The Reckoning (28 page)

Tito Smeraglia was finding this assignment vexing. After driving down from Jacksonville in a rented panel van, he had located the Sinclair beach house easily. It was right out on the shoreline, one of a long chain of elaborate homes that seemed to run down the coast and on into a misty infinity.

Most of the homes were shuttered and barred. Tito figured they were seasonal homes and this was an inconvenient season for these pampered parasites.

The wealth of America had always vaguely offended him. These people had no…restraint. Everything was always too much and too much of too much. They were a vulgar people, unlike his own people back in Istria, who were all modest, hardworking, humble, and pure of heart, at least, the holy few who weren't thieves and thugs and killers.

The beach house was a big angular structure, all wood beams and glass and offset grids and elevated decks sticking out here and there. Handsome in a masculine way, not like some of the other houses along the shore, many of which looked like pink-stucco wedding cakes or exploding car parts held in place with stainless steel rods.

But he had passed by the Sinclair house slowly enough to get a thorough look at it, and one thing it was
not
was easy to break into.

There was an outer fence made of cedar planking, with cameras and sensors and perimeter lights all over. As he sat in his van looking at the pictures on his digital camera he knew in his heart that getting inside it was going to take patience and finesse.

Well, Tito had patience and he could approach finesse, and he started by going to a local store—called, for reasons he didn't give a damn about, Alvin's Island. He had noticed there were Alvin's Islands all over this part of Florida and they were all chock-full of bloody awful beach crap and bloody awful-er souvenirs, all of them made in China, probably by political prisoners in a slave-labor camp.

He bought a huge straw hat with corks hanging off the brim and a pair of rubber sandals and a baggy shirt with hula dancers on it in hues and tints that even God had never seen coming, and baggy shorts in a riotous plaid and a pair of those wraparound bug-eyed sunglasses with the mirrored lenses and a pink plastic backpack with a picture of someone named Hannah Montana on the flap.

And he bought a metal detector.

He parked the van at a public lot a half mile up the shore from the Sinclair house, changed into his beach gear in a public washroom that smelled of pee and marijuana and mold.

Then he headed out, his backpack loaded with his trade tools, feeling like a circus clown, to do what even he had to admit was best described as a reconnaissance in farce.

The sun had wrested its big round glowing butt free of the Atlantic long before, and now it was floating in the middle of the sky like a hot air balloon as he made his slow shuffling way down the beach, the waves booming and crashing in.

He kept dutifully sweeping the metal detector back and forth as he went, and he could feel the heat building on his skin. Sunscreen. Next time, may the Merciful God forbid there should ever be one, get sunscreen.

An hour later Twyla Littlebasket was standing in the living room of the beach house, holding a cell phone and idly wondering about the short, squat old man with the metal detector who was making his crablike progress down the beach. Not that old men dressed like circus wagons were a rare sight along this shore. In the high season they outnumbered the pelicans. But this was not the high season, and she was thinking that there was something odd about him and she had almost but not quite figured out what it was when her call got picked up.

“It's me.”

“How are you?”

“I'm not supposed to say names.”

“I asked
how
, not who.”

Bluebell felt the need to whisper, as if there were a law that required all fugitives to whisper into cheap cell phones. “I'm tired. But I'm almost…there.”

“Good. How long?”

“I don't know for sure. Maybe two hours? They keep stopping by the side of the highway to let people off. All you have to do is stand there and the bus stops and people get on and off. I had no idea people still traveled like this. It's like the Great Depression never ended. Except people don't dress as well. And they stink. Will you be there?”

“I'll leave now.”

“Have you heard from…”

“No. I don't expect to. We worked that all out. He'll be here when he can.”

“Okay. I guess I better go. My battery is getting low. These phones don't last long.”

“That's why they call them throwaways. Okay I love you and I'll see you soon.”

“I love you too. I can't wait.”

“Neither can I,” she said, watching the absurd old man work his way down toward the Kellerman place, sweeping that metal thing back and forth.
God, how dull that must be
, she was thinking

How deadly dull.

Then she walked away from the window and locked up the place and set the alarm and went out to the garage and got into her scarlet Jaguar and skimmed off up Beach Front Road to the highway.

