Niceville

shot me has it.”
    “Are the federals after you?”
    “Yes. I think there’s probably a reward, if you call them.”
    She seemed to be puzzled by the suggestion.
    “Call who? The
federals
? The federals killed my husband with their stupid war. The federals can all go to hell. And I have no sympathy for bankers. Are you going to try to get the money back from this man who shot you?”
    Merle looked at his hands, and then leaned back into the chair, tensing as he put weight on his wound, and then easing himself into it.
    “Yes,” he said, deciding right then. “I am. But not right now. They have no way to spend it. The idea was to keep it hidden for a couple of years. I know who they are. I have time.”
    “Good. I like a man with patience. In the meantime, you need a safe place. There is a lot of work to do here. If I help you, will you help me?”
    He studied her delicate but uncompromising features, the linesaround her eyes, the forceful set of what was quite a lovely mouth. She stared back at him, her gaze level and unwavering, waiting with a stillness he admired,
    She had what his mother used to call Chinese Silence.
    “Yes,” he said. “I will.”
    This seemed to seal some kind of pact.
    She smiled at him, and for a few seconds he felt a cold ripple come up from the floor, and then it was gone, and she was touching his hand with her warm, dry fingertips and looking at him in a direct unblinking way that felt like a silent interrogation and there was something sensual humming in the coffee-and-cider-scented air between them.
    “Then I’ll do what I can to help you. I won’t call the federals and I don’t want any of their blood money. But there is something, Merle, something that I would like you to do for me. I would try to do it myself, but there are some things I cannot do, and I find this is one of them. I would try again, perhaps to fail again. I hesitate to ask such a thing of you …”
    “Just name it, Glynis. Whatever it is.”
    “Thank you. I need you to kill someone.”

Saturday Afternoon

Danziger Consults with the Feds
    Boonie Hackendorff and Charlie Danziger belonged to the same National Guard unit and so the first few minutes in Hackendorff’s FBI offices on the sixty-second floor of the Bucky Cullen Federal Complex in downtown Cap City were spent in going over the chances of either of them being called up to go fight the Ayatollahs of Iran anytime soon.
    The final verdict came down somewhere between slim and damn slim. In celebration, Hackendorff poured Danziger a couple of fingers of Jim Beam and leaned back in his old leather chair, propping his size twelve boots on his desk.
    The shining spires and glass towers and castellated condos of downtown Cap City spread out behind him beyond a wall of tinted windows, all the city lights turned on against the gloom and mist of a dark and rainy afternoon. The Feebs did themselves proud in Cap City, with a big suite of corner offices in the best complex in town.
    Danziger stared out at the city lights for a second, thinking about what he was going to say, and then he considered Boonie, who was grinning back at him through one of those damned ugly sharp-trimmed full-face beards that big round guys like Boonie Hackendorff delude themselves into thinking give their faces an actual jawline.
    They were wrong, but that didn’t mean Boonie Hackendorff was any kind of a fool. He watched with a thinned-out smile and suddenly narrowed eyes as Danziger eased himself into a more amiable position on the stuffed couch across the room, lifted the glass in answer to Boonie’s salute, and they each pulled a good bit of it down. Glancing athis boots, Danziger saw the spatters of his own blood on the blue leather and hoped that Boonie was far enough away to miss that detail.
    “What’s that on your boots, Charlie?”
    Danziger shook his head sadly, looking down at the boots again.
    “Blood,” he said. “My blood. I stabbed myself cutting chum.”
    “Stabbed yourself? Where?”
    Charlie tapped his chest, right on top of the bullet wound.
    “I was using a filleting knife. Slipped and stuck myself right here in the tit. Bled like a bitch. Still hurts like stink.”
    Boonie started to snicker, and ended up laughing so hard he had tears in his eyes. He was enjoying himself so much that even Charlie started to smile, if only because when Boonie laughed it was oddly contagious.
    “You dumb-ass old bastard. I never heard of such a thing.”
    “Fuck