Niceville

waiting for the manhunt to pass over.
    Although a critical part of the plan, this was also a tense period, a necessary risk to run with a chance that a state chopper flying over would notice this obscure patch of blue deep in the old forest and send a squad car in for a closer look.
    The only warning they would get, if this were to happen, would be a short cell phone call from Coker, who, as a sergeant with the BelfairCounty patrol, was out there in the hunt with the rest of the posse. So far this call had not come.
    Merle Zane was a craggy-faced Franco-Irish guy in his middle forties with a shaved head and a flame scar on the left side of his neck. Merle was extremely fit, a martial artist, calm and self-contained. The turnings of fate and the fact that his father was a mechanic and auto body man who had specialized in stolen car parts had led him into stock car racing until, one day in a Louisiana town called Cocodrie, a couple of pit mechanics started yapping at him about how he was hogging the wall on the off-side turn. Zane’s forceful counter argument included the deployment of a tire iron.
    A Cocodrie judge whose view of the exchange differed from Merle’s invited Merle to attend the notorious Angola prison, which was essentially a gladiator school granting any survivor an advanced degree in sheer brutality. Merle had survived it somehow, getting an early release seven years ago.
    Since then Zane had been in the employ of a pair of car dealers who ran auctions up and down the eastern seaboard, mainly dealing in muscle cars from the sixties and seventies. Since the muscle car auction business often blurred the line between simple fraud and grand theft auto, the owners of the business, two Armenian American kids whose family motto was “Your money and my experience will become my money and your experience,” needed someone like Merle Zane around the office, where his duties covered the spectrum from Corvettes to personal security.
    Although working with the Bardashi Boys was like sharing a hot tub with anaerobic algae, the job paid reasonably well. But Zane hoped one day to have his own charter boat service on Florida’s Gulf coast and had been quietly on the lookout for a business opportunity that would make that happen.
    This opportunity came along one day in the form of Charlie Danziger, a tall cowboy-looking older man with a big white handlebar mustache, an easy smile, and a hoarse, whispery voice. Danziger, born in Bozeman, Montana, at the other end of the state from his old friend Coker, was an ex–highway patrol officer, cashiered early due to a job-related disability—addicted to OxyContin after being injured on the job—who was now working as a regional manager for a Wells Fargo unit doing business along the eastern seaboard.
    Charlie Danziger and Coker had met in the Marine Corps, so long ago that neither man could quite remember where, although they sort of recalled that they were being strafed at the time. They were both stationed at Quantico, Virginia, by the end of their time in the Corps, and since they had both come to like the Deep South a lot better than the Far West, they eventually ended up in different law enforcement agencies down around Niceville.
    Charlie Danziger and Merle Zane had met at a used-car auction in Atlanta. Danziger was looking to buy a Shelby Cobra Mustang, and they soon discovered some mutual acquaintances among the Angola Gladiator School Alumni. After some background checking, Danziger invited Merle to take part in a confiscatory enterprise involving the First Third Bank in a rural supply town called Gracie. Four men were needed, including a good wheelman.
    The fourth man, not directly involved in the robbery, had been paid—anonymously—to create a diversion in another part of the state, which, it was felt, he either would or would not do.
    As it turned out, he had succeeded in creating the diversion in a way that approached catastrophic.
    At any rate, back in the planning stage, Danziger’s scheme, including the part involving his friend Coker and Coker’s Barrett .50, had struck Merle Zane as totally ruthless but tactically sound, and since the cops who had arrested him at Cocodrie and his keepers at Angola had not endeared the law enforcement community to him, he had come on board for a 33 percent share in the operation, the most dangerous part of which—the actual sharing—had yet to take place.
    So now the two men were waiting, with declining patience,