The Reckoning (14 page)

Now that the sun had cleared Tallulah's Wall, a convection wind had come up, and as they cruised down Riverside past the willows along Patton's Hard they could see branches flying and tossing in what looked to become a pretty brisk gale.

Nick, watching them from the shotgun seat in Mavis Crossfire's Suburban, felt the same shiver of dislike that he always felt for that mile-long stretch of old-growth forest that ran along the west bank of the Tulip, from Garrison Hills south to within a half mile of the Pavilion. The willows were abnormally huge, almost grotesque, and according to an arborist from Portland, Maine, who had made a study of such things, they were easily the oldest willows in America.

There was a map of Niceville, engraved around 1820, that clearly showed a large willow forest in this location at that time, and the same trees were still here, towering, thick, with twisted trunks and spreading branches. Which, according to the arborist, was unheard of. The average life span of a weeping willow was around a hundred years. Yet his examination of their trunks confirmed that the willows of Patton's Hard were easily twice that age.

Stepping through the hanging curtain of leaves and into the interior of one was like entering a gigantic green cave that swayed and whispered and creaked over your head, making you feel trapped, almost claustrophobic, or at least that's how these trees made Nick feel.

Nick and Tig and Lemon Featherlight—with the help of a portable crane and five divers from the Sandhaven Shoals Coast Guard station—had pulled Alice Bayer's car and later on Alice Bayer's body out of the river next to one of those towering old willows, and Lemon Featherlight's bone baskets had been ripped out from the tangled netting of willow roots that ran for a mile up the banks.

It was a matted weblike wall of roots that had seemed to fight hard to hold on to those bone baskets, as hard as it fought to hang on to Alice Bayer's body. Seven bone baskets were all they were able to wrench free, although the Coast Guard divers had seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, more of them embedded deep inside the root mass.

Mavis had been looking at the willows as well, and when they cleared the edge of them and were back into main streets, she glanced over at Nick. “Place still gets to you, doesn't it? I've been living near or walking through or driving by those damned willows most of my young life, and they still creep me out.”

Nick looked at her and then back out at the traffic streaming all around them. Away in the northeast the ancient trees along the rim of Tallulah's Wall were touched by fire and he could see a tiny cloud of black specks whirling above the trees, right around where Crater Sink was located. A flock of crows, thousands of them, infested the trees around that bottomless black pool, and they had probably been there as long as the willows on Patton's Hard.

Right now it wasn't just Patton's Hard that was getting on his nerves. Or even Tallulah's Wall and Crater Sink. It was Niceville itself. “Frankly, Mavis, the whole damn town is getting on my nerves.”

“I can see that. Maybe you and Kate should take off for a while, let Eufaula and Beth see to the kids. Go to Savannah or even Paris.”

“I can maybe afford a weekend in Cleveland.”

“Kate's got family money. Don't be such a stiff neck about it.”

“Kate's money is Walker family money. It belongs to Beth and Reed and Kate. I don't have a share in it and I don't want one.”

“And your money is Kate's money too?”

“Yeah. Of course. We're married.”

“So it's also Walker family money?”

“Mavis…”

“So why isn't her money
your
money?”

“That's not how it works. I'm her husband. She's my wife. It's my job to take care of her. Why are you riding me about this?”

“Honest?”

“No, lie to me.”

“Because I think you two really should get out of Niceville for a while. Kate's half crazy over losing the baby and then all this stuff about Rainey. And if she's half crazy, you're three gallons of crazy in a two-gallon bucket. Tell you the truth, I worry about you.”

Nick had something sharp to say but he didn't, but Mavis knew how far to push him and changed the subject. “More weird shit: You remember the two EMT techs yesterday, they attended at that scene down in the tunnel, with Dutrow?”

“Sure. Barb Fillion and Kikki…something.”

“Kikki Matamoros. Well, middle of the night, outside the Lady Grace ER, right at the end of his shift, somebody mugged Matamoros in the parking lot. Cracked his skull. It's not looking good for him. He's a Catholic and they've given him Last Rites.”

“What about his partner, Barb Fillion?”

