The Reckoning (37 page)

Coker covered the 359 miles between Cap City and St. Augustine in four hours and seventeen minutes, including two stops for gas and coffee, and it was lights and sirens all the way. He had to talk his way through a whole lot of deputies and state patrol guys who wanted him to pull over and explain what all the rush was about, but he managed to convince them that his mission, which was top secret and had to do with Homeland Security and was being monitored by an Argus drone, was way too important to stop and chat about.

In the final ten miles between St. Augustine and the beach house in Shore Road he got Mavis Crossfire's Suburban up to speeds that GMC didn't like to talk about in public, but then Mavis had her own mechanic working on the truck and he had done some things to it that Coker was sure the Niceville PD wouldn't approve of.

The sun was just tugging its big glowing red ass out of the eastern rim of the Atlantic Ocean and a flock of late-season pelicans were flying in a single snaky line a few inches above the waves when Coker shut the smoking machine down a hundred yards up from the beach house. He covered the ground at a soft trot, carrying Mavis Crossfire's Defender shotgun at port arms, trying not to think about what he was almost certain to find.

He stopped a few feet shy of the shore road gate, crouched down beside the wall, and took out his iPhone. It had an app that allowed him to make a Bluetooth connection with the security system inside the house. He flicked it on and thumbed the tab that said
HEARTBEAT
. He waited a few minutes, watching the screen. It blipped and bopped and then he was looking at a schematic of his beach house.

There were five little red beating hearts in the schematic. Three were in the basement, and two more were out on the front deck right now.

He hit the button that said
SILENT DISABLE
and killed the perimeter alarms.

Take the assholes out front first.

He moved through the gate—there was an alien rental van in the driveway, beside a black Benz with Dade County plates. The house was dark and silent, but he could hear faint music coming from the deck out front.

He ghosted down the side of the house, the sand cold and silky on his ankles. Out on the shore the waves were booming in, crashing and falling and then pulling back with a sliding sandy hiss.

The sun was in his eyes as he rounded the corner of the deck, but he was moving fast and he had the shotgun down on the two people sitting in the deck chairs before they even noticed him.

The two people were Twyla and Bluebell, in bathrobes, sipping what looked like margaritas.

Twyla saw him, jumped up with a squeal. “Coker, where the
fuck
have you been? Do you have any
fucking
idea how
worried
we've been?”

Coker came up onto the deck, checking out the window wall, seeing nobody in the main room.

“There's three fucking heartbeats in the basement, Twyla.”

“Of
course
there are, you asshole. I've been calling and calling—”

“Who's in the basement, Twyla?” asked Coker, unnaturally calm.

“Little Anthony Torinetti and his fucking mobster daddy and a piece of shit Istrian named Tito Smeraglia.”

“I know who they are,” said Coker. “How'd you get on top of them?”

Twyla took a deep breath, looked at Bluebell, who sipped at her margarita and smiled at him.

“I came back from Jacksonville with Bluebell and I checked the iPhone app for heartbeats.”

“And there was one,” said Bluebell. “In the kitchen.”

“So I switched on the Halon fire suppression thingy.”

“She knocked him out. It was the Istrian.”

“When he came around we asked him a bunch of questions.”

“He didn't want to talk to Twyla at first.”

“But he changed his mind when Bluebell tried to cut off his eyelids. It turns out Istrians really value their eyelids. We had him call Tony and his kid and tell them everything was good to go.”

“Twyla told him to say
The table is set
. Like a code, huh? He wasn't going to do it except for the eyelid thingy. I knew how to cut off eyelids from being a nurse,” said Bluebell.

Coker didn't think to ask her why a nurse would know how to cut people's eyelids off, but he got around to it later, after things had calmed down. “My question,” he said, riding over the chatter, “is why the
fuck
haven't you been answering your cell phones? I've been calling and calling.”

“We never got any…oh, shit,” said Twyla, her voice trailing away. “I might have maybe forgot…”

“To change the SIM cards?” said Coker.

Twyla made a squinting face. “Oh, Coker…don't be, like, all mad and stuff.”

Coker sat down in the deck chair. Heavily.

“Can I get you a drink?” said Bluebell.

“That would be just…lovely,” said Coker. “What about the goombahs?”

“The what,” said Twyla.

“Torinetti and the rest.”

“Well, they're in the basement.”

“I get that. What'd you
do
with them?”

Bluebell came back with a gigantic blue margarita in a flower vase and handed it to Coker.

“We tied them up with some plastic cord cuffs.”

“And then Bluebell cut their ankle tendons,” said Twyla, looking at her sister with a degree of sibling satisfaction that was, Coker thought, unique to Cherokee women whose ancestors may have invented the whole idea of scalping and skinning prisoners.

“Yes, I did,” said Bluebell proudly.

Coker took a serious belt of his margarita. He looked at Bluebell. “How'd you know how to cut ankle tendons and eyelids?”

“From being a nurse, silly.”

“What do you want to do with the goombahs?” asked Twyla. Coker found his heart rate slowing down to something between
hummingbird
and
eggbeater.

He had some more of the margarita.

“Something massive,” he said, and he put his head back on the deck chair and closed his eyes.

The Niceville Disappeared finally stopped reappearing by the following spring. Boonie Hackendorff's best count for missing people had been set at a hundred and seventy-nine over a period of fifty years. Of that number, only thirty-four actually reappeared, which came as a great relief to their loved ones, not to mention the overworked and overwhelmed Psych Ward staff at Our Lady of Sorrows in Cap City.

