The Reckoning (31 page)

He pulled her back to a canter, hearing her harness jingle and her breath chuffing like a steam engine. She was still good to go, not totally blown, but like the athlete she was, she needed a breather. He cocked his head and listened as they came down the turning of the lane.

There was a gate there, and beyond it the smooth blacktop of Side Road 311.

He could hear the truck accelerating, going away north, into the rising hills of the Belfair Range. He pulled Virago to a halt at the edge of the highway. Far away up the rising slope, he could see the truck in the distance, a moving patch of white, one red taillight glittering in the dark.

It cleared a rise and winked out, and he was alone on a horse by the side of the road, and the stars were coming out.

He sat there for a while, thinking it over, while Virago got her breath back, her head low, now cropping a bit at the sweet grass by the side of the highway. She'd need some water soon, and so would he.
North
, he was thinking.

What's north on Highway
311
?

Gracie is north.

And what's in Gracie?

Candleford House.

Virago was tossing her head and snuffling at the air. Smelling water, probably. He gave her some rein and she clip-clip-clopped across the highway to the far side and found a brook running there, inside the sweet grass along the verge.

He let her drink—not too much—slid out of the saddle and knelt down to cup up a few handfuls of water. It was clear and cold and better than pinot grigio, at least right now.

He gave her five minutes.

No cars came by, no traffic at all, just a country road in the Belfairs. The stars were all out and there was a hint of a rising moon along the western slope of the hills.

Back to Glynis and work out a strategy?

Or saddle up and go north to Gracie, a distance of forty-seven miles by the highway, and a bit less cross-country. Better than a full day's ride, and when he got there, then what?

Much as he admired Virago, he needed a car.

He looked up at the night sky. It was now a sweep of stars, shimmering and clear. And the moon glow was rising in the west. The sweet-grass perfume was all around him, the stalks hissing in a night breeze. The road was a black ribbon with a solid yellow line down the middle. He looked off to the north, beyond the hill, and saw a red flicker against the sky.

Emergency lights. Police or ambulance?

Okay, decision time.

He saddled up and went north at a steady canter, staying on the side of the road, ready to ride down into the ditch if he heard a car coming.

Fifteen minutes later he cleared the crest and looked down a long slope where the highway ran into a covered bridge across Little Cut Creek.

Two vehicles were stopped on the far side of the covered bridge, some kind of pickup truck and the ambulance. Its roof rack and side strobes were churning red and white, lighting up the valley, sending flickering red fire rippling across the grassy slopes of the hillsides.

Danziger rode up to it, pulling up twenty feet away. He dismounted, led Virago down the ditch and up the far side, tied her off on a fence post.

He walked up to the ambulance, Colt in his hand, coming quietly up on the passenger side.

He checked the ambulance, saw a blond woman in an EMT uniform slumped over the wheel, blood on her neck and chest, blood spattered all over the dashboard, obviously stone dead. Other than the EMT tech, the ambulance was empty. He heard soft voices coming from the pickup—country voices, thin, querulous, male and female, an argument.

He came back around the end of the ambulance and stepped up to the driver's side of the pickup, an ancient blue Ford. He saw an old man sitting behind the wheel, faced away, barking at his passenger.

Danziger tapped on the glass and the old man jumped a yard, turning to goggle wide-eyed at Danziger. He had a sunken weather-beaten face and a ragged white beard, watery blue eyes. His passenger, a pear-shaped pink-skinned woman wearing a churchgoing hat and a frowny face, leaned forward to glare at Danziger from the passenger seat.

The old man rolled down the window. The smell of whiskey and cigarettes came off him in waves. “Jesus, son, you scared me silly.”

“Sorry, sir,” said Danziger, slipping into cop mode. “What's going on here?”

“You kin see for yourself, deppity. Coming down from Gracie, we see this ambulance off to the side of the road, stop to look, we kin see the girl just sitting there. Cora, she useta be a nurse, goes to check on her. Dead as a dog, she is. Looks like she been shot. In the throat. Bled out fast, like a hog on a hook. Cora and me are wondering what to do about it. And you come along.”

