The Homecoming (7 page)

“What do you make of Deitz having a wad of bills from the bank thing in his own truck?”

Nick leaned forward.

“I think it stinks of a plant. Not even Byron Deitz is dumb enough to leave a hundred thousand in stolen money lying around in his truck.”

“Deitz is a greedy guy, Nick. And he’s been dirty before, back when he was with the FBI, how he got ‘resigned.’ ”

“I knew he was forced out. I’ve never heard what he did. Records were sealed.”

Coors reached for a pack of cigarettes, remembered he had quit, found a stick of gum and popped it into his mouth.

“Sealed as part of a plea bargain. Whatever he did, four mob guys ended up in Leavenworth. Still there. Very pissed off, from what I hear.”

“Who are they?”

“Guy named Mario La Motta, zipperhead named Desi Munoz, another guy named Julie Spahn. Fourth guy, De Soto something, he died a few years back. What I heard, Deitz was into something with them, figured out they were all about to get busted, flipped the whole thing into a ‘case’ he was working—lying shit—but rather than deal with another corrupt FBI story line in the media, the Feds gave him credit for a mob bust and Deitz took early retirement. That’s how he was able to get licensed to run security for a place like Quantum Park.”

“Quantum Park people never knew?” asked Beau. Coors popped his gum, shook his head.

“File was sealed. FBI does the background check on all those applications, and they sat on it. So it was like it never happened.”

“Unbelievable,” said Beau, looking at the closed gun room door. They could hear Boonie’s voice through the metal. He sounded unhappy.

“Did Boonie know about this?”

Coors shook his head.

“Couldn’t say, Beau. I doubt it. Agency was protecting itself. They’d have no trouble keeping their field guys in the dark, not if it meant keeping the lid on a ‘rogue agent’ scandal. I guess we should fill him in when he comes out of the gun room. Only fair. I only heard this story maybe a year back. By then Deitz was in solid. Nothing to be done without him screaming about his rights.”

“How’d
you
find out, Captain Coors?” asked Beau.

Coors smiled, popped his gum again, and tapped the side of his nose.

Beau nodded.

“So how do you think we should play this?” asked Nick. “The jurisdictional issues are a mess. We have a whole bunch of things cooking off right in our faces and if the national security sector lands in the middle of this, Deitz is liable to get jerked right out of our hands.”

Coors sat forward, thumped the table.

“Main thing I care about, who killed our guys? I mean, fuck these dead Chinese mooks, fuck whatever got stolen from Quantum Park. For that matter, fuck national security. All I want is for whoever slaughtered our boys to take a spike at Gun Hill.”

“Then we have to figure a way to keep Deitz here, in Gracie, where we can work him,” said Nick. “And you’re right, Deitz is our only hook. Either he had a hand in this robbery, in which case he knows who else was involved—because there’s no way Deitz could manage a Barrett .50 the way that shooter did—”

“Deitz is no kind of shooter at all,” said Coors. “I’ve seen him at the range. He can hardly manage a pistol, let alone a Barrett .50.”

“And if he didn’t have anything to do with it, the guys who planted the stolen money in his Hummer sure as hell did, and even if he doesn’t know it, somewhere, somehow Deitz connects to them. They
chose
him. They had to have had a good reason. So, either way, Deitz is our only link to them.”

The phone on Coors’ desk bleeped at him. He picked it up, listened, and then said, “Okay. Keep him in the car. And stay down the road. Don’t let any of our people see him. And don’t let him get near the media crews. He starts one of his All Cops Are the Spawn of Satan speeches to any of the television crews outside, our guys will beat him to death. So stay clear, you got it? Good.”

He hung up, looked at Nick and Beau.

“Warren Smoles is here.”

There was a general groan.

“Here in the HQ?” asked Beau.

“No. I got two of our guys keeping him in a plain brown wrapper a mile down the line.”

“They won’t be able to do that for long,” said Nick.

Coors grinned.

“Yeah. He’s already calling it unlawful confinement. They took his cell phone too. He went postal.”

“What’d they tell him?”

“Security precautions for his own safety.”

“He buy that?”

“Hell no. And I don’t give a fuck. That showboating air bag is staying right there until we figure out what to do about—”

Boonie came out of the gun room. His face was wet and red and he had taken his tie off.

