Authors: Carsten Stroud
Reed smiled down at Rainey.
“Kid, I saw them. Two huge ugly dead guys. The way they look would give you nightmares. Gonna give me nightmares.”
Reed looked back at Nick.
“The heck with the Shagreens. How are you?”
Reed stood for a moment, getting a rundown on Nick’s status, his smile fading.
“We haven’t got Deitz yet,” he said, after Nick had given him a brief sketch of what happened in the van. “No sign of him.”
“Somebody’s helping him,” said Nick.
“Has to be, considering what he was wearing. I understand he might also be wearing a broken nose?”
Nick looked at Kate, who shrugged and smiled.
“Well, I may have adjusted it a bit.”
“Was he in shackles?”
“Yep.”
“Risky. Was there a camera in the van?”
“Yep.”
“Hit him anyway?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“Seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Why are you talking like that Spenser guy in the Robert Parker novels?”
“Am I?”
“Yep.”
“You two,” said Kate, “should take this act to Vegas.”
“Kate tells me Marty has you on a desk?”
Reed’s expression shifted into gloom again.
“No. Not on a desk. I’m suspended. Full pay, but don’t come into the office until he calls me.”
Silence in the room.
Everyone who knew Reed Walker knew that the job—driving an Interceptor—was the central axis of his life. Everything else turned around it. Without that pivot, that center of gravity, what would Reed Walker do? Fly off into space?
Reed shook that off, grinned down at Nick.
“So. Are you gonna lie around here all week nursing your boo-boos or you gonna get up and go looking for Deitz? I figure, since he spent a lot of time smacking Beth around, you and me have a special interest.”
Kate was on her feet, the Irish in her rising.
“Reed! Nick’s not going anywhere—”
“Is this a bad time?” said a laconic Texas-tinted voice from the door. Everybody turned to look, and there was Boonie Hackendorff filling up the doorway and blocking the light from the hall.
“Yes, it is,” said Kate, still winding up.
“Good,” said Boonie, stepping lightly through the door, grinning broadly, bringing with him the scent of lime, of cinnamon breath mints and a strong afternote of cigar.
“I hate sneaking sideways into a room. I prefer to make an entrance.”
“Fine,” said Kate. “Now let’s see you make an exit. Nick’s only supposed to have one visitor at a time. This is turning into a parade.”
Reed stepped in.
“Actually, Kate, Boonie’s got business with Nick. Beth’s here, with the kids. Maybe we can all go get a bite of lunch? Let these two talk.”
He looked at Rainey, who was oddly absent. Rainey shook himself, refocused, said, “Sure. Can I have a mimosa?”
Reed looked down at him.
“That troubles me on so many levels, kid.”
“Yes, you can have a mimosa,” said Kate, taking his hand and pulling Rainey to his feet. “So long as your uncle has a Shirley Temple.”
She came over, gave Nick a kiss that he could feel in his knees, gathered up her things, shot a glare at Boonie.
“Don’t you be dragging my husband off anywhere, Boonie. You follow?”
And they were gone.
There was a silence, while Boonie and Nick considered Kate and all her ways.
“Hell of a girl,” said Boonie after a pause. “You ever notice she says ‘
You follow
?’ just the way that guy said it in
The Sting
?”
“The big guy, played the Irish hood everybody was so afraid of? Doyle Lonnegan?”
“Robert Shaw.”
“Yeah. Now you mention it, she does.”
“Consider yourself warned. How you doing, anyway? Can you move around at all?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Think you can make it to the morgue downstairs?”
“I look that bad?”
Boonie’s jovial mood darkened.
“No. I mean, it’s … Look, I got a problem here, and I don’t want to take it back to D.C., or even to the rest of my people at Cap City.”
“Why me?”
“Nick, when you were in the war, I guess you saw a lot of dead bodies, right? Maybe saw a lot of weird shit?”
Nick gave him a sideways look.
“You could say. That’s what war is all about. Stacking up those dead guys. Plus there were cookies.”
Boonie looked pained, embarrassed.
“Jeez, Nick. I meant no disrespect. I’m asking a serious question. I know it’s maybe stuff you don’t wanna talk about, but I can’t think of anybody else to ask.”