She planned to be in Jacksonville a good two hours before Bluebell's bus pulled into the terminal. She wanted to see if anybody else was waiting, because if anybody was, then as much as she loved Bluebell, she was going to leave her standing by the side of the road and execute Plan CUL8R, which Coker liked to call Operation Bug Out.

Tito Smeraglia was a good judge of empty houses—they just
felt
different—and as he stood on the beach in front of the Sinclair home staring at the tinted window wall, he had that sense right now. Earlier there had been a young dark-haired woman standing at the window, watching him as he went down the shore with this ridiculous machine.

She had seemed alert and attentive, as someone might well be who sees a stranger wandering down the beach in the off-season. So, being a smart girl, she paid attention to what was going on outside. But there was no one at the window now.

And the house felt empty.

It had been Tito's experience that a job either just broke open and went smoothly or became a dreary slog that took days to accomplish.

The difference was
audacity.

A risk-averse man was never going to rise to Tito's level of perfection and dedication. To the timid, every opportunity was a veiled threat.

Yes, there was security. He could see it everywhere. He was certain he was being monitored by a camera right now, but these days, who wasn't? And the woman was gone, he was certain of it.

And beach homes all over the world were like turtles. All their armor was on one side. They were closed off to the land, but wide open to the sea. That was the whole idea. So he took the opportunity to do a walkabout and see if the house had any vulnerabilities. It took him the better part of an hour before he found it. A small one, but enough.

The garage door was automatic and it had closed after the woman had presumably driven off, to be gone how long, Tito had no idea.

That was the part that required nerve, to go about the work in spite of that uncertainty.

The garage door had not closed properly. There was a slight gap between the bottom of the door and the surface of the drive, which was made of interlocking stones set into sand. There was a motion detector on the eave, but it was aimed out toward the beach road. Time to be
audacious
.

It took a few minutes to get under the garage door, and one minute later he was inside the main house—the alarm pad was already beeping, which made it easy to find—and thirty seconds after that he had cut the dedicated alarm phone line and then used a jammer to suppress the auxiliary wireless signal. It took him a while to figure out the code sequence that disarmed the system. The worn-down buttons were a giveaway, but the
order
in which they had to be pressed was challenging.

He had to work through the permutations and the box shrieked at him whenever he got it wrong, making him think of his poor dead mother—they had the exact same
tone—
but he persevered.

And the house was his.

After he had carefully restored the interlocking bricks on the driveway and scattered sand over them again, he went through the house in a practiced and competent manner, since he had a great deal of experience with how people arranged their secrets, and knowing people's secrets was a powerful advantage in his trade.

He found three pistols in different locations—by the sliding doors to the deck, near the back door, and in a night table in the master bedroom. He found but was unable to open a gun safe in the basement, next to a workbench that seemed dedicated to gun maintenance, which puzzled him.

He had been told that the subjects he was to process were retired financial people, although the man had demonstrated a degree of skill in self-defense. Yet this organized and squared-away work space suggested a military mind-set. Or perhaps, like many bankers, he was just an obsessive-compulsive, unable to deal with disorder in any way.

He noted this and moved on through the rest of the house, discovering nothing inconsistent with the profiles he had been given, a wealthy retired money changer, and his third wife, a pretty dark-haired creature of some ethnic extraction he did not care to discover. He inferred from an examination of their closets that they were living here more or less full-time, and that the dark-haired girl had left to run an errand, since she had not taken anything with her to suggest a lengthy absence. The husband, he presumed, would turn up eventually, since his car, a black GMC Yukon, was still in the garage.

Once he had them under control, he would contact his clients and invite them to attend the procedure. Tito did not approve of this aspect—it was much too public and he did his best work in private—but that had been an added element of his employment, a nonnegotiable one, and he had agreed, so there it was.

Satisfied with his afternoon's work, he went into the kitchen and found a bottle of Pellegrino. He opened it and poured himself a glass and sat down at the kitchen counter to wait for the owners to come home. He set his backpack down at his feet, laid the pistol he had found by the back door onto the countertop, which seemed to be Italian marble.

