The Reckoning (25 page)

“What happened to the man who ran the place?”

“He lived a long time, unnaturally long. He was shot and killed in the spring of this year.”

Danziger took this in, sat back and looked at her, and she looked back, no tears now.

“Up in Sallytown?” he said. “At a place called the Gates of Gideon?”

“Yes. A palliative-care hospice. He lived in that place, in a closed-off suite of windowless rooms, aided only by his…creatures. His
guardians
. They served him in every way. He never went out-of-doors, not once in all the years he lived there. I tried many times to reach him, but he was…protected. Finally I found someone who could reach him and who was brave enough to try.”

“Merle Zane.”

“Yes. Merle went to Sallytown and fought his way past the man's guardians. Albert Lee was there and he was wounded in that fight. But they persevered and they confronted this man in his chambers.”

“His name, was it Abel Teague?”

“You know him?”

“I sure know the Teague line.”

“I am not surprised. Abel Teague lived as long as he did with the help of this power I spoke of. After Merle killed him in that duel, his spirit, his shade, somehow came to us, and I have decided he must face the Reckoning he has so long evaded. For six months we have kept his
shadow
here, in confinement, because he remains in every way a Teague.”

She smiled at him. “I see this puzzles you, Charlie. Do not mind that this is difficult to understand. I have had a long time to accept that it is true, and I no longer look for understanding.”

“But that's not the end of Teague's story. That's why you need me, isn't it?”

She looked at him. “Yes. The power that helped Abel is trying to free him. There may be violence, I believe it is inevitable, and all my fighting men are dead. I
hoped
for you, I admit, but I did not
bring
you.”

“What is the Harvest, Glynis?”

She was quiet for so long that Danziger thought she wasn't going to answer.

But she did. “I can't remember when the Harvest ceremony began. It may have been with Lorelei and Albemarle, my parents. But now it is in my hands, and I keep it going, since it serves the people around here. Each season some of our people choose to come and look in the mirror—the mirror up in the Jasmine Rooms—and see what they have sown and what they must reap. Most do it happily, looking for an end to what they call their
dreaming
.”

“Is that what they're doing, Glynis? Dreaming?”

“They think so.”

“And what do you think?”

She went inward, looked for the words. “I believe they're lost, caught between the two mirrors, the one down in Niceville and the one in this house, and they want to find a way out.”

“Lost?”

“Yes. They've gotten caught up between life and death, and this state feels like dreaming to them.”

“How did they get to this…state?”

Again she smiled at him. “Many people believe that when a person is dying, unless all the mirrors in the house are covered, the dying person's spirit can pass into the mirror and live in that world, not knowing how to leave it. In France, during the Terror, the executioners used the mirrors from our house to show my family their own severed heads, taken from the basket while life was still in them, and they looked at the mirrors and sent their souls into them, and there they all stay. My great-grandfather, John Gwinnett Mercer, said that the mirrors had been ‘opened' by these dying souls. I believe there is something in what he said.”

She finished her drink, set it down. “So we have the Harvest, Charlie, and the people, if they are ready, use the mirrors to try to put an end to their dreaming.”

“Are you dreaming too?”

She looked thoughtful. “I don't question my life, Charlie. I feel very
present
, and I have good work and my plantation and the animals and Clara, and I have the care of these people until they find their way. That is what the Harvest is for.”

“Like Judgment Day?”

“No. I never believed in that kind of a god. That god wouldn't be much different from the
thing
that lives in Candleford House. The Harvest is simply for waking up and crossing over. And tomorrow is Abel Teague's time to do that. But he always looks for a way out.”

“And he has these
guardians
to help him?”

“He does. They may already be here. Have you noticed? The horses are quiet. All the animals are quiet. The cicadas and the owls too. They are never quiet. And now, as you can see, the dragonflies have appeared, as they always do in troubled times. They are waiting for the morning.”

He sighed, took a deep breath, sat back in his chair, stubbed out his cigarette. “Then let us, you and me, see to the dishes and lock up the locks, and then we will go do the same.”

She pulled her shawl around her shoulders. “I'm so afraid of this night, Charlie.”

