The Homecoming (34 page)

Coker scanned the main floor—nobody in clear view—this was terrible ground for a firefight—Nick was somewhere down in that maze but Coker couldn’t find him—he was about to call him on the radio when he heard someone damn big coming up the staircase, shaking the entire frame as he pounded up the risers.

Too heavy to be Nick.

He was hitting the steps like a sledgehammer. Coker could hear his gasping breath. He lifted the rifle and put the scope on the figure climbing up the stairwell.

It was Byron Deitz.

Coker waited.

Deitz got to the second landing and froze as he saw Coker’s outline against the dim light from the corner lamps. He had a shotgun in his hands, held at port arms. A moment later, Nick stepped softly up to the bottom of the stairs, holding his pistol and pointing it at Deitz’s back.

Deitz was trapped on the second-floor landing, Coker above and Nick below.

“Coker,” said Deitz, breathing fast.

“Hello there, Byron. How are you doin’?”

“Well, I’m just fucking jim-dandy, aren’t I? How the fuck are you?”

“Byron,” said Nick, a soft voice out of the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. “It’s over. You don’t have to die here. Drop the shotgun.”

Deitz was still staring up at Coker.

“Byron,” said Nick, putting real steel in his tone. “Put the shotgun down.”

“Nick,” said Deitz, not taking his eyes off Coker’s shadowy figure, “do you know what this asshole up here did? Do you have any
fucking
idea what he did?”

“One last time,” said Nick. “Put the gun down.”

“Hey,” said Coker, in a teasing tone, “you couldn’t even sell out your own country without stepping on your dick. And now here you are, like a hog on a spit, getting it from both ends. Man. I gotta tell you, watching you operate, it’s fucking
embarrassing
.”

The words hung in the air like sparks from a fire. Deitz’s mind filled up with red light and he stopped thinking about anything.

Coker, who was closer, saw Deitz’s sudden twist, the muzzle of his shotgun coming up. He and Nick fired at almost the same time, two distinct muzzle cracks, one slightly deeper, the two bright flashes lighting up Deitz for less than a second.

Coker’s round took Deitz in the throat, blowing out the top of his spine and nearly ripping his head off, while Nick’s nine-mill slug smacked into Deitz’s right armpit, drilling right through his lungs and shredding his heart.

Deitz, effectively crucified by two intersecting bullet paths, dead on his feet, pitched backwards, his tailbone striking the railing. He went over the rail, the shotgun in his right hand triggering one last time, the blast hitting the Kodiak bear in the dead center of the body. Deitz landed with a crash of breaking glass on a counter ten feet below.

With a creaking groan the Kodiak began a slow and ponderous fall that seemed to go on forever, but didn’t. It tumbled over onto a display of bows and arrows, rocked once, in that stand-up teeth-baring scary-as-shit Kodiak pose the taxidermist had given him. The actual living Kodiak who used to own this skin had been sitting on his ass in the middle of a mountain meadow in the Grand Tetons, up to his hips in wild wheat and buttercups, quietly downing some overripe chuckleberries,
when a Wyoming hunter with a Magnum Express punched a fist-sized hole in his chitlins from a hundred yards out. The stuffed version rocked a couple of times, and then stopped, and everything went quiet.

Coker was kneeling down beside Beau.

“Nick?”

“I’m here, Coker,” said Nick, from the bottom of the staircase, his voice steady but tight. “How’s Beau?”

Coker was already talking urgently into the radio. Beau was looking straight up at one of the dim ceiling spots right above him. His mouth was moving and his cheeks were coated in sweat. Coker put the radio down and called out to Nick.

“Entry wound in the belly, just below his vest. No exit. I’ve already called the medics.”

“Compress it. Tell him I’ll be right there. I got to go see to the civilians. Can you find the damned lights? I can’t see what I’m doing.”

“What about Deitz?”

Nick moved away.

In a moment he called up.

“Deitz is dead.”

“Where’s Andy Chu? He’s not up here.”

Coker was pressing a cloth into the hole in Beau’s belly. Beau grunted from the pressure, tried to sit up, put a bloody hand on Coker’s forearm and squeezed it hard.

He said “May” in a hoarse croak, and passed out. Coker put a finger on Beau’s carotid.