“She'd already left. They called her to let her know, went to her voice mail. So far she hasn't called back.”

“That's not like her. They're a tight pair. They still trying to reach her?”

“Text and e-mail and voice mail. But then she was looking at ten days off, so maybe she's gone on a trip or something. She lives alone, so…well, anyway, there you go. I have something else if you're game?”

“Let's hear it.”

“That 1975 Fleetwood we're looking for seems to have dropped off the planet.”

“I was wondering about that. How many 1975 Fleetwoods can there be in this state?”

“According to Motor Vehicles, three hundred and four with active plates.”

“Really? That's a lot of old Caddies.”

“Yes. It was a tank, and a lot of older people like that. They were built to last. And the South is kinder to old metal than the northern states. So they tend to…endure. County and State Patrol guys have stopped close to a hundred of them since last night—no Maris Yarvik yet—and they're running down the rest, but it'll take a few days. They've even got the choppers out, looking at country roads, wood lots, backyards…anywhere you could stick a car that size. So far, zip.”

Nick thought about it. “He's gone to ground.”

Mavis nodded. “Yeah. Parking garage or even some rental storage place. If he has, then we're not going to luck out and stumble across it. He's going to have to move.”

“Any way we can
make
him move?”

“We'll see what Glynda has to say. Wanna hear some more weird shit?”

“How weird?”

“Oh, you'll love this one. You know the Dark Boys—”

“Ollie and Gordon Kupferberg. They still around? I thought Frank Barbetta warned them off, said if they ever showed up on the Mile again he'd disappear them both.”

“Yeah, well, that's the point. Ollie Kupferberg has actually disappeared—”

“Finally, some good news.”

“Agreed, long overdue, and praise the Lord, but now Gordon is going around telling anyone who'll listen that Frank Barbetta is the one who disappeared him, right outside the MountRoyal, blew his head off with a shotgun, and then he dumped Ollie's body off the Armory Bridge. At least this is the story he's retailing to the South Sector Duty Desk.”

“Good for Frank. I favor proactive policing.”

“Yeah, me too. And if he did, and he had a good reason, I'm okay with it, but being as I'm nominally his CO, I'd have appreciated it if he'd sort of mentioned this shooting to me when he debriefed us on the Mercedes-Benz chase this morning. I'm supposed to know who is shooting whom in my sector. I don't, I feel a tad disrespected.”

“Well said, especially the ‘whom' part. Have you talked to Frank about this?”

“Called him soon as I heard, got him out of bed, I think. He seemed to get a kick out of the whole thing, asked me to tell it twice, and then he said that if he was going to take Ollie's head off with a shotgun he wouldn't leave Gordon around to talk about it, would he?”

“How about that news guy, works the all-night stand right across from the MountRoyal? Juko something.”

“Juko Aivazovzky. The duty sergeant talked to him. He says nothing happened anywhere near him other than a fight in some yuppie bar, and of course all the emergency vehicles down around Scales and the Lower Mile.”

“Any bloodstains, tissue traces?”

“Desk sergeant sent a squad to look. Nothing. It did rain hard all night. But no ejected shotgun shells, no bits of bone or brain. Might have been at some point, but the rats down there are very efficient street cleaners.”

“So, on the evidence, it's bullshit.”

“Yeah, although Juko works for Frank, really, not for us, but yes, I'd have to agree.”

“Did anything Kupferberg-ish turn up on the shoals down by Tin Town Flats?”

“Not yet, and I had a squad go check.”

“There you go. The Tin Town Flats catch all the floaters. Gordon's not the most reliable witness. He's snorted his way through more cocaine than Tony Montana. Ask him his name, he has to check his driver's license.”

“Yeah, I agree, but here's the truly weird part. Gordon says that Frank had help doing it.”

“Okay. Interesting. We get a description?”

“He said the other guy was dressed like a cowboy, wore boot-cut jeans, cowboy boots, a range jacket. An older guy, looked like a hardcase, with a big white cowboy mustache and long silver hair down to his shoulders.”

There was an understandable silence.

“Did he have a name?”