“So am I,” he said, giving her a wolfish smile. “Terrified down to my boots. Shaking in my socks. Shame to have to fight through this night all alone.”

She looked up at him and read his mind. She found a sideways smile to give him back. “You are not a very
good
man, are you Charlie Danziger?”

Danziger put on his innocent face, which was even less convincing than Coker's innocent face. “Mrs. Ruelle. I am the
soul
of virtue.”

“Well, we'll see about that, won't we?”

They got set up and ready long before dawn. Seven men and two women, all geared up, wired and rolling, two cover trucks, one a Niceville Utilities truck, the other a ten-year-old junker minivan, and three nondescript beige-mobiles, Toyotas and Hondas from a government-approved used-car dealership. This involved almost the entire operational wing of the Cap City FBI crew—two of them had been left behind to cover the surveillance taps on the Maranzano apartment and answer the office phones, which, because of all the shit that was happening in Niceville, were ringing pretty much nonstop. They had a couple of fly-ins from Atlanta to assist, and so far it was by-the-book boring. They had all done this before, in training at Quantico and on the streets for real, and being FBI, they knew how to do this pretty well.

They were setting up a box lift, an invisible surveillance square around the subject—in this case, Bluebell Littlebasket's ranch house on Skyway Road, a short block away from Mauldar Field.

The dawn was just a milky tint in the sky above the black bulk of Tallulah's Wall. Sunday morning in Niceville, and nobody out on the streets, no cars, and only the red strobes of the Mauldar Field landing lights off to the northwest.

A building wind, and maybe storms later, but right now, quiet and cool.

Boonie Hackendorff was staying well back, a half mile away in the Mauldar Field parking lot, in his own ride, a vintage Shelby Cobra Mustang in racing green, an exact clone of Steve McQueen's ride in
Bullitt
, and only slightly less conspicuous than a circus wagon.

Boonie didn't care. He loved it, and he wasn't planning on getting anywhere close to the action. If there was any, which he sincerely doubted. It seemed highly unlikely that a street operator as smart as Coker would let himself get taken down on a residential block in suburban Niceville, certainly not while trying to extract one of his girlfriend's relations.

Coker had never been a guy for the Grand Sentimental Gesture. He was as cold as ditch water and he always had been.

It was more likely that he had sent some kind of intermediary, a person with no wants and no warrants, who would come by either to transport Bluebell or to deliver the route docs and let her get on with it by herself. Either way they were going to stay on it until the trail led to Twyla or a dead end, or just maybe possibly to Coker himself.

The tricky part here was that, technically, Bluebell Littlebasket hadn't actually
done
anything illegal, other than take a call from her sister, who wasn't on a wanted list either.

Judge Stonehouse, a bit of a stickler for due process, had—grudgingly—given them a warrant loaded with restrictions, but it was enough to get the thing rolling.

All Twyla Littlebasket had against her was that she was a person of interest in the search for Coker, who was wanted on several federal warrants, including interstate flight, armed robbery, four counts of felony murder of police officers, and two counts of manslaughter one in the matter of a downed news chopper.

Tell the truth, Boonie's mind was really on the Delores Maranzano file, and those three Mafia goombahs she had holed up in her suite at the Memphis.

Acting on Kurt Pall's affidavit, Boonie had gotten a surveillance and intercept warrant on the apartment, and right now taps were on the phones and the Internet connection and a laser mike was trained on the living room window of the Maranzano suite, recording everything that was being said and done inside the place.

The results of which so far had been pretty much dick, mostly increasingly unpleasant exchanges between Delores and Mario La Motta—no love lost there—and a lot of back and forth between the goombahs about everything from business deals to Chihuahua farts to the World Cup of soccer and who was going to win it this year. Nothing bored Boonie Hackendorff more than soccer, a game that seemed to turn on who could trip over his own shadow and fall down writhing more convincingly than the other guy.

The one good hit they got was a short telephone exchange between Julie Spahn and a guy named Chi-Chi Pentangeli in Miami, who might or might not be connected to Tony Tee's organization. In the call, which sounded like it was about truck parts, Pentangeli had made one slip—if that's what it was—when he said something about the package coming in from Istria.

