The Homecoming (12 page)

When Nick came out of the shower Kate was sitting at her desk, still in her nightgown, writing in a notebook, head down, fixed and concentrated. She didn’t look up when he kissed her on the back of her neck. She sighed with pleasure, but she kept on writing. He didn’t ask her what she was writing, and she didn’t tell him. She didn’t want to tell him that she was writing about a dream and the dream was about the Teague family, and it wasn’t a good dream at all.

Nick left her there and went in to dress.

It was Monday morning, and Niceville was waiting for them all.

Leavenworth Prison, a gray stone temple under a match-head sun far off on the Great Plains of the American Heartland: the General Population Common Room was steamy and hot and packed with heavyweight cons. The low-ceilinged windowless space stank of sweat and testosterone and the ammonia reek of potato-peel screech.

Although these guys were all seasoned cons, every man in the room was staying away from the three men on the battered green vinyl couch in the middle of the common room.

The men, two of them thick as old buffalos, slab-sided and weathered, and one a thin, graying, wispy man who looked impossibly ancient, were paying close attention to a CNN newsreel playing on the big flat-screen bolted to the wall.

The screen was covered with chicken wire but the men—Mario La Motta, Desi Munoz, and Julie Spahn—could clearly see the heavy-muscled bald-headed guy with the biker goatee being perp-walked from an EMT vehicle by a couple of paramedics. Two Deputy U.S. Marshals were flanking the medics, and a guy who was obviously a plainclothes cop was walking along behind them.

They’re walking this guy up the marble steps of the county courthouse in this small southern U.S. town that the CNN banner was calling Niceville.

The perp was wearing a bright red jumpsuit and flip-flop sandals. His ankles were chained and he’s got his cuffed hands linked to a steel ring on a wide leather belt at his waist. The belt, for obvious reasons, buckles in the back.

The Deputy U.S. Marshals—a heavy-bodied black woman with flat gray eyes and this gigantic white guy with a red face and long blond hair
down to his shoulders—are looking tight and worried. So does the cop, a sharp-planed guy with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a navy blue suit, a white shirt open at the collar. He has a large stainless-steel revolver in a belt holster, from what they could see probably a Colt Python. He had a gold oval badge clipped to his belt. He looked straight ahead at the backs of the two marshals. The expression on his face was flat and he had shark eyes for the media crowd.

The Deputy U.S. Marshals were bulling through the press crowd like a couple of NFL linemen, the detective in the blue suit following in their wake.

The press were pressing in all around—why they’re called the Press—shoving mikes into faces, shouting inane questions, clutching at sleeves and shoulders. One big guy in a Banana Republic safari jacket stuck a fat furry mike with a
LIVE EYE 7
logo on it into the face of the detective in the blue suit, striking him a glancing blow on the cheekbone. There was a quick flurry of movement—the camera jerked and the scene goes chaotic—it steadied and the man in the safari jacket was lying on his back at the bottom of the stairs, arms and legs waving like an overturned beetle.

The CNN camera zoomed in on him, and then panned back up to the blue-suited cop, who has already turned away. The rest of the media crowd pulled back a few feet.

The U.S. Marshals, who saw nothing of this, and if they had would have enjoyed it immensely, got the perp to the top of the stairs, where the prisoner somehow managed to break away and look back down at the crowd on the steps, his face red and his mouth bent into a nasty snarl, and now he’s yelling something which La Motta and Munoz and Spahn can’t hear because of all the noise in the common room.

“That’s him,” said La Motta, pointing a fat pink finger at the screen. “That’s The Fuckhead,” giving it the capital letters.

La Motta’s voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a drainage ditch. He’s got thick black hair which he combs straight back and waxes down with Bed Head. Since he’s carrying three hundred pounds of muscle and fat on a frame built for maybe one-eighty, this makes him look like a walrus but nobody has ever told him this.

