The Reckoning Read Free

by the saw grass at their bases, a glimmer of shiny black like crow’s wings. When his headlights hit it, the shape froze, then went to ground, a distinctly furtive move, like a black flag dropping down, a shimmery flutter into the grass, and then nothing at all.
    Cat? Bat? Dog? Crow?
    No. Too big. And the shape was wrong.
    He rolled to a stop, lit up the scene with his high beams, and flicked on his dash-mounted video camera. Not a tremor in the tall grass around the tree trunks.
    A feeling of…waiting.
    Stillness but not emptiness.
    Something is wrong here.
    He was in a dark lane, an alley, all the streetlights behind him. If he got out of the car he’d be a silhouetted target against the glare coming off the Miracle Mile. The parkette was at the far end of the narrow lane, a good fifty feet away. Lot of ground to cover, and fences on both sides, like he was in a cattle chute. Two rutted tracks in the alley were full of black water. The rest was mud and gravel, palm leaves, trash and beer cans. Broken glass. Unsteady ground to walk on and not a place where you’d want to go down hard.
    Be nice to have a partner.
    He picked up the radio.
    “Central, this is Nine Zulu.”
    “Nine Zulu.”
    “Central I’m gonna be ten-thirty-seven here at Scales and the Mile.”
    “Roger that, Frank. What’s up?”
    “Just a walkabout. Saw something weird in this parkette here, where Brodie’s Gun Shop used to be. Got my dashboard video on.”
    “Got the Portable?”
    “You bet.”
    “Scales is a bad sector, Frank. Lots of crank calls there all this week. Six Yankee is a couple blocks out. You want to wait?”
    “What’s their call?”
    “A ten-ten.”
    Yuppie larvae fighting outside some bar.
    Could be thirty minutes with that.
    “No, Central, I’m good.”
    Barbetta keyed off, tugged at his Kevlar, and popped the door, thinking that the duty captain always told them
Be safe out there
and every time they heard that they all thought,
Horseshit, the only way to stay safe is never get out of the car.

Coker and Twyla Disagree on a Question of Civic Virtue
    Around the same time that Charlie Danziger was beginning to stitch himself back together in downtown Niceville (but technically an hour later—because of a difference in time zones), on a St. Augustine beach three hundred and fifty-nine miles southeast of the MountRoyal Hotel, the ex–Belfair and Cullen County staff sergeant—known as Coker to his friends, of which he had two if you counted Charlie Danziger—was sitting and listening to the Atlantic Ocean crash and boom in the dark under a sea of stars. Staring into the glowing embers of a fire, Coker was brooding a bit about Danziger and related recent events while drinking Laphroaig out of a sterling silver flask.
    Next to him on the blanket was a young Cherokee woman named Twyla Littlebasket, lying on her back, mildly stoned, watching Orion move ponderously into the west. Twyla, who had once been described by a cop named Nick Kavanaugh as having “curves like a French staircase,” was wearing the bottom half of a Tommy Bahama bikini in tourmaline and gold, and a sleepy, satisfied look. The night was sultry and smelled of sea salt and kelp and wisps of cedar smoke from the fire.
    Behind them on a large dune was a glass-and-wood-beam Frank Lloyd Wright beach house sheltered by a stand of palm trees and surrounded by pampas grass. A soft glow from the interior of the beach house lay on the sand around them like candlelight. In short, a lovely night, and it would have been perfect except for the house party five hundred yards down the shore, which was rapidly getting out of hand.
    The shore was mostly dark, except for these two islands of light. It was lined with other homes every bit as expensive as theirs, but most of them were shuttered and empty on this Friday evening, the summer season drawing down.
    But that thumping bass beat was getting louder by the minute. It was coming from the Kellerman place. The