Niceville

that noise,” said Danziger. “You hooked your own self in the ass two years ago, when you and me and Marty were fly-fishing up on the Snake.”
    “My ass is a hell of a lot bigger than your tit, Charlie. It was hard to avoid. You always wear cowboy boots while you’re fishing?”
    “Boonie, I wear cowboy boots while I’m fucking. I plan to die in cowboy boots. While fucking.”
    Boonie nodded, looked at his own boots.
    “I would too, if I could get anybody to fuck me. You’re moving funny too. That because you stabbed your own tit?”
    “Damn right,” said Danziger. “Chest muscle hurt so much I could only use my left arm, so I was rowing around in fucking circles, fucking rowed that damn pirogue against the wind for two hours.”
    “Doesn’t the thing have a motor?”
    “Plugs fouled. I nearly jerked my left arm off trying to pull-start it, had to give it up, and then I one-arm-rowed that slug bucket five miles to the fucking dock. I’m thinking of giving up fishing entirely. Too fucking dangerous.”
    “Catch anything?”
    “Crabs.”
    “You already got those.”
    “Old joke, Boonie.”
    “Yes, it is. I find they’re the best.”
    “How you doing with this Gracie thing?”
    Boonie patted his shirt for the cigarettes he didn’t smoke anymore, winced the way he always winced when he remembered that he didn’t smoke them anymore.
    “I was hoping you could help us out there, Charlie.”
    Danziger smiled back at him through his big white handlebar mustache, showing tobacco-yellow teeth.
    “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it was an inside job.”
    “Hard not to,” said Boonie.
    “No, it ain’t. I think so too.”
    He leaned back, groaned a bit from the pain, and pulled out a USB flash drive from an inside pocket of the suede jacket he had borrowed from Donny Falcone, handed it across to Boonie.
    “I downloaded this from our Personnel office. It’s a complete list of every employee we got who was in a position to have any knowledge of what was on that route truck, or who was going to be driving. Basically, everybody who could have ratted us out.”
    Boonie twirled the drive in his fat pink hands.
    “Thanks, Charlie. We usually have to subpoena this kinda shit.”
    Danziger made a hard face, sighing heavily.
    “Not from me, Boonie. Four cops dead. Fuck due process. If any of my guys had anything to do with this, I’ll bring the shotgun and you bring the shovel and we can bury what’s left.”
    “Your name on this list?”
    “Hell yes. I’m a suspect too. I get that. You gotta look at everybody, Boonie, be a fool not to.”
    “You not nervous?”
    Danziger tried to shrug, decided against it, lifted his big hands instead.
    “You’re a good cop, Boonie, in spite of being a lousy flycaster. I figure I can trust you to catch the right guys. You always do, I ’collect. Is there anything else I can do to help this thing along?”
    Boonie thought about it.
    “You ever hear of a guy named Lyle Crowder?”
    “Yeah. He was the driver of that rollover on the interstate. Dumb fuck. I hope he’s hurting.”
    Boonie was quiet for a while.
    Danziger let him be quiet. His chest was throbbing and he needed to take an OxyContin. And sleep for a week. Boonie looked up again, sighed.
    “We got him under a suicide watch, actually.”
    Danziger blinked at that.
    “Suicide watch?”
    “Yeah. He feels pretty bad about it. Those dead ladies. He’s, I mean, like … 
despondent
? Is that the word?”
    “Sounds about right.”
    “He’s also heard, dumb guards told him, the dinks, that the families of the ladies in that van, they’re all talking ugly stuff, what they’re going to do to him, he ever gets out.”
    “Remorse is a terrible burden. Or so I’m told. Never tried it myself. Are you going to charge him?”
    “Don’t know yet. Witnesses all saw something different. We’re looking at the truck to see if anything mechanical went wrong. Crowder says a blue Toyota cut him off on the downgrade, says he overcorrected, the flatbed started to come around, he turned into that, caught the shoulder—and it all went to shit. He’s banged up pretty bad, ribs and hips, but he’ll pull through.”
    “When’d the trailer go over?”
    Boonie didn’t have to look this up.
    “Fourteen forty-one hours, roughly.”
    “And they hit the bank when?”
    “Forty-two minutes later.”
    “While every law enforcement officer in three states was farting around the wreckage playing