The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

  Basically, Deitz had holed up in the Bass Pro Shop because he had to, and Chu went with him because he had to, and the cops went in to get him out because they had to, and it all might have gone differently if there hadn’t been an armed civilian lurking in the woodwork.

  This civilian popped out with his hand cannon just in time to totally fuck up what could have been a reasonably efficient takedown by two CID detectives—Beau Norlett and Nick Kavanaugh, backed up by a mysterious all-purpose police sniper who was being identified only by the name Coker.

  Now Byron Deitz was DATS—Dead at the Scene. His hostage/​coconspirator/​innocent victim/​inscrutable Chinese mastermind/​feckless nimrod take-your-pick Andy Chu had been medevacked to Lady Grace Hospital, his condition listed as critical. His companion on the journey was the CID guy, Beau Norlett. His condition was described as grave. And there were two civilians also tagged as DATS, a forty-eight-year-old real estate developer named Frankie Maranzano and his fourteen-year-old grandson, Ricardo Gianetti-Maranzano.

  The exact circumstances of their demise were about to become a matter for PISTOL—the Post-Incident Shooting Team Operational Liaison unit—a shooting review board composed largely of feckless civilians and disgruntled ex-cops that was being described by a couple of the troopers on the cross-talk circuit as the Pissed-Off Pogues.

  Endicott sat there in the Cadillac watching the flashing lights and the hive of law enforcement activity that was still buzzing around the huge slab-sided fortress of the Bass Pro Shop and wondered where the hell he was supposed to take it from here.

  He had given Warren Smoles the heads-up and sent him into the scene in the hope that he’d emerge with something useful to relay, but so far all Smoles had done was to leave four messages on Endicott’s shielded message center, each one delivered in the breathless I’m in the middle of it and ain’t I keen tone that makes Geraldo Rivera so irritating to watch and all of them conveying bugger-all. So now what?

  There being nothing for it but to suck it up, Endicott picked up his cell and dialed 913–682–8700. His call was expected and after a long go-round with various stiff-necked guards and assorted turnkeys the line came alive again and Endicott was talking to Mario La Motta, the Man Himself.

  La Motta was as charming as ever.

  “What the fuck’s going on down there?”

  Endicott started to lay down the basics but La Motta cut him off.

  “I gotta fucking TV up here, Harvill. I can see what the fuck went down. They’re saying Deitz is dead. Izzat true?”

  “Yes. I haven’t seen the body, but they only choppered out two wounded. Three including a security guard who got it in the knee. Everybody else is DATS.”

  “What the fuck is DATS—never mind. So the Fuckhead bought it?”

  “Cops are saying a 5.56 through the throat and a nine-mill through both lungs. The back of his neck is splattered all over a family of stuffed bobcats.”

  “That oughta do it. If you get a chance, go to the funeral and piss down his throat for us, if he still has one, willya?”

  Endicott promised to oblige.

  “Okay. Did you get the cash yet?”

  Endicott took a breath and went to his Happy Place for a moment, and then came back.

  “No. From what I’m hearing, Deitz never had it.”

  “What? You mean the other guys kept it?”

  “No. I mean, from what I’m getting down here, I’m pretty convinced that Byron Deitz had nothing to do with the robbery.”

  “What? It really was Some Other Dudes?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  A silence, while La Motta breathed in and out. Endicott found himself thinking of sump pumps. La Motta was back.

  “Then why’s he fucking dead?”

  Endicott laid it out for him. La Motta wasn’t a good listener. When Endicott had repeated a few of the salient details often enough to pound them into La Motta’s skull, La Motta did more heavy breathing. This time Endicott thought of clogged drains. Apparently when La Motta had to think carefully about something it made his emphysema worse. What he came up with was a surprise to Endicott.

  “This Maranzano guy. What’s his first name again?”

  “Frankie.”

  “Fuck me,” said La Motta. “Frankie Maranzano? How old is he?”

  “Forty-eight.”

  “Julie and Desi had a go-round with a guy by that name, worked outta Vegas. Was a made guy, so we had to be polite. His people got heated up over a jurisdictional thing. What’s this guy look like?”