He didn't seem to be worried about seeing a badge. He
was
wondering about Danziger's ride.

“You patrolling on a horse?” he said.

“Yes, sir. Have you seen any other vehicles on the road?”

They both nodded, and the woman answered. “Yessir, we have. Just this minute. Big old SUV was parked beside the ambulance, did a yoo-ee soon as we come down the hill. Went past us going like a bat out of…heck. Went back up toward Gracie. You think they was the shooters?”

Dear God. Probably watches
CSI Miami.

“No idea, ma'am. Can you two just pull forward a bit and get off the road. Wait there a minute?”

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison, and the old man put the truck in gear, eased away twenty yards, tires growling on the gravel at the side of the road. Danziger looked up into the hills all around and decided that Teague wasn't up there.

He was in that SUV.

He opened up the driver's side door, looked at the girl. He put two fingers up against her carotid, got nothing, tilted her head back. The right side of her throat was torn open, a grazing wound from a big weapon. Probably his Colt. There was a big star-shaped hole in the dashboard where the round had smacked in. She had a Streamlight in her vest pocket. He pulled it out, shone it into her eyes.

Fixed and dilated.

Like the old guy said, dead as a dog. She'd caught his round in her carotid and managed to get this far before she bled out. He put the light on her ID badge.
FILLION
.

Danziger vaguely remembered seeing her around from time to time, back when he'd been with State. How she came to be helping Abel Teague escape from the Ruelle Plantation he had no idea.

He looked at her com set, saw that it had been switched off. Reached over and flicked it back on, and got a lot of faint chatter on the emergency channel, frantic cross talk, bordering on hysterical, but a long way away. The truck was marked
CITY OF NICEVILLE EMT
, so he was likely getting heterodyne signal bounce off cloud cover from seventy miles down the valley.

He put the flash on the passenger side, saw mud marks on the floor, pine needles as well, and some blood streaks on the back of the seat, not much, but some. Teague, in the passenger seat.

He went around to the back, opened the gates. The gurney was a heap of rumpled sheets and a tangle of blankets. It looked as if someone had been lying on it. Probably not Teague.

Then who?

He closed the doors, walked back to the couple in the pickup. The old man was drinking from a bottle wrapped in a brown-paper sack. He tucked it between his legs as Danziger came up to his window, swallowed hard, tried to look innocent.

“Can I ask you for some ID, sir,” said Danziger. The old man looked at his wife, who poked around in the glove box and came up with a battered leather wallet, handed it across to Danziger.

He looked at the ID, driver's license, and insurance, an address that ended in RR. Country people, from right around here.

He handed it back. “Mr. Coglin, my name is Charlie Danziger, I'm with the State Police, and I'm going to ask you to do a favor for me?”

Mr. Coglin nodded and said he'd be happy to do anything for law enforcement.

“I've called this in and I'm going to have to stay here until we get some units here—”

“Got to protect the crime scene, ayup,” said Cora, and Mr. Coglin agreed. “Just like in
Gangbusters
, Cora.”

“That's right,” she said, smiling and nodding. “Or
The Adventures of Ellery Queen
.”

“Ayup.”

Ellery Queen?

“Yes, that's right. Do you folks know the Ruelle Plantation?”

“We sure do,” said Mr. Coglin. “Miss Glynis owns it. A real fine lady. It's just a couple miles east of here, up along Little Cut Creek side road.”

“I'm going to need someone to take this horse back up there. Do you think you could hitch her up to your truck here and take her to Mrs. Ruelle? Tell her what happened here, and tell her that Charlie Danziger was still hunting, and that he will be back as soon as he can.”

“Told you that was Virago,” said Cora with a vindicated air. “No other horse like her in the twin counties.”

“Surely can, Officer Danziger,” said Mister Coglin. “Guess you heard about all the troubles up there, eh?”

Danziger gave this a moment. “What sort of troubles, Mister Coglin?”

“There was some shooting, people are saying. Cora and me, we heard some of it not too long ago, back there in the pines. You didn't hear it, sir?”

