Niceville

grab-ass and talking on their radios. Yes?”
    Boonie had to smile at that.
    “I’m not admitting to any personal grab-ass.”
    “I’m speaking metaphorically, Boonie.”
    “Well, if you think we haven’t looked at Lyle Crowder, you’d be wrong. We’re looking at him right now. And all we’re seeing is an amiable young guy with no family who worked real hard for Steiger for six years and before that did a lot of freelance trucking with his own Kenworth until the recession came and the bank took his rig away.”
    “Yeah? What bank was that?”
    “Not the First Third, Charlie.”
    “So credit-wise, he’s a fuckup?”
    “Hey, this economy, so’s Jesus Christ. Why are you picking on this poor damn driver, Charlie?”
    Danziger’s expression got more stony.
    “Because no matter how this comes out, Fargo’s going to look like shit. My division especially. Even if we all show up as clean as a rubber ducky’s dingle. Fargo’s still going to take the hit with the general trade. And so will I. Remember, I washed out of State—”
    Boonie sat up, waved a finger in the air.
    “No. You got injured in the line of duty, Charlie, and got all tangled up with hillbilly heroin on account of the pain. Nobody blamed you for that.”
    “I don’t see a badge on my fucking chest,” Danziger said, flushing red.
    Boonie sympathized with him for a while, and Danziger’s mood cooled down. Everybody knew that Charlie Danziger had been screwed by the Internal Affairs guys. Boonie lived in fear of it happening to him. So did everybody in law enforcement. Criminals occasionally showed mercy. IAD did not. If they set out to rat-fuck you, you could consider yourself rat-fucked.
    “Sorry I blowed up a bit,” said Danziger, after Boonie had topped up their glasses. His anger had been very real but he never liked to let it show, especially since the Gracie bank robbery had been his way of getting back at IAD and all the rest of those Rear Echelon Motherfuckers at HQ.
    “No harm done,” said Boonie, looking carefully at Charlie over the lip of his glass. “When are you back at work?”
    “Monday morning,” said Danziger, looking past Boonie’s shoulders at the glittering sweep of towers and pillars that made up Cap City, thinking maybe when all this blew over he’d come down here and buy himself a real nice condo with a high-up view of the Tulip and the Cap City skyline.
    “While you’re here, can you think of anybody can put you in Metairie yesterday?”
    Danziger gave it some thought, or at least he looked like he was giving it some thought.
    “Not right off. I moor the pirogue at Canticle Key. People were coming and going. You could ask Cyril—wait a minute. Wait a minute.”
    Boonie looked happy to wait until Judgment Day.
    “I bought gas. Couple of times on my way back up. I likely got the receipts in my car. That’ll have the time date, the location on it. I mean, doesn’t put
me
in the car, but it’s something.”
    Danziger wouldn’t have been offering gas receipts at all if he hadn’t made a point of buying gas on his way home from Metairie the week before and then changing the dates with a scanner and Photoshop and printing them out again. He’d bought the gas from two little mom-and-pop stations three hundred miles apart, knowing that the receipts were printed on scrap paper and that neither mom nor pop kept any kind of accurate records. Risky, but offering them didn’t mean that Boonie would remember to actually collect them. What Boonie would remember was the offer, which was all Danziger really wanted.
    “Got any credit card receipts?”
    “Don’t use credit cards anymore, Boonie. I mean, I got ’em, but I don’t like ’em.”
    Boonie leaned over, scribbled something on a sheet, hesitated, looked up with a frown.
    “Can-tik—what? How you spell that?”
    Danziger spelled out
Canticle Key
and then gave him the phone number of the gas tender, Cyril Fond Du Lac, an amiable old Cajun who would quite probably back up Danziger’s story because his days and nights were all a blur of marijuana and whiskey anyway. Nothing Cyril could say would hurt Danziger, and might even help. In the meantime, what with drawing attention to Crowder and offering up the flash drive and the gas receipts and generally being up-front and cooperative, Danziger felt he was looking as innocent as a man could look.
    “Well, thanks for coming in,” said Boonie, lifting the flash drive. “Okay if I call you, I see