cheek. Married men live longer than single men, and there’s a reason for it. He kissed her back, and held it long enough to get a whistle from Reed.

  They ate in the formal dining room, the walls covered in family photographs, all of them sitting around the long gleaming table, under the Gallé glass chandelier that their mother, Lenore, had brought back from Paris thirty years ago. Kate was at her usual place at the end of the table nearest the kitchen. Nick was at the other end, his back up against the fireplace screen, Reed at his left hand and Axel at his right, Beth and Hannah down the middle. Sterling
-silver platters of roast potatoes and cobs of corn and sliced tomatoes and garden salad and barbecued steaks covered the center of the table.

  There were decanters of lemonade for Axel and Hannah, and three bottles of Veuve Clicquot were chilling in an ice bucket on the oak sideboard.

  A fourth, popped and fizzing, was in Reed’s right hand, and he was filling a quartet of crystal flutes lined up in front of him. When the flutes were full they were handed along and everyone looked to Kate for the toast, even Axel and Hannah, both kids looking solemn and a bit shell-shocked.

  “To Beth and Axel and Hannah. Welcome to a happy home.”

  “I second that,” said Reed, leaning in to give her a kiss on the cheek and then putting a hand out to Beth. Everybody pinged their glasses, Axel and Hannah clanked their tumblers, and the food got handed around.

  Axel, eight, a slender, solemn boy with large brown eyes and a full head of curly brown hair that hung down into his eyes, looked around the table with a puzzled expression. Nick saw the question forming in his eyes and he leaned over to listen to him. As he did so it cut him to the quick to see the boy flinch in a reflexive move. He had been doing that for a couple of years now, pulling back if any male adult came too close. “I heard Uncle Reed say that Dad was arrested. Was it because he hit Mom?”

  Looking at the boy, Nick settled on the simplest answer. Axel had all the time in the world to learn the whole story.

  “No, it wasn’t. He was arrested for driving too fast. And for fighting with some police officers. But your dad should never have hit your mom. Not ever. Men never hit women. Or little kids. Never.”

  Axel looked a little hunted.

  “Axel, did your dad ever hit you?”

  Axel looked at his plate and shook his head.

  “Not really,” he said, still looking down. “But he yelled a real lot. And he’d lean down and get real close. And he shook me sometimes. Hard. It hurt my neck and made my head ache. I didn’t like it when he did that.”

  “I guess not. It was wrong for him to do that.”

  Axel leaned in closer, spoke in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “He hit Hannah once. Mom doesn’t want anyone to know. He hit her because she made a mess in her diaper and Mom let it get on the new rug in the movie room. Dad was pretty mad about that because it was his special room and nobody was supposed to go there but Mom wanted Hannah to see a movie and her player was broken so we went in Dad’s special movie room and that’s where it happened and Dad came home and saw it. Mom was holding Hannah and Dad was hitting Mom like he does when he gets all mad and Hannah was crying so he hit her too. That’s why she can’t hear out of that ear anymore.”