  Endicott had to go by the description he’d heard on the police radio.

  “Over six feet. A weightlifter. Has money in real estate down in Destin.”

  “Always drives a Bentley? Keeps a hot young cumare with bodacious tits? Name of Delores?”

  There was an immense scarlet Bentley alone in an isolated section of the lot, lit up dramatically by a streetlight. A pretty woman was being comforted by the large female patrol cop that Endicott had come to know—and admire—as Mavis Crossfire, although they had never met. He just liked her style on the cop radio.

  Delores, the goo-may, was all wrapped up inside a Mavis Crossfire bear hug. So, if he set aside the bodacious-tits detail, since they were not currently visible, being pressed up against Mavis Crossfire’s gun belt, the markers seemed to be all there.

  “I think I’m looking right at the goo-may and the Bentley as we speak.”

  “Fuck. That’s him. You come across any of his goombahs, Harvill, you should get outta the fucking road, you follow? With Maranzano dead, there’ll be a lotta nasty people coming outta the plumbing looking to take over his interests. First to get it will be Delores. She has any brains, she’ll clean out his accounts and fuck off to Brazil.”

  Endicott expressed his readiness to get outta the fucking road if he ran across any goombahs.

  La Motta was quiet.

  Except for his breathing.

  “Okay. Fuck it. Deitz is dead. Find those Some Other Dudes who did it. Find out who’s got our money.”

  This came as no surprise to Endicott.

  To people like Mario La Motta there was no such thing as somebody else’s money. They sent Endicott down there to locate and retrieve a couple of million dollars that had somehow become “theirs” and Endicott had better do exactly that.

  “I have several leads.”

  “Good,” said La Motta. “Keep me inna loop.”

  Then he was gone.

  Endicott watched as the civilians were slowly being allowed back into the lot to collect their vehicles. Most of the cruisers were pulling out of the mall and they were packing up the large blue control van. The Live Eye chopper had gone off to unnecessarily complicate other police emergencies and the satellite vans were shutting down. Under the streetlamp Delores had been released from Mavis Crossfire’s bear hug and Harvill was able to confirm the third identifying element La Motta had mentioned. Endicott realized that he was extremely tired. The suite back at the Marriott beckoned.

  He fired up the Cadillac and did a slow U-turn back onto North Gwinnett. In the morning he’d have to go collect the Toyota, which was still parked on Bougainville Terrace, a block up from Andy Chu’s house. Chu’s house would have Feds all over it by now and it wouldn’t do for a curious cop checking for wanted plates to notice the tiny laser sensor strapped to the side mirror.

  He rolled back the moon roof, opened all the windows, and lit himself a Camel. He cruised northwest towards Mauldar Field at the speed limit, just as everyone else was doing. The lights of Niceville slowly receded behind him. Ahead of him was a lot of farmland, off to his right the sky-glow of Quantum Park, and away in the north, the blinking light of the control tower at Mauldar Field. A full day.

  He put on a Caro Emerald CD and thought about what he had said to La Motta.

  I have several leads.

  This wasn’t exactly true.

  Since it was highly unlikely that he’d be able to get anywh
ere near Andy Chu long enough to have a useful chat with him, he was left with three tenuous threads to pull on.

  Thad Llewellyn, Deitz’s banker at the First Third and obviously involved with the Raytheon caper one way or another, and perhaps a party to even more.

  Warren Smoles, since Byron Deitz may have told his lawyer who he suspected in the First Third robbery, although Smoles, an accomplished blowhard greatly given to celebrating his own insider knowledge, had never led Endicott to believe that he knew anything more than what Deitz had already told the Feds. If he did, he’d have hinted at it.

  And Lyle Preston Crowder, the Steiger Freightways driver whose wonderfully convenient rollover on Interstate 50 forty-four minutes before the Gracie bank robbery drew almost all of the state and county police from the scene, allowing the robbers to get clean away. Endicott had a strong suspicion that Crowder was an accomplice in the robbery, and that meant that he had been paid, and how he had been paid might lead an inquiring mind to the person doing the paying. That of course depended upon how one put the question to Mr. Crowder. Interesting? Very.

