Niceville

come down on this. “No idea. Lacy just says, come by and see her.”
    Nick was silent for a while longer. This wasn’t the time to bring up
the other thing
. Anyway, what Kate was saying had pretty much driven it out of his mind. He’d figure out what to say later.
    “Damn. Lemon Featherlight and Sylvia—”
    “And Miles. You can handle it, Nick. You’re a tough guy. Whatever it is Lemon Featherlight has to say, you should probably go and listen.”
    “I liked the Teagues. I liked thinking well of them. Maybe I won’t want to hear it.”
    “I know,” said Kate, touching his hand. “Who does? But that’s what you do, isn’t it?”

Coker and Danziger Have a Frank Exchange of Views
    When Danziger came to that Saturday morning, his first impression was that he was lying at the bottom of a swimming pool staring up through ten feet of clear blue water at a match-head sun that was floating in a sky of pale green. It was lovely and warm and relaxing down here and he was giving some thought to staying put for the rest of the day when a dark shadow fell across the sun and he heard a deep booming voice that must have been coming from the pool drain because it seemed to be all around him. The voice was vaguely familiar and he closed his eyes trying to place it.
    “Hey, Charlie, you dickhead. Wake the fuck up.”
    That helped. Coker.
    He opened his eyes.
    He was looking up at Coker, who was looking down at him, silhouetted against a bright halogen lamp of some sort. Coker’s face, never a kindly one, looked like a death mask, staring down at him with a cold yellow glitter in his pale brown eyes.
    “And don’t you for fuck’s sake say where am I,” growled Coker, who had a cigarette in his mouth. His silhouette was wreathed in smoke, and ashes from the tip were drifting down onto Danziger’s face.
    “Where am I?” said Danziger.
    Coker stepped back.
    “You’re at Donny Falcone’s place.”
    “How’d I get here?”
    “Last night at my house. I get home; you’re in the garage. You stick a pistol in my ear and then pass out on the floor like a mall-rat on roofies.I carried you inside, patched you up a bit, figured you needed to get that slug outta your chest, so I called Donny.”
    Danziger thought that over.
    “Donny’s a
dentist
. I was shot. I needed a medic, Coker, not a dental flossing.”
    A voice from farther away, somebody else in the background. The low drawling voice of Donny Falcone himself, not at all friendly.
    “I was medic enough to put you out and pull a nine-mil slug out of your fucking chest, Charlie. And sew you up nice and neat afterwards.”
    Danziger lifted himself up in the chair. It took awhile and hurt like hell. The room swirled a bit and went pale. He looked around, saw Donny Falcone looking back at him. Donny was a big black-eyed young Sicilian with George Clooney good looks and teeth so white that when he smiled you just wanted to smack him. Donny wasn’t smiling right now.
    In fact, he looked like a man who had just become an accessory after the fact to four—no, six—counts of felony murder, if you counted the two people in the news chopper.
    This was a pretty accurate précis of his situation, and it was a situation he would never have allowed himself to be in if he hadn’t indulged himself in a sexual fetish that involved using his anesthetized female patients as unwitting models in erotic photo-essays on the motif of partly naked and very attractive women posed shamelessly in dental chairs while gassed out of their gourds.
    This form of artistic expression, which, had it involved crucifixes stuck in buckets of rhino poop or naked dead lesbian nuns floating in glass tanks full of formaldehyde, would have gotten him a nude lap dance with a happy ending from the head of acquisitions at the Tate Modern.
    Instead, it brought him into Coker’s gravitational field in a roundabout way, beginning with the fact that Donny Falcone had—briefly—employed a young and very pretty Cherokee dental hygienist named Twyla Littlebasket, who had stumbled onto one of Donny’s “hobby shots” while borrowing his office computer.
    After some heated negotiations, Twyla Littlebasket had been very well paid to go suddenly deaf and blind. This turned out to be a short-term fix. After cashing Donny’s generous check and blowing half the money on a first-class tour of Europe and a scarlet Beemer, Twyla,upon reflection, decided that it was a matter of feminist duty to take this whole