The Reckoning (21 page)

“You
can't
go get her, Twyla—”

She lit up like a road flare. “Fuck you, Coker, I sure as hell can do whatever I damn well—”

“
You
can't. But I will.”

That damped the blaze. “But, Coker, if you go back, if anybody recognizes you…”

“They won't. It's a quick extraction. I can be in and out in thirty-six hours.”

“But…what if…”

“Fuck
what if
. This is what it is.”

“You'll come back? With Bluebell? Jesus, Coker…you're not seeing her as a threat, are you? I mean, you wouldn't just go there and—”

Coker got a touch steely. “You really thinking like that?”

She caught the warning. They had a good relationship, but a careful one.

“No, Coker…I'm sorry. You can be…harsh…but I know you better than that, and I wish I hadn't said that.”

“So do I…but I guess I've earned it.”

“We've both earned it, I'd say. I guess we belong together, like a pair of…”

“Handcuffs?”

“I was going to say wolves.”

Coker smiled, not always a heartwarming thing to look at. This one was pretty good.

“I'll go get her, bring her back safe. You have my word. We'll figure out what to do with her afterward. Now you call her back, calm her down. Tell her to book some time off and go back to her house. She's still in your dad's home, up by Mauldar Field, right?”

“Yes. But you always said they'd have somebody watching it in case I ever came back.”

“Sounds to me like there's a lot more pressing stuff going on in Niceville right now than keeping a surveillance team on your daddy's rancher. Call Bluebell, tell her to go lock herself down at home. Tell her you've got something set up. Don't tell her it's me. Then we'll have some dinner. I'll figure out how to do this, get on the road before midnight. I can be in Niceville by midmorning. Okay? Does that work for you?”

She gave him an odd look. Suddenly wary. “This isn't like you, Coker.”

“What isn't?”

“You doing this…Lancelot thing. You know. Riding to the rescue.”

“Yeah? Well, you know, maybe I'm not Lancelot. Maybe I'm just…bored.”

“With me?”

“No. You're a lot of things. Boring is not on that list. Maybe I'd just like a road trip.”

Her look slipped sideways some more. “This wouldn't have anything to do with Delores Maranzano and that Harvill Endicott guy, would it?”

Coker gave her a wide-eyed stare, put a hand over his heart. “Twyla, you
doubt
me?”

She had to smile at his expression. He looked like a wolf with a mouth full of bunny rabbit, trying to explain why Easter got canceled.

“All the time, Coker.”

“Probably a good policy.”

“Going after Delores Maranzano is stupid and risky. And if you get killed, what happens to me?”

“You'll be a rich young widow. And you'll meet a decent young guy who might live long enough to give you some babies and a normal life.”

“I don't want to be a rich young widow. And I sure as hell don't want
children
. They're sticky and they're smelly and they leak. I just want
you.
So do NOT get killed. And you
will
get Bluebell? You'll see her safe
first
?”

“On my sainted mother's head.”

“Your mother was an alcoholic hooker. What about me? Do I stay here?”

“No. Too exposed. Go back to the beach house. Lock it down. Turn on the alarms. Gun up. Don't answer the door.”

“The beach house…”

“Yeah. You'll be safe there.”

In a stuffy back room on the seventeenth floor of the Bucky Cullen Memorial Federal Building on the west side of Fountain Square an FBI civilian intern named Esmé Phuong was sitting at a computer console with her earbuds in listening to a Malaysian boy band named NeetDaScreet bludgeon their way through a medley of Nine Inch Nails tunes. She was also reading
Wolf Hall
on her iPad, so she was not immediately aware of the pop-up message that had just now appeared on her monitor:

FILE 23901 POSITIVE HIT

It was accompanied by a soft-spoken computer-generated female voice with a Mid-Atlantic accent saying
attention please a key word has been detected in an active file please notify case manager attention please a key word has been detected in an active file please notify case manager attention please…
the Mid-Atlantic voice, being a matrix of electrons arranged into an MPEG loop by an IT subsidiary of Samsung, was quite willing to go on in this vein until Jesus Christ got a decent haircut, but she was no sort of competition for a Malaysian boy band with the volume set to stun, so it was fortunate that Esmé Phuong's immediate supervisor happened to be passing by the door to the Collections room and he overheard the warning message.

