Niceville

it … how soon? Yeah … yeah … we got an okay from Mauldar to do this? On paper? Right. Good. Relax, Mavis, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I got the gear in the truck. Yeah. Good.”
    Coker put the phone down, looked across at Danziger, cracked into a broad grin.
    “That was Mavis Crossfire—”
    “Yeah. You can see her in the background there, by the squad cars. She needs a police sniper, am I right?”
    “Just in case.”
    “What about Marty’s SWAT guys?”
    “At Benning, in a competition.”
    “Bad time to be drawing attention to your sniping skills, Coker.”
    “What am I going to do, Charlie? Tell her I don’t feel like it?”
    Coker stood up, killed the last of his JB, set the glass down, his mind already on the job.
    “I gotta go change. You wanna come along on this job? Might be interesting.”
    “And do what? Hold your dick? Fetch coffee and donuts? I’m not a cop anymore. I’m going to go do something about this bionic Frisbee here.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like fuck with Byron Deitz’s mind.”
    “How?”
    “We’re gonna get him to buy it back, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, first we gotta get him off balance.”
    “You got any idea how?”
    “I’m gonna dance him all around Tin Town, one damn place after another, Helpy Selfy, Piggly Wiggly, Winn-Dixie, Lowe’s, every second peeler bar. By the time I’m through jerking him around, he won’t know his ass from a tuna fish sandwich. Then we’ll do the deed.”
    “Yeah? Still be more fun holding my dick.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?”
    “Ask your mom.”

Byron Deitz and Thad Llewellyn Disagree
    Byron Deitz, a guy with a limited emotional range, was finding his limitations sorely tested today as he sat in his yellow Hummer in the rain-misted parking lot of the First Third Bank in Gracie. He was staring out through the rainy ripples on the Hummer’s tinted window and waiting for a Mr. Thad Llewellyn, the Assistant Commercial Accounts Manager for the First Third Bank in Gracie, to come out and get in the truck and respond to a few simple fucking questions.
    However, Llewellyn was not all that anxious to come out and respond to a few simple fucking questions from Byron Deitz.
    Nor had he particularly savored his earlier interlude with Phil Holliman, Byron Deitz’s Second in Command, his Two IC, as Holliman called himself, which had taken place around daybreak on the front steps of Mr. and Mrs. Llewellyn’s rambling ranchero property in a shady glen a mile off Side Road 336, a few short miles south of Gracie, and generally—make that
formerly
—felt by the Llewellyn family—all two of them—to be a safe haven from the dizzying delights of Gracie’s social whirl, of which there weren’t any.
    Sadly, this had not been the case at six this morning, when Mrs. Llewellyn—born Inge Bjornsdottir—had her hatha yoga session forcefully derailed by a hammering din on or about the front door, followed by the stumble-tumble sound of her husband coming down the hall stairs two at a time and shambling towards the front door with a look of utter panic on his pinched and birdlike features, his furry lambskin slippers slip-sliding on the polished parquet.
    Mrs. Thad had listened, rapt and avid, to a short but memorableexchange between Thad and the Unexpected Caller, from what she could see of him over her husband’s cringing figure, a monstrous black man in a charcoal suit not quite up to containing him.
    The words were indecipherable to her, but the tone was pretty clear—malice and threats have their own unique cadences—and the interview ended with Thad having his own front door slammed in his face hard enough for the sidelight windows to rattle in their custom-built frames.
    Inge oozed out into the hall in her sky blue one-piece yoga suit and her hot-pink bunny-eared slippers and the couple stood there staring at each other as the sound of a big sedan wheeling around in their circular drive and spraying pricey quartz gravel all over their Arts and Crafts front porch gradually faded into a pressure-filled silence.
    “
Who
was that
awful
man?” Inge had asked, in tones of brass, while Thad stood in the front hall, drooping before her like an under-watered fern.
    “His name was Phil Holliman, Inge,” Thad had replied, in a small scorched voice. “He works for Byron Deitz.”
    “What did he want at this ungodly hour?”
    Thad, who had not been totally frank with Mrs. Thad on the matter of the