Niceville Read Free

should do, you should go stand there for a while, yourself, see what you get.”
    “You think?”
    “Ayup.”
    So Nick did.
    The store where Uncle Moochie ran what he liked to call his brokerage service had been a fairly ornate barbershop back in the thirties, and it still had faint traces of gilt lettering in an arch across the front of the glass— SULLIVAN’S TONSORIAL ACADEMY —but the window was so jammed to the ceiling with antique clocks and gilt mirrors and pocket watches and china busts of pocket dogs and rusted Art Deco lamps and cameos and brooches and gaudy costume jewelry and tiny bronze nudes that it looked like a treasure chest. Nick could see how a kid would find the window fascinating.
    According to Boot Jackson’s field report, Nick was right on top of the last place on North Gwinnett where anyone had seen the kid.
    No one in the shops farther down North Gwinnett had seen him go by, although he was a regular at Scoops in the next block, and people often saw him climbing the base of the bronze statue of the Confederate trooper in the parkette at the intersection of North Gwinnett and Bluebottle Way.
    But not today.
    Today, as far as the Niceville PD had been able to determine, this spot of sidewalk in front of Uncle Moochie’s was the farthest Rainey Teague had gotten before … before
something
happened.
    Pawnshops have security cameras
, Nick was thinking. There it was, in the top left corner, one red eye blinking down at him.
    Moochie, a morose Lebanese with a sagging face full of guile and sorrow, had once been enormous, but a severe case of ulcerative colitis had left him looking like a melting candle. He was a notorious fence but also a good street source for Nick, and he was happy to let Nick see the security video, leading him through the clutter and litter and overloaded display cases to the back of the narrow store, where, in an office that reeked of sweat and hashish, he opened up a cupboard concealing an LED monitor and pressed a few buttons on a panel.
    “It’s all digital. Auto-erases every twenty-four hours, if I don’t cancel it,” said Moochie, as the video began to roll backwards, the time marker flickering in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
    They stood there in Moochie’s crowded office and watched the people in the video walk jerkily backwards through time as the seconds coiled up again. A minute and thirty-eight seconds ran off and Nick saw himself standing on the walk outside Moochie’s, staring up at the video camera, and then Nick walked backwards away to the left of the picture. The marker spooled and flickered, the people in the video moving as in an old silent film, stiff and strange, as if they were all ghosts of the long-gone past.
    Nick was very aware of Moochie beside him and for a time he wondered if Moochie himself was the last thing Rainey Teague saw.
    Had Rainey come into the shop?
    And if he had, what had happened then?
    Was he upstairs right now, or in the basement?
    The next shop along was Toonerville, a hobby shop with a big Lionel train going around and around in a miniature version of Niceville. Rainey never failed to go inside and talk to Mrs. Lianne Hardesty, who ran the shop. Rainey was a favorite there, but today, no Rainey.
    Moochie?
    Nick had never heard anything hinky about Moochie, no hint of a pedophile streak or any other kind of chicken-hawk leaning. His record, although far from edifying, contained nothing that indicated any sort of sexual impulses at all.
    But you never knew.
    Moochie grunted, hit a button, and the image froze with the time marker stopped at 1509:22. There was Rainey Teague, just stepping into the picture, seen from an angle above and to his right, so that the kid seemed foreshortened.
    Moochie looked at Nick, who nodded, and Moochie hit a button that advanced the frames one at a time. Rainey’s clockwork figure ticked fully into the picture frame, exactly as Alf Pennington had described him, Harry Potter knapsack