Niceville

payroll? I got every right to ask questions. Also, look into the Fargo guys, the drivers, see if they were talking too much, and if so, to who. Go up the ladder at Fargo and see who in management had the day off. Look for the one guy with a real good alibi, because that’ll sure as shit be the perp. If it was an inside job, other than somebody in the bank, Fargo is the best bet. Another thing, I hear some asshole laid his rig down up on the interstate, just before the robbery. Is that right?”
    “Yeah. It was a full load of rebar, came off a Steiger Freightways flatbed. A rollover. Some of the rebar got rammed straight through a minivan, laid some heavy pipe right through a coupla old church ladies. Hey, probably the stiffest rods they ever got to ride their whole lives.”
    Phil Holliman thought that was pretty funny, but it was totally wasted on Deitz.
    “Thing like that,” said Deitz, oblivious, “it woulda tied up all the state guys, including their choppers, medevac, traffic management, right?”
    “Yeah. That’s exactly what happened.”
    “And then somebody hits the First Third?”
    “Yeah. Are you thinking—”
    “I am. Did the driver live?”
    “Yeah. At least I think so.”
    “Find out. Get his name. Find out where he is right now. Find a way to get to him. I’ll bet my left nut that puke knows something.”
    “Yeah. Okay, I’ll do that. But the Feds are all over this. This is about dead cops. We start poking into it, they’ll wanna know why.”
    “Like I said, they took a lot of money belonging to Quantum Park,and that’s sure as shit
our
business. Anyway, that’s a risk we gotta take. The main thing, I don’t want this … item … out there, hanging over our heads. You listening?”
    “The Feds won’t like it. Not smart to get them fired up. They’ll come sniffing.”
    Deitz thought it over.
    “Kavanaugh. Nick Kavanaugh. I’ll start there. Maybe I can get close enough to the case to get one move ahead. Meantime, you work the angles, get some money on the street. Anybody asks, say we’re showing solidarity with our fallen brothers. Trying to help, you follow? One way or another, we gotta find these pukes, burn them down to the bone, get the thing back.”
    “Nick’s County. Dead cops. A national bank. That’s Fed. County won’t be near this case.”
    “No. But State CID will and he’s in real tight with State CID. And the Feds, that Boonie Hackendorff guy, the Agent in Charge, they all love him in Cap City. Nick’s a war hero. He’ll hear stuff.”
    “Maybe. But will he tell
you
?”
    A good question.
    Deitz thought this over.
    So did Phil Holliman, who had locked horns with Nick Kavanaugh a while back and gotten a piece of himself snapped clean off.
    “Yeah,” said Deitz, finally. “He’s family, isn’t he? My brother-in-law, remember? I married his wife’s sister?”
    Holliman knew Beth, Deitz’s wife and Kate Kavanaugh’s older sister. Also the older sister to Kate’s brother, Reed, a pursuit cop for State who was colder than outer space and crazier than a wolverine on meth. Both men knew that Deitz was smacking Beth around on a pretty regular basis. Knowing Nick and Reed the way he did, in Nick’s case from bitter personal experience, Holliman figured someday soon Byron Deitz was going to open his front door and find two off-duty cops there and then Deitz’s lights would get duly punched out. But he said nothing.
    What was the point?
    A difficult silence followed.
    Deitz knew what Phil wasn’t saying, but he didn’t give a damn about that. He was still a cop, no matter what that U.S. attorney said about it.
    And cops were like family.
    On the far end of the line Phil Holliman was thinking there was some irony in Deitz using a word like
family
considering the state of his own, but Deitz wasn’t a guy you could say was all loaded up with insight and awareness and all that shit.
    So he just kept his mouth shut and listened to Deitz rant and rave.
    “Anyway, whatever we’re doing, we got to do it fast. We got some serious Chinks flying in Saturday, to look at the
item
. And the window at … the source … closes on Monday night. It’s gotta be back in their inventory by then, or the black choppers will be flying up our ass. Go get this done.”
    He snapped the call off, tried some deep breathing to calm himself. He could see the lights of Niceville coming on down in the valley, see the microwave masts blinking red on the top of the limestone