The Homecoming (15 page)

Reed kept his mike on but stopped talking.

They heard a rising siren wail and then a huge metallic
clank
, and then another—Reed swearing, teeth gritted, his voice a guttural snarl—and then the clatter and clanging of something tumbling along the highway—something big and made of iron—the earsplitting shriek of metal on road—Reed’s transmission cut off abruptly and the interior of the marshals’ van was suddenly jammed full with an intense and painful silence.

After a long pause, Deitz decided now was a good time to make a helpful comment.

“Hey, Nick,” he said, his tone jovial, “sounds like your boy just got his ticket punched—”

Nick stepped up and crossed the space between them—Deitz was getting to his feet, his shackles rattling, his heavy fists coming up, moving into a boxing stance, a fighting guard, chin low—Nick bypassed all that Queensberry crap and drove his fist over Deitz’s guard and straight into the tiny furrowed space between Byron Deitz’s right and left eyebrows, feeling the nose cracking like a walnut, feeling the impact of his punch all the way up his arm and into his pectorals and deltoids and then down into his hips.

Deitz crossed his eyes under Nick’s fist and his thick legs got all wobbly and his head slammed backwards into the wall of the marshals’ van, striking it with a clear bell-like bong. Deitz bounced back, his nose bubbling blood, but he was sliding now.

Nick stepped back and let him fall.

A high-pitched female voice was blaring at him and he turned to see Shaniqua twisted around and banging a fat fist on the prisoner mesh, Bradley Heath shouting at her, trying to catch her arm—

“Hey, you can’t be pounding on my goddam prisoner—” But her voice was cut off and ridden down by the cello note of Bradley Heath’s awestruck, almost reverential
Holy shit
and everybody but Byron Deitz turned around to look back out at the road, where a sleek amber shape with brown eyes ringed in white was rising up in the air to meet the windshield.

“Deer—a deer!” Nick heard Bradley Heath’s hoarse growl, as the van
shuddered and dipped—Nick, reeling, clutched the stanchion at his left—Heath was stiff-legged on the brakes and the squishy tires were starting to fold … everything seemed to stop moving … Nick saw the way the muscles rippled under the deer’s pelt, saw the terror in its wide brown eye … a heartbeat … another—the buck hit the windshield square, two hundred and sixty pounds of tightly packed meat and muscle and bone slamming into a big flat wall of glass moving forward at sixty miles an hour. The effect was nothing less than spectacular.

The windshield exploded in a shower of glass beads as the deer smashed through it. The carcass smacked Bradley Heath and Shaniqua Griffin square in the face and upper body, crushing them from the chest up, cracking their skulls like raw eggs and then—still moving at about fifty miles an hour—the entire mass of disintegrating gore and bone and viscera struck the steel prisoner mesh immediately behind them, bending it into a concave bowl and shearing off nearly every one of the rivets that held it in place.

Most of the meatier bits got stuck in the mesh, but Nick, still on his feet, transfixed, caught the full force of the semi-liquid wall of brains and bodily fluids and bone splinters that hurtled through the screen, coating the entire inside of the prisoner box with blood and ruin.

Nick felt the wave hit him full on—it was as hot as black coffee and stank of copper—blinded, he went backwards and down, banging his head on the floor, and lay there next to Byron Deitz’s unconscious body as the van, driverless, veered sharply to the right, left the road, went airborne as it hit the verge rail, descended ponderously again, and landed on the right front wheel, which blew up on impact.

The van, making a grinding metallic groan like a freighter striking a reef, rolled majestically onto its right side, struck hard and bounced once, dropped back to earth, and then gouged a furrow through the pampas grass and red earth about fifteen feet wide and forty yards long, mainly with the upper right edge of the roof.

At forty-one yards and a couple of inches the leading edge of what used to be a federal marshals’ van and was now a loose confederation of auto parts and assorted biological material struck a stand of lodgepole pine and slammed to a sudden halt—sixty to zero in one—rapidly ejecting an undifferentiated mass of deer and dead deputy parts that flew out the shattered windshield and spread itself all over the pines and painted the pale gold pampas grass with a fan of scarlet and pink and purple chunks for a radius of fifty feet.

Nick Kavanaugh lived through this, although he didn’t come around until the medevac chopper got him onto the roof of Lady Grace Hospital in downtown Niceville seventy-nine minutes later, and even then he was only awake enough to recognize the round pink and badly bearded face of Boonie Hackendorff, whose worried expression got more worried as he replied, in response to Nick’s faint whispered question, that no, Byron Deitz had not been killed in the crash and was, as of this point in time, nowhere to be found.

“In the wind” were Boonie’s exact words.

“And Reed? Is he okay?”

Boonie Hackendorff’s face went pale around the edges. His eyes were wide and full of regret.

“Reed’s alive. A lot of other folks, not so much.”

These were cryptic words and the effort involved in trying to decode them carried Nick off into the following darkness.

Business at the Quantum Park Marriott Hotel and Convention Center was brisk on this lovely Thursday morning, but the central foyer happened to be nearly empty. A few stragglers from a convention of mechanical engineers were holding up the long bar in the Old Dominion off to the left.

