Niceville

dead and the crows are pecking out his eyes. Could go either way.”
    “A guy wrote a movie once about these mutts who find a bunch of money and then they have to start killing each other over it. With that weird-looking actor in it, used to be married to Angelina Jolie?”
    “Billy Bob Thornton.
A Simple Plan
.”
    “Yeah. That was it. They started by just trying to keep the money, and then they had to start popping guys, ended up popping each other—”
    “First one was Billy Bob. And he was the nicest guy in the film. What’s your point?”
    “I’m just saying …”
    A silence.
    The weed-whacker dad was helping his kid whack weeds. Dad was blitzed to the eyebrows on beer, and the kid was waving the weed whacker around like he was Luke Skywalker. It wasn’t going to end well.
    “All I was saying, Coker, was the way we’re going right now we’re going to end up having to shoot each other.”
    “We’re not there yet.”
    “Okay. Good to know.”
    “Where are we on Deitz and the Frisbee?”
    Danziger grinned. “I had him bouncing around Tin Town going from Piggly Wiggly to Winn-Dixie to the Helpy Selfy and back to the Piggly Wiggly. Coker, I tell you, it was a thing of beauty.”
    “Where we going to make the exchange?”
    “No exchange needed.”
    “We gotta get the thing to him, don’t we?”
    “He’s already got it.”
    “He does?”
    “He just doesn’t know it yet. I had a Slim Jim, popped the rear hatch on his Hummer while he was inside the Piggly Wiggly reading my note. Shoved it into the jack storage slot under his spare tire. Lest he has a flat, which Hummers don’t get, he’ll never find it on his own.”
    Coker stared at him.
    “What if Deitz doesn’t wire us the money?”
    “Then we snitch him out to the Feebs. Make a call, we say Byron Deitz is diddy-bopping around Niceville with a top-secret Frisbee in the back of his Hummer. Either way, we’re not stuck holding something will get us in deep shit with the CIA.”
    “Risky,” said Coker.
    “No. It was
audacious
,” said Danziger, savoring the word. “Another thing. I also tucked a packet of bills from the First Third inside a cable hatch down behind the gas pump shutoff switch.”
    “Jeez. How much?”
    “One hundred thousand—”
    “Holy fuck, Charlie. That’s a lot of cash.”
    “Yeah, well, you’re not going to like this either, but I also threw in some of the shit we scooped out of the lockboxes.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like that antique gold Rolex and those emerald cuff links in the Cartier case and a string of—”
    “
Fuck
, Charlie. I had my eye on that fucking Rolex—”
    “Rolexes are out, Coker. Everybody’s wearing Movados now.”
    “Says who?”
    “Says
GQ
.”
    “Fuck
GQ
. What did you do that for?”
    “For verisimilitude,” said Danziger, savoring that word too.
    “Verisimilitude?”
    “Convincing supportive evidence. Just in case we need to dump this whole thing onto Deitz.”
    “I know what
verisimilitude
means, Charlie. Getting that twitchy, is it?”
    “It is. It always does, at least in this town.”
    Danziger looked out at the sky, saw a slice of the old forest on top of Tallulah’s Wall.
    “You ever wonder, Coker, about that?”
    Coker’s smile gradually went away, and he cut a sideways glance at Danziger.
    “What? Wonder about Niceville?”
    Danziger folded his arms across his chest, kicked at a tuft of saw grass.
    “Neither of us was born here. I’m from Bozeman and you’re from Billings. Before we got here, neither of us ever did anything like we just did yesterday, did we?”
    “Regrets are for losers, Charlie.”
    “I’m not talking regret. I
like
money, Coker, and I intend to enjoy every fucking dime. It’s just that, this job, killing those cops, you get right down to it, it was sorta out of character for us. Both of us.”
    Coker gave it some thought.
    “You, maybe. You’re basically a nicer guy than I am. Hell, I was twelve when I kicked my old man to death in the backyard.”
    “Your old man deserved it, what he was doing to your mom. Hell, even the Bighorn county deputies said he had it coming.”
    “What the fuck are you saying, Charlie? Like, Niceville put some sorta
spell
on us? Jesus, Charlie. We saw a business opportunity, we took it. End of story. Don’t go all mystical on me now.”
    Danziger was staring up at Tallulah’s Wall.
    “Them old Cherokee, Coker, they thought this place was cursed, before ever a white man got here. Said there