Niceville

Kleen Kar Kare on Long Reach Boulevard, watching the Tulip River, at full flood, boiling past the muddy banks, the broad back of the river mud brown, the surface of it rippling and roiling with the current.
    Deitz was drinking a lime slushy and waiting for a wiry Filipino kid to scrub Mr. Thad’s nose blood off the leather passenger seat of the Hummer.
    He had a new BlackBerry and was trying to get it to dial a number for him, but it didn’t really want to. He had to use his thumbs to type the number in manually. He had extremely large thumbs. Things were not going well.
    Finally he got through to his IT section.
    “Andy there?”
    A moment of silence, and Deitz had time to wonder again where the hell that walnut-cracking sound was coming from.
    “Sir?”
    “Andy. You got anything yet for Tig Sutter?”
    “I’m afraid not yet, sir. It is very complicated. The sender was—”
    “I need something for Tig, Andy,” he said, literally in a growl. “Something fucking soon. I need Tig to owe me big. I need it fast. This is
not
the time for you to fuck up again, kid.”
    “I will most definitely not fuck up again. I am on it very hard.”
    “How long?”
    “End of the day, I hope.”
    The walnut-cracking sound inside Deitz’s head got very loud and the Tulip River went all reddish.
    “
End of the day?
Fuck
that
. Get it now. Get it right
fucking
now. Be back to me in one hour or start clearing out your desk. You follow?”
    A long silence, while Deitz wondered where he was going to get an IT guy as good as Andy Chu, deciding finally that the woods were full of IT geeks just as good as Andy Chu. Maybe better. In the meantime, like any good manager, you had to motivate your people.
    Andy’s voice again, cool and calm.
    “I follow, sir.”
    “I’m fucking clear?”
    “Yes sir. You are … extremely clear.”
    “Good. Get it done,” said Deitz, clicking off.
    He stood there, staring down at the screen, thinking, as had been his habit lately, black and complicated thoughts, including an inventory of everyone he had ever met who owned a pair of navy blue cowboy boots—not many—when he heard his name called, in a strange lisping accent.
    He turned to watch as a long black Lincoln Town Car—the one that looked like a turtle in a tuxedo—came to a stop at the curb by the car wash, a lean and sallow face peering at him out of the rear window—
another goddam zipperhead
—an Asian man with narrow wrinkled eyes as black as buttons, the too large head completely bald, on closer examination, a distinctly unpleasant look, with a large misshapen forehead, bumpy irregular cheekbones, a squashed mushroom of a nose, and a thin-lipped slash of a mouth with an incongruous soul patch under the lower lip.
    Deitz threw the slushy into the Tulip and came over to the curb, his expression not welcoming and his mood unimproved by this unexpected arrival.
    “I’m Byron Deitz. Who the fuck are you?”
    The head bobbed and showed its teeth, tiny, even babyish, stained with tobacco, fencing off a fat white tongue that bobbed around inside the man’s bloodred mouth like a moray in a cave.
    “Will you join me?” he said, opening the door and pulling back inside the rear seat to give Deitz some room to slide in. “It is much cooler inside.”
    Deitz looked at the man for a moment, feeling the weight of his Sig in his belt holster, considering the man’s expensive pearl gray suit, his satiny shirt, a much paler gray, the lavender silk tie, and the gold collar bar, the slender Italian shoes, the lavender silk socks.
    The man made an ingratiating head bob and flashed those teeth again, and the name came to Deitz out of an old black-and-white film with Humphrey Bogart.
    Joel fucking Cairo
, he said to himself.
In the flesh. What next? A fat man with a black bird?
    “Who are you and who you with?” he said, in a steely snarl, staying firmly planted on the sidewalk.
    “I’m sorry. My name is …” Here he mumbled something that sounded to Deitz like
Hickory Dock
.
    “Come again?”
    “I am Zachary Dak,” he said, more carefully. “Here is my card.”
    He reached into his suit jacket and brought out a silver card case, extracted one, offered it to Deitz with both hands, palms up, smiling at him.
    Deitz took the card, read it.
    Zachary Dak, LLB, PhD
Director of Logistics
Daopian Canton, Inc.
2000 Fortunate City Road, Shanghai
PR China 200079
86.022.63665698
    Deitz slid the card into his suit jacket, looked around the