Read Online Niceville by Carsten Stroud - Free Book Online

leather jacket. Merle straightened up on his oil drum, reaching instinctively for the mid-sized Taurus nine-mill in his belt. Danziger held up a hand, his callused leathery palm out, shaking his head.
    “Yeah?”
    Merle could not hear what was being said on the other end, only that whatever it was made Danziger’s face tighten up.
    Danziger put the cell phone to his chest.
    “Go check the perimeter. Coker says there may be civilians inside the fence line.”
    “Not cops?”
    “Says no. Maybe hunters. Go look. Be careful.”
    Merle pulled out his Taurus and stepped softly over to the barn doors, leaning down to look out through the gaps in the boarding. All he could see was weeds and the top of the lane where it opened up into the clearing. He was reaching for the door handle when Charlie Danziger shot him in the back, a rushed shot, hitting Merle in the lower back instead of the spine, a complication which proved to be quite troublesome later on.
    The impact slammed Merle up against the barn doors and he crashed through the rotten wood, turning as he fell, landing on his back in the dust outside. He rolled to his left as a second shot scored the dirt a foot away from his thigh.
    The barn wall was now between Zane and Danziger. He heard Danziger’s boots scraping on the concrete floor of the barn. Merle fired four quick shots in a horizontal line at roughly chest height along the wooden slats.
    He heard Danziger cry out, a startled grunt, followed by the satisfying tumble of a body hitting the floor hard. A second later the barn boards began to shred as Charlie Danziger, apparently still very much in the game, began firing blind, straight through the wall. One stray round caught Zane in the right shoulder, a glancing impact, but the blunt shock threw him back to the ground again.
    He rolled, got back up, stumbling backwards as he emptied the Taurus into the barn, concentrating his shots in and around the area where he thought he could see the dim outline of Danziger’s body through the bullet holes in the barn boards.
    He stitched up the boards in a Charlie Danziger–shaped pattern—eleven more rounds—and then the slide locked back and he was out of ammunition. Merle turned and stumbled into the woods, lungs on fire and head spinning, crashing through the brush like a gut-shot buck, thinking,
So much for the beautiful friendship
.

Gray Haggard Comes at a Bad Time
    Gray Haggard had once been briefly and happily married, but the young Margaret Mercer whom he had adored beyond words was so long in the past now that he had trouble bringing her image to mind, other than her soft brown eyes and her auburn hair and her round full body and that she had been a daring and sometimes astonishing lover.
    But Margaret Mercer was long gone from the world and it had always seemed to him unfair that he should manage to survive the Kasserine Pass and that god-awful landing at Gela in Sicily and finally go through the abattoir of Omaha Beach and come out of it with nothing more than a chest full of shrapnel, while back in Niceville his heart’s desire had fallen prey to a female mosquito loaded up with the encephalitis virus.
    His relationship with the Almighty had been a distant one ever since and now that he was closing in on eighty-five he often gave thought to what he was going to say to God should they ever end up on speaking terms again.
    These were the sorts of thoughts he was thinking as he drove his 1952 lime green and hot pink Packard around the curve of the tree-shaded lane that led up to Temple Hill. It was late in the day to tend to Delia’s garden—the light of the evening was almost gone—but his alternative had been to drive all the way up to Sallytown to the Gates of Gilead Palliative Care Center and watch an old friend named Plug Zabriskie descend deeper into his terminal dementia.
    So a bit of shuffling around in Delia’s forsythia bushes and perhaps some time spent fiddling with her malfunctioning sprinkler