Spahn had changed the subject so fast that it stood out, and Pentangeli had picked up on it as well, so there was a lot of meaningless babble that went nowhere, much of it in Calabrian.

But Boonie knew that Istria wasn't even a place anymore, that it was part of Yugoslavia or maybe Croatia now, and the Istria connection just might mean a reference to a double homicide up in Quebec a year ago, a French-Canadian lawyer and his wife, who had been tortured and killed in a truly spectacular way.

The lawyer had been part of the Commisso-Racco network and the hit—there was no other word for it—had been so mind-blowingly gruesome that even some of the button guys around Montreal had been talking about it too much, and once in front of an RCMP snitch. The snitch picked up one useful bit of information—namely, that the hit was a “demonstration” done to make a point with the Commisso-Racco crowd, and that the rumor was running around that it had been done by
L'Istriano
, whoever the hell he was.

The RCMP Organized Crime guys had brought it to DC and asked the FBI for a data-mining search through the NSA, the results of which were three brief mentions of the Istriano, and one linked name, Tito. So they had Tito who maybe was a hired assassin called the Istriano and maybe was just some low-level mob guy named after the thug who used to run Yugoslavia.

Intel, they called it, probably because
irrelevant crapola
was already taken.

“Six Actual?”

Boonie, who was Six Actual, picked up the radio and keyed it. “Six. Go.”

“Six, this is Blue Three.” Blue Three was the Niceville Utilities truck.

“Go, Blue Three.”

“Six, I have the Eye on the subject and she's just turned on the lights in the living room. She's moving around, still in her robe.”

“Roger that, Blue Three. Everybody else hold tight. No radio checks. Just sit on it.”

A series of double clicks as the other Blue Team units acknowledged the transmission. The Eye was the name given to any member of the Box Team who actually had the subject in sight.

The rest of the units were set up in a roughly rectangular grid on the side streets east and west and south, and north on the perimeter fence that ran along the southern edge of Mauldar Field. No matter which way Bluebell moved, if she did, and no matter which way someone might approach the house, they'd be seen by one or more of the surveillance units.

The only thing that could screw it up was some civilian phoning in a suspicious vehicle parked outside her house at four in the morning.

And that could be tricky, because Boonie had made the operational decision not to inform the Niceville PD about the surveillance op this morning.

That was because the Niceville PD was thoroughly rattled by the totally crazy shit that had gone down over the last few days and in their current state could not be depended upon to shut the fuck up about what the Cap City feds were doing.

Boonie had gone down to see the cops last night and he'd found a pack of state and county and city cops crowding the halls of Lady Grace, all of them looking for payback, blood, anybody's blood.

A State Patrol captain named Martin Coors—Reed Walker's boss—had told him that Reed was with the Walker family and friends in a private waiting room down the hall from the critical care unit, and that's where Boonie found them all: Kate Kavanaugh and her sister Beth; Reed, a block of ice with an inward stare, looking down at his hands; Tig Sutter, looming large and weary in a corner; Beau Norlett, Nick's old partner, in a wheelchair; Lacy Steinert, a PO with the Probe, sick with shock; a Nordic-looking blond he didn't know who was introduced to him as Helga; and a gorgeous young woman in a Niceville Transit uniform who said she was Doris Godwin, apparently a special friend of Lemon Featherlight's. Godwin was a Cherokee, had that aristocratic look, dark shining hair, and a strong face, and there seemed to be some tension between her and the Nordic woman.

Boonie went straight to Kate, who was a wreck. He hugged her, hugged Beth, shook hands with Reed; asked about Nick and Lemon and Frank Barbetta—didn't like what he heard, not at all; spoke quietly in a corner to Tig, who smelled of cigars and looked like hell; hugged Lacy Steinert; patted Beau Norlett on the shoulder and got a weak grin back; looked around the room—
grief and fear and pain and anger
—and then, sensing that he was one visitor too many, got the fuck out of their way.

Out in the hall, in a tangle of cops and a few media types, he pulled Marty Coors and Jimmy Candles off in a corner. Jimmy Candles was a staff sergeant with the Belfair and Cullen County Sheriffs, and they were all old friends.

Boonie got the details, and the prognosis.