He noticed a set of knives in a standing wooden block at the other end of the counter. He reached out and pulled one free of its scabbard. These were fine knives and would have been more than adequate for his purposes, had he not thought to bring along his personal tool kit, which allowed him to achieve effects not easily duplicated by knife blade, no matter how skilled the hand.

He drank the Pellegrino and breathed in the sea air, feeling that he had done a good day's work, and that there were not many obstacles in the world that could not be overcome by a slow and meticulous man who could occasionally approach…
finesse
.

They got up early and spent the morning doing what needs to be done every morning when you live on a farm and have horses and chickens and cattle to care for. He saw to the horses in the barn, a lovely big Hanoverian mare named Virago, as shiny black as an obsidian blade, two Clyde broodmares, Althea and Jocasta, a two-year-old Clyde stallion named Traveler, almost as big as Jupiter, and a gawky Clyde foal they were calling Tanglefoot, for obvious reasons. After he tended to their needs, Danziger went to the rail fence and whistled Jupiter in from the fields.

Watching him come thundering across a chest-high field of wild flowers was like standing on a railroad crossing watching the Wabash Cannonball coming down the mountainside and cross the valley floor.

Jupiter came up to Danziger, his eyes full of recognition and wary half liking, his ears forward, huffing and stamping. Danziger gave him his apple and then another. He looked at Jupiter's teeth and checked his ears for mites and spent time washing him down, going over his hide for deer ticks, his hooves for thrush—he needed a new shoe on his rear offside—that would have to be tended to soon. Afterward he patted him down with a big terry cloth towel and took a brush to his barrel and withers and cannons and currycombed the tats out of his mane and his tail and his fetlocks.

All in all, by the time he was through, Jupiter looked like a show horse and Danziger looked like a pile of dirty laundry.

At noon they ate hard bread and cheese and apples and cold cuts—cider for Glynis and lemonade for Danziger—and then they showered and changed, a green summer dress for Glynis, with a pale yellow cardigan over it, jeans and a clean white shirt for Danziger—one of John Ruelle's old shirts, collarless—over that Danziger's range jacket, and of course those famous navy blue cowboy boots.

They were talking about various practical issues when there was a knock at the screen door and they saw Albert Lee standing outside in the shade of the porch, resplendent in a black suit, a gleaming white shirt, and a charcoal-gray tie.

He smiled at Danziger as Glynis opened up the door and brought him in. “Charlie, you decided to stay, I see.”

“He did,” said Glynis, looking serious, now that Albert Lee was here. “I've…explained things to him. He's ready to help if he's needed.”

“So am I,” said Albert Lee, pulling back his suit jacket to show the butt of an old pistol tucked into his waistband.

“What is it?” asked Danziger with professional interest. Albert Lee pulled it out, a small-frame stainless-steel hammerless revolver. He checked the action, flipped out the cylinder, and handed the weapon, butt first, to Danziger, who turned it in the light streaming in through the kitchen door. It was in perfect condition, fully loaded, and had a shimmer rippling along the steel.

“Damn,” he said, “A Forehand and Wadsworth. I haven't seen one of these in years.”

He snapped the cylinder back into the frame, passed it back to Albert Lee.

“I had it from my daddy. He went to the South African war. It shoots thirty-eight. I got an extra box of fifty. Not good for long-range, but it will do very nicely up close.”

Danziger looked up at Albert Lee. “You think it'll come to that?” he asked.

Albert Lee glanced across at Glynis, who looked as grim as he did. “I believe it might,” he said.

Danziger took that in. “Glynis, I see you've got a Browning Automatic Rifle back there in the parlor. It looks to be in pretty good condition.”

“It is,” she said. “Ethan brought it back from the war, and he always kept his weapons well.”

“Do you have any spare rounds for it?”

“Yes. During the troubles with the Teague Faction after the war, Ethan bought four more magazines and a box of bullets.”

“Springfield thirty-ought-six?”

Glynis gave him a look. “What else would they be? I know weapons at least as well as you do, Charlie. Do you wish to bring that along this afternoon?”

“Well, it would sure help clarify the situation.”

“That it would,” said Albert Lee. “Although it's a heavy brute.”

“I've fired them,” said Danziger, “I know what they can do. They're well worth the carrying.”

