The Reckoning (27 page)

Over his head the smoke snake coiled and twisted against the tin tiles. The sound of the ambulance faded away. Far off to the east, beyond the black shoulder of Tallulah's Wall, the sun was a crescent of fire on the rim of the Atlantic Ocean.

The crows who lived on top of the wall were waking, puffing their feathers, clacking their beaks, spreading their wings, scuffling and squabbling in the branches of the old forest that grew along the spiny crest. In the heart of the old forest, Crater Sink looked like a black hole in the middle of the world.

It was time for the Harvest.

Since the gunfight had scared the hell out of Axel and Hannah, Beth had taken them to a hotel. There was a squad car parked outside the house, guarding the scene, roof rack slowly turning, sending red and blue light arcing all around the neighborhood. The parkette across the street was wreathed with crime-scene tape, but Yarvik's body had been taken away hours ago. Even the spent brass had been policed up, and Reed's shot-to-bits pickup had been hauled away by a wrecker.

Kate spoke to the two young patrol cops, both of whom wanted to know how Nick and Frank were doing. Kate gave them the best news she could manage, and they took it as if it were totally true, which everyone knew it wasn't.

The main floor lights were on when she stepped into the front hall, broken stained-glass cracking and sliding under her feet, the reek of gunpowder residue hanging in the air like stale cigarette smoke. She looked around at the damage.

Amazingly, other than the front-door glass and one of the sash windows, and the chalky footprints of patrol cops all over the main floor, the place wasn't in terrible shape. She sighed, as people do when they are trying to keep themselves together but what they'd really like to do is fall to their knees, curl up, and fade out.

She took a deep breath, turned away from the mess, and went up the stairs. The mirror should still be where they kept it, in an upstairs hall closet, wrapped in a blue blanket. Climbing the stairs, fatigue rolled over her like a black wave and she stopped on the landing to get her breath back and her courage up. The landing on the second floor was dark, so she hit the switch and got nothing.

No light.

Just dark shadow at the top of the stairs.

She stood there on the landing, looking up into the darkness. A cold tremor rippled through her chest and an artery in her neck began to thump. “Hello,” she called, first in a small voice, and then again with more force, “Hello? Is there someone up there?”

Maybe a cop, still looking around?

Something was there. She could feel it.

“Hello?”

Nothing?

Was Nothing there?

She tried the switch again, and this time the upstairs hall light came on, but low, a dull green glimmer. The bulb looked as if a firefly had been caught inside it.

No. Not a firefly.

A dragonfly.

A glowing green dragonfly.

The light in the bulb began to grow stronger, slowly filling the upper landing with an emerald-green fire. Her fear subsided slightly, for reasons she couldn't explain. She climbed the second flight of stairs slowly, her senses straining, and the green light grew brighter all around her. She reached the top of the stairs, stepped into the upper hall. It was filled with emerald-green dragonflies, each one a tiny spark of green fire, a cloud of them hovering in the hall, dazzling and hypnotic.

There was a shape inside the glowing cloud of dragonflies. A woman.

Kate knew her.

“Hello, Kate,” the woman said, coming forward, growing more solid and clear, surrounded by that dazzling emerald light.

“Glynis?”

“Yes,” the woman replied.

“Why are you here?”

Glynis Ruelle smiled at Kate, but it was a troubled smile, something else underneath it. Concern? Fear?

“I need to be,” she said.

Delores, a nimble little thing and a skilled multitasker, was whipping Raylon Grande around the clubhouse turn to a standing ovation from the choir invisible, while at the same time keeping an eye on the clock on the bedside table.

It was almost six-thirty in the morning, a Sunday—the Lord's day—and they had been at it most of the night. Raylon Grande had tremendous staying power, but she could tell he was beginning to falter, and it was long past time to transition to stage two of the master plan.

So she dug down deep within herself and came up with one of her most convincing fake orgasms. Later she looked back on it as one of the best of her fall season. It started out with a kind of steam-whistle puffing, her head thrown back wild-eyed—
oh my, popcorn stucco on the ceiling, how awful
—her gasping rapidly escalated into a cross between a coyote yodeling at the moon and Inva Mula Tchako's aria from
Lucia di Lammermoor
.

She cut it off before somebody started pounding on the hotel wall and collapsed across Raylon's muscular chest, burying her face in his neck. She could feel his carotid thrumming like a trapped bat, and his chest was heaving so hard that she thought he might buck her right off.

