Niceville

sensible solution.
    “We kill him if we can, and if we can’t, we piece him off?”
    “That’s the plan.”
    “Okay. I’m in.”
    Coker smiled, smacked the top of the dental tray, making the steel tools clatter.
    “Great. And now you got the slug out and you’re all doctored up, how about you go and get the
proceeds
and we divvy it up—Donny here’s going to get a taste, aren’t you, Donny?—and then we can all go about the Lord’s work with a clear conscience.”
    Danziger inhaled the smoke, let it out slow.
    “Nope.”
    “Nope? Why nope?”
    “I can’t go get it right now. I gotta be available to talk to the Feds today.”
    Coker looked a bit off balance.
    “Why are the Feds wanting to talk to you today?”
    Danziger gave him a sideways look.
    “Because I’m the regional manager of Wells Fargo and we popped that bank about a half hour after one of my trucks dropped off the payroll for half of Quantum Park. That’s why. The Feds don’t like coincidences.”
    Coker blinked down at him, pulling on his cigarette, sucking his cheeks in as he did it, which made his eyes look even scarier.
    “Did we think of this?”
    Danziger, who was getting tired of looking up at Coker looking down at him, pushed himself out of the chair and looked around the office for his shirt. Donny was a step ahead.
    “You didn’t have a shirt,” said Donny. “You can have one of mine. Also, I think you can fit into a pair of my jeans. Your boots are okay. Spotted up with blood some. You’re going to have to take a blood thinner in case you throw a clot. I have some OxyContin too. When that freezing wears off, you’re going to be in a lot of pain.”
    “I’m in a lot of pain right now.”
    Falcone nodded, got up, and walked back into his dispensary, fatigue in every line, a portrait of the dentist as a hanged man. While he was out of the room Danziger turned to Coker, who was leaning up against a rack of dental tools.
    “Where’s my cell phone? Not the one we used on the job. My own phone.”
    Coker reached into the pocket of his range jacket, tossed the cell to Danziger, who flipped it open and hit the ON button.
    He looked at the screen for a couple of minutes, and then held the screen up to Coker.
    “There you go. Seventeen calls, starting about ten minutes after the robbery. Nine from Cletus Boone at the depot—I left him in charge—four from Marty Coors at State, and the last three are from Boonie Hackendorff at the Feebs office down in Cap City. I called Boonie back last night around eleven—”
    “With a bullet in you?”
    “Had to. I knew they were going to wanna see me.”
    “Boonie ask you where you were calling from?”
    “Yeah. I said I was calling from Canticle Key, outside of Metairie, fly-fishing off a pirogue. Said my cell was off because I was on my goddam vacation and how the fuck would I know that somebody was going to hit the First Third in Gracie.”
    “Can you prove where you were?”
    “He can’t prove I wasn’t. Besides, if Boonie ever gets
that
suspicious, we’re fucked anyway.”
    “You use your cell? Because if you did—”
    Danziger was shaking his head.
    “No. I made a Skype call from my laptop. You can’t trace those to a cell tower.”
    Coker gave Danziger a look of approval.
    “Sharp, Charlie. Very sharp. Now what?”
    “I said I was driving up right away, going all night. I’m going to call in, say here I am, go see him at his office, as soon as I get a shirt.”
    Coker looked at Danziger’s bare chest, at the general color of the man, which, if Coker had been an interior decorator instead of a cop, he would have described as a cross between taupe and ecru.
    “How the hell are you going to get through a grilling with the Feds with a hole in your chest? You can’t afford to fall on your face right in the middle of a meet with the Feds, start barfing up blood and shit. And what about the
proceeds
?”
    “We’ll divvy up the proceeds after I’m done with Boonie, okay? You pulling duty tonight?”
    “No. The Feds don’t want us tracking mud all over this cluster-fuck. It belongs to the State CID and the Feebs. I’m off until Monday.”
    “Okay—you call Zane, set up a meet.”
    Coker thought it over.
    “Do the split—or the hit, if he gives us a chance do it all at once?”
    “Yeah. Why not?”
    “Even me?” asked Donny, walking back in the room carrying a crisp white shirt and jeans and a big soft suede jacket. “I mean, the split, not the