He stepped into the office without first tapping on the doorjamb—a serious breach of HR's boundaries policy right there—and stood for a moment taking in the scene. A seasoned bureaucrat, the supervisor had only recently rememorized the departmental mission statement and he was mindful of its soul-stirring exhortation that
promotable
agents will proactively exhibit leadership initiative in all eventualities where precipitate action may be required, bearing in mind all situational factors and probable outcomes, and will by example optimally enhance and support dynamic interactivity within an achievement culture that incentivizes our excellence mission…

Anyway, he got her attention and a couple of hours later—operational procedures had to be followed to the letter—a fax—yes, a fax—was sitting one floor up on the desk of Boonie Hackendorff, the SAIC of the Cap City office:

NSA subscription link to FBI HQ DC

Forward to FBI CAP CITY RE CASE FILE 23901

LITTLEBASKET, Twyla—Non Warrant Intel Only

KEYWORD INTERCEPT—>> Twyla <<

INTERCEPT TIME: 1339 Hours EST

INTERCEPT LOCATION: Chicago Illinois

Partial Transcript:

BL: (Bluebell Littlebasket) (Agitated)

Hello…hello?

UNSUB: Honey, it's me again.

BL: Oh, God >> Twyla << I'm so scared.

UNSUB: I know, honey.

BL: Can I come to you?

UNSUB: Here's what I want you to do. Just go back home right now.

BL: I can't. I have to work. The whole ward is going nuts and these disappeared people—

UNSUB: You're going to come down with a migraine right now and go home, okay?

BL: I'll get suspended—fired—

UNSUB: So what? Just go home and lock the doors and get Daddy's gun and wait there.

BL: How long? Why? What are you gonna do?

UNSUB: Just do what I said. Do it now.

BL: But how long? I can't just—

UNSUB: Soon. Very soon. Now go.

DISCONNECTS: NEGATIVE GPS fix timed out.

Five thousand miles north and east of Boonie Hackendorff's corner office in Cap City—where Boonie Hackendorff was currently
not
, since he was out petitioning a local judge for a surveillance warrant for Delores Maranzano's penthouse suite in the Memphis—and far around the curve of the slowly turning earth, a white Fiat cab pulled up at the departure gates of the Friuli Venezia Giulia airport outside Trieste, Italy.

It was raining, around one in the morning, but the airport was still busy with travelers from Venice and Pordenone, Padua and Udine and Ljubljana across the border in Slovenia. It was a warm night, almost sultry. Low clouds and a drifting mist blurred the constellation of radar and microwave tower lights that studded the peaks of the Tyrolean Alps in the far north.

The airport, set down on a broad alluvial plain that had seen a thousand invading armies pour across it, from Hannibal to Napoleon to the Wehrmacht, was grim and nondescript and run with Teutonic efficiency. There was a distinct Austrian bite in the accents of the people milling about in the concourses and walkways.

On the far side of the Tyrol lay the land of the Tedeschi—the Bavarians and the Prussians and the Austrians. Their intermittent visits had left an indelible impression on the region. Even the Italian spoken here had a Germanic edge, and the local dialects were almost incomprehensible to people from the south of Italy.

Harsh sodium arc lights burned away the surrounding night, making the airport feel like an outpost on a distant planet. It had none of the disheveled amiability that makes the rest of Italy so appealing.

The man getting out of the Fiat suited the airport and the region. He was Istrian, almost a separate race from the Italians. His ancestors were pirates and raiders. It took the Roman empire two separate campaigns to hunt them down in their mountains and cliffs and put them under the sword. Although his name was Tito Smeraglia—an Italian name—his high cheekbones and heavy jaw and his pale gray eyes came straight from the Caucasus.

