Niceville

off, going their separate ways, no two together. There had been no talk between the riders during the bus trip.
    The man sitting next to Merle, a tall skinny white-haired old man with a forlorn look, wearing beige slacks and a plaid shirt, had spent the whole trip staring out the window, his thin blue lips working soundlessly and a puzzled look in his eyes.
    Merle asked him his name, but the old man just turned to blinkslowly at Merle, as if trying to make him disappear, and then went back to watching the fields and towns tick by, radiating a deep sadness.
    A Niceville PD patrol car rolled slowly past, two cops inside, neither of them showing any interest, either in Merle or in much else.
    This made him feel easier. If there was a description of him floating around, he obviously didn’t match it. After the patrol car turned a corner, Merle moved out into the streets, heading into the town square towards City Hall, unmistakable with that huge round dome.
    The redbrick pile next to it would be the library, just where Glynis Ruelle had said it was going to be. Lady Grace Hospital, according to Glynis, was on the far side of the library, about a block along a street called Forsythia.
    The rest is up to you
, Glynis had said.
    He touched the back pocket of his jeans, where there was a wallet that Glynis had given him, stuffed with cash, as well as a driver’s license with a black-and-white picture that could actually have been any middle-aged white male without a beard, identifying Merle as John Hardin Ruelle, address Ruelle Plantation, 2950 Belfair Pike Road, Cullen County Side Road 336.
    He shouldered the bag, moved out into the crowds, who paid him no mind at all, heading in the direction of Lady Grace. A navy blue and bright gold streetcar rumbled past him, shiny as a kid’s toy. People inside were staring straight ahead, faces fixed and blank.
    They looked like corpses.
    A block later, at the intersection of Forsythia and Gwinnett, he saw a bank of television screens flickering in a large shop window, and a group of people gathered on the sidewalk, staring at multiple images of the same picture.
    Merle stopped at the outside edge of the crowd, tall enough to look over the heads of the other people. From what he could see, some sort of police emergency was going on, squad cars and uniformed cops clustered around a church, and an EMS van waiting in the background.
    The sound was off, or too low to be heard through the plate glass of the shop window, but a blond newswoman was talking into the camera, and a crawl along the bottom read HOSTAGE STANDOFF CONTINUES AT SAINT INNOCENT ORTHODOX .
    Merle watched the action for a while, which seemed to be at some sort of stalemate, and then moved off up Gwinnett as the sun finallybroke out completely. He glanced up past the uneven rooflines of the shops on the street and saw, in the luminous haze, a large stand of trees on top of a high wall of pale limestone, a sheer cliff face that seemed to bend over the town.
    Merle vaguely recalled Coker talking about Tallulah’s Wall and a limestone sinkhole supposed to be on top of the wall. Crater Sink. Merle got the impression that this sinkhole was a bad place, haunted by something nobody wanted to think about.
    If some stupid hole in the ground could spook a hard case like Coker, it was just another good reason to get out of town as soon as possible.
    The sunlight was shining on the stand of trees and he could see a cloud of tiny black specks circling the upper branches of a taller tree poking up right in the middle of the forest—crows, a huge flock, he decided, and all stirred up, trying to frighten something away, a hawk or an eagle. He heard a harsh croaking call, this one very close.
    Following the sound, he saw a group of crows perched on a sagging power line no more than fifty feet away, on the sunny side of Gwinnett.
    They were looking directly at him, their black wings flaring as they shifted and cocked their heads sideways to peer down at him, black beaks sharp-edged in the sunlight, their feathers glittering like glass as they shifted from leg to leg, croaking at him, glaring down at him, as if outraged to see him there, as if personally offended by his presence.
    For a moment Merle felt a strange sense of unreality flow over him, and under it a tremor of irrational fear. At that point, the flock, screeching and calling, exploded up into the sky, formed into a tight cloud, wheeled above the oaks that lined Gwinnett, and