The Reckoning (2 page)

Twelve fifty-five the same night.

Down in Tin Town, a Niceville police cruiser driven by a thirty-year staff sergeant named Frank Barbetta was rolling down the Miracle Mile, Tin Town's main strip.

Tin Town was Niceville's version of Compton, California, or Chicago's South Side. The Miracle Mile was called that because if you tried to walk it after midnight it would be a miracle if you got a mile. Tin Town people just called it the Mile.

Frank Barbetta was an amiable bulldog-type cop who had a reputation on the Mile for being fair-minded and likable, slow to anger; he never needed his gun, hadn't shot anyone in thirty years, and used his brains and his muscle and occasionally a nearby chair to get bad situations under control. In short, an old-fashioned beat cop who would never kick the living daylights out of anybody who hadn't been simply begging for it.

In Tin Town he was seen as a Wyatt Earp sort of cop who knew that the hookers and druggies and bikers and mutts and grifters were all part of the passing parade and they were his people to protect and care for.

This was essentially true.

In short, on this rainy Friday evening, Frank Barbetta was the benevolent God in his personal heaven and all was right with the world. Fate is drawn to that kind of attitude, finds it amusing.

The Tulip River had, in a way, created Tin Town. Broad and deep, the Tulip rose up out of the Belfair Range ninety miles north and gathered strength all the way down a wide grassy valley until it curved around a huge limestone cliff that dominated the northeastern part of town and powered through the center of Niceville like an interstate highway.

But the river had to make a sharp bend around a stony shoal south of the Armory Bridge. Here water roiled and rushed across a muddy flat where a cluster of tin-roofed fishing huts sat on pitch-pine stakes driven into the gravel.

Cattails and saw grass drooped down over washed-up garbage, beer cans, every kind of dead thing. At least once a week a stray corpse would get caught up in the weeds, a blue-skinned waxy blob, eyes and lips and ears torn off by the river carp. Smoke rose up from stovepipe chimneys on the roofs and the yellow glow through shuttered windows glimmered on the surface of the water. These tin-roofed shacks gave Tin Town its name, and in the fall, the warm days and cold nights gave Tin Town its mists and fogs.

The Miracle Mile reflected in the rain-slick windows of Barbetta's cruiser was lined with neon-lit biker bars covered in chicken wire, tattoo shops, Dollar Generals, and six different barred-up bunkers with bulletproof windows where you could get a payday advance at thirty percent interest compounded daily or a cash loan on somebody else's wedding ring provided there wasn't a finger still in it.

Halfway down the Mile, between the Piggly Wiggly and a Helpy Selfy Laundromat, there was a ten-floor brownstone hotel with spray-painted gang tags all around its base. A board above the entrance said in bold black letters:

CASH ONLY NO CREDIT !!!

NO DISCOUNTS FOR THE ELDERLY

YOU'VE HAD TWICE AS MUCH TIME

TO GET THE DAMNED MONEY!!!

The crumbling brick facade carried a neon sign shaped like a huge cross made out of the words
MountRoyal
and
Hotel
, the words crossing at the letter
T
.

In Room 304 of the MountRoyal there was a man who had a lot on his mind. A tall, lean, and big-boned guy with long silvery hair and a face that looked like it had been chipped out of sandstone, he was standing at the window and looking out at a Niceville black-and-white as it cruised south toward the riverbed. From the numbers on the roof he figured it had to be Frank Barbetta's ride. The man standing at the hotel window knew Barbetta from way back, when he himself had been a staff sergeant with the State Troopers.

Good memories, most of them, and some others best forgotten. Memories were on his mind tonight.

Mainly, where were his?

He could clearly remember the kick-ins, the bar fights, and the highway patrol car chases, the rollovers and the mangled dead and the occasional gunfight. He could recall many wild nights raising hell with Jimmy Candles and Marty Coors and the one and only Coker, and he had a crystal clear memory of the death of his wife, and he could remember all sorts of the scrapes and scandals and escapades of the typical cop life that he had lived, over thirty years of it.

But all that was in the past. He had a strong feeling that a lot had happened recently, important life-altering stuff, but when he tried to remember precisely what that might be, he got nothing. Nothing up to right here and now, standing at the window in Room 304 of the MountRoyal Hotel watching Barbetta's cruiser slide down the Mile. He wasn't even all that sure of his name.

He did have a big gold ring on the third finger of his right hand, with the crest of the U.S. Marine Corps on it. And he had a wallet with a whack of cash, maybe a thousand, a blue plastic bank card with the word
MONDEX
on it and a logo for some kind of bank, PNG Bank.

It had a microchip embedded in it, but the man had no idea what the hell a Mondex card was or why he had one. He'd have to Google it.

There was also an employee card from Wells Fargo. It had his picture on it—yep, it was him, all right—and the card said his name was Charles Danziger.

Then there was the driver's license with an address on Rural Route 19 in Cullen County and a picture that looked sort of like him only it was maybe taken after he died because he looked too fucking sick to drive.

