Niceville

at least. He got the impression that the figure—if it had been a man—had been lying on his back with his legs bent over to one side, as if something heavy was lying on top of him, pressing him into the floor.
    Well, this was ridiculous.
    It is a
stain
, Nick.
    A mark. There was no blood, no heel marks to suggest a struggle, no signs of violence at all.
    He knelt down again, and touched the floor in the middle of the stain. It
was
definitely warm, several degrees warmer than the surrounding floor.
    Check for a hot-water pipe
, he thought,
under the boards
. He rubbed at the surface, feeling the raw grain of the old wood. The varnish had been taken off right down to the wood. In the shape of a man. He lifted his fingertip and smelled the residue on his skin. A sharp scorched smell, like burned cloth, and underneath that a bitter coppery reek.
    What in the hell happened here?
    His radio beeped, and then Beau’s voice, crackling with static, a tight hoarse whisper.
    “Nick, where are you?”
    “In the living room. Where are you?”
    “I’m in the basement.”
    “What are you doing down there?”
    “Up until a minute ago, I was tracing the camera cable. There’s something down here, I don’t know what it is, but, Nick, you got to see it.”

Coker and Danziger Complicate Things
    The robot Frisbee with the Raytheon GNS logo sat in a blue-velvet-lined cutaway inside its stainless-steel casket on the dining room table between Coker and Danziger, bathed in a circle of hot white light from a halogen desk lamp that Coker had brought in from his office.
    A bottle of Jim Beam was set at Coker’s right elbow, and a glass, fruity juice-glass-type thing with oranges and grapes all over it, sat at each man’s right hand. In the background some smoky music was playing, Jerry Goldsmith’s trumpet solo from the
Chinatown
movie.
    Coker sucked the last hit off his cigarette, stubbed it out in an ashtray that looked like a NASCAR racing slick, sat back in the chair, making it groan like a rusted gate, and considered Danziger’s complexion as Charlie inhaled another drag of his own cigarette.
    “You
do
recall you got a bullet hole in that lung you’re choking up right now?”
    Danziger gave him a squint-eyed look through his personal fogbank.
    “I’m not using
that
one. I’m redirecting.”
    “Redirecting what? Like into the other lung?”
    “Yep.”
    “You die, Charlie, I get to keep it all.”
    “What about Merle Zane? He call back?”
    Coker shook his head, wondering about that.
    “I got three calls in about ten minutes. Each time it was his cell number on the display, each time I picked up the call, and all I’m hearing is some sort of hissing, scratching sound, like steam or maybe likeleaves or grass being blown around. I’m thinking, maybe some kind of animal, even. Like a raccoon or a possum? I wait for Merle to say something, but nothing comes, the hissing and scratching goes on for about fifteen maybe twenty seconds, and then the call cuts off.”
    “You phone him back?”
    “After the third call. The cell rings a couple of times, and then his voice mail picks up—”
    “You leave a message?”
    “I said we wanted to meet, straight across, repair the situation, make it right, and all he had to do was name a place.”
    “And he never called back?”
    Coker shook his head, going inside himself for a moment, trying to figure out Zane’s game, gave it up for insufficient data.
    “No, he didn’t. So now I’m giving the Merle Zane matter some additional thought. I come up with anything brilliant, I will let you know.”
    Coker leaned forward, tapped the steel box.
    “Now. About this cosmic-gizmo-Frisbee that lies before us … you got any suggestions?”
    Danziger was quiet for a while.
    In a corner of the room Coker’s big flat-screen Samsung television, muted, was showing cop cars clustered randomly around a large redbrick building next to an Art Deco church, and a female broadcaster with helmet hair was talking into the camera in the foreground.
    There was a crawl along the bottom of the screen reading: STANDOFF AT SAINT INNOCENT ORTHODOX CUSTODIAN TAKES TWO HOSTAGES THREATENS SUICIDE POLICE NEGOTIATING  …
    “I got a question, first,” said Danziger finally, taking a sip of his JB, wincing as he choked it down. He hated Jim Beam but in this part of the state it was what got drunk if you were drinking with cops. When he was alone he drank Italian Pinot Grigio so cold it hurt his teeth,