  Endicott was moving, therefore so was Edgar Luckinbaugh. He had listened to the events at the Galleria with professional interest and was gratified to see that Staff Sergeant Coker had been able to make another significant contribution to the cause of law and order, and in a small way Edgar felt that he too had been a part of something greater than himself.

  And, since he was out of Krispy Kremes and coffee, he was happy to be on the move again, and on the lookout for a handy 7-Eleven.

  After a while it became clear to him that Mr. Endicott was heading back to the Marriott, hopefully to turn in for the night. That was fine with him. There was an old Army cot in the back of the Windstar, and a small portable radio that could be tuned to Niceville’s classical music station.

  Once he had seen Mr. Endicott safely to bed, he would put a Radio Shack motion sensor alarm under the bumper fairing of Mr. Endicott’s Cadillac, tune his scanner to the sensor’s frequency, and retire to his bunk. With any luck, he could catch his favorite evening broadcast, Nocturne, where surely there would be a soothing Mozart or Debussy to sing him to his sleep.

  Stairway to Hell

  Kate was at home, in the book-lined study on the second floor, curled up on the sofa in a defensive position, wrapped in a cashmere blanket that had been knit by her mother. She had changed out of her street clothes and was wearing a pair of emerald green velour pajamas.

  She had the television on, with the sound off. The images were starting to repeat themselves as the TV stations ran out of what they liked to call “Breaking News.”

  But the images were self-explanatory and Tig Sutter’s call from Lady Grace had come a few seconds before she would have decided to go into a Screaming Hysterical Full-On Panic Attack.

  At zero hours minus a couple of seconds, the phone had finally rung.

  “Nick’s okay. Not a scratch,” was the first thing Tig said.

  “And Beau? How is he? I wish I could be there, but Rainey hasn’t come home—”

  “Beau’s in surgery. The good news is the slug broke up a lot when it went in and he’s a big solid guy so his spine’s okay. The bad news is the slug broke up a lot and ripped him up pretty bad. The docs are working on him. They have him listed as grave, but I think they’ll bump that down in a bit. I was in to see him before he went under and he was asking how Nick was. He’s a fine kid.”

  “I should be there. Is somebody with May?”

  “Yes. Her mom and her sister are here. We sent a female officer to be with the kids. How’s Beth taking it—you know, about Deitz?”

  “Tig, I think it’s fair to say that she’s just been through the worst day of her life.”

  Kate filled him in, briefly, on the situation with Rainey and Axel, with Hannah’s hearing aids, and now the televised execution—almost—of her husband and the father of her kids. Tig listened quietly, asking only one or two clarifying questions. When she was finished, he asked where Beth was right now.

  “She’s in the carriage house, with Axel and Hannah. Axel came home in a cab an hour and a half ago. He was a wreck. He couldn’t even talk. Something about Rainey and Crater Sink. He was nearly hysterical, sobbing and … out of it. I would be too if it weren’t for several G and T’s. What an awful thing, at the Galleria, those poor people.”

  Tig’s tone lost some of its warmth.

  “I know where your heart is, Kate, but if you mean the Maranzano guy, none of this would have happened—and that Maranzano kid would still be alive—if his idiot grandfather hadn’t decided to kick off a firefight inside the Bass Pro Shop.”

  “I know, Tig. I’m sorry. When will Nick be home?” she asked, glancing at the time marker at the bottom of the television feed.

  It was eleven thirty, and although Axel had come home an hour and a half ago—they were all asleep in Beth’s bed, Axel in a nearly catatonic state, tightly wrapped in his mother’s arms, Hannah wonderfully oblivious on Beth’s left side—so far there had been no sign of Rainey, and he still wasn’t answering his phone. All she knew was that Axel had left him at the bottom of the staircase at Upper Chase Run.

  “I’ll pry Nick out of the PISTOL thing in fifteen minutes. He’ll be home in forty-five. I’ll drive him myself. Don’t you worry about any of this, you hear, Kate? Nick’s fine and Beau’s getting the best care we have and Coker’s backing up everything Nick is saying.”