It was
also
telling him his name was Charles Danziger, and that he had to wear corrective lenses while driving at night.

There was a third card that indicated that he was a fully paid-up member of the Retired State Patrol Officers Club with the rank of staff sergeant and a whole bunch of award citations listed on the back.

The man looked at these various pieces of official plastic and figured a reasonable man could draw the conclusion that his name really was Charles Danziger.

Okay, I'm prepared to accept that my name is Charles Danziger, but what the hell happened to me? A blackout?

From booze or drugs?

No.

Not him.

Never in all his wild years had he ever done drugs—other than OxyContin for injuries acquired in the line of duty, and his only weakness was wine. Now
Coker
, there was a man who liked his pharmaceuticals, a risky hobby for a guy who was a staff sergeant with the Belfair and Cullen County Sheriff's Department and the most famous police sniper in the entire state.

But not Charlie Danziger, who favored pinot grigio, and no man with any self-respect blacked out over a couple of bottles of pinot grigio.

The cruiser stopped at the intersection, and the light from the hotel sign lit up the interior of the cruiser and the driver, a big gray-haired Sicilian with deep-set black eyes and a heavy jaw.

Frank Barbetta.

Danziger considered opening the window and calling down to him, but for some reason decided not to. The cruiser pulled away into the traffic along the Mile, tires hissing on the slick pavement, trailing a veil of rainwater.

Danziger turned away from the window, feeling dog tired and blue and cut off from real things. Also, right now, his chest hurt like a bitch. It wasn't a heart attack; he'd had one of those and there was no mistaking them for anything else.

No, this felt more like he'd been kicked in the middle of the chest. Twice. Two distinct sore spots. No bruises, but pain, deep and aching pain. A puzzle, like the rest of it.

Well, he did remember that there was a cold bottle of pinot grigio in an ice bucket on the dresser. He crossed the room, twisted off the top, took the plastic wrap off one of the cheap-ass paper cups the hotel supplied, and poured himself a stiff one.

Sleep now. Maybe the morning would bring wisdom. He was looking at the mirror over the dresser as he drank it down. Noticed something a bit unusual.

He wasn't in it.

Danziger stood in front of the mirror, stone-still, his breathing suspended. Instead of his reflection, he was looking out at a section of tilled earth that fell away toward a dense stand of pines and willows. From the way the shadows fell on the land, it looked to be nearly sunset. There were dark figures in the distance, working the field, digging in what looked to be trenches, shovels and axes working, the figures bent and somehow beaten-looking.

There was a wheeled cart being drawn by a brace of oxen. The cart was loaded with round white stones, or maybe melons. It struck him that they could be skulls, a dark thought not at all like him.

There was no sound coming from the scene, only this image floating in the mirror, the tilled earth, the bent black figures hacking at the ground. He put out a hand to touch the glass and the image went away.

He was looking at himself in the mirror, a picture of a worn-out hard-looking man with a lot on his mind. He turned away from the mirror, thinking
Forget it, just go to sleep
.

But sleep did not come.

Instead Danziger lay there in the dark, listening to the rain lashing against the window, the sound of the street below, seeing that mirror vision in his mind, the farm field at sundown, the workers, the sled piled with round white stones that made him think of skulls.

He had seen that field before somewhere, and down in his lizard brain he had a feeling that he'd see it again.

Back out on the Mile, things got downright dismal. A few people were wandering about, drunks and addicts and mopes and the feral kids who preyed on them. Most people with ready money and a choice in the matter were still in the bars getting rid of it, and the few hookers with a serious work ethic were over in the MountRoyal, earning their cut the hard way.

“A typical Friday night in Tin Town,” said Barbetta to no one at all. Barbetta was alone in his Crown Vic Police Interceptor because Little Rock Mauldar, Niceville's Mayor for Life, was up for reelection and he was shaving the corners on nonessential services so he could bribe the voters with property tax cuts. Apparently keeping a patrol cop alive while policing a part of Niceville as dangerous as Tin Town was a nonessential service.

Barbetta had reached the end of the strip and was turning left onto Scales Alley to check out the Shore Walk down by the Tulip when his lights raked across a scruffy parkette next to a boarded-up gun shop.

The parkette had a cluster of raggedy-ass palm trees jammed into it. They were surrounded by a chain-link fence that made you wonder what terrible crime the palm trees had committed.

Barbetta caught a flash of movement in the center of the palm trunks, down by the saw grass at their bases, a glimmer of shiny black like crow's wings. When his headlights hit it, the shape froze, then went to ground, a distinctly furtive move, like a black flag dropping down, a shimmery flutter into the grass, and then nothing at all.

Cat? Bat? Dog? Crow?

No. Too big. And the shape was wrong.

He rolled to a stop, lit up the scene with his high beams, and flicked on his dash-mounted video camera. Not a tremor in the tall grass around the tree trunks.

A feeling of…waiting.

Stillness but not emptiness.

Something is wrong here.

