The Homecoming (8 page)

“I got nothing to say to Nick, Mavis.”

“Maybe,” said Nick. “But I have something to say to you. You’re going to want to hear it.”

Deitz opened his eyes and looked at Nick. There had been a tone in Nick’s voice. It sounded like an opening. An angle he could work.

“How’s Beth and the kids? I figure they’re with you.”

“They are. Beth is leaving you.”

“Jeez. There’s a bulletin. Alert the media.”

“You stepped in it pretty good here.”

Deitz closed his eyes.

“Fuck you, Nick. I’m tired. Go away.”

“In a minute. I said I had something to say.”

“I’m not telling you one fucking thing. Where’s that asshole Smoles?”

“He’ll be back here tomorrow morning.”

“What’s all this shit about me having a heart condition? All I got is high blood pressure, and who the fuck wouldn’t, they were in my shoes?”

“We’re just trying to keep you local, keep you out of the hands of the federal government. Saying you’re too sick to be transported is how we’re doing it. Smoles signed off on it. He knows that national security will be all over you for the Chinese thing—”

Deitz grinned.

“Those fucking Chinks. They really all dead?”

“Yes. We’re still looking for the item.”

Deitz was just a bit too still and his face just a bit too blank.

“What item?”

“The one you and Holliman were so worked up about this morning at the Marriott.”

Deitz thought this over.

“I hear that Lear went straight in at five hundred miles an hour.”

“Nowhere near. Maybe two.”

Deitz laughed, opened one eye.

“Good luck trying to find jack shit in a smoking crater like that. Even if there
was
jack shit to find.”

“We don’t need to find the item, Byron. We just have to figure out what’s missing from Quantum Park. All
that
takes is a thorough inventory check.”

“Still doesn’t prove I had dick to do with it.”

“The government isn’t going to want to
prosecute
you, Byron. They just want to
use
you. You go down that rat hole on a national security finding, you’ll never see blue sky again. You might even end up in a Chinese prison.”

“Why the hell would that happen?”

“Five Chinese nationals died this morning, died while trying to leave the country with a top-secret device—”

“You don’t know that.”

“Okay. I only
suspect
it. I’ll bet my 401(k) that you damn well
know
it. So the State Department can claim it was an accident until their lips fall
off. Chinese government won’t believe that, not for a minute. And if you think Zachary Dak didn’t use your name to his bosses, you’re kidding yourself. Five of their guys are down, in a ten-million-dollar plane. We have information that says they were
guangbo
—spies. Secret police. Their bosses lost face and they’ll need your ass to get it back. Washington will give you up in a flash. They’d rather hang it on you than run the risk that the Chinese would think
they
had something to do with it. The country needs Chinese money a lot more than it needs you. So you need to think about it.”

From the expression on his face, Deitz was.

“Well, that’s all I wanted to say,” said Nick, straightening up. “This is the last time we’ll get a chance to talk like this. Once you get into that lockdown ward upstairs, it all runs on auto. Eventually the spooks will arrive, and you’ll be gone. You have a nice night, Byron. I’ll kiss the kids for—”

“Fuck the kids. Are you offering me something or not?”

“I think somebody planted that money on you—”

“No shit? You should be a detective.”

“And I think there’s a
reason
they picked on you. It’s pretty obvious that whoever planted it has a connection to the robbery. So if you help us with that, maybe we can do something about the Chinese angle.”

Deitz opened both eyes.

“You don’t really give a fuck about the Chinese thing, do you?”

“Not really. Not my jurisdiction. I just want the people who killed those cops. I think you might even know who they are.”

Nick could see the cartoon
thinks
bubble floating above Deitz’s head.

“If I had information about who they were and didn’t report it, I’d be an Accessory After. Draws the same penalty as if I actually did the bank.”

“Hard thing to prove
when
you figured it out. Could have been a minute ago, and here you are reporting it right away, like a good citizen. So. Do you know who they are?”

Deitz said nothing for a while.

“I don’t
know
who they are. I got a few theories.”