“Well, here we go. I just got off the line to D.C. State Department is sending an investigator to monitor the crash investigation. And get this. They may be bringing somebody from the Chinese Embassy with them. I’m gonna have to lee-aze with them. What the fuck does ‘lee-aze’ mean?”

“It means it’s your turn in the barrel,” said Coors.

“That’s what I thought. Fuck them all. Okay. So, to cut to the chase, whaddya wanna do with Deitz?”

They all tried to look blank.

“Don’t even start with me,” said Boonie, shaking his head. “I know none of you give a rat’s kidney about a buncha dead Chinamen, or if any spy shit was stolen from Quantum Park. All you want is who killed your boys, and Deitz is all you got. He had the money. We have him. You want to keep him close.”

“That’s right,” said Nick. “And you’d let us?”

Boonie blew out air, patted his shirt for the cigarettes he had given up around the same time Marty Coors did, rolled his eyes, and sat down on the edge of Coors’ desk.

“I’d take him away from you guys for the bank thing in a heartbeat, if that’s all it was. But this Chinese deal changes everything. It’s only a matter of time before the DNI lands on us, maybe even the CIA, and then nobody will see Byron Deitz again this side of Jordan. They’ll use him in some poodle-faking espionage stunt with the Chinese that’ll fall flat on
its ass like always and none of us will ever be able to find a trace of him in a hundred years. Tell you the truth, that’s all I give a fuck about too. These were
our
people. But to pull it off, we’re gonna need a stunt. Any ideas?”

There was a silence.

“How’s his blood pressure?” Nick asked.

“Deitz?” asked Coors.

“Yeah. His heart, liver, that kind of thing.”

They all looked at each other.

Nobody said anything for a while.

“We’ll need a tame doctor,” said Coors.

“We’ll need him right away,” said Nick.

More silence.

Boonie reached over, took one of Marty Coors’ gum sticks, started chewing on it as if it were a toothpick. The effect was not pretty, but then neither was Boonie Hackendorff.

After a time, Boonie smiled around the gum.

“I think I got just the guy,” he said.

Warren Smoles had long, luxurious white hair that he combed straight back in a leonine flow that perfectly framed his deep-set brown eyes, his strong jaw, his lofty forehead. He may have been tanned a buttery brown, but it was hard to tell under the pancake makeup that he had put on before he arrived. Right now he was standing out in the parking lot of the State Police HQ, surrounded by media people, a bright flood lighting him up like a roadside Jesus, if Jesus had been wearing a double-breasted navy blue pin-striped suit over a pale pink shirt with a white English-style collar and a pale blue silk tie held in place with a gold collar bar.

Warren Smoles was where he liked to be, where he was born to be, right in the middle of a media scrum, doing what he did best, which was to lie his ass off with style, wit, and ferocious conviction.

Nick, watching him on the television set in the Lady Grace Hospital cafeteria, surrounded by a squad of Niceville cops, was thinking that you had to hand it to the guy.

He had arrived on the scene only four hours ago; he had spent less than thirty minutes consulting with his client, and another half hour playing hardball with Boonie and Nick and Captain Coors while they arranged Deitz’s helicopter transfer to the intensive care unit here in Niceville.

And now Smoles was out there on the hardpan, claiming complete mastery over every detail of the case, and the media mutts were hanging on every word. The fact that Smoles knew damn well that the tame doctor—a Lady Grace heart surgeon who was Boonie’s brother-in-law—was using a preexisting blood pressure issue that Deitz had as a pretext for admitting Deitz as a critical care case, didn’t seem to be slowing him down at all.

Smoles had completely signed on to the stunt, since he knew as well as they did that if they didn’t find a powerful excuse for secure medical custody right here in Niceville, Deitz would be swallowed up on a national security finding, never to be seen again by mortal men.

And then where would Warren Smoles be?

So he was in top form this afternoon.