“Yes, I did,” said Danziger.

Mr. Coglin tapped the side of his nose. “Figured that's why you was on horseback. You catch the feller?”

“Not yet,” said Danziger.

“Too bad. Shot a good man up there, a Mr. Albert Lee, who drives the Blue Bird bus.”

“Salt of the earth he was,” said Cora, “even though he was a cullud man.”

Mr. Coglin gave her a censorious frown. “Don't know as he's dead yet, Cora. Only that he got shot. And cullud folks is as good as anybody,” Coglin said with a prim smile, “and better than some what live right around here.”

He came back to Danziger. “She meant no offense, officer.”

“None taken.”

“Well…you go on now, Officer, and you catch that man. I hear he is a bad one.”

“The worst,” said Danziger. “His name is Abel Teague. He looks like an old man in a white shirt and black trousers. Has a scar under his right eye. He's quick and he's strong and he's dangerous. If you see him, don't let him get close to you.”

Mister Coglin reached under the seat, pulled out a large single-action Colt .44 revolver, held it up so Danziger could admire it.

Danziger, a little on edge, barely managed not to shoot him.

“Got this with me all the time.”

“And he's good with it too,” said Cora. “Stanley was a sharpshooter in the wars.”

“Long time ago,” said Mr. Coglin.

“Yes it was,” said Danziger, keeping an eye on the Colt until Mr. Coglin put it away.

Shaking his head—
getting rusty; should have thought about the gun—
Danziger went back to the mare, patted her flanks, unbuckled her girth strap, stripped off her saddle and the sheepskin pad under it, carried the saddle and the pad over to the back of Coglin's pickup and stowed it, got the BAR, and the box of .30-06 rounds from the saddlebag. Went back and stroked her neck, talking horse talk to her, and she whinnied back at him. He got the impression that she had enjoyed the chase and was sorry to see it end. A real fine horse, fast, steady under fire, and damn brave, one of the finest horses he'd ever met.

Then he watched as Mr. Coglin got Virago roped to the passenger side of the truck, where she'd be clear of the engine's exhaust pipe. She whinnied a bit, but seemed happy enough to go along.

“Well, you two have a safe night,” he said, as Coglin put the truck in gear. “And don't stop for any hitchhikers.”

“We surely won't,” said Mister Coglin. “Good hunting, Deppity.”

Coglin, thin lips pursed—probably glad not to have to account for the bottle in the brown paper sack—pulled away at a crawl and was still going away at a snail's pace, Virago clip-clopping calmly along beside the passenger door, when Danziger went back to the ambulance.

He gathered the EMT tech up and carried her back around to the rear gates, lifted her on to the gurney. She was a pretty girl and he felt damn bad about killing her, no matter how poor her life choices had been.

There was a bicycle lashed up against the other wall of the ambulance, a Gary Fisher, whoever he was, red and gold, with big fat tires. Looked expensive and it meant not a damn thing to him.

He covered the young woman up with a red blanket, strapped her down, got some wipes off the crash cart, and spent a few minutes cleaning blood off the front seat and the dashboard.

Then he got behind the wheel, shut off the emergency flashers, put the truck in gear, and headed north up Side Road 311 with Gracie on his mind. He told Glynis he'd bring Abel Teague back, in the saddle or across it, and he was going to do that if it killed him. Whatever the hell
that
meant around these parts.

Well, come to think of it, based on recent experience, it sure as hell meant
something
serious, because he'd left a whole litter of dead men behind him. He may not be through the looking glass, but getting killed was obviously still very much on the table.

La Motta was trying to concentrate on the soccer game, but that fucking dog was going nuts, moaning his stupid strangled moan and snapping at the air. Delores had Frankie Twice's vocal chords snipped so he couldn't yap, but Jesus Christ, that dog could still bitch and moan.

He was in Frankie Maranzano's media room, wearing wrinkled boxers and a hula shirt, lying back in a red leather recliner chair, a pitcher of Stella propped up on his fat belly, staring at a flat-screen television bigger than Nebraska.