His pulse was rapid but strong.

Coker knew that a gut shot took longer to kill than other wounds, unless it had clipped an artery. But from the sound of it when it hit and the concentrated shape of the entry wound, Coker figured that Deitz had loaded up his shotgun with what hunters called deer slugs, a single solid lead shot instead of the cylinder of lead pellets that made up a normal shotgun load. They were lousy at long range but if you were close enough you could kill a real Kodiak bear with a slug that size.

If Coker was right, there was no way of telling what that slug had done to Norlett’s insides. If he lived, Beau Norlett was never again going to be everything he was.

The store lights snapped on, blinding him for a second. He heard voices down the hall and the sound of pounding feet. Cops and medics were pouring into the upper gun deck. Coker stepped back and let them
go to work on Beau. Nick had moved off into the store. In a moment he was on the radio.

“I have Chu. He’s down by the fishing gear with a big hole in his chest. He’s awake and talking. He might make it.”

Coker tapped a medic on the back, told him what Nick had said, got back on the radio as a pair of EMT guys ran down the stairs.

“What about Maranzano?”

A pause.

“Maranzano’s here. Fixed and dilated. Looks like one of your rounds. Center mass. Straight through the heart.”

Coker knew it was a righteous shot, but Maranzano was a civilian and protecting civilians was why they had gone into the store in the first place. There’d be an after-action PISTOL inquiry.

Coker would have to make damn sure their forensics team found that .44 round that Maranzano had fired at Nick. Nick would back him up on the shooting, but Coker’s career could depend on that round.

“The kid?”

A moment.

Nick was back, his voice slow and heavy.

“He’s here. Got one in the upper thigh.”

“Jesus. One of mine?”

A moment.

“No. Looks like a shotgun round.”

“Any vitals?”

Another moment.

“No. Blew out his femoral. He’s gone.”

Endicott sat back in the comfy leather seat of the Cadillac and watched the video streaming on his iPhone. He was looking at Warren Smoles talking straight into the Fox News camera, going on in his usual style about what he was calling
The Galleria Mall Incident
. He had pointed out several times that he was calling it that because what had happened here was a lynching just like
The Ox-Bow Incident
.

Since most of the reporters crowding around him were barely into their thirties and the products of various elite Ivy League universities, with all the monumental cultural ignorance that entails, they didn’t have a freaking clue what the hell he was talking about. But they kept the cameras on him because he gave great video.

He was wearing a light gray suit over a shell-pink oxford shirt with a wide-spread English collar and a watered-silk tie in pale lavender. When he spoke, it was in the rounded and assured tones of a practiced orator, a device that, given the caliber of his audience, effectively obscured the fact that he was utterly and totally full of shit.

Endicott, who had personal experience of the man, watched with grim amusement as Smoles, who had absolutely zero actual knowledge of what had gone on inside the Bass Pro Shop, laid out the sequence of events that had resulted in the deaths of three innocent civilians and the grievous wounding of another at the hands of what he was calling “cowboy killer cops.” He listened to the narrative for a while and then turned the video off.

What he had gleaned from
The Smoles Report
was directly at odds with what he had been able to intercept on his police scanner, which was good enough to decipher the encrypted chatter between the Niceville PD and the EMT people working the site.

Basically, Deitz had holed up in the Bass Pro Shop because he had to, and Chu went with him because he had to, and the cops went in to get him out because they had to, and it all might have gone differently if there hadn’t been an armed civilian lurking in the woodwork.

This civilian popped out with his hand cannon just in time to totally fuck up what could have been a reasonably efficient takedown by two CID detectives—Beau Norlett and Nick Kavanaugh, backed up by a mysterious all-purpose police sniper who was being identified only by the name Coker.

Now Byron Deitz was DATS—Dead at the Scene. His hostage/​coconspirator/​innocent victim/​inscrutable Chinese mastermind/​feckless nimrod take-your-pick Andy Chu had been medevacked to Lady Grace Hospital, his condition listed as critical. His companion on the journey was the CID guy, Beau Norlett. His condition was described as grave. And there were two civilians also tagged as DATS, a forty-eight-year-old real estate developer named Frankie Maranzano and his fourteen-year-old grandson, Ricardo Gianetti-Maranzano.

