Niceville

this?”
    “Pattern.”
    “Yeah. Look, Linus, I know this is crazy, but look around the office—”
    “Nick, with respect, what the hell you
think
I’m doing? Playing with my dick? I’m looking—”
    Silence, while Nick listened to the guy breathing, rapid and wheezy, like he had asthma or a cold.
    “What is it?”
    “I’m just … okay, the floor here …”
    Nick’s chest froze solid, but he said nothing.
    “There’s like …”
    The man was moving around, stepping back. Nick could hear his shoes on the floor.
    “Okay, there’s like a stain here, like something got spilled on the floor and took the varnish off—”
    Nick couldn’t help himself.
    “Is the floor warm?”
    “Warm? You mean, like, to the touch?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Hold on a minute”—creaking leather, the man’s wheezy breath coming shorter—“Yeah, it is. I mean, you can feel it pretty—”
    “Try outside the stain. See if the stain is warmer than the rest of the floor.”
    More rustling.
    “Yeah. Yeah, it is—okay, hold on. There’s something under the desk here … rolled under …”
    More creaking, the man breathing hard as he reached under the desk, Nick wondering why people always held their breath when they were reaching down to pick something up off the floor. It was why their faces got all—
    “Little metal rods. Sorta corroded.”
    Nick’s mind went on a short trip to Tahiti because it was a long way from here and Tahiti was supposed to be a real nice place to get away from all the bad things in life, but then Nick had to go get it and drag it all the way back to here and now.
    “Little rods. Okay. How many?”
    “Let’s see. Five … no, six.”
    “Steel rods? About two inches long?”
    “Yeah. That’s right. Stainless steel.”
    He had to convince the guy, not just say it right out loud.
    “Kate’s dad had a medical every year. At the VMI clinic. I’m going to tell you something, going to sound weird as shit, so you’re going toneed to know I’m not crazy. I want you, after I tell you what I’m thinking, I want you to go over to the clinic and ask to see Dillon Walker’s X-rays—”
    “Nick, I’m like off duty in a half hour—”
    “Dillon Walker served in the Hundred and First Airborne. He dropped into France on D-Day. He landed on a stone fence and shattered his right femur. They had to put pins in it to hold it together. They’ve been there ever since.”
    A silence, but it was that special kind of cop silence that you hear while the cop is thinking
oh please God not another fucking fruitcake
.
    “That’s why I want you to go over to the clinic, Linus. Take the pins and go over to the clinic and if they’re not the same damn pins Dillon Walker had in his femur then you’re right and I’m just another fucking fruitcake.”
    “Hey. I wasn’t thinking that.”
    “Yes you were. Will you do it?”
    More silence.
    “Okay. What the hell. I’ll do it. Will you be at this number?”
    “Yes. Anytime. Day or night.”
    “You’re serious, right? I mean, if what you’re saying is true—”
    “You’re screwing around in a crime scene.”
    “Oh jeez,” said Linus, and clicked off.
    Nick put the cell in his pocket, drew a long breath, and turned around to walk back to the house and tell Kate something other than what he firmly believed to be true, which was that her father was as dead and gone as Gray Haggard and how it was done was a complete mystery to him.
    She opened the door and stepped out to meet him halfway and as soon as she looked at him she knew what was in his heart. She dropped to her knees and began to cry, and Nick stepped in and held her.
    “That,” said Beau, watching from the conservatory, “doesn’t look good.”
    “It isn’t,” said Lemon Featherlight.
    “What the hell’s going on in this town?” asked Beau. A rhetorical question, but Lemon tried to answer it anyway.
    “Whatever it is,” he said, watching Kate Kavanaugh trying to pull herself together, “it’s been going on for a long time. Too long.”
    Kate came in, gave both of them a harried, puzzled look, as if wondering what to do with two strangers in her house.
    Both men saw it.
    “Nick, I think maybe I should turn the cruiser in. I can drop Lemon off somewhere?”
    Nick thought about it, about the day. He was done, and Beau looked the same. Lemon was quivering with a drive to do … something. Kate was about to collapse. The old line from the Bible came back:
    Sufficient unto the