Niceville (49 page)

The impact caused the fuel tanks, just topped up an hour earlier, to explode, and a red and black flower of flame blossomed across the face of the cliff, drawing everyone’s attention down in the town. The concussive wave rippled across the rooftops of the city, bouncing people out of their Sunday-morning sleep. It shook the windows of Brandy Gule’s flat over the needle exchange hard enough to wake up Lemon Featherlight, who had just now fallen asleep while she watched over him, and it thumped pretty hard against the glass of the conservatory where Kate and Beth were having a long heart-to-heart about Byron Deitz, and it rattled all the windows in Tony Bock’s flat, briefly distracting Coker and Twyla Littlebasket from the very interesting story Tony Bock was, at that point, only halfway through.

But the shock wave had faded into a distant rumble by the time it reached Charlie Danziger’s place, where he was sitting on his porch with a glass of Pinot Grigio and a loaded Winchester on his knees, half expecting either Byron Deitz or Boonie Hackendorff or maybe the devil himself to come wheeling up his driveway, guns a-blazing.

The concussive wave drew people all over Niceville out onto their porches and lawns and balconies to stare up at Tallulah’s Wall, where the roaring fire on the face of the cliff had spooked a large flock of crows that lived there. The flock took flight, a huge black swarm, and headed west across the upper part of the city, their flight followed by almost every citizen in the town.

The flock, later estimated at maybe three thousand birds, entered the airspace over Mauldar Field about ten minutes after Morgan Littlebasket’s plane, what was left of it, carrying Morgan Littlebasket, what was left of him, went cartwheeling down into the rocky base of the cliffs.

The black mass of crows, moving in unison like a school of fish, banked to the south-southeast over Mauldar Field, a move that put the flock directly into the path of a Learjet that had just cleared the runway after a short delay caused by a crank call the tower had received a few minutes earlier from an unknown citizen.

The jet, banking right and rising, reached the same height as the flock of crows, into the midst of which it flew at more than four hundred miles an hour. The twin jets sucked in enough crow meat and bone and blood to lock up the turbines and, since the windscreen was so smeared with crow blood and crow guts that neither of the pilots
could see a damn thing, the plane entered into a death spiral so steep that not even the archangel Michael could have stopped the Learjet from doing what it did sixty-four seconds later, which was to augur fifty feet into the ground at a little more than four hundred miles an hour and turn Mr. Zachary Dak and everything else on board, including the cosmic Frisbee, into a volcanic fireball that exploded outwards all over the fourteenth green of the Anora Mercer Golf and Country Club.

As the fireball and the molten shrapnel hurtled out in a 360-degree arc the explosion narrowly missed a slender reed of a man with red-rimmed eyes and a large bandage over a badly broken nose who was addressing a ball buried deep in a sand trap sixty yards away from the fourteenth green, but, sadly, in a strange quirk of fate, the fireball caught and utterly incinerated his beloved wife, Inge, who was standing in the dead center of the fourteenth green, holding the flag and bellowing at him, in tones of brass,
For Christ’s sake, Thad, will you just hit the goddam—

The fireball then shrank to a towering pillar of black smoke with a flaming core. Now the flock of crows, decimated but still a coherent mass, gathered together again, seeming to turn into a single solid entity, dense, cold, black, impenetrable, as curved as a scythe.

This shape swooped low over the rooftops and church spires and forested blocks of Niceville, darkening the town as it passed. Then it rose up, soaring into the blue, wheeled suddenly to the northwest, and flew back to the crest of Tallulah’s Wall, where it settled into the ring of ancient trees that grew around Crater Sink, the birds clustering there in fluttering ranks, strung along the ancient branches, chittering and squawking, yellow eyes shining, sharp beaks clacking like scissors, staring down into Crater Sink.

And there they stayed, for an unnaturally long time, until well after sundown, motionless and strangely silent, two thousand crows watching the perfect circle of cold black water with a fixed intensity, as if they were all waiting for something, finally, to come back out of Crater Sink.

All my gratitude goes to my agent, Barney Karpfinger; my guardian angel, Cathy Jaque; and my editor, Carole Baron, all of whom made a good book infinitely better; and to Danielle Adair, Emily Stroud, Tom Macdonald, Susan Hodgins, Suzanne Hutchinson, Debbie Fowler, Barbara Wojdat, and Lisa Hong, all of whom know why.

Carsten Stroud is a seasoned writer of fiction and nonfiction, including the true-crime account
Close Pursuit
, a
New York Times
bestseller when it was published almost twenty-five years ago. His novels include
Sniper’s Moon
,
Lizardskin
,
Black Water Transit
,
Cuba Strait
and
Cobraville
. He lives in Toronto, and is currently working on his next novel.