“As clear a case of evidence planting as I have ever encountered,” he was saying, in his rolling baritone, his eyes alight with righteous fury, his expression one of outrage and indignation. “We have the savage killing of law enforcement officers at the hands of unknown felons—an abominable act that I decry with every fiber of my soul, as does my client—but instead of launching a serious professional investigation, the FBI and local agencies, having utterly failed to crack this heinous case, have conspired together to lay the guilt at the feet of an innocent man—by the way, a very sick, no, a critically ill innocent man—he has only now been diagnosed by a doctor as suffering from atherosclerotic ischemic heart disease and severe hypertension—he has been medevacked only two hours ago—as you all witnessed—to the intensive care unit of Lady Grace Hospital in Niceville, where I will make sure that he receives the critical care that will be needed to save this poor man’s life, a man who, I might add, is a pillar of the community and a highly decorated member, now retired with honor, of the very same agency, the FBI, that is now deliberately scapegoating—”

Nick clicked the set off, stood up, and faced the Niceville police officers.

“Okay. You all have your assignments. Nobody gets near the custody wing, let alone the lockdown where Deitz is. And that includes any and all state and county guys. And I’m going to have to ask you guys to stay out of his room. I don’t want Smoles to have any pretext for a beef against any of us. His room is as good as a cell, he’s shackled down, and the male nurses up there are used to prisoners. I know you all feel like seeing this guy dead, but there’s more to it than that. A lot more. You got any questions,
any doubts about your ability to carry out your duties, you go explain it to Staff Sergeant Crossfire and she’ll reassign you.”

“What about Smoles?” a cop asked from the back of the room.

“By law Warren Smoles must have free access to his client, within reason, especially if we’re going to ask Deitz any questions about the case. But I want to know when he arrives. As you can see, Smoles is still up in Gracie shooting his face off. But he’ll be down here tomorrow morning, just in time for the morning news feed. Until then, other than his docs and the nurses, nobody gets to see Byron Deitz.”

Everybody nodded, everybody seemed to get it, and Nick broke up the meeting. Beau was leaning against the back wall, and they both watched in silence as the cops filed out of the room.

Beau pushed off the wall.

“What about us?”

“We’re going to go talk to Deitz right now.”

“You just told everybody that nobody but the medics could get in to see him. How are we going to get around that?”

“They’re guarding the lockdown wing.”

“Yeah?”

“Deitz isn’t in the lockdown wing.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s in the underground parking lot, sitting in Mavis Crossfire’s Suburban.”

“Jesus. Who’s watching him?”

“Mavis is watching him.”

“All by herself?”

“Yes.”

Beau nodded.

“I hope he doesn’t pull something on her.”

“I hope he does. He could use another beating.”

They found Mavis Crossfire’s Suburban parked in an out-of-the-way corner of the subbasement parking level, backed into a narrow slot with concrete walls on both sides. Mavis was at the wheel, eating one of the Krispy Kremes that had originally been intended for Edgar Luckinbaugh. She looked up, a wary flicker, as Nick and Beau came out of the gloom, her hand going down to her sidearm. But then her face brightened into a cheerful smile and she opened the driver’s-side door.

“Hello, boys. Busy day?”

“Yeah. How’s Deitz?”

“See for yourself.”

She stepped around to the passenger-side door, popped it. Deitz was stretched out on the rear bench seat, still in his prison jumpsuit, shackled at the waist and ankles, the chains run through a ringbolt in the floor of the backseat.

He was sound asleep.

“Man,” said Nick. “Did you slip him something?”

“He wanted a smoothie. I popped an Ativan into it. He hasn’t had any sleep in twenty-four hours.”

“How long’s he been out?”

“He went out as soon as I parked. How’s it going upstairs? I can’t get any radio down here.”

“Smoles is all over the news. According to him, local law enforcement is the Antichrist.”

“Is Smoles coming in tonight?”

“No. He’ll want a fresh news cycle in the morning. Change into a better suit. Get his makeup redone. It’ll take CNN and Fox a while to get their trucks down here and set up. Smoles wants us to do a perp walk for the cameras around two. He asked us to get a couple of Deputy U.S. Marshals lined up for that.”

“Why U.S. Marshals?”

“They make better TV, he says. I guess we better wake Byron. We’re going to have to get him tucked away in lockdown.”

Mavis took out her ASP baton, poked Deitz in the side. He moaned, twitched, opened his eyes.

“Shit,” he said. “Where am I?”

“In the basement at Lady Grace. Nick here wants a word with you.”

Deitz sat up, his chains clanking, leaned into the rear seat, closed his eyes, and put his head back on the neck rest.