Niceville Page 23

  He also checked his bank account—online—to make sure he had enough ready money to make bail and he also got his lawyer’s business card off the dresser—Ms. Evangeline Barrow, Attorney-at-Law.

  Barrow wasn’t a criminal lawyer, but she knew her way around the courthouse, and maybe she’d be able to keep Judge Theodore W. Monroe from hanging Bock out to twist in the wind while crows plucked his eyes out like fat green grapes.

  With that lurid image in his head, he spent another few minutes setting up a shredding program to begin the complicated work of erasing every conceivable digital trace of anything incriminating from his hard drive, a slow, exacting, but thankfully automatic process that would nevertheless take several hours to complete.

  Then he pulled himself together—with an effort—and turned his attention back to the television—he was recording the thing on his TiVo—just as a dark green Crown Victoria pulled up to the squad car tangle in front of the church and a tall broad-shouldered silver-haired man in a dark gray suit got slowly out, his angular face set and cold-looking.

  This guy, in civilian clothes but obviously a senior cop of some kind, was met by the large red-haired female cop, Staff Sergeant Mavis Crossfire, the NPD cop in charge, according to the news broad, and by the State Police guy, a lean blond cop in a crisp gray and black uniform, identified as Captain James Candles. The man from the green Crown Vic was not identified, but he stood out even in that elite company, an impressive-looking Clint Eastwood type with hard eyes and seamed leathery skin who moved well and radiated a kind of quiet menace, at least to Bock, who was very sensitive to menace wherever he encountered it, which was almost everywhere he went. The news pixie was speculating on who this guy might be when the cop walked around to the trunk, popped it, and extracted what was unmistakably a rifle case, which caused Bock’s throat to close up and his knees to go weak.

  Holy Shit.

  They were ready to kill the guy.

  Holy Leaping Jesus.

  And they were letting the weapon be seen on camera, sending a clear signal to the citizens and specifically to Kevin David Dennison inside the rectory office that things were being kicked up a level. Bock had already heard that the record on the guy wasn’t accurate—horseshit, by the way, Bock did not make mistakes about data—and they were hinting that maybe there was some doubt about just how guilty this Kevin David Dennison guy really was. But apparently that wasn’t going to stop them from blowing his brains out on national television.

  And if that happened, if they did that, the root cause of this guy’s death—along with the deaths of anybody else who might get whacked this afternoon—the root cause of it all would be …

  Tony Bock, that’s who.

  Jesus Christ, he was thinking, sitting down on the couch and staring at the screen, what the hell have I gotten myself into?

  This cop standoff was serious shit.

  Even if nobody got killed, those cops down there in the street, maybe even that silver-haired movie-star assassin in the dark gray suit, they were all going to come looking for the busy little asshole who started all this.

  And that busy little asshole was sitting right here, on his big leather sofa, staring at them from the other side of his flat-screen Sony.

  Bock flopped backwards into the couch, heart hammering, cold fear rippling up and down his belly and chest—he had a terrific aptitude for dread—his agile rodent mind darting about the basement floor of his life looking for some rat hole to duck into. It was at this unpleasant juncture that his phone rang. He leaned down to stare at the call display, which read: SECURICOM TECHSERVE.

  Okay.

  Not good.

  But not the cops.

  Bock reached out, picked up the receiver, swallowed hard, and said, “Bock here.”

  “Mr. Christian Bock?”

  A mild meek voice, definitely not a cop voice. Some cubicle-rat for a telemarketing firm.

  Bock reached down deep for intimidating syntax.

  “Yes. Whom is this to whom I am speaking?”

  “My name is Andy Chu. Have you got a moment?”

  “I don’t know an Andy Chu. What’s this about?”

  “I’m the IT tech here at Securicom, Mr. Bock. I can hear your television set in the background. Are you by any chance watching the coverage of the hostage-taking at Saint Innocent?”

  “Yes. I am. Everyone is. So what?”