When the tinted glass doors of the front entrance swished open and Edgar Luckinbaugh escorted a tall and bookish-looking older man in an English-cut blue suit across the polished oak slabs to the registration desk, Mark Hopewell had a lot of time to speculate upon the precise nature and character of the man before him, holding out an American Express card, his thin-lipped smile revealing a set of smoke-stained teeth.

His accent, when he spoke, was neutral, neither southern nor northern, neither European nor North American. A mid-Atlantic man, thought Hopewell, who felt that the man’s presentation was neutral, neither imperious nor overly friendly, as is often the case with business travelers.

“Good morning. The name is Harvill Endicott. I believe I have a reservation.”

Hopewell tapped a few keys, looked up with a cheerful smile, and agreed that this was so, welcoming Mr. Harvill Endicott to the Marriott. He slid a form across the granite surface of the desk and watched as Mr. Endicott filled it out and signed his name in an elegant flourish, setting the pen down gently beside the form.

When he looked up again, Hopewell was slightly disconcerted by the impression that Mr. Endicott’s eyes were almost completely colorless. This, combined with his blue-white skin and his thin purple lips, gave him a cadaverous air that sent a vague tremor of unease through Mark Hopewell’s young and impressionable mind. If Mr. Endicott was aware of this effect, he gave no sign.

Hopewell glanced down at the registration card, noting that under “BUSINESS” Mr. Endicott had written “Private Collector and Facilitator.”

“Is it business or pleasure, sir?”

Endicott smiled again, a much more open and friendly smile.

“I suppose it’s a bit of both, Mr. Hopewell. I requested a suite with a view of the town, one not on the ground floor, if possible. With windows that open to the air? And a terrace? I’m a smoker, as you may have been warned. And high-speed Ethernet in the room?”

“Yes sir. All taken care of. We have you in the Temple Hill Suite, one of our finest. It is a smoking suite, as you requested, and it has a large terrace, one of only three in the hotel. It’s on the top floor, quite secure. It’s named after the estate of Alastair Cotton—”

“The Sulfur King,” finished Endicott.

“You’ve heard of him?” Hopewell said, obviously surprised. Endicott inclined his head.

“I have made something of a study of the area,” he said, gathering up his card and the papers and slipping them into an inside pocket.

“I requested cars as well?”

Hopewell nodded, pleased to be pleasing.

“Yes sir. You asked for a black Cadillac DeVille and a beige Toyota Corolla. We have them in valet parking. The Cadillac has a GPS screen, as you requested. Just ring for the valet and whichever vehicle you request will be brought around whenever you wish.”

“Thank you, but if you would just send the keys to my room, and let me know where to find the cars, I’d greatly prefer that. I come and go at irregular hours and I don’t wish to be a burden to the staff.”

“Not at all, Mr. Endicott. I’ll have the keys and the garage map sent up right away. Is there anything else I can do, sir?”

“Not that I can think of right now.”

“Then enjoy your stay. We have a concierge desk, as you can see,” he said, inclining his head in the direction of a French escritoire behind which sat, primly erect, a tiny Oriental man in a black suit.

Hopewell watched him cross the oak floor, thinking that Mr. Harvill Endicott did not seem the sort of man who would do anything at all for pleasure, or, more accurately, what Mr. Endicott would consider pleasurable might be something quite unpleasant to know about.

“Yes, thank you, the suite is perfectly fine,” said Endicott, tipping the bellman, whose name tag identified him as
EDGAR
. This Edgar creature was fidgeting about the suite, poking at this and fussing with that, seemingly unwilling to leave, although Endicott had tipped him twice, once at the lobby door and again four minutes ago, for a total of nine dollars, which ought to be enough for any damn bellhop.

“May I help you?” Endicott said, with an edge. Edgar Luckinbaugh stopped twitching at the curtains and stiffened, and, mumbling something about the thermostat, shuffled across an acre of beige carpet to the door.

Endicott closed it with emphasis, turned away with a sigh, and considered the suite.

It was large and full of light, and, as promised, it offered a splendid view down a long grassy incline to the town of Niceville, about five miles to the south and east.

He opened the French doors and walked onto a large stone-tiled terrace with a gallery railing. The air was sweet and scented with harvest smells, with cut grass and turned earth, and the sun was warm on his cheek.

Niceville was a snug-looking town situated in the looming shadow of a long limestone barrier wall that, according to his researches, was a thousand feet high.

He smiled, patting his suit pocket and pulling out a heavy gold cigarette case and a battered Zippo lighter, in gleaming brass, with the crest of the First Air Cavalry on the side, a black-rimmed yellow oval bisected with a black bar, a black horse head in the upper angle.

He flicked it and put a light to a Camel, drew the smoke in with real pleasure, considering the view before him.

Niceville was shrouded in live oaks and pine with, here and there, a brighter green swath of willows. A number of church steeples pierced the canopy of trees, and a golden, hazy light lay upon it, even at this early hour. Sunlight rippled on the broad brown back of the large river that carved a meandering course through the middle of the town.