Niceville

standing around, the ambulance waiting a ways back, lights churning red and blue, casting a crazy hectic flicker across the graveyard.
    “It’s a trick,” he said finally, his temper flaring. “This whole thing has been some kind of sick stunt. Someone is jerking us around, Mavis. It’s all just some kind of twisted game.”
    “If it is, it’s a damn good one,” said Mavis, taking no offense, speaking in a soothing tone. “The guy tapped on the stone and the cryinggot worse.
Something’s
in there. We all think—maybe I should say we all
hope
—it’s Rainey.”
    They heard a muffled
crump
, a gravelly tumble, and then everyone was talking loud and fast.
    Nick and Mavis got to the mound just as Marty Coors stepped up and put his Maglite into the hole the fire guys had opened. There was a terrified face looking up at them, big round brown eyes, dirty blond hair, his dusty cheeks streaked with tear tracks, his mouth round and stretched as he went way back and down for the scream he finally came up with a few seconds later. It rang out across the graves and a flock of crows went exploding up out of a stand of linden.
    The boy was Rainey Teague, and he was alive.
    When they got him out a few minutes later, still in his school uniform, they realized he had been placed inside a long wooden box, a coffin, and the coffin wasn’t empty.
    Rainey Teague had been cradled in the withered embrace of a corpse, presumably the remains of Ethan Ruelle. They had no idea how this had been done, how the tomb had been opened without any sign of tampering, or by whom, or why, but Rainey Teague was alive. They took him to Lady Grace, where, over the next five hours, he slipped slowly but inexorably into a catatonic state.
    He was still lying there three days later when his father, Miles Teague, came to see his boy once again in the ICU unit. Rainey was lying in the middle of all the usual medical machinery, IV drips and beeping monitors and catheter racks and catheter drains.
    The ICU docs told Miles—a blunt-bodied Black Irish man in his early fifties, with a well-cut, handsome face going rapidly to hell—before withdrawing to leave the man alone with his son, that Rainey’s catatonia was not an uncommon response to unimaginable trauma.
    Miles Teague stared down at his son for two hours, watching him breathe in and out, then he leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, straightened up and went out to the parking lot and climbed into his big black Benz. He drove himself back to the family home in Garrison Hills, where he was found the next morning, in the same clothes, in a marble folly at the bottom of the garden, a handmade Purdey shotgun lying by his body and his head blown off at the shoulders.

ONE YEAR LATER

Friday Afternoon

Coker’s Afternoon Required Some Concentration
    The two-way radio in Coker’s pocket started to buzz, like a palmetto bug in a bottle. Coker was down deep inside himself, trying to see it all unfold. This Zen trick used to come naturally, but that was a long time back. He was looking through the yellow pampas grass at the snaky stretch of blacktop curving towards him through the long green valley, the heavy rifle in his hands as solid and warm as the neck of a horse.
    The two-way buzzed again.
    Coker pulled the handset out, thumbed the key.
    “Yes.”
    “We’re at mile marker 47.”
    Danziger’s voice was flat and calm, but tight. Coker could hear the sirens in the background, hear the hissing rush of wind, and the rumble of tires on the pebbled surface of the highway.
    “What have you got?”
    Coker listened to a short hard-edged exchange between Danziger and Merle Zane, the driver, both voices a little adrenalized, which was only natural.
    “So far only four,” said Danziger, coming back, “They’re right on us but staying back. We’ve got one news chopper with us, but far as we can see no cops in the air yet. Anything up ahead?”
    Coker looked down at the little portable TV on the ground beside him. On the tiny plasma screen he could see a dull black bullet-shaped car with a front like a clenched fist, Merle Zane’s Chrysler Magnum, flying down a curving ribbon of county road, patchwork farmlands all around, with four cars in close pursuit, two charcoal-gray and blackCrown Vics, what looked like a black and tan deputy sheriff car, also a Crown Vic, and one dark blue unmarked car, a flying brick with big fat tires and a rack of black steel bumper bars right up front.
    The image