Niceville

pillar of white smoke was rising up into the sky.
    The cottonwood smoke smelled nice, tangy and biting. Reminded him of Christmas back in Billings. Happy times. Coker breathed it in for a while, feeling the world come slowly back to normal.
    He turned on the scanner and listened to the cross talk for a moment. All he heard was panic. Nobody knew what the hell had just happened and everybody was telling everybody else what to do about it at the top of their lungs.
    He figured he had time for a quick cleanup.
    Just to be on the safe side, he removed the empty box mag, slammed a new one home, released the bolt to chamber a round, flicked the safety to horizontal, and shouldered the rifle, all twenty pounds of it, on a patrol sling, where he could swing it around and bring it to bear if he had to.
    He pulled out a Colt Python and walked down the road to the squad cars and put a big soft-nosed .357 round into every intact skull he could find, reloaded, and did what he could with whatever was left of whoever was left.
    Then he extracted, with some difficulty because of the latex gloves he was wearing and the bits of tissue and blood and bone all over the interior, all the hard disks from the various dashboard cameras. That done, he stepped backwards out of the area, looking to see if he was leaving bloody boot tracks at the crime scene.
    Coker went back and policed his shooting position, gathered up his five spent casings, kicked away his boot marks and scuff traces, double-checked the area once more, and then walked over the low brush-covered hill to his cruiser, a big black and tan Crown Vic with county markings.
    He popped the trunk, broke the Barrett down, easing the hot barrel out of the lock, wiped the machine with a silicone-saturated cloth, and tucked it away in sections inside its carrying case.
    Then he peeled off his bloodstained overalls, stuffed them into a brown paper bag, slammed the trunk, checked his uniform in the side mirror—he looked pretty good, all things considered—got in behind the wheel, and slowly drove away from the scene. In his rearview mirror a thin spiral of smoke was rising into the sky. The crows had come back, now that all the excitement was over, and a few of the hungrier ones were settling onto the roofs of the squad cars, drawn by the scent of fresh blood.
    The sun was sliding down and long blue shadows stretched across the highway. A honey-colored light strobed along the side of his face as he drove through a stand of cottonwoods. On his police radio the air was crackling with cross talk, but it sounded like somebody at HQ—probably Mickey Hancock—was finally getting a grip on things. Soon they’d be calling him in, along with every other cop in the western hemisphere.
    Coker sighed, looking out at the world rolling by with a satisfied mind. He smiled, put on his Ray-Bans, lit himself a cigarette, pulled the smoke in deep. His shift was just starting, with what looked to be a long, hectic night ahead. He was, however, consoled by the warmth and the lovely light. It promised to be a pretty evening.

Bock’s Afternoon Was Disappointing
    “All rise,” and so they all rose, as Judge Theodore W. Monroe came back into the courtroom, his robes swirling behind him like portents of doom. The courthouse had originally been a Catholic church, and it still had ten wood-frame leaded-glass windows along either side, old whitewashed wooden plank walls, and a row of ceiling fans down the cedar-vaulted middle to stir, without much effect, the humid air, which, after all these years, still carried the scent of sandalwood incense.
    Judge Monroe, a hatchet-faced old warrior with small black eyes and a thin smile, sat where there once would have been an altar but now there was a high carved wooden bench with an oil painting of a Civil War cavalry battle—Brandy Station on the second day—and a giant but faded American flag hanging behind. The flag had only forty-eight stars, but since neither Alaska nor Hawaii had written him to complain it was still hanging up there behind Judge Monroe’s gray and bristly head.
    He nodded curtly at the other people in the room, all eight of them, the unhappy ex-couple at two separate tables, standing by their lawyers, the clerk of the court, the court deputy, and a familiar elderly couple at the rear, the Fogartys, Dwayne and Dora, both retired deputy sheriffs, childless, amiable and well liked by the court staff, as alike in appearance as hermaphroditic