The Reckoning by Carsten Stroud

Author:Carsten Stroud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

If You Can’t Get There from Here Then They Can’t Get Here from There

As a precaution, in the wake of what Twyla was calling the Bloody Beach Smackdown, she and Coker had pulled out of the shore house and checked into the Casa Monica Hotel in downtown St. Augustine.

The hotel, built in 1888, looked like a film set for a thirties musical with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, a sprawling, block-long, vaguely Moorish-looking Spanish Baroque mansion in gleaming white stucco with ornate terra-cotta towers and carved Juliet balconies, stained glass and flowers and ferns everywhere, a massive vaulted lobby walled with polished mahogany and studded with original art, and an Old Hollywood courtyard pool surrounded by medjool date palms.

They checked into the Flagler Suite under one of Coker’s alternate IDs, Mr. and Mrs. R. J. Quirk from Atlanta, Georgia, made it a point to decline the turndown service each night, and let it be known to all parties that they were there for privacy, not attention, which they were promised they would get, or not get, or…well, yes, sir, and you have a real nice stay.

The Flagler Suite took up an entire tower of the hotel, with three separate floors, the bedroom being on the highest level, two kings, and a wraparound view of the town, even a sliver-glimpse of the sapphire-blue Atlantic.

Twyla, a dedicated sybarite, found her jagged nerves soothed by the old-world luxury. She was feeling pretty tentative right now, having been the Predicate Cause of the Bloody Beach Smackdown, although Coker wasn’t the kind of guy to blame others for his own excesses.

And they both agreed that beating the living daylights out of those two dim-witted college boys had been in retrospect a tad excessive.

Not to mention expensive.

So they settled in to await events, should there be any events to develop, having decided that when there was nothing to be done but wait and see, it was best to do that in comfortable seclusion.

Right now they were down in the main floor living room, both in their bathrobes, Coker sipping a single malt with a bandaged right hand—punching a guy in the teeth has consequences—and Twyla with her glass of Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio, a habit she had picked up from Charlie Danziger, who drank enough of it every year to warrant a personal thank-you note from the mayor of Valdadige.

A moment of relative peace after a hectic interlude, and a time for quiet reflection on the future. Until Coker turned on the big flat-screen.

The news was on, but the sound was muted, apparently a taped repeat of a news story broadcast earlier on Fox, and what was filling up the screen was Mavis Crossfire, looking splendidly Wagnerian in her harness blues, talking to a reporter from Cap City CNN, a stainless-steel blond with bee-stung lips and gunfighter eyes. Under the video a news feed was spooling across the screen:

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