The Reckoning (32 page)

Out on the sidewalk a couple of homeless guys were squaring off for a fight, from Coker's POV a knife fight. There was already a crowd forming. Money was changing hands. By the curb a short guy in a newsstand was talking into a cell phone.

Coker was trying to remember the short guy's name. Joko something. Frank Barbetta's snitch.

Barbetta, wounded and in the ER; Lemon Featherlight too; and Mavis and Nick. Coker hoped they were all okay. But yes, they had trouble, and there was trouble in the air tonight too. Right around here. He could feel it. He'd asked Boonie about it, about what was wrong with Niceville, and gotten the back of Boonie's hand for it.

Well, whatever it was, it wasn't his problem.

He was here to tidy up the ledger and then go back to the beach house and pick up on his retirement again. He had called Twyla's current throwaway to get an update on Bluebell and generally touch base, but the call went to her voice mail, so he left a brief message saying he was fine and he hoped she was fine and say hello to Bluebell.
Probably out shopping.

Coker figured it would take max two days to settle the Maranzano file. Twyla could handle the home front okay, and anyway he didn't really want to hear Bluebell moaning and bitching about her life.

But she was Twyla's family, and Twyla was his family, so it looked like Bluebell was his family too. He'd have to think about getting her relocated eventually, but right now he was happy to be out of the beach house and away from all the drama.

The laptop beeped at him.

He was looking at a blue screen with the crest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation floating in the middle. Under the medallion was a line of bright red letters:

FBI CJIS ENTER PASSWORD AND AGENCY

Coker had a Moleskine notebook beside the laptop. He flipped it open to the page marked by the black elastic band, and read what Charlie Danziger had written there over six months ago.

Coker if you ever need this, first, I sure hope you don't because you suck at this stuff, and second, if you're the one doing it then I'm either dead or in prison. After the Gracie thing I went in to see Boonie and I gave him a flash drive with a list of all my employees. Looks like Boonie stuck it in his mainframe because now I've got a back door into his CJIS database if we ever need it. So if you do, the password is:

1
stBtn
2
ndMarinesTarawa

and the agency designator is

SAIC FBI CAP CITY UNIT
298701

By the way if I am dead, I always wanted to let you know you were a good friend and I'm real sorry about all those times I boinked Twyla's brains out behind your back.

Just kidding.

No, really.

Trust me.

Semper Fi

Charlie.

Coker held the notebook up and carefully typed in the password and agency ID, sat back and waited, half expecting the machine to blow up in his face. It didn't, and after a few more keystrokes he was looking at Boonie Hackendorff's Cap City FBI case file for MARANZANO, F.

It was damned instructive.

It was particularly instructive in those parts that touched upon the Community of Goombahs.

Boonie, smarter than he looked, seemed to have established what Coker already knew, that Harvill Endicott had been sent down to Niceville six months ago to collect on what three Mafia goons had decided was their share of the Gracie bank job, operating under the delusion that Byron Deitz had pulled the job and that he had the money stashed away somewhere.

According to Boonie's analysis, after talking it over with Nick Kavanaugh, after Nick and Coker had taken Deitz out of the picture at the Bass Pro Shop, Harvill Endicott had consulted with the goombahs—three guys named La Motta, Munoz, and Spahn, who had a serious grudge against Deitz—and the goombahs had told him to go ahead and find the money, wherever the fuck it was, and get it for
them
, on the basis of it was owed to them on account of karma and fate and because—like all made guys—they were greedy fucks who could eat the whole world and still wake up hungry.

Somehow Endicott had gotten on to a kid named Lyle Preston Crowder, the only weak link in that Gracie thing; Coker had wanted to kill the kid but Charlie had gone all Saint Francis of Assisi on the issue. Anyway, Coker already knew the rest.

Luckinbaugh had been tailing Endicott for them and reporting in, so when he let them know that Endicott had cornered Crowder in a Motel 6, Coker and Danziger had come in for a look and been duly burned by Endicott.

Like a pair of prancing putzes.

And Harvill Endicott had pulled together a team from Delores Maranzano's operation and sent them up to Danziger's ranch to get the money, and in the following cluster-fuck Charlie Danziger took two in the chest while saving Mavis Crossfire's life. Much as Coker admired Mavis Crossfire, if anybody had checked it with him, he'd rather have Charlie Danziger alive and Mavis a dead hero.

But that's not how it went.

Anyway, it was all there, like a conga line of clowns doing the fucking cha-cha of Destiny. Mario La Motta, Desi Munoz, and Julie Spahn.

And the
goo-mai,
Delores Maranzano.

They were why Charlie Danziger was dead.

