Niceville

breathing. Deitz suppressed the urge to call Phil Holliman right then, and turned to the banker.
    “Okay, Thad, we gotta—holy shit, you okay? You look kinda fuzzy.”
    Mr. Thad, now almost completely zoned out on his Happy Caps, a few minutes away from being totally blotto and feeling quite serenely invincible, gave Deitz a Buddha-like smile.
    “You, my Byronic friend, my … my Byronic Man … are far too intense.”
    Thad blinked in slow motion, giving Deitz a slow and clinical once-over.
    “Look right there,” he said, pointing languidly. “A vein is popping out on your forehead. Your complexion is dangerously flushed. You need to relax, Byron, you really do. Would you like one of my HappyCaps? They are bliss in a bottle, Byron my boy. Bliss in a bottle. Try one?”
    Thad held out his bottle, his loving spirit rising to the moment, the Brotherhood of Man welling up in his drug-saturated soul.
    Deitz blinked down at the bottle, read the label— ATIVAN —and then looked over at Thad.
    “Shit. How many of these have you had?”
    “I,” said Thad, giving the matter some thought, blinking back at Deitz. “I may have had three. Yes. Three it is.”
    Deitz reached over, plucked the bottle out of Thad’s palm, held it up—it was half full of little beige nuggets—frowned censoriously at Thad—Deitz disapproved of drugs, particularly when used by other people to blunt the Byron Dietz effect. He tossed the pill bottle into the cup holder on the seat divider.
    Stared at it for a moment.
    A kind of Zen pause here.
    Then he backhanded Thad across the right cheek so hard Thad’s head bounced off the passenger window with a musical
bonk
. The pink clouds in Mr. Thad’s mind parted briefly and a bolt of clarity pierced the rosy mist.
    Deitz saw his opening.
    “Just one fucking question, Thad. Did you tip anybody off to what was in my lockbox?”
    Thad put a hand up and touched the red mark on his cheekbone.
    “No. How could I? I didn’t know what was
in
the lockbox. You only told me to keep an eye on it. You never said what was in it. Why? What was it?”
    Deitz chewed that thought for a while. Thad was right. He’d never told the banker what was in the box. Why the hell would he?
    “None of your fucking business. The guys who did the bank, any idea who they were?”
    Thad labored to bring his mind to bear upon this question.
    “No. There was nothing … two white men, both with those masks on … one large, with blue eyes, and another, dark eyes and … and …”
    His voice trailed off and Deitz reached out, pinched the man’s nose between his index finger and his thumb, twisted it hard, and let it go, wiping the blood off on Mr. Thad’s shirt. Then he took him by the throat and started squeezing.
    “Give me something to go on,” he said in a grating snarl, his eyes slitted almost shut and his look inhuman, a hot glare his family knew pretty well. “Or I’ll snap your fucking neck right here.”
    Thad, tears of pain on his cheeks, eyes welling up, a trickle of blood running from his red-tipped nose, stared back at Byron Deitz with the totally absent look of a man with less than three brain cells still firing. He could no longer feel his toes and a warm numbness was creeping up his torso.
    Deitz shook him like a rag mop, but even Deitz could see that the banker had left the building.
    The guy blinked a few times, and then his lids closed and his head fell forward, held up only by Deitz’s rigid forearm. After a long silence, and in a dreamy murmur, Mr. Thad said, quite distinctly, “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius.”
    Deitz grunted in disgust, let go of his throat, and Thad commenced to pour himself down into the passenger footwell.
    “Boots,” he muttered, a moment later, from the depths of the footwell. “The big man wore navy blue cowboy boots. I have never seen navy blue cowboy boots …”
    His voice receded into a sighing whisper. The rest was silence, broken only by the sound of one man seething.
    Boots?
thought Deitz, picking Thad’s pill bottle up again and, almost absentmindedly, turning it in his hands.
    Beth, his unsatisfactory wife, was always popping Ativans to counter the Deitz Effect. Her Ativans were sort of squared-off little white pills with a T-shaped notch pressed into the top. These looked different, like little beige nuggets, but what the hell. Maybe he could use one himself.
    He was sure as hell stressed out enough.
    He held the bottle in his thick