“Yah think?” asked Munoz, being sarcastic, because there’s no fucking way any of them is ever gonna forget The Fuckhead. Desi Munoz is as bald as a trailer hitch and has bushy black eyebrows that he combs straight up like he’s hoping one day they’ll be long enough to start looking like hair.

“Byron Deitz. In the freaking flesh.”

“What’s going on this time?” asked Julie Spahn.

They’d been following the Byron Deitz saga ever since the spring, when the media story about the First Third robbery and his connection to it had first broken.

“They’re taking him to another one a those fucking jurisdiction hearings. The Feds want him remanded to D.C. to face that espionage beef. Local guys want him to stay. They’re saying he’s got a heart condition—that’s why the EMT guys are there—Feds think it’s bullshit and they want his ass in D.C. Deitz is saying he knows who really did the bank, but he’s not gonna tell until the Feds drop the spy thing. It’s what you call a stalemate.”

“They ever get the money back?”

“Not so far,” said Munoz. “Still out there somewhere. Fucking millions, floating around. Not a sign of it in six fucking months.”

“Who’s the cop in the blue suit?” asked La Motta. “Looks like a nasty piece of work.”

“Onna crawl there,” said Munoz. “At the bottom.”

La Motta peered at the words streaming along the banner at the bottom of the screen.

“What the fuck is ‘local cee eye dee’?”

“Criminal Investigation Division. Bigger than the local cops but smaller than the state investigation guys. Cover maybe a buncha counties and shit.”

La Motta didn’t get it.

“What’s a local CID guy doing on the perp walk?”

“Cop’s name is Nick Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh is Deitz’s brother-in-law,” said Munoz. “Deitz married a chick named Beth Walker, she’s older sister to Kavanaugh’s wife. I guess they figure Kavanaugh can get Deitz to talk—you know, family and all that shit. Ain’t working so far.”

“How do you know this shit?”

“I asked the block boss. Swanson. He owes us.”

“No shit. Where’d he get it?”

“He gargled it onna web.”

La Motta thought this over.

“Maybe this cop’s a way in to Deitz?”

“Maybe,” said Munoz, looking doubtful. “Looks like a tough nut. You could crack a tooth on guys like that. Swanson says the guy used to be a war hero, got a shitload of medals. Was inna Special Forces, over there in Raghead-istan. I dunno. Maybe the wife or the sister would be easier.”

La Motta nodded, went quiet.

Spahn pointed at the screen.

“This jerkwater town—what is it again?”

“Niceville,” said Munoz, smiling. “It’s down inna southeast, few miles outta Cap City.”

“We got any people in this shithole?” asked La Motta.

“In Niceville?”

“Yeah.”

“Not yet. But we gotta do something about Deitz, that’s for sure. Soon as we get out.”

“Nobody’s forgetting that,” said Spahn, smoothing him down.

“We’re just sitting here, our thumbs up our asses. Be good if we had a guy down there now, do some advance work for us. Get the lay of the land.”

Spahn grinned.

“The lay of the land? Wasn’t that your wife?”

“Fucking funny, Julie.”

La Motta went inside for a bit, remembering what Deitz had done to them, came back, shaking his head. They all remembered it just fine. They had been remembering it every day for eighteen hundred and forty-seven days. They’d be out soon. Fucking Byron Deitz wasn’t going to have that long to wish he had never fucked with them. Maybe eighteen hours. Maybe less.

“So they still didn’t find the money yet?” Spahn wanted to know. “The shit Deitz stole?”

La Motta and Munoz shook their heads.

“Not yet,” said La Motta. “Swanson says it’s still out there. Six fucking months. That means it’s hidden pretty good. I figure Deitz is gonna sit on it until he gets out. Then he cashes in.”

“Three million bucks, rotting inna storage locker somewhere,” said Munoz, shaking his head. “Money rots, you know, less you keep it in a dry place. Remember what it was like, trying to keep all that money in fucking New Orleans?”

“Or it’s inna basement somewhere, fucking rats making nests outta it,” said La Motta.

A pause, while they all thought about the money.