Albert Lee looked as if he had a question, and Glynis asked him if he did.

“Well, Miz Ruelle, I was wondering if Clara was going to attend, at all?”

Danziger got the distinct impression that Albert Lee was more than a tad sweet on Clara.

Glynis shook her head, patted Albert Lee on the shoulder, gave him a sympathetic smile. “No, Albert Lee. I'm afraid Clara has already been to the Harvest. If all goes well, she may come down to dinner, and I hope you'll stay? Clara is always happy to see you.”

“Is she here now?” asked Charlie.

“She is,” said Glynis. “But there is someone to be dealt with this afternoon that she wishes never to look upon again.”

The men heard that, left it alone.

“Well,” said Glynis, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “We might as well get ready. You men get your gear together. It's about time.”

Ten minutes later they left the old house and headed down the slope toward the wheat field, Danziger on the right, because the BAR kicked its empty brass out to the right and they were as hot as coals. The BAR was the
M
1918 model, so it could fire either single-shot or 350 rounds per minute on auto. Either way, Danziger figured the BAR pretty much owned the day.

Glynis walked in the middle, carrying a midsized package, flat, rectangular, wrapped in an old Indian blanket, and Albert Lee on her left, his suit coat open, his Forehand & Wadsworth in his belt, and his pockets full of loose thirty-eights, jingling like coins.

Danziger looked back up the lane to the house and saw a lovely young woman standing at an upper window. She had long blond hair and an oval face, large expressive eyes with a greenish tint, and sadness in her aura. She lifted a hand to Danziger, and he smiled and then turned away, knowing that he had finally seen Clara Mercer. They crossed Little Cut Creek and came up a small rise, and they were there and the Harvest had begun.

It was right out of Danziger's dream, the one he'd had in his room at the MountRoyal Hotel.

They were standing at the western edge of a field of wheat that rose and fell away toward a dense stand of pines and willows. There were dark figures in the distance, working along the edge of the field, digging in what looked to be trenches, shovels and axes rising and falling, the figures bent and somehow beaten-looking. There was a wheeled cart being drawn by a brace of oxen. The cart was loaded with round white stones, or maybe cantaloupe.

Or skulls.

Now that he was closer, Danziger got the question answered. They were stones, river rocks, rounded by water for ten thousand years. They were using them to build a barrier wall along the edge of the pine forest. By the look of it, a damn big barrier wall. A wall works both ways. It keeps things out and it keeps thing in. Danziger had no idea which way this wall was pointed, but his money was on keeping things out.

But they were just rocks.

Not skulls.

Freud was right,
thought Danziger,
sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

When they crested the hill, someone in the wheat field called out, and the people working along the edge of the pine forest began to gather in the center of the field, where a small hay wagon stood, sagging and ancient, once painted green.

Glynis led the way, moving through the wheat with a silky hissing sound, the package cradled across her breasts. The sun was past noon and her shadow ran ahead of her. The heat lay on their shoulders and Danziger could feel it burning through the heavy twill of his range jacket. He had the BAR on a combat sling over his right shoulder, twenty-one pounds fully loaded, four spare box mags—twenty rounds each—stuffed into his outside pockets, and his Colt Anaconda in his belt.

In a few minutes they were all gathered around the old hay wagon, a crowd of perhaps thirty or forty people, all middle-aged or old, some black, some white, some dark, some light, a mosaic of the Old South. No children.

The people from the Blue Bird were all there—Danziger recognized the careworn woman who had invited him to their “sing” as she was getting off the bus—and many people he did not know, but all of them were carrying an invisible weight and an air of sleepwalking fatigue.

But they were smiling and all of them greeted Glynis in a way that made Danziger feel that they had a strong affection for her. Albert Lee got a few hellos and friendly nods. They all avoided looking directly at Danziger.

Beyond the gathering, over by the tree line, Danziger could see four men standing apart, hard-looking, their faces grim. They were holding tools, picks and shovels, and were wearing dusty overalls and work boots.

They looked…separate…like gravediggers waiting for the funeral to be over and the mourners to depart so they could get the business over with. All four men were looking right at Danziger and he felt…not a threat but a
warning
in their expressionless faces.