“Gordon didn't hear one, but he said the guy was real close with Frank, like they were old friends. He said the other guy was a cop, had that cop attitude, and that he had a gun on him.”

“Gordon say what kind?”

“Not a pistol. A revolver, a big one. A Colt or a Smith. Probably a Colt.”

The silence came back again. The wind rocked the Suburban and Mavis watched the road.

“That,” said Nick after a time, “is just plain nuts.”

“I agree, and it undercuts Gordon's credibility, not that he had any in the first place.”

They drove on a while in silence, watching the sunlight glimmer on the wind-whipped surface of the Tulip, bikers and joggers and dog walkers along the riverbanks in Boudreau Park, all braced against the wind, a big brown barge butting north against the flow, bow waves curling white under its hull.

“Charlie Danziger is dead, Mavis.”

“Tell me about it. I gave the eulogy.”

Nick was thinking about the shadow he had seen standing in the window of the MountRoyal Hotel last night, about how the shape had seemed familiar.

They were coming up on the Pavilion. They could see the deck of the Bar Belle, the usual Saturday crowd under the café umbrellas—upscale, shiny, loud, like Armani geese and Gucci parakeets. There was music playing, ragged, staccato, irritating, like a jazz quartet falling down a fire escape. Mavis parked the truck, killed the engine, looked at Nick, who looked back at her, and said, “Mavis, my dove, I got
nothing
.”

“Neither do I, honey pie,” said Mavis, “So it goes in the FIDO file. Let's go see Glynda.”

Glynda Yarvik had seen them arrive. She met them on the steps of the restaurant, a large broad-shouldered woman with Chinese eyes and Slavic cheekbones and whipped-cream hair. Her gray eyes were smeared and teary and either she had no makeup on or none of it had survived the morning.

She got a hug from Mavis and shook Nick's hand, her palm cold and damp, and then she walked them through the indoor section to her office at the back, a large room lined in bamboo and hung with red plastic lobsters caught in blue plastic nets. Her desk was set in front of a picture window that looked out on the Tulip River and the industrial buildings, the wharfs and warehouses and lumberyards that lined the eastern bank.

Nick looked up at the ridge along the top of Tallulah's Wall, far away in the northeast, rising up over the town. The crows were still wheeling around up there, a black cloud with reddish sparks inside it, sunlight glinting off their wings. Something was going on at Crater Sink and the crows didn't like it.

Glynda was crying now, sobbing, coming apart, and Mavis was standing over her, patting her shoulder while Glynda shredded a blue handkerchief covered in pink polka dots. After a minute or two Glynda managed to subside. Mavis asked her when she had last seen her husband Maris.

“Yesterday, Friday, around two. He…he came home for lunch, from the car lot, a late lunch…I made pierogies and he kissed me and took some with him…He went back to the dealership…and he never came home again.”

She went off again for a while, looking out the window but seeing something else entirely. They let her go for a time, and then she took a deep shuddering breath that made her front porch heave, swiveled around in the chair, and put her hands on the desk. The polka-dot hankie was a goner.

“And you haven't seen or heard from him since?” asked Nick in a soft voice.

She shook her head, wiped her nose. “No. I'm calling his cell and it always goes to voice mail. It's an iPhone, so I go on the computer—Find My iPhone, you know this app?”

They did.

“And it's not showing. He has it turned off, I think. But isn't it true you can't turn an iPhone off, not really?”

“No, that's not true,” said Mavis. “If you power it off, the phone is dead, and the Find My iPhone won't work. Motorola phones are the only ones that shut right down if you take the battery out. Have you tried the carrier to see if there's a GPS signal?”

“I have,” she said. “Verizon says no.”

“Okay, Glynda,” said Nick, “is there any reason your husband would be visiting anyone up in The Glades?”

She gave it some thought. “Why there?”

Mavis explained about the red-light camera, tracing the tag on the Cadillac.

“Yes, that's his car. He was driving it…I don't know anybody in The Glades. We don't know anybody.”

“Maybe a client, something to do with the dealership?”

“Yes, that could be…Are you looking for his car? The police?”