He was in a dark lane, an alley, all the streetlights behind him. If he got out of the car he'd be a silhouetted target against the glare coming off the Miracle Mile. The parkette was at the far end of the narrow lane, a good fifty feet away. Lot of ground to cover, and fences on both sides, like he was in a cattle chute. Two rutted tracks in the alley were full of black water. The rest was mud and gravel, palm leaves, trash and beer cans. Broken glass. Unsteady ground to walk on and not a place where you'd want to go down hard.

Be nice to have a partner.

He picked up the radio.

“Central, this is Nine Zulu.”

“Nine Zulu.”

“Central I'm gonna be ten-thirty-seven here at Scales and the Mile.”

“Roger that, Frank. What's up?”

“Just a walkabout. Saw something weird in this parkette here, where Brodie's Gun Shop used to be. Got my dashboard video on.”

“Got the Portable?”

“You bet.”

“Scales is a bad sector, Frank. Lots of crank calls there all this week. Six Yankee is a couple blocks out. You want to wait?”

“What's their call?”

“A ten-ten.”

Yuppie larvae fighting outside some bar.

Could be thirty minutes with that.

“No, Central, I'm good.”

Barbetta keyed off, tugged at his Kevlar, and popped the door, thinking that the duty captain always told them
Be safe out there
and every time they heard that they all thought,
Horseshit, the only way to stay safe is never get out of the car.

Around the same time that Charlie Danziger was beginning to stitch himself back together in downtown Niceville (but technically an hour later—because of a difference in time zones), on a St. Augustine beach three hundred and fifty-nine miles southeast of the MountRoyal Hotel, the ex–Belfair and Cullen County staff sergeant—known as Coker to his friends, of which he had two if you counted Charlie Danziger—was sitting and listening to the Atlantic Ocean crash and boom in the dark under a sea of stars. Staring into the glowing embers of a fire, Coker was brooding a bit about Danziger and related recent events while drinking Laphroaig out of a sterling silver flask.

Next to him on the blanket was a young Cherokee woman named Twyla Littlebasket, lying on her back, mildly stoned, watching Orion move ponderously into the west. Twyla, who had once been described by a cop named Nick Kavanaugh as having “curves like a French staircase,” was wearing the bottom half of a Tommy Bahama bikini in tourmaline and gold, and a sleepy, satisfied look. The night was sultry and smelled of sea salt and kelp and wisps of cedar smoke from the fire.

Behind them on a large dune was a glass-and-wood-beam Frank Lloyd Wright beach house sheltered by a stand of palm trees and surrounded by pampas grass. A soft glow from the interior of the beach house lay on the sand around them like candlelight. In short, a lovely night, and it would have been perfect except for the house party five hundred yards down the shore, which was rapidly getting out of hand.

The shore was mostly dark, except for these two islands of light. It was lined with other homes every bit as expensive as theirs, but most of them were shuttered and empty on this Friday evening, the summer season drawing down.

But that thumping bass beat was getting louder by the minute. It was coming from the Kellerman place. The Kellermans, nice people—a tad vulpine and smug, but pleasant enough—were away on a Viking river cruise down the Rhine.

They had, however, left the keys to their beach house with their youngest son, Nathan, a second-string fullback at Notre Dame and a first-string pain in the ass. Nathan was now living up to his hard-earned reputation.

The bass beat from the Kellerman place was getting powerful enough to rattle Coker's windows, and in the middle of the blaring music and the drunken crowd noise Coker and Twyla could hear breaking glass and the sound of a girl screaming, cut off suddenly.

Twyla sat up, stared down the beach. “God, Coker. Should we do something?”

Coker leaned over, gave Twyla a gentle kiss on the cheekbone, and shook his head, the firelight glinting in his pale eyes.

“No, Twyla, we should definitely
not
do something.”

More glass shattering and a burst of hooting male laughter, a dim-witted mass braying like a jackass choir. Twyla stood up, her hands on her hips—she was a pugnacious woman with a short fuse.

“I'm going to call the cops.”

Coker got to his feet. He was about six-one, muscular and lean, hard as a hickory cane, with short-cropped silver hair and a face that could be—and often was—considered flinty and intimidating.

“Twyla, you know the rules. We do
not
draw attention. We do
not
call the cops. You have to remember who we are.”

“I know who we are, Coker.”

“Okay. Let's review. Who are we?”

She simmered a bit, listening to the bass beat hammer the planet. She made an effort to shake it off. “We're the Sinclairs. You're Morgan and I'm Jocelyn. I'm your third wife. You made your money in currency trading, you're retired, and I'm—”

At that point there was a chorus of chanting, followed by a crescendo of bass that bordered on painful and the sound of expensive things breaking. And another piercing female shriek.

Twyla gave Coker her death-ray glare.

“Dammit, Twyla,” he said, hesitating.

She kicked the death ray up to
STUN
. Coker knew the next level well. It was
VAPORIZE
, and you did not want to stand in front of that one.

“Okay. Okay, I'll call the cops.”