“Now’s the time to talk, Byron.”

Deitz looked at Mavis, then came back to Nick.

“Can you really keep the government off me?”

“I think so.”

“How?”

“If you’re assisting the police in a multiple-cop-killing case, even Jon
Stewart would go nuts if a pack of nameless spooks stepped in and shut that down just so the president could keep the Chinese friendly.”

“How would the media find out?”

“Smoles would be happy to take care of that.”

Deitz put his head back, closed his eyes.

They waited him out.

“I’m gonna want to talk to Smoles.”

“You do that.”

“I will.”

“I’d do it soon.”

Nick made it home long before moonlight. Beau dropped him off outside Kate’s town house in Garrison Hills just as the sun was going down. A golden light was slanting through the live oaks that framed the cream-colored facade of the house. Lights were on inside, a soft glow filling the tall French windows. He could hear voices, and music. The scent of steaks cooking on the barbecue grill in the back garden drifted on the air.

Beat down, depressed, sleepless for almost twenty-four hours, Nick slowly climbed the curving steps that led up to the main floor landing.

As he reached the doorstep he could hear children’s voices coming through the ornate black doors. Axel and Hannah, Beth’s kids. They sounded happy.

He stopped for a moment, leaned his back against the wrought-iron railing, listening to the murmurs of life inside the house. The double doors had two arch-shaped stained-glass panels set into their rising curves. He could see silhouetted figures moving through the light.

At that moment it came to him that his old life with Kate had ended yesterday, and that from now on everything would be different.

They had been alone, quietly and happily alone. Now there would be Beth, and Axel, and Hannah.

And in a while, when he got out of physio, they’d have Rainey Teague, and all of that poor kid’s troubles along with him—kidnapped—missing
for ten days—discovered buried alive in a sealed crypt—both parents committing suicide—in a coma for a year. The prospect of having Rainey in the house was a stone in his heart. In Nick’s mind, Rainey was tied to the essential
strangeness
of Niceville.

Even the disappearances of Delia Cotton, of Gray Haggard, and the unexplained absence of Kate’s father, Dillon, had barely registered with the people of the town. But they sure had with Nick.

And only last night, right here where he was standing, right on these steps, Kate had opened these same black doors onto a
thing
that had no explanation, no framework, no reason to exist that fit into any of the outer world’s reality. It was utterly strange, and it was
hostile
—hate-filled, hungry, mindless—something out of a nightmare world, something alien and terrifying and inexplicable.

They both saw it, Nick and Kate.

And they both saw the woman—the
image
of the woman—who had stepped out of that old mirror in a haze of green light and confronted the
thing
in the doorway. They had recognized her from an old picture. It was a woman named Glynis Ruelle, who had died in 1939. This had actually happened last night.

Or had it?

Maybe none of it had been real.

Neither he nor Kate had spoken about it since. Beth’s emergency call, her arrival in the middle of the night, the kids crying, all of this had driven the memory of the woman in the mirror, and the thing at the door, into the background.

And in the morning, the call about the plane crash at Mauldar Field had taken his mind off everything but his work. Now he was back home, and it was all in front of him again.

Hesitating on the landing, his hand on the latch, listening to the kids playing and the talk of the adults inside, Nick felt that he was an
outsider
in Niceville, that he didn’t belong, that whatever was going on in Crater Sink, in Niceville, whatever was going on with Rainey Teague and all the missing people, whatever had created that swirling black nightmare at their door, it had nothing to do with him, and it never had, and it was nothing he’d ever be able to understand, or ever hope to change.

It was in his mind to turn away, to go back down the steps, to walk away up the hill, walk away from Beth and Axel and Hannah and Reed and even from Kate, walk away from Rainey Teague and all the inexplicable forces he represented.

Just go quietly away under the branches of the live oaks, under the Spanish moss, vanish into the evening darkness, just keep walking until Niceville and all of its mysteries were miles behind him.

Go home to California, find a way to get back into the Army, or even try for the Marine Corps. Find an
ordinary
life, a
comprehensible
life.