Italia was playing those Greek pansies and fucking
losing
, which was bad enough in itself, but La Motta had laid down a heavy load on Italia by two and right now they were down by three!

Three!

What the fuck is this, basketball?

Nobody racks up high numbers in a soccer match, and sure as shit not those fucking Greek—

Frankie Twice just would not stop. He was out there in the living room, moaning and snapping.

“Delores! Will ya shoot that fucking rat dog, will ya just?”

In a moment Spahn was at the door, his clothes all messed up. He had a headache or the flu or some fucking thing, and he was pissed.

“Mario, will ya shut the fuck up?”

La Motta looked at him, his anger rising up. They had been cooped up in this stinking pink palazzo for weeks now—okay, it was
white,
so fuck you very much—waiting for the all clear to start moving around the state again, and to be honest he was starting to miss his prison cell. At least he'd had some privacy.

“Where the fuck's Delores?”

“She's over in her wing, taking a shower or shaving her legs or something,” said Spahn, who was twice as sick of Mario La Motta as La Motta was of him. “And Desi's down inna gym.”

“Will ya go see what the fuck is eating that dog, Julie?”

“I missed the part where I got to be your butt boy,” said Spahn, and then he started coughing, a wet racking cough, working his mouth like he was going to spit up.

“Jeez, Julie, you hork up a loogie in this room I swear I'll fucking—”

“Fucking
what
?” said Spahn, with ice and steel in his voice. Although he looked like a plucked chicken, Spahn was a killer several times over, a skill he'd picked up as a street kid in Bed Stuy. He always had a ceramic flick knife on him somewhere and he was as quick as a mongoose with it.

“Jeez,” said La Motta, prying himself off the recliner with an asthmatic wheeze. “You're as cranky as fuck these days.”

“I'm sick as a dog, Mario, and the phone's ringing and you're in here watching those pixie farts playing with a soccer ball. I gotta get outta bed and answer the fucking phone.”

“I didn't hear it. That dog keeps—”

“Talk to the hand, Mario. Talk. To. The. Fucking. Hand. I'm going back to bed.” Spahn said something in a muttering grumble as he made his way back down the hall.

La Motta followed him out. “Hey, Julie. Who was it? Onna phone?”

Spahn turned and glared at him, the pot-light in the ceiling making his vulturine face look like a skull. “Chi-Chi Pentangeli.”

“Who is?”

“Jeez, Mario. Tony Tee's operations guy.”

“Yeah, okay. Chi-Chi Pentangeli. I remember him now. What'd he want?”

“To say thanks. From Tony Tee. He says Tony Tee says thanks.”

“Thanks? For what?”

“For the
favor
. Remember?”

La Motta worked it through.

“You mean, the thing with Tito? That done already? That was fast.”

“Not done yet,” said Julie, coughing into a wad of Kleenex, holding it up to consider the results. “Not done yet, but Tito called him and said if he still wanted to, like, get in on it, then he should pick up Little Anthony and come on up.
The
table is set
, was what he said. Tito, I mean. That's what he said to Chi-Chi.”

“
The table is set
, hah? That's Tito for you. Well, I hope Tony Tee and his kid like what they're gonna get for dinner, and they better wear a big fucking napkin, 'cause the juices are gonna be flyin', that's all I got to say.”

He waited for Spahn to get the joke.

Lately, Julie Spahn didn't get jokes.

“Yeah, well, whatever,” said Julie Spahn as he turned away. La Motta heard his door slam with a solid thud—this was a well-made building—and he decided to call his lawyer tomorrow and see if the Do Not Associate With restrictions had been lifted yet. Because if they hadn't, he was going to try to pressure Munoz and Spahn to find somewhere else to coop up. Or maybe turn Tito loose on both of them.

He came back around the corner and out into the tennis-court-sized living room. The floor-to-ceiling window wall ran right across the whole front of the suite, ending at the other side of Frankie Maranzano's office, which was set apart from the main room by a wall of tinted glass.

