Niceville

throw a hysterical rang and run around the backyard yapping like a castrated hyena and Mrs. Kinnear would shuffle to the screen door in her house smock and her rabbit-ear slippers and scream at it to shut the hell up, and then shuffle back to her movie—
Gigi
—and her bucket of Zinfandel and whenshe did she’d always let the screen door slam, which drove her neighbors nuts.
    After eight rings, the line would switch over to voice mail and the machine delivered Christian Bock’s recorded voice, pretty wise-ass, saying,
“This is a machine, you know what to do”
and then the beep. No message was left.

Charlie Danziger Calls It a Day
    Charlie was a patient man.
    It was Saturday night. Maybe Bock was out having a few beers with the boys.
    Maybe Bock was just a regular guy.
    Maybe Bock had nothing to do with screwing Twyla Littlebasket and her entire family in the ear.
    Maybe Bock was a Cub Scout who helped old ladies across the street whether they wanted to cross or not.
    Maybe Charlie Danziger was just an ugly-ass old coot with a suspicious mind.
    Fuck that
, Danziger was thinking.
    He’s the one
.
    Danziger set the cell phone down, yawned, stretched, looked at the clock on Coker’s wall, looked across at Coker and Twyla, both sound asleep on the couch, Twyla all curled up in Coker’s lap like a big tawny kitten, Coker’s silver-haired head flopped back and his mouth wide open.
    No formal decision had been made, but neither Coker nor Danziger had any stomach, right now anyway, for punching Twyla’s ticket, so it looked like they had acquired another partner.
    She’d probably be okay.
    The way she’d handled the Donny Falcone thing had called for a streak of cold-ass larceny as tough as boot leather.
    And she knew she was in business with people it was risky to fuck with, at least in the metaphorical sense.
    God, look at Coker
.
    How the fuck old was he?
    Coker was fifty-two, the same age as Danziger, but he looked about eighty, lying that way. He wasn’t snoring yet, but Danziger knew he was going to start any minute. You didn’t want to be around for something like that.
    Danziger pulled the blanket up over both of them, shut off the cable news—apparently the Rainey Teague kid had come out of his yearlong coma and started yapping about some guy named Abel—some biblical shit, sounded like—anyway, how nice for the kid—welcome back to reality, you poor little bastard—and they were
still
running a loop of the sniper takedown at Saint Innocent Orthodox, including that long shot of Coker and Mavis Crossfire and Jimmy Candles and Danziger having a good laugh by the cruiser.
    So far nothing more about the cop killings from Friday
—the investigation continues
was the phrase—Boonie Hackendorff and Marty Coors, the State guy, had given a press conference—Boonie looking like a club bouncer in a nice blue suit and the tie around his neck all askew—saying that they were
following breaking leads
and
expected to make multiple arrests very soon
. Coker snuffled, swallowed, and then began to snore.
    Oh Christ, there he goes
—sounds like somebody pulling a rubber boot out of a bucket of mud.
    Adenoids probably.
    Well, as Dandy Don Meredith used to say on
Monday Night Football, Turn out the lights, the party’s over
.
    Danziger got his jacket and his boots and the last bottle of white wine and tiptoed out Coker’s front door, locking it softly behind him. The night was dark and smelled of cut grass and flowers and leftover barbecue smoke.
    Stars were out.
    The long day was done.
    And tomorrow promised to be interesting as hell. Way it looked right now, he’d either end it a rich man or a dead man. Maybe Boonie Hackendorff and his boys would come calling. Maybe Coker would wake up early and decide that he needed to do some preventive maintenance on his life, this time including Charlie Danziger.
    Either way, he intended to be up before dawn and ready for whatevercame down the road. One thing he knew, anybody wanted a slice of him, they’d have to pay for it in a couple quarts of their own blood.
    This was the sort of life-or-death drama that gave a lonely man some spring in his step, put some jalapeños in his chili. Maybe it was even the reason he’d planned the First Third robbery in the first place. One thing for sure, he wasn’t bored.
    So, all in all, he figured, a good two days of work. He particularly enjoyed imagining the look on Byron Deitz’s face when he read the text message telling