She pulled back, letting her hair fall just so across his face, creating a curtain of intimacy around them, stared down into his slightly buggy eyeballs. “Raylon sweetie. Can I tell you a secret?”

Raylon swallowed and got his breath and looked up at her like a big old puppy dog in a basket full of daisies, licked his lips. “Please, honey. Anything.”

She kissed his wet nose. “I know you're a fucking fed.”

His color changed. “What?”

She smiled down upon him. “You're a fucking fed. Actually, to be precise, you're a fed, fucking.”

Raylon started to unspool a string of lying lies. She stopped him with a warm wet kiss. “Wait,” she said. “There's more.”

“Delores, I have no idea what the—”

What she said next chilled him to the core. “Raylon, we have to talk.”

“Delores—”

She climbed off, leaned down and gently patted his rapidly receding courting tackle. “Come on, sweetie. Get dressed. You're not going to want to hear this while your little turtle-head thingy is going all pinkly-wrinkly.”

He was still goggling at her amazing butt, but now with mixed emotions, as she wriggled into the en suite and gently closed the door.

He stared at it for a while, his mind racing, and then, feeling unfriendly eyes upon him, looked across the room to the credenza, where her mammoth braided leather Bottega Veneta bag was propped up against the flat-screen. A pair of buggy eyes were glaring back at him.

Frankie Twice, her goddamned Chihuahua.

Raylon had made several attempts to go through that bag while Delores was in the bath, but every time he went near it that fucking dog would start snapping and snarling. Dog had teeth like a piranha.

The dog had stayed there the entire night—maybe he had diapers on; he wouldn't put that past Delores—and now he was regarding Raylon Grande with a censorious frown.

“What the fuck are
you
looking at?” said Raylon. Frankie Twice licked his lips, twitched, blinked, farted, but otherwise declined to comment.

They reconvened in the living room of their suite at the Quantum Park Marriott Hotel and Convention Center—“
Conveniently Located Just a Hop and a Skip from Mauldar Field
”—and sat down on opposite sides of an ottoman as big as a dead buffalo and sipped at their drinks, in her case a champagne and orange juice mimosa, and for Raylon two Excedrins washed down with black coffee.

The residue of last night's dinner lay scattered all over the top of the ottoman, along with a silver tray streaked with cocaine and a number of squished-up spliffs jammed into an empty jar of Dijon mustard. The unmistakable scent of stale weed and crazed sex floated in the still air.

They had taken the Temple Hill Suite, the largest and most luxurious suite in the place and the only suite in the Marriott where smoking was allowed. The rules were not specific about what could or could not be smoked, but the management was probably going to draw the line at goat.

“Okay,” said Raylon, sitting back into the couch and adjusting his trousers. “Say what you gotta say.”

Delores made a pouty face. “Why, Raylon, aren't we friends anymore?”

“Not when you start accusing me of being some kind of government snitch.”

“I'm not accusing you of being a snitch, Raylon. That would be offensive. I am merely stating that you are an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who has been assigned to an undercover role as a sales associate at Neiman Marcus in order to establish contact with the widow of an Italian businessman named Frankie Maranzano. Unless you are ashamed of your job, you shouldn't feel offended at all. You should be proud.”

Raylon looked up at the ceiling and then across the room to the window wall, where the sun was just clearing the edge of the world. “You know, Delores, you can be sort of a trial sometimes. I have no idea—”

“Oh, but I do, and guess where I got it?”

“Do I have to?”

“The Starbucks at Fountain Square, where I saw you having a coffee with Special Agent Hackendorff of the FBI.”

Raylon tried not to look ashen and failed.

“Yes,” she said with a sympathetic smile. “Just the other day.”

“I have no idea—”

“Sweetie, this isn't
Oprah
. I'm not trying to wring a tearful confession out of you so I can give you a Prius. I'm just trying to establish the terms of our new relationship.”

Raylon got to his feet and started to hunt for the rest of his clothes, talking at her over his shoulder as he stumbled around the suite. “I said this is nuts and I don't know what the fuck is going on, but you know, Delores, I am outta here anyway and I hope we can still be—”

Delores had turned on the flat-screen television while Raylon was bustling about trying to create a diversion. When he came back out into the main room the flat-screen was showing a video of Raylon and Delores working their way through a small mountain of cocaine set out on a silver tray. Seeing this video was sufficient to get all of Raylon's attention. “You…evil…bitch,” he said rather predictably.