It was a hell of a nice room, although right now a pigsty, but Delores had hired another housemaid, a guy this time—well, not really a
guy
, a blond-haired marigold named Raylon Grande. Delores had brought him around earlier this afternoon, and the deal was him coming in twice a week to dust and vacuum and shimmy-shake and all that nancy-boy horseshit.

La Motta shuffled across the carpet and stood in front of the window wall for a minute, staring out at the city lights at the last of the sunset going down off there in the west.

He sighed and belched and rubbed his hairy belly, feeling a bit melancholy. Maybe it was time to change things up around here. They were all getting stale. Like in that airline commercial. They needed to feel free to move about the—

And the dog went nuts again, howling now, back on his bony haunches, head back, screeching at the sky like a coyote. La Motta grabbed a pillow off the couch and winged it at the dog, missed, and knocked a lamp and the phone off the table by the end of the sectional.

“Christ,” he said aloud, because it was one of those old-fashioned phones all tricked out in solid gold trim and white enamel, where the old-timey handset rested on a golden cradle and you had to dial the numbers in a circle thing using an ivory stick thingy.

Delores had told him once that it cost Frankie Maranzano six thousand dollars, and if that was true, then Frankie Maranzano was a bigger putz than La Motta had ever suspected.

He waddled over, bent down with a grunt to pick up the phone. Shit, it was all busted up, the handset speaker hanging off, the insides all spilling out like electronic intestines—

What the fuck!
La Motta knew what he was looking at. A bug.

He leaned down, peered at it through his half-glasses. It looked like a tiny black bedbug, all scrunched up inside the mouthpiece.

La Motta had been exposed to so much electronic surveillance in his career that he felt he could read by the light coming off his own skin like one of those glow-in-the-dark crucifixes his mother used to hang over his bed so Jesus H. F. Christ could suffer down at him all night long.

So he knew exactly what the fuck he was looking at.

Frankie Twice was still whining, but at a safe distance. La Motta put the phone thing down, turned and stared at Frankie Twice.

That little fucker is in pain
, he thought.
And what hurts dogs enough to make them howl?

Sound does. High-frequency sound.

He went back to the window wall and looked out across the glittering expanse of Fountain Square at the Bucky Cullen Memorial Federal Building. Home of the Cap City FBI.

He spent some time considering the darkened windows of the FBI office across the square. He reached the inevitable conclusion.

“Fuck. Me. Blue,” he said aloud.

“What'd he just say?”

“What'd who just say? Spahn or La Motta?”

The FBI guy sitting next to him at the monitor table shook his head, lifted a hand.

“Gimme a moment.”

They were sitting in a darkened office on the seventeenth floor of the Bucky Cullen Building, a good two thousand yards away from the window wall of Delores Maranzano's suite on top of the Memphis. They were Pulaski and Gerkin, known around the office as the Picklers, a couple of FBI electronic surveillance techs that had been choppered in from Chicago to run the Maranzano surveillance, Cap City being short-handed due to the fact that weird shit was bubbling up out of the sewers.

They were a matched set of FBI techno-geeks, both of them pasty-skinned with close-cropped brown hair and steel-framed glasses and the bulging steroidal torsos of chronic heavy lifters.

Pulaski had the headphones and was running all the video recording gear and the laptop, and Gerkin had the laser mike and the digital spotter scope and a whole bunch of related techno-geekery.

The spotter scope was linked to an HD monitor that was giving them a shaky image of a large fat man in boxer shorts silhouetted in the third window from the left in the Penthouse Suite.

Night was coming on and the lights of Fountain Square were making the humid air all misty, so it was hard to make out the details.

But the laser mike was working fine. It registered microscopic variations in the window wall glass and somehow or other—neither Pulaski nor Gerkin was entirely clear on the details—turned those vibrations into the sound of people talking inside the suite.

Lately all they'd been getting was that fucking Chihuahua snapping at the window wall. They got bits of some kind of conversation between Spahn and La Motta, but that was deeper into the apartment, and all they could make out was something about a guy named Chi-Chi Pentangeli, who was one of Tony Tee's people, and Tito somebody, and the table being set.

