The Homecoming (42 page)

Coker’s cell phone beeped.

Coker showed Danziger the screen, took it back.

“Could be Edgar. Could be Endicott,” said Danziger.

“Yeah.”

“Did you have a tell set up?”

“No. I never thought Edgar would have to go in hot. Got a suggestion?”

“Ask him how’s the wife.”

“His wife’s dead.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Coker keyed the board.

A pause.

“Still don’t like it?” asked Danziger.

“No.”

“You could voice him?”

“Not on this. I don’t want my voice track anywhere near this stunt.”

“Maybe you’re being a bit fastidious.”

“
Fastidious?
What the fuck is—”

His cell beeped again.

Coker paused a moment, and then texted back

A pause.

The reply beeped back.

“Man,” said Danziger, as the exchange ended. “What did we offer him?”

“Five large.”

“Cheap at twice the price.”

“Fuckin’ right.”

“Guess there was still a lot of cop in Edgar.”

They were about a minute away from the motel now, and Danziger slowed down a bit to ease into the time frame. Coker was still worried about Edgar.

“Maybe there’s too much cop in Edgar.”

Danziger looked at Coker.

“Coker, we are not gonna whack Edgar.”

“He’s gotta be wondering, Charlie. Lotta money in it for him, he starts putting things together.”

“Never happen. Edgar’s more afraid of you than he ever was of Francis, and she was fucking scary.”

“We’re there. Come in from the back way.”

Danziger found a left-hand turn a block away from the Wendy’s lot. It was almost four and the traffic on North Gwinnett was dense and chaotic. The Wendy’s lot was jammed full, but as they came around the right side of the building they could see a mud brown Windstar parked in a slot facing the main street, nose in.

Across the way was the Motel 6, a squat rat-brown breeze-block structure covered in siding and as purely butt-ugly as, well, as a Motel 6.

The motel lot was half empty but they could see the big red hood of Crowder’s Kenworth parked in a side lot. Danziger slowed the pickup to a crawl as they approached the Windstar.

There was no other parking spot open so Danziger came to a stop behind it. Immediately someone in a car behind them hit his horn.

Danziger waved him around and the guy shot them a finger as he squeezed past. Coker’s cell phone beeped and he plucked it off the dash.

“Bingo,” said Endicott, standing at a slit in the motel window curtains, looking through a pair of Zeiss binoculars. He watched as the man in the passenger seat of a large white Ford F-150 picked up his cell and looked at the screen.
Rough trade
, Endicott thought, looking at the guy.

Endicott couldn’t see the driver, just a pair of large-veined brown hands on the steering wheel, big strong hands, cowboy hands. Faded jeans. Another big guy, and no fat on him either. A tooled-leather belt with a big cowboy buckle. A white shirt. Some kind of thick gold ring on his right hand, looked like a Marine Corps crest.

The butt of a large steel revolver was sticking out of a hideaway holster tucked into the driver’s waist.
Okay. There you go
.

These are the guys running Edgar
.

The leathery cowboy with the silver hair was still looking at the cell screen. Endicott knew what it said because he’d had the message ready to go as soon as he saw anyone showing the slightest interest in Edgar’s Windstar.

The man with the silver hair put the cell away and looked up at the second-floor gallery of the Motel 6. In the double lens the guy’s face was like something chipped out of a gravestone and his eyes were as yellow as a wolf’s. They seemed to be boring straight up through Endicott’s Zeiss glasses and drilling into his brain.

He knows I’m here
, came the irrational thought, unbidden but piercing.
He knows
. Endicott’s groin got tight and he stepped back away from the window.

The Ford suddenly accelerated away from Edgar’s van, turned the corner, and was gone. But Endicott had the plate number memorized. He was good at that sort of thing, even when he was scared brainless.

Endicott watched through the slit for a while, expecting the Ford to pull into the Motel 6 parking lot any moment. But it didn’t.

After a long, tense time, Endicott drew the slit closed, feeling deeply rattled, which was highly unusual for Endicott.

He pulled himself together and started to work on the room, and the unholy mess it contained. Drill enough holes in people and all sorts of
stuff comes running out. As he went at the job, which was unpleasant, and likely to get more so as he worked his way through the scenario he was going to create, most of his mind was on the work in front of him.

But a small screen at the back of his skull was running a text loop over and over:

“You know what the fuck happened back there?” said Coker, as they worked their way north.

“I do. Edgar’s dead and we just got burned.”

“He’ll have your license plate.”

“Yep.”

“I figure Crowder’s dead too.”

“I certainly hope so.”

“Edgar must have talked, Charlie.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe he was alive when you asked him how his wife was. Maybe not. Maybe Endicott already knew Francis was dead. I have no idea how, but did he tell the guy everything? I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because Endicott still had to go to the trouble of reeling us in for a visual. If Edgar had talked, told him who he was working for, Endicott wouldn’t have run that risk. He would have known about us already. Why take a chance on us coming right at him, once we figured out we’d been burned? Edgar had to know he was a dead man either way. Edgar had a lot of
fuck you
in him. He wouldn’t want to go out crawling.”

A pause.

“Good point,” said Coker. “Neither would I.”

“Did Edgar have people?”

“He had an Aunt Vi. Loved whiskey and macaroons. You think we should send her a bit of money?”

“Yes. I’ll take care of it.”

Another pause, while both men worked it out.

“We’re gonna have to kill this pesky fucker,” said Coker, with an edge. “We should have gone in and taken him out right there.”