  On the screen, something was happening—the cops were all ducking behind their cars or racing for cover behind buildings. The news pixie was talking too fast into her mike, breathlessly squealing Shots fired shots fired OMG.

  “My goodness,” said Andy Chu, a placid voice with a hint of Asian in it. “Looks like things are going downhill pretty fast, doesn’t it?”

  “Look, whoever you are, what the hell do you want with me?” asked Bock, faking puzzled impatience, although his heart was telling him to brace himself for something deeply ugly.

  Chu paused, and then, although in the mildest and most conciliatory of tones, he spoke the four words that will always strike mortal terror into the hearts of even the most stalwart men.

  “We need to talk.”

  Coker Sorts the Wheat from the Chaff

  Coker had taken a firing position five feet back from an open window inside a vacant apartment over a pizza parlor across Peachtree from the rectory of Saint Innocent Orthodox, with a good clear line of sight through the thin glass window of the rectory, where, beyond the partially closed venetian blinds, he could see the figure of a stout apple-faced middle-aged man with a bald head and tortoiseshell half-glasses perched on his flushed, sweaty face.

  The man was wearing a dark green uniform with the name KEVIN stitched on the front right pocket. He was holding a black phone to his ear with his right hand and was waving a small stainless-steel pistol around in his left.

  In the background, directly behind the man, Coker could see three people lined up on an overstuffed couch, a willowy-looking young man with his arms protectively wrapped around two little boys, all three of them literally bug-eyed with fright.

  Coker was also aware of what they were sitting on—an overstuffed couch in bug-splatter orange with big blue flower blotches all over it; a classic seventies atrocity that Coker felt could only be improved by bloodstains and bits of human skull.

  From where Coker was sitting, the young priest could just as easily have been using the kids as shields to hide behind, but then Coker was a suspicious sort of guy, although he did try to think well of civilians, even if they were gutless pencil-neck pastors with lousy taste in furniture.

  Coker was sitting in a wooden chair, his suit jacket draped neatly over the back of it. He always wore a nice dark business suit with a shirt and a tie for this sort of thing, feeling that the serious nature of the work called for serious clothing.

  He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and his elbows braced on top of a heavy dining room table that he had forced two grumpy Niceville cops to hump up the back stairs from the pizza parlor downstairs.

  His right eye was hovering close to one end of the Leupold scope he had fitted to an SSG 550 semi-auto sniper rifle firing a 5.56 round, a Swiss-made jewel of a killing machine, with adjustable cheek-piece and shoulder-butt support, a two-stage trigger he had fine-tuned himself, a heavy hammer-forged barrel, a forward bipod, and an anti-reflective screen over the long barrel, so that heat rising off the barrel wouldn’t cause air ripples in the scope image: all in all, a sniper’s dream and a privilege to kill with.

  Through the scope he could see the short round man pacing back and forth through his crosshairs, and in his ear he could hear the laconic talk going on between Mavis Crossfire, who had command of the scene, and Jimmy Candles, Coker’s platoon mate.

  Mavis and Jimmy were discussing the informal pool that had started up between the various cops attending regarding the likely outcome of this afternoon’s festivities, with Mavis putting ten dollars into the guy getting his fontanel remodeled by a couple of HV rounds
from Coker’s SSG, and Jimmy Candles going for a disappointing but peaceful resolution of the thing, mainly on the grounds that word had come down from Tig Sutter that while the guy in the janitor’s suit really was a convicted sex offender back in Baltimore, it was a lousy beef.

  “Waddya mean a lousy beef?” said Nate Crone, one of Tig’s CID guys. They were all sitting around the office watching the thing on the squad room television. “What about the cell phone cluster around the schoolyards and swing sets?”

  “He’s a gym coach,” said Tig, grumpy, trying to watch the screen. “Part-time. He was coaching the parish soccer team.”

  “Horseshit, boss. He’s dirty as my dick,” said Nate, who was young enough to still think that all civilians were just degenerates who hadn’t gotten up the balls to go do something unspeakable yet.