“This all about a particular dead body?”
Boonie looked down at his hands.
“Yeah. It is. Thing is, nobody—right now anyway—nobody can know I’m asking you in on this. I mean, the jurisdictional thing and all. There’d be blowback out of D.C., maybe even with the State guys. Not Marty Coors, no. Nor Mickey Hancock … plus, there are … other things, about this body, details I don’t want to see go anywhere else. I know I can trust you to shut up. I’m not sure about the rest of my guys downtown. This is career death for me, I handle it wrong. Like I said, can you move?”
“I can sure as hell get my ass downstairs.”
Boonie looked uneasy, but committed.
“You not gonna faint on me, or pitch a fit? ’Cause if you do, Kate will surely tear me a new—”
“I’m fine. I promise I won’t die on you.”
Boonie took it in, nodded.
“Can we do it now? I got a guy with a wheelchair outside. You can ride down—”
Nick was already standing, in his slippers, reaching for a thick blue robe. He lashed it tight around his waist, looked white around the edges, got his color back, and said, “Let’s go.”
Boonie was going for the door.
“I’ll go get the wheelchair guy—”
“Boonie, you bring a wheelchair into this room, and you’ll need a flashlight and a crowbar to get yourself free of it again. You follow?”
“I follow.”
Charlie Danziger was aware that he reminded people of Sam Elliott—he was tall and lean and craggy and he had a big white mustache, and now that he wasn’t with the State Patrol anymore he wore his faded blond hair on the longish side. So Charlie Danziger, who liked to think of himself as an original, did what was possible within the narrow scope of choice that nature had given him to counteract that effect.
This afternoon he was counteracting the Sam Elliott effect by sitting on the front porch of his ranch house in the foothills of the Belfair Range, watching his horses run on the downslope of his front forty while drinking Italian Pinot Grigio, a flowery white wine from Valdadige that Danziger was convinced the real Sam Elliott wouldn’t tolerate as a barbecue starter.
The anti–Sam Elliott effect of this was diminished a bit by the fact that he was wearing a clean white shirt and a pair of boot-cut jeans faded by the actual sun and he had on the battered bloodstained old navy blue Lucchese cowboy boots that he was, in his own eccentric circle, notorious for.
The noon hour of this lazy Thursday was passing, sliding into the west—and the sun was putting a hazy autumn glow on the Belfair Range behind him and on the black hides of the six Tennessee Walker–Morgan crosses that he was letting run wild down the hill. A lovely sight, marred only by the tan-colored County Sheriff’s Department car that was rolling along the Cullen County side road about a mile away.
Danziger eased himself forward in the old wooden chair he was sitting on, groaning as he did so since the bullet hole in the right side of his chest still smarted a bit, even after all these months. Perhaps if he’d had
the slug taken out by an ER doctor instead of an Italian dentist named Donny Falcone it wouldn’t be smarting quite so much.
However, since he’d acquired the chest wound by getting himself shot by a guy who had, just two hours before, helped him rob the First Third Bank in Gracie, Danziger took the view that going to a real ER doctor instead of Donnie Falcone would have been a bad decision.
Danziger bore the guy who shot him no grudge since the guy, a decent enough fellow named Merle Zane, had only shot him because Danziger had shot Merle Zane first, and in the back at that.
Danziger leaned forward in the chair, poured himself a fresh glass of wine, watching the distant dust trail of that County car as it got closer and closer. It was slowing now, getting ready to make the turn into the long gravel drive that curled and wandered its way up the quarter-mile-long grassy slope to Danziger’s place.
It was too far away to make out the markings. Could just be a social call. Danziger, ex–State Patrol, was on good terms with local law enforcement, good enough to go fishing down in Canticle Key with Marty Coors and Jimmy Candles and Boonie Hackendorff, all of them members of the same National Guard unit.
Still …
He reached down beside him and picked up the Winchester carbine that was leaning on the wall. He didn’t have to rack it to put a round in the chamber. That was movie stuff, done mainly for the sound effect.
If a gun isn’t loaded, it’s a paperweight
, his sainted mother used to say, usually when she was getting loaded herself.
He cocked the hammer back, sighed heavily, got to his feet with a groan, and walked to the edge of the porch, setting his glass down on the railing and holding the Winchester muzzle down along the seam of his pants.
