The Reckoning (13 page)

Rainey was sitting in his corner at the dining room table, his back against the bow window, doing something with his iPhone.

Eufaula pulled out a chair and sat down at the other end of the table. Rainey didn't look up.

“Rainey, can we talk?”

Rainey looked up, glanced over at Axel and Hannah. Axel was wiping down the kitchen counter and Hannah was standing at the door to the solarium, fiddling with her hearing aids. He put the phone aside and sat back in the armchair, cocking his head to one side, smiling brightly.

“Sure, Falla. What can we talk about?”

Eufaula reached into the pocket of her red apron and brought out a Motorola walkie-talkie, bright blue plastic, a solid well-made handset about as big as a cell phone. Rainey's eyes grew cloudy and that
veil
came down. The smile remained.

“I found this on top of the fridge.”

“Oh yeah? What is it?”

“It's a walkie-talkie. One of the walkie-talkies that you and Axel are always playing with.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. It was behind the tea tray. The
send
button was held down with an elastic so it would be on all the time. So you could hear what was being said.”

“Yeah? Whoa. Who would, like, do that?”

She put her hand into the apron pocket again and pulled out a second handset, a blue Motorola. “I found this one under your pillow.”

Rainey went a bit sleepy-eyed.

“Don't know as I like the colored help poking around in my stuff, Falla. I may have to talk to Kate about setting some boundaries for the staff.”

Eufaula felt her skin get hot. Something harsh and acrid burned in her throat and she was forced to swallow. Words boiled up, but she kept her mouth shut tight, pushed that emotion down, not wanting Rainey to see how deeply he had cut into her. But now she knew what he was, and the look in her eyes should have warned him. When she spoke her voice was cold and clear and calm.

“I'd like to know why one of these was on top of the fridge, hidden behind the tea trays.”

Rainey shrugged.

“I don't know. Maybe…Axel and me were playing Special Ops. Maybe he left it up there?”

“Maybe. But he doesn't remember doing it.”

“You asked him?”

“Yes. This morning, after I found it.”

Rainey looked thoughtful. “Axel is kinda…moony, you know. He probably forgot.”

“Perhaps he did.”

“Or maybe it was Hannah?”

“Hannah would need a ladder to reach the top of the fridge, and anyway she can't use these radios because they interfere with her hearing aids. You and Axel are the only ones who play with them. Axel says he hasn't seen these radios since last week. He saw them in your room. You told him they were broken and you were going to fix them.”

“Yeah. They needed new batteries.”

“And you replaced them?”

“Yes.”

“So Axel was telling the truth?”

“About what, Falla?”

“That he hadn't seen them in a week, that the last time he saw them they were in your room?”

Rainey shrugged, picked up the iPhone, went back to poking at it.

“Rainey…”

He kept his head down.

“Yeah, what?”

“Rainey, I don't know what you were doing with these radios, but if it's what I think you were doing—”

He started to shake the iPhone up and down, poking at it. “Temple Run sucks,” he said.

“Rainey. Put the phone down.”

He didn't, but he looked up at her, a flat lidless stare through his silky blond hair.

“What? I'm trying to play a game here.”

“Yes,” she said. “You are.” She got up, looked down at him, arms folded. “And I know what it is. If you don't stop it, I'll tell Nick and Kate where I found this radio.”

The flat stare wavered for a second. Rainey felt that he had Kate under control, but Nick was another story.

“Do you understand me, Rainey?”

He was back to playing with his phone, head down, hair over his eyes, hiding his face.

“Rainey. I need an answer.”

He looked up at her and there was nothing of the little boy in his face. Just that lidless stare. “Okay, Falla…what-
ever
.”

Eufaula stared at him for another minute, but he kept his head down. Finally she walked away. She took the radios with her. Rainey watched her back as she went out into the sunroom. He could hear Axel and Hannah laughing, running around on the lawn in the backyard. They had a playhouse at the bottom of the yard, down near the pine and willow forest there, where the creek ran. Rainey listened hard, and after a while he heard Eufaula's voice mixed in with the kids' voices, some kind of stupid kiddie song about itsy-bitsy spiders.