None of the Returned had any idea where they had been or how they had been Disappeared in the first place. Human nature being what it is, some of the Returned got a little cranky when they realized that their loved ones had adjusted pretty well to their absence.

In particular, younger relations who had inherited homes and money after the missing person had been declared legally dead were highly resistant to giving it all back to Aunt Lobelia now that she had turned up on the front porch looking dazed and confused but utterly persuaded that she wasn't dead and who were these damned strangers living in her damned house.

There were some ugly scenes and the Niceville PD and a phalanx of social workers and lawyers had to spend a lot of time racing about Garrison Hills and The Glades and Saddle Hill and Upper Chase Run trying to put a damper on a lot of domestic strife.

And, as was noted above, there were plenty of Aunt Lobelias and Uncle Reynards who finally ended up in the Psych Ward at Sorrows, since there seemed to be no better place to put them.

One happy exception to this was the arrival one soft June afternoon of Kate's father Dillon Walker, who turned up on the landing at Nick and Kate's townhouse looking like he'd been dragged through a hedge backward—very unlike him—and utterly convinced that he had only that day set out to drive down from VMI to assist Kate in her researches into Rainey Teague's history.

The fact that it was Rainey himself who opened the door when he knocked was rather upsetting for both of them, and it took Eufaula a while to get things calmed down and the old gentleman into a spare room so he could lie down and take in the new circumstances, which over time he managed to do.

He and Rainey became accustomed to each other and even found a shared interest in Niceville's genealogy, although for very different reasons.

Rainey by this time was growing into a broad-shouldered and athletic young man, acutely handsome, and he had managed to develop a few friends at Regiopolis Prep after he made the junior football team as a middle linebacker.

If Axel Deitz bore Rainey any sort of grudge for shoving him into the Tulip River, he kept it hidden and they seemed on the surface to get along reasonably well, although now that Beth and Hannah and Axel lived in a very nice home across the river in The Chase, they only really saw each other at school, which suited Beth very well, since she and her brother Reed retained a deep and abiding distrust of Rainey Teague and all his works and days.

Nick and Kate eventually stopped trying to get her father to reconstruct where he had been and what had happened to him, and he never inquired openly about the mirror, although he had figured out where it was and he thought about it more than anyone knew.

He did the same amount of thinking about Rainey too, and he kept that to himself as well, at least he did for many months, until he had reached some important conclusions and felt he needed to share them with Nick and Kate before he died.

Tig Sutter, the CO of the Belfair and Cullen County CID, retired shortly after the events of that terrible weekend in the fall, and Nick got promoted to CO in his place.

Beau Norlett got his legs back and he and Nick went back to being cop partners again, as they were in the beginning of all this, and Nick enjoyed watching Beau turn into a very smart and very skilled street cop.

Mavis Crossfire never told anyone about lending her Suburban to Coker on that complicated night, but she wasn't surprised when a Kenworth Car Carrier pulled up at her home a week later with her Suburban lashed down to the flatbed, freshly waxed, detailed, and gleaming, fuel all topped up, and a
thank you, all is well
note from Coker taped to the dashboard. Although she knew that Coker might have been no more than 359 miles away—it was equally likely that Coker and Twyla and Bluebell were in Bali or Borneo—she never went looking for him, nor did she ever give Boonie even a little hint.

Nick managed to piece a lot of it together over the following weeks, but since Mavis Crossfire was a dear friend and a good cop and Nick was experienced enough to know when to leave well enough alone, that's pretty much what he did.

Mavis did develop an unlikely association with Delores Maranzano, who after the timely deaths of all of her competitors finally took over most of Frankie's interests in trucking, real estate, waste management, and recreational drug trafficking all over the Southeast from Cap City to Miami.

They found each other useful, and Mavis Crossfire, being a smart cop, appreciated useful people wherever they might be found.

Lemon Featherlight got his Air National Guard chopper pilot papers and ended up doing a lot of air cover and coordination work with the state and county cops. Doris Godwin kept her job with the Peachtree Lines and they both kept in close, perhaps even intimate, contact with Helga Sigrid, who had gone back up to the University of Virginia to head a new division of the Forensic Anthropology Department devoted to the full-time examination of what had become known around the global scientific community as the Featherlight Ossuary.

By the late spring what her people were finding out about the bone baskets drew the attention of assorted three-letter agencies in the government, but so far they were merely observing. From a distance.

What exactly had happened that night up at Crater Sink and at Candleford House remained a secret all who had been involved kept very close.

The lady in the well gradually descended into the deep, never taking her eyes off the two women as they floated there in the cold blue light. She eventually faded from sight, and in the following six months the aura of malice around Crater Sink seemed to dissipate.

Nick and Kate and Reed never talked about that night with anyone other than Lemon and Helga and Doris. Rainey seemed to have no recollection of it or of the events preceding it, or at least he said so with every sign of sincerity. For a long time Nick didn't push the issue, until he had to, but when he had to, he did.

At the Ruelle Plantation the winter passed and the spring came on and Charlie Danziger ran the horses and the stock and helped Glynis with the crops. The Blue Bird bus made sure that people who didn't know where they were going managed to get there safely, and he and Albert Lee stood by Glynis for the Reckoning in the spring.

Abel Teague wasn't there.

Abel Teague was still in that furnace in the basement of Candleford House, still mostly alive, still in torment, his mind utterly shattered.

But he wasn't alone.