“No, sweetie, the evil part comes later.”

Raylon sat down and watched the video for a while. It was grainy and flickery and dim, but he was pretty certain that if it were to be run in the office of the director of the FBI, the man would find it endlessly fascinating. He leaned back into the couch and smiled at Delores.

“Honey, about undercover ops, you need to know that FBI policy allows for UC operators to engage in some light drug activity and even some sexual contact if it helps to establish their—”

Delores reached over and retrieved her MacBook Air, talking while she hit a few keys. “But, honey, I'm not thinking about the FBI people in DC. I'm thinking about the person whose e-mail address is
‘[email protected]
.' ”

Raylon went all the way to puce. “How the
fuck
—”

“Never leave your iPhone in the bedroom while you're in the bathroom admiring your abs.”

He took that in. “Horseshit. That phone's got an encrypted password. There's no way you'd ever be able to—”

“Didn't need it. You left the phone on. All I had to do was go look at your contacts.”

“You'd have no way of knowing—”

“I know your real name is Kurt Pall, and that you've been with the agency for sixteen years.”

Puce intensified, verging on russet. “How could you know that?”

She shook her head teasingly. “I'm always interested in people who take an interest in me. So when you showed up at the store and started to work your way into my panties—”

“Not a lot of work.”

“And I've enjoyed every minute you've spent there. But you got my attention. So I took a picture of you with my iPhone and sent it to one of Frankie's associates who collects photographs of federal law enforcement people. He did something called Facial Recog—I have no idea—but a guy who looked exactly like you had been working as a pool boy at the Delano in South Beach last spring. And you were playing the same game, getting close to the wife of a made guy. You rolled up three of Tony Torinetti's guys on an extortion beef. They finked out, and now here you are, following up.”

“No way they'd get my fucking name.”

“You were on the DA's list of witnesses for that case.”

“That list is sealed.”

She blinked at him. “Not for people inside the DA's office.”

Raylon sagged into himself. “You got people in the Miami DA's office?”

“Tit for tat, in a way. Seems only fair.”

Raylon took a belt of his coffee. “What are you doing with the laptop?”

She looked over at the flat-screen, where clothes were coming off at a frantic pace and various body parts were jiggling and throbbing. “I have a copy of this MPEG attached to your wife's e-mail. If I hit the
SEND
key it will ruin her Sunday afternoon. And probably yours too.”

“How did you get the…of course. That goddamn purse. You never leave it.”

“I never leave Frankie Twice either.”

“Yeah, right. So now the fucking dog makes porn films?”

“No. But he keeps you out of my purse. I hear him snapping at you whenever you try to get into it. Oh, Raylon, don't look so glum.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“Because I have no intention of sending this silly video to your wife.”

A ray of hope for Raylon. “What, then?”

“You're watching my condo right now, aren't you?”

Raylon struggled with it, but in the end he just nodded and looked at his hands. Over on the flat-screen, things had gotten pretty graphic, so he wasn't looking there anymore. He was glad the sound was off. Nobody wants to hear himself doing what he was doing. Seeing it was bad enough.

“I thought you might be. Frankie Twice keeps snapping and staring and moaning at the windows that look out on Fountain Square. Your offices are right across the square. So you have some kind of listening thingy set up.”

“Yeah, we do. You want it shut down? Because there's no way I could get Boonie to do that.”

Delores stood up and came over and kneeled down at his feet and gave him an up-from-under that, in spite of himself, he could feel in his hip pocket. “No, I don't want it shut down, honey-booboo. I want you to keep listening. Is there any way you can make it more irritating to Frankie Twice?”

“Maybe. Probably. But why?”

“Just do it. Also, do you have any bugs inside the apartment?”

“No. Those assholes never go out. As soon as they do, we'll be all over it.”

“But right now, nothing?”

“Contact mike under the suite number plate on the front door. But we're not getting anything off it.”

“Can you lend me one? Like for a phone?”

“What? I guess so. Why?”

She ran her hands up his thighs. It was a cheap trick, a really shopworn move, almost a cliché. There's a reason why things get to be clichés. Because they're true
all
of the time. Long story short, Delores got everything she wanted.