  Tig sighed, thinking, Okay, a teachable moment, as the president likes to say.

  “Nate, all of you. Listen and learn. This is why I didn’t want to do anything before we got the Maryland report. It turned out the charge was based on some photos he had taken of his two-year-old daughter in her bath and then been stupid enough to take to a photo-mat, where a radical feminist clerk, caught up in that mid-eighties horseshit thing about Satanic child abuse, calls in the cops.”

  “Why’s he taking nudie shots of his naked kid?”

  “This was then, Nate. The eighties. Nobody does it now, because we’re all scared shitless, and this kind of crap is exactly why. The Baltimore ADA, another feminist crusader, bulls the case through, getting a conviction in spite of the appeals of the guy’s wife and his employer. So he does six months, getting beaten up and butt-fu … getting sexually assaulted every other day by actual sex offenders.”

  “Good. Pedophile creep. Hope he gets some more of it when he gets back there.”

  “Nate, button it. Anyway, he finally gets early release. Since he wasn’t actually a real sex offender, he found it pretty easy not to assault his children over the next twenty years. He raises two kids, loses his wife last year, goes on being a solid citizen right up to today, and by the way, both of his kids are being flown in right now from Baltimore to beg the guy to give himself up.”

  “Then why’s he waving a gun around at two kids and a pastor?” said Nate, unwilling to surrender the warm glow of his self-righteous preening.

  “I think I just explained that. Guy’s been through a lot, now here it’s all happening again. Thanks to one sleazebag snitch with a grudge against him. He just … lost it. It happens.”

  “Screw him,” said Nate, whom Tig was beginning to actively dislike. “Coker should just drill him and end it.”

  “Nate, no offense, but you’re actually kind of an asshole,” Tig said, more in sorrow than in anger, giving up on Nate and going back to the television, where it looked like things were coming to some sort of crisis point.

  Coker’s earpiece popped and cracked—he heard a sound like a small firecracker from across the street—all the cops down in the street flinched—and then he was hearing the voice of Jimmy Candles in his earpiece, his official voice, now speaking for the record.

  “Coker, Little Rock thinks we can’t let this run on. He’s not cooperating at all, he’s just fired a warning shot into the ceiling, the kids are going nuts, the priest just peed himself, and the guy’s getting freakier every second.”

  “If you want him, Jimmy,” said Coker, in a flat, businesslike tone, looking through the scope at the target, and then looking harder. “I got him. Anytime. But maybe you want to put a pair of binoculars on that Llama .32 he’s waving around, before you green-light this thing.”

  “Just a minute,” said Jimmy, clicking off. Coker looked away from the scope and watched as Jimmy Candles, the tall blond guy in the black fatigues standing in the middle of the platoon ring, raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and stood there for a while, focused, silent.

  Coker went back to his scope and steadied his crosshairs on the janitor’s left hand, which was not being waved around so much while the guy was on the phone to the negotiator.

  The small steel pistol, a semi-auto with a slide on the left-hand side of the frame, had a small brass tube sticking straight up from the ejector slot. Coker spent some time making sure of that brass tube, and then he watched the janitor talking on the phone.

  He had studied the backstop and come to the tactical conclusion that even through the glass of the office window he could still put a nice neat hole in the guy’s temple without hitting the folks on that butt-ugly couch.

  Then he went back and made sure of the brass casing sticking up out of the ejector slot, sighed, and waited. Jimmy Candles was back in a minute.

  “Am I seeing a stovepipe round, Coker?”

  “That’s what I’m seeing. Little piece like that, you don’t hold it steady when you fire it, the slide won’t come back far enough, and the spent casing gets jammed right there, sticking up out of the ejector slot.”

  “Does he look like he sees it?”

  “No,” said Coker, after checking. “He’s busy with the phone. But that ain’t going to last.”

  Coker heard a muttered side-talk conference over the headset, muted and muffled by Jimmy Candles’ hand. Then he was back.