  “You’ll bring Nick home?”

  “I will.”

  A moment here.

  “So Rainey’s not home yet?”

  “No. He isn’t. Lemon’s gone to Crater Sink to look for him. I know he’ll call as soon as he has something to tell me. I’m this close to asking the Niceville guys to start an informal search.”

  Tig had something on his mind, and he was trying to find a way to say it.

  “Lemon called in about what you and he found up at Patton’s Hard. He came in to the CID office a while ago to make a formal statement about it. It’s too dark to do anything tonight, and the current there is too dangerous for a night dive, so we have a Niceville cruiser securing the scene. From what we could tell, without getting the divers down, the car in the river looks to be a 2005 Toyota. The plates are registered to an Alice Bayer.”

  Kate realized she was holding her breath.

  “Were you able to … see if anything was inside?”

  Tig was slow in replying.

  “Well, the auto unit guys lowered a camera on a cable, but it’s pretty murky there, with the mud and all, and the windows are all silted up.”

  “So she might not be in there?” said Kate, not believing that for a second. Neither did Tig, but he was kind enough not to say so.

  “We’re out looking for her. We asked State to send a unit in to Sallytown to see if she’s with her relatives up there. She’s not, and they said they weren’t expecting her and that they hadn’t heard from her in two weeks.”

  “There was a note. I was told there was a note, on her door, I mean her house on Virtue Place. Did you get that?”

  “Yes. We did. Kate, this part is no fun … You and Lemon said you found a few of Rainey’s things under that willow.”

  “Yes. Axel’s too. We left them there.”

  As if we didn’t want to tamper with a crime scene, she was thinking.

  “Well … they were still there when we secured the scene. I just wanted to tell you that was the right thing to do. I admire you for it. Not that anybody thinks Rainey or Axel had anything … that they might have seen the car there or something. No reason they would have, is there?”

  “No. No reason at all,” said Kate, realizing that now she was thinking less like Axel’s aunt and Rainey’s guardian and more like a defense counsel.

  “Rainey or Axel ever say anything about going down to Patton’s Hard?”

  Now the defense counsel was front and center and although she hated herself for it, she had to handle Tig’s question carefully,
and she was pretty certain that Tig would pick up on that.

  “They’ve talked about Patton’s Hard, about why they go there.”

  “Nothing jumps out at you?”

  Voices in the willows.

  Forged notes from a dead mother.

  Alice Bayer was the school attendance secretary.

  “No. Not a thing.”

  Tig was quiet for a moment.

  “Okay. Well, I’ll be over in a while, with Nick. You give me a heads-up if Lemon calls in, will you? I want to know the boy is safe.”

  “Thanks, Tig. As I said, they played hooky today, and Rainey knows we know. I think he’s just putting off the confrontation. You know boys.”

  “I do,” said Tig, with a low rumbling chuckle. “I have an office full of them. And they’re armed.”

  “You have people with Beau?”

  “Only half the CID and most of the Niceville PD and Marty Coors from State and Jimmy Candles and Mavis Crossfire and your brother, Reed, and Boonie Hackendorff. Other than that the place is deserted.”

  “Can you ask Reed to call me as soon as we know something about Beau?”

  “I will. You stay cool, Kate. Everything will turn out okay.”

  He was gone.

  Kate sat there staring at but not seeing the television, her mind going down various twisted roads. She was still doing that forty minutes later when her phone rang. It was Lemon Featherlight. He was calling from his truck. She could hear sirens in the background. He had found Rainey.

  Lemon Featherlight had reached the top of Upper Chase Run ten minutes before midnight. The last Peachtree trolley of the night was in the roundabout station, a female driver sitting at the controls, writing on a clipboard. She glanced up as his lights swept across her trolley, gave him a once-over—dangerous? probably not—and went back to her clipboard.

  The lights of the station cast a yellow glow over the bottom of the staircase and on the tree-shaded facades of the last two houses on the street, both of which were shut down and dark.