Niceville

supplementary income which was allowing them to maintain this shady retreat, was at a bit of a loss how to reply.
    Watching his eyes dart to and fro while his nose twitched and his lips quivered, Inge, no slouch herself when it came to calculations of self-interest and knowing her husband pretty well, had decided that what she didn’t know wasn’t going to get her indicted.
    She harrumphed at him twice, her lips pursed, and then turned sharply around on her suffering bunnies and swept regally back into her yoga room, slamming the door behind her and leaving her husband to contemplate the finer points of domestic discord.
    What that awful man had wanted at that ungodly hour, Thad was now trying to cope with, was that he should be ready to pop like a jack-in-the-box out of his cubicle at the First Third Bank in Gracie within a few heartbeats after he saw Byron Deitz’s yellow Hummer lurch into the bank’s parking lot.
    This, according to Phil Holliman, would happen around noon this day.
    And it had just now come to pass, exactly at noon, exactly as the unpleasant Mr. Holliman had predicted it would.
    Not surprisingly, the sight of Deitz’s Hummer had nearly given the excitable banker a stroke of his own, and he took himself off to the bathroom to have a drink of water and pop a couple of what he called his Happy Caps as a way of girding his loins for the fray.
    Deitz, sitting in the Hummer and grinding his molars in that way he had which filled his bony skull with those mysterious walnut-cracking noises he was always at a loss to explain, got another phone call on his OnStar system, which made him jump a yard and swallow his gum.
    The call display read BELFAIR CULLEN COUNTY CID , so he punched CALL ANSWER and said, “Deitz here.”
    “Byron, this is Tig Sutter.”
    Jeez. Now what?
    “LT, how are you, sir?”
    “I’m good, Byron. I’m good. You got a minute?”
    Deitz looked out the window as the glass doors of the First Third swung open and out popped the reedlike figure of Mr. Thad, holding a red umbrella over his head and scooting in pixie steps across the wet pavement towards the Hummer.
    “About to go into a meeting, Tig, but anything I can do—”
    “Nick was going to call you about this, but he’s sorta tied up on a Missing Persons case—”
    Thad Llewellyn had reached the passenger door and was now standing outside, peering in through the tinted glass, blinking at him, looking mournful but resigned, and even a little bit dreamy-eyed.
    Deitz reached out and popped the locks and Thad scooted inside, settling into the passenger seat with his back up against the door.
    He nodded weakly at Deitz as Deitz held a finger up to his lips, letting Thad know that he was to remain silent until required to speak.
    “Always happy to hear from you, LT. How is Nick?”
    “He’s good,” said Tig, in a distracted tone. “Look, you following this hostage thing at Saint Innocent?”
    Deitz, who had been following nothing but his own doom-laden lines of thought ever since yesterday evening, had to admit that he had no idea what Tig Sutter was talking about.
    Tig laid it out for him, the anonymous e-mail accusing the custodian, Tig’s decision to wait for Maryland to get back to him, and thenthe sudden explosion of publicity, the Live Eye Seven truck and the newspapers and the subsequent cluster-fuck now taking place on Peachtree.
    Deitz listened, aware of Thad Llewellyn’s rapid breathing and smelling his minty-fresh cologne. He buzzed a window down while wondering where Tig was going. He was sensing an incoming request which he might just be able to exploit for reciprocal info on the bank job, so he was paying close attention.
    Tig reached the end of the narrative, and there was a hesitant silence.
    Deitz made the leap.
    “You want this anonymous creep traced, Tig?”
    “Well, that was where we were going. I mean, we could send it down to Cap City, but everybody down there is involved in what happened yesterday, and we just don’t have the technical resources—”
    “Tig, we have a whole IT section at our disposal. I gotta brilliant guy, name of Andy Chu, he’s just sitting around on his butt playing Grand Theft Auto. I’d be happy to offer whatever help you need to follow this thing. Pro bono. of course. I admit we’re kinda caught up in doing whatever we can do to find out who pulled that bank job—”
    “Well, that’s a federal thing now, Byron—”
    “True, but a lot of the funds belonged to