The sound of the spider song got drowned out by the rising waspish buzzing in his skull.

she knows she knows she knows she knows

Rainey shook his head, making his hair fly, and then he went back to the iPhone game. The voice intensified, became shrill and sharp like a needle, like a rock saw, stinging, slicing, cutting.

she knows he knows they know they all know

“I know,” said Rainey. “Don't. That hurts.”

need to do something need to do something

“I
know
,” he said, with heat. “I'll think about it. Now stop sticking me. Shut the fuck up.”

Danziger found the Blue Bird Bus Line terminal right where Monkey Boy's matchbook cover said it would be, at the intersection of Forsythia and Peachtree, by the entrance to Tulip Landing Park. It was a small part of a much larger terminal called the Button Gwinnett Memorial Regional Bus Depot, right in the heart of downtown Niceville. It occurred to Danziger that although he had been into or had walked by the Button Gwinnett Bus Depot many times, he had never noticed the bay where Blue Bird lines carried on their business.

The Button Gwinnett depot was a huge barnlike structure with thirty-two sheltered bays where various bus lines operated—Greyhound, Stars and Bars, Old Dominion, Tres Estrellas, Happy Valley, Southern Cross, and apparently, Blue Bird Lines.

The rains from last night had stopped and the sky was blue, the day warming, but the whole station reeked of mold and diesel fumes. Steam was rising up from the cedar-shingle roof now that the sun had cleared the lip of Tallulah's Wall and was pouring heat and light down onto the center of Niceville.

Niceville downtown was a genteel Deep South shambles, an old-fashioned city center netted over with a black tangle of telephone poles and power lines, most of it in the shade of a virtual urban forest of live oaks, a random city full of lanes and alleyways, treed parks with fountains or statues of long-dead heroes, streets laid out in a pinwheel pattern, like Paris or Washington. Needle-tipped church spires rose up over ragged roof lines and wrought iron galleries fronted ancient redbrick store fronts, creating shaded cloisters beneath that ran for blocks in all directions. In the hazy fall light the town looked timeless and old-fashioned, like a hand-tinted shot taken from an antique calendar:
Niceville Seen from the Button Gwinnett Bus Terminal Looking North Along Forsythia Avenue to Peachtree…

Danziger stopped just inside the shadowy vault of the terminal, watching as a group of passengers filed one by one out the front door of a very old Blue Bird school bus that had once, a long while back, been painted a bright robin's-egg blue.

It had
BLUE BIRD BUS LINES
painted in faded black letters on the back and sides, and, under the name, their slogan, in the same Art Deco style:

IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING

WE KNOW HOW TO GET YOU THERE.

Danziger approved of the slogan. It had a certain cheeky style, but the people getting off the bus looked worn-down and weary, like people seen at the side of a country road in pictures taken during the Great Depression. This Dirty Thirties vibe was also in their trudging walk and the way they sagged into themselves as they passed by him and went on out into the sunlit streets of Niceville. Their faces were blank, expressionless, and there were no children.

After the people passed by, none of them looking his way, he heard the bus brakes chuffing and sighing, and the rattling old engine coughed, huffed, rattled, and died.

The bus springs creaked a bit as an old black man, soldier-straight and limber, but white-haired and lined with age, came down the stairs and stepped onto the oily pavement. He was wearing a crisp navy blue uniform. His boots were black and shiny. He was carrying a clipboard and a battered leather briefcase. He stopped by the bus, patted its side, and set the case down by the luggage doors.

He had not noticed Danziger watching him, or so it seemed, but after he had extracted a cigar from an inside pocket and fired it up, he looked at Danziger through the cloud of blue smoke. His eyes were yellow with age, but full of intelligence. He had good lines around his eyes, an open aura around him, a man who smiled often. “Good morning, sir. Might you be waiting for the two o'clock bus?”

Danziger wasn't sure what the hell he was waiting for, but he remembered what Blue Eddie had said to him.
Tek da bus
, and this was the only bus around that seemed to be waiting for him. Danziger came up to the man, who was shorter than he was, but he carried his own gravity with him.

“I'm not sure. I'm trying to get up to the Belfair Saddlery…”

“The Belfair Pike General Store and Saddlery? Would that be your destination?”

“Yes, sir, that's right.”