  “Hold on, will you?”

  “I’m here. But hurry up. I got to piss.”

  A silence, and then Mavis Crossfire came on.

  “Coker, you sure about this?”

  “I’m sure it’s a stovepipe jam, Mavis.”

  “He doesn’t come across like a guy knows weapons. How long you figure it would take an amateur to clear that jammed casing, rack a round, and fire at somebody coming in through the door?”

  “Jeez, Mavis. Where are you? I can’t see you. I can hardly hear you.”

  A silence, then a whispered reply.

  “We’re right outside the office door. In the hallway. We got a ram with us.”

  Coker really liked Mavis Crossfire.

  Everybody did.

  She was a stand-up and a cop’s cop. He’d rather see that moron janitor get his ticket punched than have anything happen to Mavis Crossfire.

  He leaned into the scope, zeroed the crosshairs on the guy’s temple, slipped his finger inside the trigger guard, eased the blade back a hair … another faint tick he could feel in his finger … as the sniper he had the right to make a judgment shot … he could do it now … tick … tick …

  Shit.

  He pulled his finger out, softened a bit.

  “Okay, how about this? I keep the scope on him, we count down from five, you take the door, come in fast but keep out of my line of fire. I want to have a clear head shot if he manages to un-jam that thing. You know where I am?”

  “We do,” she said, a faint whisper now. “You’re across the street, the second floor, the open window above Perky’s Pizza Palace.”

  “Okay. We’re going to do this? You sure?”

  “Long as you’re right about that stovepipe. ’Cause if you’re wrong and I get killed, my ghost is going to come haunt your belfry.”

  “I don’t have a belfry. You’ll have to haunt my garage. You ready?”

  In his mind Coker could see them, out in the hall, looking at each other, doing a gut check.

  “Okay. We’re ready.”

  “Okay. Here goes, Mavis. Countdown. Start. Five … four … three …”

  He put his eye to the scope, settled into calm, finger on the trigger, let out a slow breath …

  “Two … one …”

  Kate Puts Dad on the Hook

  On his way to the lab with Delia’s cat, Nick got on the phone to Kate, catching her on her way back to the house.

  “Kate, where are you?”

  “Almost home. Where are you?”

  “On the way to the crime lab with a cranky bloodstained house cat that’s gotta weigh in at fifty pounds.”

  “So just another day at the office, then?”

  Nick laughed, but there was still something odd in his voice,
and she could hear it.

  “You okay, babe?”

  Nick was going to tell her yes, but then he thought, what the hell. She wouldn’t have asked if she hadn’t heard very clearly in his voice that he was far from okay.

  Beau was staring at him sideways, obviously still shaken and upset by what he had seen in Nick’s face at Delia’s house in The Chase.

  Nick figured Beau was seeing the first hairline crack in his idol. Good. Beau needed to be his own man, not somebody else’s sidekick.

  Kate was still waiting for an answer.

  So Nick gave her the basics, telling it without any editorial spin, or any attempt to play it down. She asked a couple of good questions but mainly she just took it in.

  The fact that Beau had been through it too made the whole thing easier to tell, and now, as Nick came to the end of the story, they were both hanging on Kate’s answer, as if she could make some sense out of it, maybe because she was a woman.

  “The black figure you saw in the glass—?”

  Nick’s chest closed up.

  She was going right for the heart of it.

  “That sounds like something you might have seen in the Middle East, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Nick, staring out at the traffic, very aware of Beau in the seat beside him, holding the cat as if she were about to bite him. For her part, the cat seemed pretty calm. She had curled up in Beau’s lap and gone straight to sleep.

  “I mean, women in burkas, that’s what they look like, just shapes in black. So it makes sense that you might interpret a black reflection that way.”

  “True,” said Nick, hoping she’d leave it there.

  “But you think there’s more, don’t you?”

  “Like what?”

  “From the sound of your voice, I’d say you think the house itself was to blame. That the house was making you see things from your past, things that upset you.”