His skin was as pale as parchment and his age was hard to determine, but the Croatian passport he handed to the Dogana e Immigrazione official listed his DOB as the fifteenth day of March, 1954, his place of birth the village of Piran, a desolate salted plain in the north of ancient Istria, a grim and ill-favored moor swept by rain and war and successive waves of conquerors for over two thousand years. It was a good place to raise up killers, and Tito Smeraglia was a killer.

He was not showy or flashy or in any way striking. He left no particular mark on anyone unless he was killing them, and they were never around to file a report on his true nature.

Tito Smeraglia's central gift was that he simply did not care. To a certain degree his work bored him. He found it tedious, but it paid well. It supported his hobby, which was collecting antique dental tools.

His purpose, in the words of his employers, was “
fare un'impressione durevole
”—“make a lasting impression”—and he did this with the bloodless and meticulous detachment of an auditor of banks, which was his traveling cover, and it suited him perfectly.

The passport official compared the photograph on the document with the squat, blunt-faced man standing silently in front of him. He felt no pulse off the man at all. It was as if the man was made of salted mud.

The official noted that he was Croatian but with an Italian name. He contemplated a friendly comment but decided against it. He noticed that Smeraglia's passport showed many visits to America, and that he had only returned to Istria a few days ago, and now he was going away again. He was professionally moved to inquire.

“Ciò che le imprese che hanno riportato in Croazia, Signore Smeraglia?”

What brings you back to Croatia?

Smeraglia blinked at the man for a while, and then said in English, “My mother is dead of the cancer two days ago. We put her in the ground.”

“Mi dispiace…le mie condoglianze.”

The man shrugged, looked down at his shoes.
“E qual è la sua destinazione finale?”

And what is your final destination?

Smeraglia seemed to stir, he lifted his eyes, focused on the official. The official looked back without pleasure. Smeraglia was not a joy to look upon. One's heart did not rise up with the larks. His lips looked dry. Everything about the man looked dry. If you cut him, would red dust pour out of him like salt from a box?

“Jacksonville, Florida,” said Smeraglia in a thick Croatian accent.

“Jacksonville,” said the official, who had been to the area on his honeymoon, although his wife was now dead.
“Vi è una graziosa cittadina nei presse di li. Si chiama sant'Agostino. Si consiglia di visitare esso.”

There is a pretty little town near there. St. Augustine. You should visit it.

Smeraglia blinked at the man and said nothing. The official shrugged, thought
uomo fango—a mud man,
and stamped his passport. Smeraglia took it and walked away, wondering if this had been a message, a sign of which he should take note.

And then he dismissed the notion. There are no secret messages, there is no hidden world.

He had cut living men open and he knew that the distance from the breastbone to the spine was about six inches. That was how deep the world was. Six inches of quivering bloody pulp and then you hit the table they were lying on.

He walked through the concourse, a squat, blunt meaningless man in a long cloth coat the color of mud, with short heavy legs and long-fingered hands and an air of dull-witted perseverance that trailed him like a miasma, and his hard-shelled rolling bag following along behind him across the terrazzo like a mud-colored tortoise.

In a way they were much alike, Smeraglia and his suitcase. Hard-shelled, vacant, crawling over the surface of the world like a tortoise. He turned the officer's words around in his head.

“There is a pretty little town…St. Augustine…you should see it
.”

Perhaps.

When his work was done.

At the beach house.

It was a poor heart that never rejoiced, his mother used to say. But then, she was in the ground.

It was early in the evening when the Blue Bird bus came to a clattering, chuffing stop on a dusty gravel road that climbed up into the shaded valleys and grass-covered hills of the Belfair Range. The setting sun had turned the landscape into shining gold and even the pines and pampas grass seemed painted with fire.