“Well, sir, I can save you a trip. The Belfair Pike store got itself burned to the ground about six months back. Isn't nothing there now but a black patch of ground soaked in creosote and a bunch of goldenrod crowding the edges and a big old pine forest all around that.”

Danziger's memory fish came shimmering back to his inner mind, Merle Zane firing at him, the bullet holes punching through the old barn boards, spears of sunlight cutting through the haze inside the barn, the smell of gunpowder and kerosene. Then the image flickered away again.

“I didn't know. What happened?”

“Well, sir, the stories vary, but it seems that a couple of bank robbers had a gunfight in it, and that old barn was full of grain dust and gas fumes, so it just caught fire and went up like a bonfire.”

“Bank robbers?”

The old man looked at Danziger for a moment. “You don't know the story, sir?”

“Can't say that I do.”

“You must be new to Niceville, then.”

Danziger hesitated, and the old man noticed that. He checked his watch, an old Hamilton on a leather strap. “It's only the biggest bank robbery ever to happen in this part of the state. If you have a mind to hear it, I'm going across to the Sunrise Grill there to have a bite of lunch. If you'd like to join me, I'd be happy to tell you all about it.”

Danziger said he'd be pleased, and they crossed the busy street together, dodging the streaming traffic running up and down Forsythia, stepping quickly out of the path of one of Niceville's famous old trolleys, painted blue and gold, heavy as an Abrams tank. The driver clanged his bell at them as the trolley car rumbled past, shaking the ground; the old man waved back.

The Sunrise Grill was an old-fashioned shotgun-shack diner, fifty feet long and about twelve feet wide, with one long battered wooden bar and a row of stools running the length. The ceiling was covered in stamped tin tiles painted white, the board-and-batten walls were decorated with prints of Civil War scenes taken from calendars, and the lighting came from a line of fifteen green-shaded cones hanging on black wires, each with a dim yellow bulb flickering inside it.

The diner smelled of Dustbane and cigarettes and grilled cheese sandwiches. It was filled with noise and smoke and people, but the old man found a couple of stools down near the back and they bellied up to the counter, where a round damp woman wearing black slacks and a crisp white shirt and a hard-boiled expression was right there, tapping a pencil on her order book. They ordered lunch, grilled cheese and coffee for Danziger, a chicken-fried steak and a pint of ale for the driver, and when she was gone he turned to Danziger and offered his hand.

“I'm Albert Lee, sir. Lee as in the general, not Lea as in the Minnesota. And you are?”

“Charlie Danziger,” he answered, shaking the man's hand, a strong dry grip, a leathery pink palm.

Albert Lee seemed to react to the name, and a shadow of some emotion passed quickly over his face and was gone. They made some small talk about Niceville, about the weather, the rains last night and now this mini-heat-wave, and after their meals came, they set about them efficiently, Danziger realizing that although there was a lot wrong with his memory, his appetite was working just fine.

After the plates were cleaned and gone, Albert Lee leaned back, patted his uniform tunic, and took out an old and shiny flat gold case with the initials
JR
engraved on the cover. He flipped it open and offered Danziger a slender cheroot, and lit them both from a brass Zippo with a medallion on the side, a green shield trimmed in white with a red number one in the middle of the green. Danziger recognized the unit patch of the 1st Infantry Division, known as the Big Red One.

“You were in the service, Mr. Lee?”

“I'm Albert, if you will.”

“I'm Charlie to my friends, then.”

“Charlie it is. ‘In the service,' as in the Big Red One? No, sir. This case and lighter came from a dear friend of mine. His widow gave them to me, and I keep them to remember him by. He was killed in the war, and his younger brother maimed in the same battle. A bad war, and we had no business getting into it, and it's all on that grinning fool of a president we had back then. From your ring I'd guess you were a Marine.”

“Yes, a long time back.”

“I myself was not allowed to serve in a combat unit, the Jim Crow laws being what they were back then, and I wasn't about to spend the war years cooking grits and cleaning out latrines. But I was going to tell you about this robbery, took place up north of here, in a town called Gracie.”

Gracie.
The name struck Danziger with a tiny crystalline chime. But Albert Lee charged on, leaning into the story. By the time he had finished it all up, Charlie Danziger was all the way back.