Danziger shook his head.

“Edgar said Endicott had a big Sig Sauer and lots of ammunition.
Holed up in there, only one way in. It would have been a gunfight. Hard to explain why we were there when Niceville PD showed up. We’re gonna have to lay back in the tall grass and work this out.”

“We know anything about this guy?”

“Only what Edgar sent us. Resident of Miami. Single. Calls himself a collector. Probably working for those guys in Leavenworth. Or at least he was.”

“You think he’s gone freelance?”

“Two million buys a lot of loyalty, Coker.”

They were out of the suburbs now and pulling onto North Ring Road.

“You gonna go to work?”

“No. I called in before I called you. Jimmy’s okay with it. I can’t be buggering around in a black-and-tan with this Endicott guy running loose. He has your plate. I figure he’ll come for you tonight. We’ll be ready.”

Danziger pulled up beside Coker’s car, a green Crown Vic, shut the engine, put out a hand to stop Coker before he got out.

“He’s not coming for anybody tonight, Coker. He’s gonna want to bring in help.”

Coker considered this.

“Got a point.”

Danziger gave him a sideways grin.

“He’s read the file. You smoked four cops with a Barrett. He’s gotten a look at you already. Even I think you’re a scary-looking guy. From the way he’s handled himself, he’s no fool. He’ll check out of the Marriott, hole up somewhere secure, and call for backup. Give him a day for his shooters to get here, get ready. Then he’ll come.”

Coker grinned at Danziger.

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you, Charlie? Be just like the big fight at the end of
The Wild Bunch
.”

“Except in my version they die and we don’t.”

It was after three o’clock Friday afternoon when Reed pulled into the main square of Sallytown, parked his shiny black Mustang under a spreading willow, and climbed out of the car, stretching his back muscles. He was still sore in all kinds of places—he’d been bounced around pretty good in that crash at the Super Gee and his safety harness had left welts across his chest and shoulders. It felt good just to stand in the sunlight and take in Sallytown.

He knew the town pretty well, since he’d spent a year patrolling it for State before he got reassigned to pursuit. It was a sleepy Main Street kind of town, population around three thousand, just like thousands of others scattered across the South, and the main square had what most main squares in the South had, a redbrick town hall with a Confederate flag flying on the pole outside, a flowered central garden with a statue of a Rebel cavalryman in the middle, and live oaks all over the place, every one trailing wisps of Spanish moss.

On the far side of the square was the Episcopalian Church of Christ the Redeemer, built in 1856, rebuilt in 1923 after the lightning strike and the fire. It was a white wooden structure with a needle-sharp spire painted silver. The spire could be seen for miles around, sticking up out of the trees and glittering like a spear tip.

A historical plaque beside the town hall said that it had been built in 1836 and during the war it had been the headquarters for Robert E. Lee and his staff for three months in 1864. A soft fall light lay over the square and the buildings and the people walking up and down the main street, going in and out of the shops.

The vehicles were mainly pickups and older Detroit steel. The pickups had bumper stickers with sayings on them like
THIS TRUCK INSURED BY SMITH AND WESSON
or
OUT OF WORK? HUNGRY? EAT YOUR
IMPORT!
Reed, a man of the South himself, had no problem with that Confederate flag either.

Although a bunch of pig-eyed redneck dimwits had defiled it back in the sixties—and were still doing it—to him the flag of the Confederacy would forever stand for Chickamauga and Shiloh and Manassas and Vicksburg and the thousands of wildwood boys who had died at those places.

Not that he’d try explaining that to anyone north of the Ohio River.

He stretched again, worked out a kink in his neck, and headed across the square to the town hall, which was where the Archives and Records Office was located, on the second floor facing the parking lot out back. He was in plain clothes, jeans and cowboy boots, a white tee and a navy blue blazer, but he had his service Beretta in a holster at his waist and his badge was in his coat pocket. He wasn’t on official business, but nobody had to know that.

As he climbed the stairs to the old carved doors he remembered the call he had taken from Nick earlier in the day, telling him about the theft of the Shagreen brothers’ corpses from the State HQ lock yard. He had no thoughts on it other than to be thoroughly amazed that the Shagreen brothers had friends who cared enough about them to steal their corpses. Nick had suggested that those friends might be out looking for Reed Walker.

Reed had no position on that other than to hope it was true because he would truly enjoy shooting them.

Archives was open until five on a Friday. When he stepped into the dim, shadowy space with the slowly turning ceiling fan and the tall sash windows, he was greeted by the slender shape of Miss Beryl Eaton, who had been expecting him for over an hour now.

Miss Beryl was in her seventies at least, but still a beauty, with soft pale skin and vivid blue eyes. Her long white hair was swept up in a spiral arc and pinned by a silver bar. She had been the archivist for Sallytown since the fifties, a widow now, and kind of a living monument herself.

“Reed, how lovely. You look well.”

“I am, thank you, Miss Beryl. You are, as always, stunning.”

“And you are, as always, a charming liar.”

She asked after the family and she required details, not just a few vague pieties. She said how sorry she was about Dillon’s disappearance and asked him if any progress had been made in finding out the circumstances of his “passing.”

Reed was forced into a series of evasions that he hoped Miss Beryl did not notice while she walked him back into the records area, where there was a long trestle table, shiny with age, on which she had laid out a silver pot that smelled of strong black coffee, a tall china cup, and several ancient green ledgers. Each one was as thick as the King James Bible. She pulled out a chair for him and watched while he got himself squared away.