Niceville

the dim outline of Danziger’s body through the bullet holes in the barn boards.
    He stitched up the boards in a Charlie Danziger–shaped pattern—eleven more rounds—and then the slide locked back and he was out of ammunition. Merle turned and stumbled into the woods, lungs on fire and head spinning, crashing through the brush like a gut-shot buck, thinking,
So much for the beautiful friendship
.

Gray Haggard Comes at a Bad Time
    Gray Haggard had once been briefly and happily married, but the young Margaret Mercer whom he had adored beyond words was so long in the past now that he had trouble bringing her image to mind, other than her soft brown eyes and her auburn hair and her round full body and that she had been a daring and sometimes astonishing lover.
    But Margaret Mercer was long gone from the world and it had always seemed to him unfair that he should manage to survive the Kasserine Pass and that god-awful landing at Gela in Sicily and finally go through the abattoir of Omaha Beach and come out of it with nothing more than a chest full of shrapnel, while back in Niceville his heart’s desire had fallen prey to a female mosquito loaded up with the encephalitis virus.
    His relationship with the Almighty had been a distant one ever since and now that he was closing in on eighty-five he often gave thought to what he was going to say to God should they ever end up on speaking terms again.
    These were the sorts of thoughts he was thinking as he drove his 1952 lime green and hot pink Packard around the curve of the tree-shaded lane that led up to Temple Hill. It was late in the day to tend to Delia’s garden—the light of the evening was almost gone—but his alternative had been to drive all the way up to Sallytown to the Gates of Gilead Palliative Care Center and watch an old friend named Plug Zabriskie descend deeper into his terminal dementia.
    So a bit of shuffling around in Delia’s forsythia bushes and perhaps some time spent fiddling with her malfunctioning sprinkler system—thatis, the
house’s
malfunctioning sprinkler system—he had an idea that Delia’s sprinkler system was in tip-top shape … now there was another thing he needed to take up with God, if they’d ever let him get close enough. One of the benefits of age was supposed to be a certain easing of the more frantic carnal imaginings and yet here he was having sinful thoughts about Delia Cotton’s sprinkler system. Haggard slowed to a halt, the sinful ideas dying slowly away as he stared at the entrance to Delia’s estate. The wrought-iron gates were wide open. Delia always kept them closed.
    Always.
    He braked the Packard in the entrance and extracted his long, lean frame from behind the wheel, straightening up with an effort and peering over his glasses at the big house up on the rise, a tall, bent old man wearing tan slacks and a plaid shirt, gardening boots, with a tanned, hawkish face, a crest of snow white hair, and clear blue eyes with a fan of deep wrinkles at each corner.
    He was looking at
another
puzzle.
    Delia’s house, called Temple Hill, was a classic High Victorian mansion, with a wide curving porch running all the way around the building, gingerbread carvings and gables and turrets here and there, and very fine stained-glass windows in all the rooms.
    Tonight these rooms were shining like red and violet and green jewels in the fading light. It looked like Delia had turned on every light in the entire house. It stood out in the blue evening like a cruise ship on the far horizon.
    As he was wondering about the open gate and the house all lit up like this, he heard the sound of music floating down the grassy hill-side—a deep resonant droning melody, a cello or a viola or perhaps an organ.
    The sound, although very graceful and moving, was also very loud, and loud was one of the many modern innovations that Delia did not approve of.
    Gray stood there for a moment, taking it all in and wondering what the hell Delia was up to, and then he got back into the Packard and rolled up the cobblestone drive, parking the car in the wide turning circle a few yards from her front steps.
    The front door was wide open and the hallway was filled with shimmering light from the massive crystal chandelier that dominated thefoyer. The cello music flowed out of the house in a river of honey-colored sound.
    He stood there beside the car for a moment, wondering if he had been taken back in time to those buttermilk days before the goddam