And Charlie Danziger was Coker's partner.

And when somebody killed your partner, you had to go do something about it. It was as simple as—

Noises up front, chairs flying around, tables going over, coffee mugs smashing, chicks screaming—and a big hoarse voice over it all, bellowing
Shut the fuck up please just shut the fuck up I'll do it I said I'll do it
in a hoarse ragged bray like he was losing his mind to
sheer fucking crazy.

Coker saw the big goon in the bath-mat coat shoving the baggy crotch guys out of the way while he was reaching into his coat, coming out with…
an AK, where the hell would a mutt like him get an AK?
The guy had it out now and he was bringing it to bear right on the barista with the free-range bazongas—
ah shit
, thought Coker, who was halfway out the side door,
not her not those fantabulous tits.

So he stepped back into the coffee shop with his Sig in his right hand and he lifted it up and he drilled the guy twice in the side of his fucking ugly head from a distance of maybe twenty-five feet, and through a sea of bobbing heads and screeching hipsters, which, he had to admit, was pretty cool shooting, all things considered.

The guy went over sideways, like that Kodiak bear at the Bass Pro Shop, crashed down through a pile of overturned chairs, bounced once, lay still.

Everybody was silent, staring at Coker, including the barista with the free-range bazongas.

“Is he dead?” asked Coker into the silent room.

One of the baggy crotch guys stepped in, stared down at the guy, looked back at Coker. “Yeah, I think so. His skull's all broke up and there's squishy shit running out of it.”

“Okay,” said Coker. “Well, it's been lots of fun and you all have a real nice evening.”

He was headed for the side door with his laptop under his arm when the barista called to him. “Hey, you, Marine Corps, what's your name?”

“Harry Lyme,” said Coker for some demented reason, giving her his wolf grin, and he was gone.

He had the coat off and he was jogging to his rental Town Car down the block with the echo of the gunfire still ringing in his ears and he was thinking as he slowed to a walk,
Now why the hell did I do that?
And the answer came back right away.

Free-range bazongas.

They got Lemon out of his hospital room, they had to bluff down a duty nurse to do it, hurried him down the hall to the Haggard Lounge. There were people already in it: a pack of jabbering tweens, a random intern sleeping off the night shift, and the farm couple from Grant Wood's
American Gothic
.

Reed, who was in uniform, told them it was a police emergency, and they all hustled themselves out of the lounge and Reed shut the door behind them. They all stood there, looking at him.

Finally Nick, still in his bathrobe, sat down on one of the armchairs, taking a while to do it, and the fact that he was moving seemed to free up everybody else.

Nick had called a meeting, and this was
it
, as far as he was concerned, the last tango in Niceville.

Frank Barbetta was dead because Nick wasn't taking this problem seriously enough. He had made the decision, internally so far but he was about to make it clear to everyone else, that they either figured out something useful right now and then went out and did it and had some success doing it, or he was taking his wife and his family and anybody else who wanted to come and he was getting the
fuck
out of town as soon as he could walk ten yards without passing out from the pain.

Sitting around the room in silence, aware that something major was coming from Nick, were Reed and Kate, along with Lemon and his entourage, Lemon bound up like a mummy, his left arm wrapped tight against his chest, shirtless, and still somehow managing to look like a GQ model.

Beth and Eufaula were taking care of the kids and Mavis was back out on the streets, trying to cope, trying to keep the lid from flying off.

There was coffee, stale but hot, on a side table, and a flat-screen TV with the sound off was showing a Cap City CNN report from a coffee shop down in Tin Town, where there had been some kind of shooting—VIGILANTE SHOOTER SAVES THIRTY AS SMALL SOUTHERN TOWN SLIDES INTO CHAOS was the crawl—under a video of a well-developed girl in a red Che Guevara shirt talking to Sarah Band.

Everybody got their coffees and sat themselves in a rough half circle around Nick's armchair, where he was leaning back, stone-faced, arms on the rests, pale and tight.

He sighed, looked at Kate, who was eyeing him warily, and then he looked around the room. “Okay. Here it is. There is something wrong with Niceville and it isn't going away. Lemon knows it, Reed knows, Doris knows it, and I know it. I have no idea what the hell it is. And if we can't figure out a way to deal with it, we should all get out of town.”

“Okay. Out
when
?” asked Reed, cool but intense.

“Out as soon as I realize there's not a fucking thing we can do about it.”

“Then you should go now,” said Reed, “because I've seen the thing up close and what I did about it was to back myself out of a fourth-floor window and hit every branch on my way to the ground.”

“Candleford House,” said Lemon, who had heard the story.

“What is this Candleford House?” asked Helga.

