Niceville

old ladies, and anyway nobody around here will let him plea-bargain while he’s standing on the graves of four dead cops, and besides he doesn’t know who we are.”
    He took a sip, puffed at his cigarette, ran a hand through his hair, making a bristly burring sound, his eyes on the middle distance.
    “No. I mean, all he can say is he got a fat FedEx envelope with five thousand dollars in fifties in it and a note saying what he had to do to get another five thousand, which was to fuck up traffic big time on the interstate at a certain point in time. From what he said to me, I figure Boonie’s almost all the way convinced the kid is clean. That’s fine with me. We just leave it be. We don’t want to change Boonie’s mind about any of that. Anyway, killing Crowder will just convince Boonie that he’s closer to the guys who did the bank than he thought he was. He’ll go back over everything Crowder ever did. They’ll find out he got a FedEx delivery, start tracing it backwards.”
    “Won’t lead to us, will it? You used gloves when you packed it, gave a phony address?”
    “Yeah. But killing the guy, it’s just one of those tricky things that people do in robberies, the one-step-too-far that ends up getting them fucked. Look what happened with Merle. Tried to shoot him, and now he’s out there somewhere doing God only knows. We simply paid him off, he’s back home with the Bardashi boys happy as a rabbit in rhubarb. We try for Lyle, maybe one of his guards gets in the line of fire? Or we only wing him and now he knows his only chance is to come clean with the Feds. Nope. When in doubt, sit tight. When there’s nothing to be done, do nothing. You follow?”
    Coker, after some thought, nodded.
    “Works for me, if you say so. What you wanna do about the proceeds?”
    “Best thing there is to stick to the plan, leave it alone for a year orso, then piece it out careful-like, not doing anything too showy. Which reminds me, what’d you do with the Barrett?”
    “Switched out the barrel and the firing pin. Cleaned it up and now it’s back in storage, at the depot, where it belongs. Threw the old barrel into Crater Sink. It sleeps with the fishes.”
    “You’ll find no fishes in that black hole, my friend. Place gives me the willies, always has. What about the Python you used to mop up the dead?”
    “Also sleeps with the fishes.”
    “And my shit-box Chevy?”
    “Drove it to Tin Town and left it on Bauxite, next to the needle exchange. Left the keys in. Waited around. It was gone in fifteen minutes.”
    “Damn, Coker. Had my blood in it.”
    “So what? Don’t mean a thing unless they want the DNA. DNA doesn’t have a microscopic label saying ‘I belong to Charlie Danziger.’ Anyway, by the time those hypes get through with it, your blood’ll be underneath sixteen layers of icky junkie poop. No crime scene guy in the world is going to get inta that vehicle. It’ll be FIDO by the time the NPD even notices it.”
    “Fuck It Drive On.”
    “Yep.”
    Charlie shook his head, smiling at Coker.
    “Icky junky poop?”
    “I’m trying to be colorful.”
    “Well, don’t.”
    Coker’s phone rang, an old black number sitting behind him on a sideboard.
    Coker leaned back, snagged it.
    “Coker.”
    Danziger could hear some sort of soft buzzing sound from the earpiece, a female voice. Coker’s expression changed as he listened to the caller.
    “Hey Mavis … no, I’m good … sitting here having a glass with Charlie Danziger … yeah, I know, all over the news right now, I can see it—”
    He set the phone aside, pointed at the television set, where the Live Eye Seven coverage of the standoff at Saint Innocent had gone national.
    “Charlie, can you un-mute that?”
    Danziger did, and the room was filled with the overheated breathless coverage of the Live Eye Seven field reporter, a plastic-coated blond chick with helmet hair who looked to be about fourteen.
    “And as of this hour there seems to be no progress as Kevin David Dennison is refusing to answer the negotiator’s calls—”
    Coker and Danziger watched the screen for a moment, and then Coker made a slicing move across his throat and Danziger hit the MUTE button. Coker was back on the phone, listening hard, making a few terse replies, suddenly all business.
    “Okay. I got that. What about Marty’s guys? … Well then call Glynco and get a—what? Benning? Well, that’s fucked. No, I get it … no, I got no problem with