Julie Spahn had the last word on it.

“That fucking money is
ours
.”

A sunlit fall afternoon in the Garrison Hills section of Niceville. Kate was waiting for Rainey Teague and Axel Deitz to come home from Regiopolis Prep. She did this whenever she could, waited on the stairway like this, so Rainey and Axel would see her standing there when they turned the corner. Both boys needed to see someone waiting for them.

Axel’s mother was working from Mondays to Fridays down in Cap City, as a civilian employee of the FBI, a job engineered for her by Boonie Hackendorff, the Special Agent in Charge and a family friend. Beth’s daughter, Hannah, just turned five, spent the week in Cap City with her mother, at a day care facility maintained for FBI staff. Beth and Hannah made it home on weekends.

Their father was still in Twin Counties Correctional, awaiting the outcome of a long and complicated federal appeal demanding that he be remanded to Washington, D.C., to face a charge that he had conspired to sell national defense information to a foreign nation, specifically China. Apparently the Chinese government had taken the view that the death of their people was an act of aggression on the part of the U.S. intelligence agencies.

The matter was being fought out in various jurisdictions, from the State Department and Justice all the way down to the screamers on talk radio. Kate had followed the ins and outs of the case. She felt it could go either way. Byron might get sent to Cap City for a trial, or he could end up on a plane to Beijing, wrapped in heavy chains.

As for Rainey, his father, Miles, was lying stiff, cold, and dead in the white Greek Revival temple that was the Teague family crypt in the New Hill section of Niceville’s Confederate Cemetery. Miles was on the second
shelf from the top, just below an ancestor named Jubal Teague, and across the way from Jubal’s brother, Tyree Teague. Miles had a small mahogany box tucked under his right hand that contained what little they could find of his head.

Jubal and Tyree were the sons of the infamous London Teague. He wasn’t there. No one knew where London Teague’s body was. No one cared. He was rumored to have died of syphilis in a brothel in Baton Rouge, or possibly it was Biloxi, a bitter old man given to gin and violence.

London’s son Jubal seemed to have lived an honorable life, serving with distinction as a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War, the same war that saw his brother, Tyree, cut down by Union grapeshot at Front Royal.

Jubal Teague went on to become the father of a deeply unpleasant man named Abel Teague. Deeply unpleasant men seemed to reappear in the Teague line fairly often. Like his grandfather London’s, Abel Teague’s body was not in the family crypt either, for roughly the same reasons.

Kate had undertaken an informal study of the Teague line, keeping her interest a secret from Nick, whose instinctive unease around Rainey had, over time, receded, or had appeared to recede. She had no desire to have that unease flare up again. So here she was, standing on the landing, waiting for the last of the Teagues to come down Beauregard Lane. And there they were.

Her heartbeat jumped a groove, like a needle in an old vinyl record, but she calmed herself. Lately she had been doing a lot of that. Two weeks ago, she’d gotten a heads-up call from Alice Bayer, Delia Cotton’s ex-housekeeper. Nick had gotten Alice a job as attendance secretary at Regiopolis.

Alice had called to say that Rainey and Axel had been skipping a lot of classes lately, and she wanted to know if there was anything she could do to help, because “she really felt for those young men, for what they’d both been through.”

This was very much on Kate’s mind as she watched the boys coming up the sidewalk. They were wearing baggy gray slacks and white shirts, each with a sky-blue-and-gold-striped tie and a navy blue blazer with a gold pocket crest, a crucifix bound up in roses and thorns, the insignia of Regiopolis Prep. This was the Regiopolis school uniform, a uniform Rainey had worn since he was four, but Axel had only recently acquired.

About Rainey, the Jesuits at Regiopolis Prep and the therapists from the Belfair and Cullen County Child Protection Agency and the doctors and the various law enforcement agencies involved in the Rainey Teague Case—it was one of those cases that seemed to demand capitals—had all agreed that, after the emotional trauma he had been through, what Rainey Teague needed most was continuity and predictability.