Albert Lee brought the bus to a halt at the entrance to a tree-lined road that curved up a long grassy slope toward a large and very old country house set in a stand of willows and live oaks. Weathered and worn, a rectangular and symmetrical facade in the Federal style, badly in need of paint, it retained an air of self-contained simplicity that reminded Danziger of a Shaker church he had seen up in eastern Canada.

It had a cedar shake roof, silver gray with age, two huge yellow limestone chimneys on either side of the house, a wide veranda with a few plain hardwood chairs and one wicker couch. The glass in the tall sash windows was rippled with age.

There were outbuildings farther back, chicken coops and possibly a workshop, a fenced-in pasture, what looked like a summer kitchen, and one ancient wooden barn, charcoal gray trimmed in navy blue.

Lights were on inside the house and in some of the outbuildings, and from a distance came a low muttering sound that Danziger was able to identify as a generator. He saw no power lines. The Ruelle Plantation seemed to be a long way off the grid.

There were about fifteen people left in the bus, not counting Danziger and Albert Lee, the last of the careworn and silent travelers who had set out from Niceville in the midafternoon. The others had been dropped off in ones and twos at crossroads or the ends of narrow lanes that led off into the pine forest, or sometimes just at the side of the gravel road. None of them had been met; none of them said good-bye.

But all of them stood for a while and watched as the Blue Bird trundled off up the country road, Albert Lee working it through the gears, the engine straining, the exhaust muttering and popping.

Now the last of them were stirring.

Albert Lee turned and smiled at them. “Second-last stop, ladies and gentlemen. The Ruelle Plantation. Next stop is Sallytown.”

They all rose, in that scattered, stiff-necked way that people have when they come to the end of a journey. They did not speak to each other and they had not spoken to either Danziger or Albert Lee at any time during the trip. They were a silent and glum and timeworn lot as they gathered up their bags and cases. Danziger wondered who they were and how they got that way as they slowly shuffled past him and went down the stairs, assisted with amiable grace by Albert Lee. They seemed to have no extra luggage stowed below.

The last passenger edged by him, a middle-aged woman who might once have been pretty. Some of her beauty remained, hazel eyes and long white hair as fine as corn silk, and a sweetly rounded figure under the thin fabric of her cotton-print dress.

Danziger caught her downcast eye as she slid by him and she gave him a thin fleeting smile.

“Are you here for the Harvest?” she asked him, in a voice that had a smoky southern lilt.

“I believe I am,” said Danziger.

She stopped to consider him. “I don't know you. Are you for the Harvest or the Reckoning?”

Danziger, puzzled, said, “I have no idea, miss. I suppose that will be up to Miz Ruelle. Will I see you there?”

“Oh yes,” she said, her smile going away. “We will all be present in the morning, one way or another. If you wish to take part, we are having a fellowship sing tonight, down in the Annex by Little Cut Creek. That's where we all stay, in the cabins down there. It's a ways back, on the far side of the wheat field, hard by the pine forest.”

“Thank you,” said Danziger. “I'll try to attend. It depends on Miz Ruelle.”

“Yes, of course. Well, good evening to you.”

And she left him there with her scent, which was a candle-wax smell, and under that something soft and floral. He watched her go down the stairs, and then stood up as Albert Lee came back and sat down behind the wheel, sighing.

He reached into his jacket, came out with a silver flask, unscrewed the cap and offered it to Danziger. “Cognac,” he said, “not that god-awful corn liquor. If you like?”

Danziger did, and it was splendid.

He handed it back and Albert Lee took a sip, savored it, offered Danziger a cigarette.

“Well, Charlie, have you decided to go see Miz Ruelle? If not, the end of the line is up ahead in Sallytown. Expect you could get a room and a meal at the Lucille House.”

Danziger took the cigarette, leaned over as Albert Lee lit it up, and then sat down in the seat opposite Albert Lee, watching the passengers file slowly up the lane toward the big house on the hill.

“I think I'll probably go see Miz Ruelle. Tell me something, Albert Lee, if you will?”