Save himself.

As if.

He opened the door and Kate was there with a drink in her hand and a kiss for his cheek. Married men live longer than single men, and there’s a reason for it. He kissed her back, and held it long enough to get a whistle from Reed.

They ate in the formal dining room, the walls covered in family photographs, all of them sitting around the long gleaming table, under the Gallé glass chandelier that their mother, Lenore, had brought back from Paris thirty years ago. Kate was at her usual place at the end of the table nearest the kitchen. Nick was at the other end, his back up against the fireplace screen, Reed at his left hand and Axel at his right, Beth and Hannah down the middle. Sterling-silver platters of roast potatoes and cobs of corn and sliced tomatoes and garden salad and barbecued steaks covered the center of the table.

There were decanters of lemonade for Axel and Hannah, and three bottles of Veuve Clicquot were chilling in an ice bucket on the oak sideboard.

A fourth, popped and fizzing, was in Reed’s right hand, and he was filling a quartet of crystal flutes lined up in front of him. When the flutes were full they were handed along and everyone looked to Kate for the toast, even Axel and Hannah, both kids looking solemn and a bit shell-shocked.

“To Beth and Axel and Hannah. Welcome to a happy home.”

“I second that,” said Reed, leaning in to give her a kiss on the cheek and then putting a hand out to Beth. Everybody pinged their glasses, Axel and Hannah clanked their tumblers, and the food got handed around.

Axel, eight, a slender, solemn boy with large brown eyes and a full head of curly brown hair that hung down into his eyes, looked around the table with a puzzled expression. Nick saw the question forming in his
eyes and he leaned over to listen to him. As he did so it cut him to the quick to see the boy flinch in a reflexive move. He had been doing that for a couple of years now, pulling back if any male adult came too close. “I heard Uncle Reed say that Dad was arrested. Was it because he hit Mom?”

Looking at the boy, Nick settled on the simplest answer. Axel had all the time in the world to learn the whole story.

“No, it wasn’t. He was arrested for driving too fast. And for fighting with some police officers. But your dad should never have hit your mom. Not ever. Men
never
hit women. Or little kids. Never.”

Axel looked a little hunted.

“Axel, did your dad ever hit you?”

Axel looked at his plate and shook his head.

“Not really,” he said, still looking down. “But he yelled a real lot. And he’d lean down and get real close. And he shook me sometimes. Hard. It hurt my neck and made my head ache. I didn’t like it when he did that.”

“I guess not. It was wrong for him to do that.”

Axel leaned in closer, spoke in a conspiratorial whisper.

“He hit Hannah once. Mom doesn’t want anyone to know. He hit her because she made a mess in her diaper and Mom let it get on the new rug in the movie room. Dad was pretty mad about that because it was his special room and nobody was supposed to go there but Mom wanted Hannah to see a movie and her player was broken so we went in Dad’s special movie room and that’s where it happened and Dad came home and saw it. Mom was holding Hannah and Dad was hitting Mom like he does when he gets all mad and Hannah was crying so he hit her too. That’s why she can’t hear out of that ear anymore.”

Nick couldn’t help glancing down the table to where Beth and Hannah and Reed were busy talking about getting the carriage house ready for Beth and the kids to live in it.

Hannah was a round, plump, angelic little girl who had just turned four, still quite babyish, with large blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white. She had pale skin and a slightly loopy smile and a wonderful sense of humor.

She had a habit of tilting her head to one side if people were speaking to her, and she always focused on their lips while they were talking. She also had trouble getting some words out right.

He knew this was because she was deaf in her left ear. It hadn’t
occurred to him that she was deaf because her father had slapped her so viciously on that ear that he had damaged her hearing. The realization left him with nothing to say.

Like all kids who have to live with unpredictable parents, Axel had developed an acute ability to sense what was going on in the minds of adults in his world. Axel read Nick pretty well.

“It’s okay, Uncle Nick. Don’t you worry about her. Mom took her to a doctor. She’s going to get a hearing aid. She’ll be okay.”

She will now
, he thought.