south on the winding pitted asphalt of Route 311, there’s a rutted track on the right, hidden in the brush, that leads off the highway and into the cool green darkness of the old forest, a dense mix of alders and oaks and pines. The track curves away around a bend and seems to dissolve into the trees.
After a few hundred yards, the track breaks out into a clearing, in the middle of which stands—or stood—an old pale blue barn, sagging under the weight of all the years since the Great Depression, during which it finally ceased to operate as the Belfair Pike General Store and Saddlery.
The sheet-metal roof of the barn had collapsed in several places, exposing square-cut beams a hundred and fifty years old, slick with mold and rot. The interior was dim and hot and reeked of spilled oil and manure and decades of accumulated bat scat.
Merle Zane and Charlie Danziger had been sitting inside this barn for three hours, breathing through their mouths, patiently waiting for the manhunt to pass over.
Although a critical part of the plan, this was also a tense period, a necessary risk to run with a chance that a state chopper flying over would notice this obscure patch of blue deep in the old forest and send a squad car in for a closer look.
The only warning they would get, if this were to happen, would be a short cell phone call from Coker, who, as a sergeant with the BelfairCounty patrol, was out there in the hunt with the rest of the posse. So far this call had not come.
Merle Zane was a craggy-faced Franco-Irish guy in his middle forties with a shaved head and a flame scar on the left side of his neck. Merle was extremely fit, a martial artist, calm and self-contained. The turnings of fate and the fact that his father was a mechanic and auto body man who had specialized in stolen car parts had led him into stock car racing until, one day in a Louisiana town called Cocodrie, a couple of pit mechanics started yapping at him about how he was hogging the wall on the off-side turn. Zane’s forceful counter argument included the deployment of a tire iron.
A Cocodrie judge whose view of the exchange differed from Merle’s invited Merle to attend the notorious Angola prison, which was essentially a gladiator school granting any survivor an advanced degree in sheer brutality. Merle had survived it somehow, getting an early release seven years ago.
Since then Zane had been in the employ of a pair of car dealers who ran auctions up and down the eastern seaboard, mainly dealing in muscle cars from the sixties and seventies. Since the muscle car auction business often blurred the line between simple fraud and grand theft auto, the owners of the business, two Armenian American kids whose family motto was “Your money and my experience will become my money and your experience,” needed someone like Merle Zane around the office, where his duties covered the spectrum from Corvettes to personal security.
Although working with the Bardashi Boys was like sharing a hot tub with anaerobic algae, the job paid reasonably well. But Zane hoped one day to have his own charter boat service on Florida’s Gulf coast and had been quietly on the lookout for a business opportunity that would make that happen.
This opportunity came along one day in the form of Charlie Danziger, a tall cowboy-looking older man with a big white handlebar mustache, an easy smile, and a hoarse, whispery voice. Danziger, born in Bozeman, Montana, at the other end of the state from his old friend Coker, was an ex–highway patrol officer, cashiered early due to a job-related disability—addicted to OxyContin after being injured on the job—who was now working as a regional manager for a Wells Fargo unit doing business along the eastern seaboard.
Charlie Danziger and Coker had met in the Marine Corps, so long ago that neither man could quite remember where, although they sort of recalled that they were being strafed at the time. They were both stationed at Quantico,
After a few hundred yards, the track breaks out into a clearing, in the middle of which stands—or stood—an old pale blue barn, sagging under the weight of all the years since the Great Depression, during which it finally ceased to operate as the Belfair Pike General Store and Saddlery.
The sheet-metal roof of the barn had collapsed in several places, exposing square-cut beams a hundred and fifty years old, slick with mold and rot. The interior was dim and hot and reeked of spilled oil and manure and decades of accumulated bat scat.
Merle Zane and Charlie Danziger had been sitting inside this barn for three hours, breathing through their mouths, patiently waiting for the manhunt to pass over.
Although a critical part of the plan, this was also a tense period, a necessary risk to run with a chance that a state chopper flying over would notice this obscure patch of blue deep in the old forest and send a squad car in for a closer look.
The only warning they would get, if this were to happen, would be a short cell phone call from Coker, who, as a sergeant with the BelfairCounty patrol, was out there in the hunt with the rest of the posse. So far this call had not come.
Merle Zane was a craggy-faced Franco-Irish guy in his middle forties with a shaved head and a flame scar on the left side of his neck. Merle was extremely fit, a martial artist, calm and self-contained. The turnings of fate and the fact that his father was a mechanic and auto body man who had specialized in stolen car parts had led him into stock car racing until, one day in a Louisiana town called Cocodrie, a couple of pit mechanics started yapping at him about how he was hogging the wall on the off-side turn. Zane’s forceful counter argument included the deployment of a tire iron.
A Cocodrie judge whose view of the exchange differed from Merle’s invited Merle to attend the notorious Angola prison, which was essentially a gladiator school granting any survivor an advanced degree in sheer brutality. Merle had survived it somehow, getting an early release seven years ago.
Since then Zane had been in the employ of a pair of car dealers who ran auctions up and down the eastern seaboard, mainly dealing in muscle cars from the sixties and seventies. Since the muscle car auction business often blurred the line between simple fraud and grand theft auto, the owners of the business, two Armenian American kids whose family motto was “Your money and my experience will become my money and your experience,” needed someone like Merle Zane around the office, where his duties covered the spectrum from Corvettes to personal security.
Although working with the Bardashi Boys was like sharing a hot tub with anaerobic algae, the job paid reasonably well. But Zane hoped one day to have his own charter boat service on Florida’s Gulf coast and had been quietly on the lookout for a business opportunity that would make that happen.
This opportunity came along one day in the form of Charlie Danziger, a tall cowboy-looking older man with a big white handlebar mustache, an easy smile, and a hoarse, whispery voice. Danziger, born in Bozeman, Montana, at the other end of the state from his old friend Coker, was an ex–highway patrol officer, cashiered early due to a job-related disability—addicted to OxyContin after being injured on the job—who was now working as a regional manager for a Wells Fargo unit doing business along the eastern seaboard.
Charlie Danziger and Coker had met in the Marine Corps, so long ago that neither man could quite remember where, although they sort of recalled that they were being strafed at the time. They were both stationed at Quantico,
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