“If I can, I gladly will.”

“Who the hell were all those people?”

Albert Lee puffed on his cheroot and watched the last of the stragglers as they disappeared into the twilight woods surrounding the farmhouse. “They were my passengers, Charlie.”

Danziger sat back, gave him a big cowboy grin, put his boots up on the rail, hooked his thumbs into his belt, and spoke around his cigarette. “Don't go all cryptic on me now, Albert Lee.”

Albert Lee didn't smile. “Well, I think you're sort of working it out a bit, aren't you, Charlie?”

Danziger took the cigarette out of his mouth, but the grin stayed. “I'm thinking they're all ghosts. And I'm wondering about you and me and Miz Ruelle and what sort of things go on up here in the Belfairs.”

From a long way away came the trumpeting sound of a horse, a damn big horse, and then the earth-pounding thump and jingle of it galloping across a field.

“That'd be Jupiter?” said Danziger.

“Yes. Miz Ruelle lets him run free. He comes and goes pretty much as he pleases. Would you care to meet him?”

“I would. So can you help me out here, Albert Lee?”

Albert Lee was quiet for a moment. He sipped at his flask, handed it over to Danziger. “Well, they're not ghosts, exactly. They're kind of stuck in between two worlds.”

“Do they know that?”

“They may suspect it, the ones who've been here longest. To most of them I think it's like being in a dream.”

“Are we ‘in between' too, Albert Lee?”

The old man shook his head, looked down at his cheroot, looked back up at Danziger. Here he paused, considering what to say. “I have come to sort of a…position…on the issue, if you'd care to hear it?”

“I surely would.”

“Well, ever see that trick done with the two big magnets? Where they get placed just exactly so far apart, one I saw it was about a foot, and then the science fellow, he places a hollow copper ball just exactly right in between the two magnets?”

“I remember. The ball just floats there, held up by the magnets. Doesn't go either way. Just hangs there in midair.”

Albert Lee nodded. “That's right. So I'm thinking maybe that's where we are. In between two big old magnets, and we're just sort of floating there, spinning a bit, vibrating back and forth, not going either way.”

Danziger gave it some thought. “So what are we being held up by?”

“You mean, like where are the magnets?”

“Yeah.”

He looked up the slope, at the lights of the big house glimmering through the trees. “I figure she's one.”

“Miz Ruelle?”

“Yes. I believe she is.”

“And the other magnet?”

Albert Lee frowned, pulled on his cheroot. “Something not so nice. The opposite to her.”

“You mean, like the devil?”

“No. It's not like that at all. It's not about God and Satan or Heaven and Hell. That's all too far away. This is
local
. It's about something real bad that lives right around here, in the Belfairs, in Gracie and Sallytown and Niceville.”

“Like the Cherokee myth about Crater Sink? That demon supposed to live there?”

Albert Lee nodded, butted out his cheroot.

“The soul-eater. I believe that Crater Sink is the center of it, yes. But it spreads out from there. Like a shortwave radio signal. Radio waves are real, but we can't see them. It's like that. You can't see it, but if you listen hard, you can almost hear it. Sort of a high-pitched buzzing that seems to come from everywhere. Like cicadas in a tree line.”

Danziger was thinking about Frank Barbetta. “I talked to a man last night, said the same thing. Said there were words in it.”

“Haven't heard words,” said Albert Lee. “And you don't hear it so much up here at the plantation. But down in Niceville, it's in the air everywhere. And the closer you get to Crater Sink, the worse it gets. That's why everybody stays away from there. Even if they can't say why.”

“And what can we do about this?”

Albert Lee gave him an up-from-under look as he lit another cheroot, puffed out a cloud of blue smoke, grinned at Danziger through the cloud.

“A man came up here last spring. He was a man a lot like you. What we used to call a gunhand. His name was Merle Zane. He had a bullet in him and Miz Ruelle took it out for him. I guess the bullet was the one you put into him. Would you agree?”