Lemon Featherlight, now a certified hero, was probably going to live, but he might have some nerve damage from the bullet track across his left shoulder. Mavis Crossfire was down in the bone clinic, getting fitted for a cast, and she'd be back on the job in the morning. Frank Barbetta had lost a lot of blood and the wound was septic and he was fighting shock and there could be blood clots, so who knew.

And then there was Nick Kavanaugh, who, by the faces these two cops were wearing and the mood in the halls, and from what Boonie had heard in the private waiting room, and from what he had seen in the CCU—Nick surrounded by machines and LED displays and sensor readouts and wires and harried nurses and doctors trying to get his heart rate stabilized—had them all running scared.

“Six Actual, Blue Three.”

“Blue Three.”

“I have a Cap City cab pulling up.”

“Roger that. Everybody, ready to roll?” Multiple clicks.

“Blue Three, still got the Eye, subject is in the living room now, she's dressed, got a coffee, talking on her cell, looking out the window. Cab is at the curb. I can see a driver—”

They had no warrant to tap Bluebell's phones, which was a serious pain in the—

“Subject is moving to the hall. Got her coat on now—”

“Can you ID the cabdriver?”

“Female. Black. Not Coker.”

“Roger that. Everybody hold.”

A minute passed.

“Six, she's still inside. Not coming out yet.”

“Six, this is Blue Four.”

“Go.”

“We've got a cab rolling south here. Looks like he's hunting a street address.”

“What company?”

“Ace Cabs. Don't know them. He's turning onto Skyway now, a black Crown Vic.”

“Four, this is Six. Can you see the driver?”

“No. Tinted windows.”

“Six, this is Blue Two. We've got a cab rolling north on Carrier Drive—just went by us, a Windstar minivan, Peachtree Cabs. He's turning left onto the service road.”

“This is Six. Can you ID the driver?”

“No. Tinted windows.”

“This is Blue Five. We've got him. He's rolling past us right now. There's some light from the streetlamp here…Wait one…a woman, white.”

“Okay. Everybody hold.”

“Six, this is Blue Four. Ace Cabs is rolling up to subject's house. How many cabs is that?”

“Cap City, Ace, Peachtree—this is a stunt.”

“Six, this is Blue Two. We have another fucking cab coming toward us—Airport Limo!”

“Everybody shut up and hold. Don't get rattled just hold your positions.”

“Six, this is Blue Three. We have four cabs all pulled up in front of subject's house. No drivers out. Subject still in house.”

“Blue Three, this is Six. Do you have the Eye?”

A moment.
“Six, we haven't seen her leave.”

“But do you have the Eye on her?”

“Negative that. You want us to move in?”

“With what? Our dicks in our hands. We got no warrant to contact her. All we can do is follow.”

“Roger that.”

“I want the rest of you to acknowledge.”

“Blue Two, roger that.”

“Blue One, copy.”

“Blue Four, copy.”

“Blue Five, copy.”

“Blue Three, what's going on?”

“Garage door coming up. No lights. Someone's moving. Dome light in the Airport Limo just came on. Now off. Airport is rolling. Repeat, Airport is rolling. Fuck. All cabs are rolling now. Peachtree, Ace, Cap City, all rolling out. Six, do we follow?”

Shit. What now?

“Anybody got the Eye?”

“Six, this is Blue Three. She's in the Airport Limo.”

“Have you got the Eye?”

Hesitation. Doubt.
“Windows are all tinted.”

“Six, this is Blue Four. These cabs are going in different directions. They're scattering like bugs. We should stop them all.”

“On what grounds? And if we do, then what? We have no warrant for interception until she's in contact with our target. Judge Stonehouse made that crystal clear. We stop her now, and even if she's got Coker stuffed into her panties, it's all fruit of the poisoned tree—”

“Six, she's scampering. We gotta—”

“Look. Everybody pick one and—”

Boonie's cell phone rang. Boonie grabbed it up. “What the fuck?”

“Tell them to sit tight.”

That voice. Holy shit. “Coker?”

“Tell them to hold their positions.”

“Why the fuck would I do that?”

“Because I have a hostage.”

“Coker, who the fuck have you got?”