The exact circumstances of their demise were about to become a matter for PISTOL—the Post-Incident Shooting Team Operational Liaison unit—a shooting review board composed largely of feckless civilians and disgruntled ex-cops that was being described by a couple of the troopers on the cross-talk circuit as the Pissed-Off Pogues.

Endicott sat there in the Cadillac watching the flashing lights and the hive of law enforcement activity that was still buzzing around the huge slab-sided fortress of the Bass Pro Shop and wondered where the hell he was supposed to take it from here.

He had given Warren Smoles the heads-up and sent him into the scene in the hope that he’d emerge with something useful to relay, but so far all Smoles had done was to leave four messages on Endicott’s shielded message center, each one delivered in the breathless
I’m in the middle of it and ain’t I keen
tone that makes Geraldo Rivera so irritating to watch and all of them conveying bugger-all. So now what?

There being nothing for it but to suck it up, Endicott picked up his cell and dialed 913–682–8700. His call was expected and after a long go-round with various stiff-necked guards and assorted turnkeys the line came alive again and Endicott was talking to Mario La Motta, the Man Himself.

La Motta was as charming as ever.

“What the fuck’s going on down there?”

Endicott started to lay down the basics but La Motta cut him off.

“I gotta fucking TV up here, Harvill. I can see what the fuck went down. They’re saying Deitz is dead. Izzat true?”

“Yes. I haven’t seen the body, but they only choppered out two wounded. Three including a security guard who got it in the knee. Everybody else is DATS.”

“What the fuck is DATS—never mind. So the Fuckhead bought it?”

“Cops are saying a 5.56 through the throat and a nine-mill through both lungs. The back of his neck is splattered all over a family of stuffed bobcats.”

“That oughta do it. If you get a chance, go to the funeral and piss down his throat for us, if he still has one, willya?”

Endicott promised to oblige.

“Okay. Did you get the cash yet?”

Endicott took a breath and went to his Happy Place for a moment, and then came back.

“No. From what I’m hearing, Deitz never had it.”

“What? You mean the other guys kept it?”

“No. I mean, from what I’m getting down here, I’m pretty convinced that Byron Deitz had nothing to do with the robbery.”

“What? It really was Some Other Dudes?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

A silence, while La Motta breathed in and out. Endicott found himself thinking of sump pumps. La Motta was back.

“Then why’s he fucking dead?”

Endicott laid it out for him. La Motta wasn’t a good listener. When Endicott had repeated a few of the salient details often enough to pound them into La Motta’s skull, La Motta did more heavy breathing. This time Endicott thought of clogged drains. Apparently when La Motta had to think carefully about something it made his emphysema worse. What he came up with was a surprise to Endicott.

“This Maranzano guy. What’s his first name again?”

“Frankie.”

“Fuck me,” said La Motta. “Frankie Maranzano? How old is he?”

“Forty-eight.”

“Julie and Desi had a go-round with a guy by that name, worked outta Vegas. Was a made guy, so we had to be polite. His people got heated up over a jurisdictional thing. What’s this guy look like?”

Endicott had to go by the description he’d heard on the police radio.

“Over six feet. A weightlifter. Has money in real estate down in Destin.”

“Always drives a Bentley? Keeps a hot young
cumare
with bodacious tits? Name of Delores?”

There was an immense scarlet Bentley alone in an isolated section of the lot, lit up dramatically by a streetlight. A pretty woman was being comforted by the large female patrol cop that Endicott had come to know—and admire—as Mavis Crossfire, although they had never met. He just liked her style on the cop radio.

Delores, the
goo-may
, was all wrapped up inside a Mavis Crossfire bear hug. So, if he set aside the bodacious-tits detail, since they were not currently visible, being pressed up against Mavis Crossfire’s gun belt, the markers seemed to be all there.

“I think I’m looking right at the
goo-may
and the Bentley as we speak.”

“Fuck. That’s him. You come across any of his goombahs, Harvill, you should get outta the fucking road, you follow? With Maranzano dead, there’ll be a lotta nasty people coming outta the plumbing looking to take over his interests. First to get it will be Delores. She has any brains, she’ll clean out his accounts and fuck off to Brazil.”

Endicott expressed his readiness to get outta the fucking road if he ran across any goombahs.