Niceville

hit.”
    “Yeah,” said Coker, shooting a glance at Danziger and then cutting away, which Danziger correctly interpreted as
maybe we’ll hit Donny too, just to be safe
.
    “Yeah, even you.”
    Then he had a final thought.
    “Hey, what if it goes all wrong at Boonie’s? Say you
do
pass out, or you start bleeding all over the carpet, some crazy shit. What about the money then? Maybe I should go get it now?”
    Danziger went back a long way with Coker, knew him pretty well, which was why he was giving the answer a long thought. If Coker decided that Danziger was jerking him around, he was just as likely to shoot him right now.
    “It’s at your place.”
    Coker was not delighted by this news.
    “My place? Where at my place? On my front porch, all wrapped up in a black bag with LOOT on the side, maybe a big red ribbon and a note with teddy bears on it?”
    “It’s lying on the rafters in the roof of your garage. Black canvas bags. No teddy bears.”
    Coker watched as Danziger got himself into Donny’s shirt and the leather jacket.
    “You’re an unpredictable son of a bitch, Charlie. I’ll give you that.”
    “Yeah?” said Charlie, pulling a cigarette out of Coker’s pack and lighting it up, squinting at him through the smoke. “Well, there it is.”
    “Yeah,” said Coker, grinning back at him. “There it is.”
    “Ecco la cosa,”
said Donny.
    They both looked at him through the smoke. Donny shrugged his shoulders.
    “What did you just say?” asked Coker.
    “I said,
ecco la cosa
. There it is.”
    A thoughtful pause.
    “Well, don’t,” said Coker, after a moment.
    “Yeah,” put in Danziger. “Don’t.”
    “Why not?” asked Donny in a hurt tone.
    Danziger and Coker exchanged looks.
    “Because it just sounds …”
    “Weird,” said Danziger.
    “Yeah,” said Coker. “Weird.”

Nick Kavanaugh Gets Some Disappointing News
    Beau Norlett, back from a week’s leave, caught Nick as he came in through the door, the office reeking of burned coffee, the weekend crew sitting around in their shirtsleeves, holsters and cuffs showing, everyone talking low, a cold gray rain streaming down the windows.
    “Nick,” said Beau, with a broad smile. “How was Savannah?”
    Nick gave him a look.
    Had he heard about what had happened in Forsyth Park? Probably not.
    “Nice town. A little buggy. But pretty.”
    “Yeah? I never been there. May wants to go. Says it’s really romantic, like Paris. You ever been to Paris, Nick?”
    “Yes.”
    Beau, forgetting himself, sat looking up at Nick, expecting something more. Then he remembered that Nick hardly ever said something more.
    “Okay. Hey, that was some bad shit, up in Gracie, wasn’t it?”
    “It was.”
    “Tig says you walked the scene with Marty Coors?”
    “I did.”
    Beau waited.
    Nick said nothing.
    “Yeah. Well. Uh, Tig wants to see you. Asked me to say.”
    Beau Norlett was a nice kid, blue-black, solid as a bridge abutment, with a round bald head, sloping shoulders, great hands, as light on hisfeet as a tango dancer, but he could hit a crack-house door like a runaway freight.
    He had been a famous linebacker when he was at Saint Mary’s, might have made Notre Dame or Ole Miss with some luck. If you were looking for somebody to take a door down, he was your guy. If you were looking for cop smarts, you were still looking. But Nick thought the kid had potential.
    Nick smiled, went down to the coffee room, poured himself a hot bitter cup and walked on through the crowded office to Tig’s hideout, a corner glassed-in cubby with a view across the motor pool to the marble dome of the city hall. Rain was sleeting straight down and the dome looked like a round wet rock sitting on a pile of bricks.
    In the northeast, looming high over the town like a storm front, blurred by the rain, he could just make out Tallulah’s Wall, which made him think of Crater Sink, which brought the Teague case back in full HDTV.
    Even before Sylvia Teague went into Crater Sink—if she really had—Nick had always thought that Tallulah’s Wall had a kind of sickness cloud floating over it, and if anybody had told him that even the Indians who used to live here had stayed away from the place he’d have believed it.
    Most small towns would have made a feature like Tallulah’s Wall and Crater Sink a theme park and put ads in
USA Today
trying to drum up tourism, but not Niceville.
    Early on, Nick had asked Reed Walker why Tallulah’s Wall had everybody in