Reed gave it a moment, did a check-glance at Nick, took a breath, and laid out the history of the place in a few words, leaving out the part where Clara Mercer's ghost had told him that Rainey Teague needed to be killed before Abel Teague could take over his body and live another hundred years. He ended with the story of what happened to him when he got up to the top floor and ran into
nothing.
Helga listened, thought about it.

“You all call it
nothing
but it is very much
something
, yes?”

“Yes it is,” said Doris Godwin, “my people have always known what it is. It is a demon. My people call it the Kalona Ayeliski.”

“The Raven Mocker,” said Lemon.

“Yes. The Raven Mocker. Because it imitates the sound of a real raven, and its presence is signaled by ravens. It has been in this part of the world long before our people came here. Would you like to know what it does?”

“Very much,” said Helga.

“It's a spirit, invisible, but sometimes it takes the shape of an old woman. When people are weak, dying, she comes in at that hour and
feeds
on the soul of the dying person. Each soul she sucks in gives her another year of life. She feeds on suffering, on pain, on anguish. The sharper the suffering, the longer the dying, the more she is satisfied. That is the Kalona Ayeliski.
”

“We too had stories,” said Helga, “in Reykjavik, similar stories. The
draugir
, my father told me of them, they would come to eat the souls of the living, but they were only the bodies of dead men come back to life.”

“Well, the Raven Mocker is a fuck of a lot more dangerous than some dipshit Viking zombie,” said Doris with an edge. Helga stayed cool.

“I see that it is. This spirit, this Raven Mocker, how did your people fight it? With spells? With other spirits?”

“No. With a sing. And with smoke. There were people who hunted the Raven Mocker. It was what they did. They knew she was coming because of the ravens or crows that were flying around her.”

“Like the crows on Tallulah's Wall,” said Kate. “Doris, tell us where the name Tallulah came from.”

“There is a pool on top of that wall, the Niceville people call it Crater Sink. But we, my people, called it after an eater of souls who lives in it, and her name is Tal'ulu. It is where the name Tallulah comes from.”

Doris turned to Lemon. “Do you have your cell phone with you?”

Lemon did. He fished it out of a pocket in his robe and handed it to her. Doris flicked through to his photos and handed the phone over to Helga, who looked at the screen. Pictures taken by the camera's flash in the middle of a forest at night. In each photo there were people standing under the trees, staring back at the flash, hundreds of them, men and women, some in ordinary street clothes, but varying in fashion as if they were from different eras.

“What are these?” Helga asked.

“Doris took those shots two months ago, on top of Tallulah's Wall. She was helping me get a kid down from there, and she could
feel
something out there all around us. In the forest, in the dark. She had a camera. This is what she got.”

Helga looked down at the phone again, paging through the shots, frowning. “These people…they are from different times, different ages…I see soldiers from your Civil War, I see Native Americans, people who look like villagers from a long time ago, people from the Depression, others look like they are from the fifties…and they all look…”

“Dead,” said Nick.

“And these people…are they ghosts?”

“We have no idea,” said Doris. “Images, maybe, just images burned into the air around Crater Sink. Like the images of ash people that were burned into the walls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But whatever they are, the old forest around Crater Sink is full of them. There may be thousands of them. If this is hard for you to understand, then stop trying to understand it. It is what it is. No amount of science is going to explain it.”

She glanced at Kate, as if considering whether it was cruel to carry on. But she did. “We believe, Lemon and I, that they are people whose souls have been eaten by Tal'ulu.”

Helga stayed on point.

“Is this Tallulah—”

“
Tal'ulu
,” said Doris.

“Tal'ulu…is she the same spirit as the Raven Mocker?”

Doris thought about it. “Our people did not think so.”

“But, according to what Lemon has told me, about this entity he is calling
nothing
, doesn't this entity behave exactly like your Tal'ulu spirit?”

“Yes,” said Nick, remembering Jordan Dutrow's death. “This thing enjoys human pain. Suffering. Grief. She gets off on it. She eats it and drinks it.”

“And you have
seen
this?”

This got under Nick's skin. “I have seen what happens to people she gets control over. Would you like to hear some specific details, because—”

“Nick,” said Kate, “no need to do that. I think Helga was just asking for confirmation.”

“Yes,” said Helga. “Please. You do not need to give me…details. I do not want to hear the details. I can see them in all your faces.”

She went back to Doris. “So your people, when they fought the Raven Mocker, they did what you call a
sing
? I know of such things in many cultures, but I do not assume to know what it is in yours. Can you describe it for me, what is this
sing
in the Cherokee world?”