Danziger took that in. “I'd have to say yes. What happened to him?”

“Well, he went to work for Miz Ruelle.”

“What kind of work?”

“He fought that duel I was telling you about. Up at the Gates of Gilead in Sallytown. It was Merle Zane who killed the bad man. Merle Zane was a good brave man and I liked him, Charlie.”

“So did I,” said Danziger. “And I regret shooting him. And where is he now? Is he here at the plantation? Maybe waiting for me?”

“No. He too was killed in the duel. Both shots were mortal. Both men died. It happens sometimes.”

“Who was the bad man?”

Albert Lee went quiet, thinking what to say. The heavy beat of hooves sounded on the lawn, and the stamp and rumble got louder. Now they could hear the snuffle and chuff of a horse breathing. The dark was coming down all around, and the house lights glimmered through the trees like fireflies.

“I think I have to leave that part to Miz Ruelle. But you might want to think on this. You ever hear of a man named Fernand Desnoyers? Was a Frenchmen—a painter, I think?”

Danziger finished the cigarette, stubbed it out on his boot heel, and tossed it out the door onto the gravel. “You're back to being cryptic, Albert Lee.”

They heard a loud snort and a trumpeting whinny and they both looked up the lane as a massive horse came out of the shadows and stood in the glow of the interior lights of the Blue Bird bus. A Clyde, but bigger than any that Danziger had ever seen, a war-horse from the Dark Ages, easily twenty-five hundred pounds, a white blaze on his muzzle, his ears forward, a magnificent head, alert brown eyes rimmed in white, a curved muscular neck, a chest as broad as a river barge. He had a long white mane, four white fetlocks, and a golden brown coat that in the dim light seemed to shimmer.

He stopped at the bottom of the drive and stamped and snorted, stared at them for a moment, huffed once more, and then dipped his head and started cropping at weeds by the side of the road.

“Damn,” said Danziger, getting up and going down the bus steps to take him in, “that's a magnificent animal.”

The horse looked up at the sound of his voice, shook its massive head, blew out a hot breath, and pounded a hoof into the earth so hard Danziger could feel it in his boots. He turned around and looked up at Albert Lee. “Well, I guess I'm invited.”

“Don't feel too special, Charlie,” said Albert Lee. He reached under the driver's seat and pulled out a burlap bag, handed it to Danziger. “Apples, Charlie. I always give him apples. That's what he's here for. Go make a friend.”

Danziger hefted the bag, smiled at Albert Lee. “I guess I will.”

He picked up his range jacket, slipped it on, feeling the heft of the Colt in the pocket. He started to walk away, stopped, turned back.

“You were gonna tell me about the French guy?”

“Yes. He lived in Paris in the 1850s. He once said, ‘Among the dead there are those who still have to be killed.' ”

He started up the engine, put his hand on the door lever. Danziger looked up at him and he felt the big horse's muzzle and his hot breath as he pushed it against Danziger's back.

“Is that what I'm going to do? Kill somebody who's already dead?”

“That depends on the Harvest. Miz Ruelle is up at the big house. She'll have some supper waiting. Mind you listen to what she has to say. Like I said, she's sort of a power in these parts.”

He closed the door and put the bus in gear, and the Blue Bird rattled off up the long grade, taillights burning hellfire red in the velvet dark.

Danziger turned around, ran a hand down the horse's muzzle, felt the heat in the silky hide, stroked his neck, and fed him an apple. The horse snapped it once and it was gone and then he looked at the bag in Danziger's hand and then into Danziger's eyes, nuzzled the bag and stamped a hoof, and Danziger gave him another apple.

He took the horse's halter and turned him around—it was like turning a cruise liner around in a canal—and they went back up the long dark lane toward the lights that shone through the trees.

The wind carried the scent of horse sweat and sweet grass and fresh-cut earth and cowboy coffee and pine smoke from a fire and Danziger knew that he had been called here for some purpose.

And he was fine with that.