Glynis unwrapped her package, and the sunlight glimmered on an intricately carved gilt frame. As she turned it, the sun flashed out in a blinding white blaze from the pitted and worn glass of an antique mirror, medium-sized, quite old.

All eyes were on the glass as she placed it carefully on the floor of the wagon, leaning it upright against the slats, the glass facing the people. A silence came down and there was nothing but the wind hissing through the wheat field and, from deep in the pine forest, the sound of crows calling.

Glynis turned to look into the pine forest for a while with a troubled expression, listening to the crows, and then she came back to the gathering.

“Today the Harvest comes again. Are we all willing to do this today? Those of you who are not willing and ready need not take part. You see Albert Lee is here, with the Blue Bird. Those of you who wish may go back to your homes or to one of the towns. And there is always room in the Annex. The work of this plantation will always go on.”

She paused, as if letting her words settle in.

“So, remember, this must be something you
wish
to do. Something for which you feel ready all the way down to your toes. No one should feel forced or driven to it. No outer influence should bring you to it. It must come from your own heart.”

There was movement and murmuring—it ran in a ripple through the crowd. It passed and an air of imminence set in, everyone waiting for the first person to begin this, whoever it might be.

Glynis said nothing, seemed content to wait until sundown, perfectly still, perfectly attentive. Even the crows in the deeps of the pine forest were now silent. Danziger and Albert Lee studied each face in the crowd, but they all were staring into the glass, fixed and rapt.

“I believe I am ready,” said a small voice, a woman's voice with a strong southern accent, pure Louisiana, and the crowd parted to let her come forward. She was a young black woman, not tall, very beautiful, a full and sensual body.

She was barefoot and wearing a simple smock made of unbleached cotton. Her hair was held back by a red ribbon and she had a necklace around her neck, wide rings of emerald-green and scarlet stones, each ring separated by a thinner ring of intense yellow. The effect was snakelike, and against her coffee-colored skin, it glittered like a ring of fire and light. Her expression was calm and she held her body upright, her hands folded.

“Talitha,” said Glynis with a note of surprise. “Are you sure?”

Talitha looked down at the wheat, as if considering. Then she raised her head, a clear light in her topaz eyes. “I am, Miss Glynis. I feel my time is come.”

Glynis looked both pleased and worried. Danziger got the idea that Talitha had come to the mirror many times before and it had not gone well.

“You must not be downhearted, Talitha, if it is not yet time.”

“I will not be downhearted,” she said.

Glynis came forward, gave her a kiss on the cheek, and then stepped away. “Here, come and look.”

Talitha hesitated and then came up to the wagon. She took a breath, let it out, and then leaned forward, bringing her face close to the glass. Danziger, standing beside the wagon, his eyes roving over the crowd and then on to the edge of the pine forest, to those four waiting men, and then moving on to search the pines, could not see what Talitha was seeing in the mirror.

Everyone waited in silence.

After a minute, the girl straightened up, tears on her face. She looked at Glynis. “I am to go,” she said in a trembling voice. “Second Samuel will meet me on the other side of the woods.”

A low murmur ran through the crowd.

“Do you wish this?” asked Glynis. “You are welcome to stay.”

“I truly wish it,” she said in a small voice. “I been pining to see my daddy for a long time.”

“Then go, Talitha, with all of our love.”

Talitha smiled then, a sudden flash of joy and release. She turned for one last look at the rest of the people, performed a graceful curtsy, and then set off across the wheat field in the direction of the pine forest. Danziger noticed that as she moved through the wheat she made no sound and left no trail. Halfway to the tree line she faded into a misty outline and then she was gone.

A sigh ran through the crowd.

And that is how it went. Someone would step forward and look into the mirror. Their reactions varied—some seemed relieved, some seemed saddened—and some who looked into the mirror backed away and shook their heads and drifted off into the comfort of the crowd. Everyone who said they were to go left the same way Talitha had, moving silently away through the wheat, slipping into a veiled shape and then slowly fading away before they reached the pine forest.

In one hour Danziger counted nine people who took that walk. Glynis stood and waited, and the time rolled on, but no one else came forward.