“What it sounds like,” said Doris, but with some of her edges smoothed off. “It's a chant, a very specific chant, and it has to be sung exactly right. There are other things that are a part of it, sharpened sticks, a call for the Red Warrior and the Purple Warrior, and smoke. But the chant is what has the power to drive away the Raven Mocker.”

“So you fight the Raven Mocker with
sound
, in other words?”

Doris, along with everyone else but Lemon, was surprised by the question. “Yes. A song is made of sound.”

“And did it work?” asked Helga.

“Yes. According to the stories, if the singer was skilled and came in time, then the Kalona Ayeliski was driven away.”

“This is all lovely,” said Reed, “but if our plan here is to take the choir from Holy Name up to Crater Sink and lay some Handel's
Messiah
on her, you can count me AWOL. I've locked horns with this bitch, and trust me, Handel isn't going to cut it.”

“Chopin did,” said Nick.

Reed didn't know about that part, so Nick filled him in on Blue Eddie's advice to Frank Barbetta, about Chopin.

“I saw that. Frank had headphones on when he came to see us at the house.”

“Yeah, and when somebody took them away, Frank killed himself rather than let the…buzzing…take him over.”

There was a silence.

“Then he was a brave man,” said Helga.

“Yes. He was,” said Nick.

“And listening to Chopin, this had an effect on the…the buzzing?”

“Frank thought so.”

“But this sound in his head, has anyone else heard it?”

“Yes,” said Nick. “I heard it when we were down in the storm drains.”

“And what was it like?”

Nick thought about it.

“Like…radio static. A cross between hissing and buzzing. High-pitched—”

“Was it steady, or did it rise and fall?”

“It…varied.”

“Did it ever start to sound like speech?”

Nick shook his head.

“I never gave it a chance. But a kid named Jordan Dutrow got infected by this thing, and he said it talked to him. So, yes, I'd say it could sound like speech. Where are we going with this?”

Lemon spoke up. “Helga has a theory, about this whole thing.”

“I'd love to hear it,” said Nick.

“We all would,” said Kate.

Helga looked at Lemon and then back to the other people in the room. “You know about the bone baskets? That Lemon found?”

“Nick and I both found them, Helga.”

“Yes. Sorry. They were in a riverbank, yes?”

“Yeah,” said Nick. “Along the Tulip.”

She looked over at the coffee table, saw the white plastic box with the digital panel. “That is a microwave. What happens when you leave something in a microwave for too long or set the power too high?”

“You get crispy critters,” said Reed.

“Crispy critters?”

“Reed means you get stuff that's burned to a crisp,” said Kate.

“Yes,” said Helga, “and burned by what?”

“Microwaves put out radiation,” said Nick. “The wavelength comes in somewhere between radio waves and infrared radiation. The waves cause molecules to vibrate—to heat up—”

“Yes,” said Helga, “because heat is really just molecules in rapid motion.”

“Okay,” said Reed. “And?”

“We do not yet know how Lemon's bone baskets were made—this will take many years to understand—but I believe that they are whatever was left after this entity consumed all those people.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Reed.

“This is not a matter of God and Satan. This thing is a
being
, an entity. I believe it is made of radiation. It exists as a type of wave that comes somewhere on the radiation spectrum. Where we do not know yet, but—”

“Helga,” said Nick, “this thing
thinks.
It plans. It
operates
. It's a thinking being. It's a lot more than just a string of electrons. It reasons. It remembers. It makes plans. It's
alive
.”

“Yes. It is alive. It thinks. It makes plans. And so do you. So do we all, yes?”

“Okay,” said Reed. “Not tracking you here.”

“We do all those things too, and we too are really nothing more than a string of electrons.”

“Oh, Jeez,” said Reed. “Here we go, down the rabbit hole. Quantum mechanics?”

“Yes,” she said, with heat. “Down at the quantum level, we are all just…energy waves—”

“Or energy particles,” said Nick, who had read his physics texts. “Nobody knows which.”

“The theory is we're
both
,” said Reed. “But this thing, it doesn't have a form, a body.”

“We do not know that,” said Helga. “I have Googled the geological charts for this area. You have this big lake underneath us here, it is called the Sequoyah Aquifer?”

“Yeah,” said Nick, remembering Arnie Driscoll's lecture at the Dutrow scene. “It runs from the Belfairs all the way down to Cap City.”

“And does this Crater Sink connect to it?”

“Yes. At least, we're being told it does.”

“So there is your
body,
Reed. The entire valley of the Tulip River. From Gracie down to Cap City. The limestone shelf that lies underneath the earth right here. That is the
body
that this entity lives in. What is the one element that is present in all of these places?”