He squinted a bit against the glare of the sun on the patrol car windshield as it made the final turn and rolled up the grade, coming to a stop in the middle of the turning circle.
At this range, Danziger ID’d the car by its numbers. It was Coker’s official ride. He was a staff sergeant in the County Sheriff’s Department.
Coker was from Billings. Danziger was born in Bozeman. They were a year apart in age, Coker fifty-two, Danziger fifty-three. They’d met in the Corps a long time back and were about as tight as two cranky twice-divorced cops could manage. Danziger kept the Winchester in close and waited.
Coker shut the engine down, popped the door, and got out slowly, six feet of ropy muscle with skin tanned copper brown. He leaned his left hand on the roof of the cruiser and smiled across it at Danziger. Danziger figured his right hand was resting on the butt of his service Beretta.
“You gonna shoot me with that carbine, Charlie?”
“Depends on why you’re here, Coker.”
“Guess you’ve heard the news?”
“Deitz is out.”
“Yes.”
Coker ran his left hand through his bristles, set it back on the roof.
“Sorta complicates things a bit, I guess.”
Danziger nodded, cracked a big smile.
“Got that right, my friend.”
A silence.
“Well, you gonna offer me a beer, or what?”
“Outta beer. How about a glass of wine?”
“Jeez,” said Coker, wincing. “That Dago cat piss all you got?”
“Might have a lime cordial back there.”
Coker laughed, a short sharp bark, pushed himself off the roof of the cruiser, and came around the front. He was in his patrol uniform, tan with brown flashes, his six-pointed gold sheriff star glittering in the afternoon light. He came to the foot of the stairs, looked up at Danziger.
“I guess we need to talk.”
“I always hated that phrase. Whenever Barbara used it, I knew I was in deep shit.”
“Well,” said Coker, grinning up at him, “I believe that about covers the situation.”
Danziger went inside and brought out the bottle, frosty from the cooler, and a heavy glass tumbler for Coker. Coker was sitting in the other ancient wooden chair, tilted back against the boards, his boots up on the railing. Danziger, looking at him, got that classic image of Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in
My Darling Clementine
.
He handed him the tumbler, sat down in the other chair, tilted it back against the wall. Boots on the railing. His bloodstained blue cowboy boots. Coker sipped his wine, cradled the tumbler in his hands, and nodded at Danziger’s boots.
“Them’s what did us in, my friend. Those damn blue boots.”
“
Them’s
?”
“Okay.
Those
. If you hadn’t worn them to the fucking robbery, then that Thad Llewellyn banker guy wouldn’t have told Deitz that one of the gunmen was wearing blue cowboy boots and Deitz wouldn’t have put you and them
—those
—boots together.”
“I wore them because they’re my lucky boots.”
“So you keep telling me. Only reason Deitz hasn’t told the cops yet is they haven’t let him off the Raytheon beef. If they had cut that deal when they still had him, we’d be playing out the last part of your favorite movie right now.”
“
The Wild Bunch
?”
“Yeah. At the end, where they fight the whole Mexican army and they all get killed.”
Coker was right.
Coker was the best police sniper in this part of the state. They called him in for all the really bad ones. Coker was also the guy waiting in the Belfair Range when those four cops came barreling up the defile, right on their asses, he and Merle Zane with the black Magnum.
Coker had taken out the two media types in the news chopper first and then all four of the pursuit cars. Five rounds from the Barrett .50 he had borrowed from Armories.
Six dead.
The take had added up to two million one hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars, plus random jewelry from the safety-deposit boxes.
And one stainless-steel box with a Raytheon logo on it. Inside that, the disk-shaped guidance module that Coker had named the cosmic Frisbee.
If you had asked either of these men why they did that, robbed the bank, took the cash, killed four cops—being cops
themselves
—well, both of them would have looked at you for a long while and then one or the other of them would have said something along the lines of
who is this asshole and how did he get in here?
Coker sipped at his drink again, and they sat there for a bit, watching the stud horses gallop on the hillside.
“So,” said Coker, after a while. “Got any suggestions?”
“I been thinking about it, ever since I heard. Coupla things come to mind.”