“The table is set?” asked Gerkin. “What's Tito, the fucking butler?”

“Sounds like a code or something,” said Pulaski.

“You
think
?” said Gerkin, doing an ironical eyebrow twizzle at him. “And who the fuck is Tito? Is he in the files?”

“I don't know. We'll have to listen to the tapes and check with Boonie. You're distracting me, okay? Just now, the fat guy in the boxers was yelling at the dog and throwing something at him—broke a lamp, I think. And then nothing.”

Gerkin was watching La Motta in the window while he was talking. “And then the fat guy—La Motta—he comes over to the window, his hands on his hips, and stands there for a while, and then he says three words. What'd he say? Did you get it?”

Pulaski paused to think about it. “He said—I think I heard—Fuck. Me. Blue. Giving it the periods, like.
Fuck. Me. Blue
. The dog stops moaning, and then he starts up again.” Pulaski took the headphones off.

“Yeah. That's what I heard too.”

“Fuck. Me. Blue.”

Gerkin frowned into the spotter scope. “What's that mean?”

Pulaski adopted a professorial tone. “In your community of goombahs, it's a phrase that is usually connected with an unhappy surprise or an unpleasant shock of some sort. Normally it has negative connotations.” Pulaski put the headphones back on.

“He's just…standing there.” Gerkin looked through the spotter scope. The guy was right there, big as a bear, a black shape. “I don't know,” he said, mostly to himself.

“What?”

“I got a bad feeling.”

Pulaski had worked with Gerkin for eight years now. Surveillance was all they did. They worked out a lot to keep the exterior look of a pair of FBI muscle guys, but under the beef they were pure geek. They might as well have been wearing matching plaid pajamas and living in a basement apartment on a diet of mac and cheese. “What's the bad feeling?”

Gerkin was shaking his head. “I think…I think that fucking dog just burned us.”

Pulaski went back on the headphones. “Dog is still there.”

“Yeah. And now La Motta is gone.” Gerkin reached over, turned the power output on the laser mike down a couple of bars.

“Shit,” Pulaski said. “The dog just stopped whining.”

They were quiet for a minute while the implications sank in.

Finally Gerkin said, “I hate that fucking dog.”

Coker sat back in the booth and stared at the laptop on the table in front of him. He was in a nice and private tuck-away booth at a coffee shop called Bean Me Joe across the Mile from the MountRoyal Hotel. It had a good view of the front door and the fire exits. He was looking quite bankerly in a dark blue suit and a white shirt and a long blue overcoat that was too warm for this unseasonable season but did hide the SIG pistol he was carrying in a Bianchi shoulder rig.

The coffee shop had free wireless and strong coffee and a wild-looking barista with fantabulous free-range bazongas inadequately constrained by a thin cotton tee with a picture on the front: Che Guevara wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt with a picture of Che Guevara on it.

One of her nipples was poking into Che's right eyeball, but the other one was way off by itself in a field of red fabric.

Maybe it was sulking.

From where he was sitting the coffee shop was packed full, with one exception, of Tin Town hipsters, skinny guys in tight-legged jeans with baggy crotches and trick facial hair talking to morose dead-eyed chicks with piercings and tats. Being avant-garde and
ay-pat-aying les bourgeoisie
must be depressing as hell.

There was only one guy out of place, a big slouchy-looking mutt in a long brown overcoat that looked like it was made out of dead bath mats. He was sitting alone at a table near the front, his long hair hanging down, white earphone wires sticking out of his hair, staring into a gigantic cup of latte something and talking to himself. Although the place was crowded, nobody was sitting anywhere near him. He had that
do not feed the animals
look about him.

Coker, still very much a cop, was keeping an eye on him and on the street outside.

Tin Town was just getting up to speed. Niceville squads were prowling up and down, the blocks were filling up with Sunday-night partiers. Gypsies, tramps, and thieves. A few minutes ago, a few blocks away, he had heard the poppity-pop-pop of semiauto pistol fire, and then sirens.