Niceville

voice trailed off as she unscrewed the cap and looked inside the bottle.
    She looked up at him again.
    “Do you know what these are, Mr. Ditz?”
    His belly took a slow roll and his neck muscles tightened. He was afflicted with a terrible doubt. This must have showed on his face.
    “I believe they’re Ativans, Officer Martinez.”
    “I believe they’re ecstasy, Mr. Ditz. An illegal substance. Please get out of the vehicle.”
    Deitz blew up.
    “Look, for fuck’s sake, you goddam bitch—”
    This was not helpful.
    Ten minutes later he was sitting in the back of the cruiser, scraped and bruised and pepper-sprayed, his hands cuffed behind his back. Two more State cars and one deputy car had arrived and he was watching them all jerking around playing grab-ass while Officer Martinez, who was obviously a major whack job, went through his truck from grill totaillights, who the fuck knew why—probably, if he knew cops at all, looking for something else, anything else, to nail him for, along with speeding and failure to stop and possession of a controlled substance.
    He wasn’t all that worried about the ecstasy beef. Even a third-year law clerk could lay that off on Thad the Banker without breaking a sweat.
    What he was worried about, sitting there watching Officer Martinez tear his truck apart, was that fucking Learjet, now wheels-up and heading for the wild blue yonder at six hundred miles an hour, taking the Raytheon GPS back to China. Something massive would have to be done about that. Exactly what would take some thought.
    In the meantime, he watched her go at it, riffling through the rear storage compartments, intensity in every line of her compact body.
    Fucking Dickless Tracies
.
    They were all the—
    Something in her body language shifted.
    He heard her call out to the other cops.
    She turned and came striding back to the rear window of the cruiser, full of grim purpose, and she slammed something up against the glass, grinning down at him like a shark. In her hand was a fat stack of mint hundred-dollar bills. He could see the First Third Bank logo on the wrapper.
    The other cops were all gathering around and talking real fast and getting on their radios and only then did Byron Deitz begin to suspect how totally and completely fucked he really was.

Bock’s Sunday Was Memorable
    Bock parked his truck in the tiny little space Mrs. Kinnear had assigned to him, got out, and his mind elsewhere, slammed the door loud enough to wake up Mrs. Kinnear’s shi-tzu. Bock could hear his frenzied barking through the thin wooden boards of the house, and then the harsh croaking squawk of Mrs. Kinnear’s voice, trying to shut the little ratso up.
Good luck with that
, Bock thought, climbing the stairs to his flat over the garage, turning over the events of the last two days, thinking about how much he could wangle out of Andy Chu for his services.
    Dearie me
, he thought,
a guy can get a lot of living done in thirty-six hours
, wondering idly, as he turned his key, if he had any Stellas left in the cooler. He opened the door, stepped inside
—home again home again hippity-hop
—and felt something cold and steely pressed up against the back of his head. A young woman was sitting on the black leather couch, drinking one of his Stellas and smiling at him, not a nice smile at all. A deep growling voice very close to his ear, heavy with the scent of cigarettes, said:
    “Tony Bock, meet Twyla Littlebasket.”
    Twyla lifted the Stella, gave him a tight smile. A strong hand on his shoulder turned him around and he was looking at the Clint Eastwood cop he had seen on his television yesterday afternoon, the silver-haired sniper from the hostage-taking incident at Saint Innocent. Bock’s legs became unreliable and he started to go down, but Coker had him in an iron grip. He perp-walked him over to the couch, shoved him downbeside Twyla, and sat down in Bock’s matching black leather chair, a large blue-steel revolver in his right hand.
    He made a ceremony of lighting up a cigarette, exhaled with quiet satisfaction, blowing the smoke in Bock’s direction. Bock swallowed, tried to say something, choked on it, his lips working but nothing coming out other than a few strangled chirps, as if he had swallowed a budgie.
    Coker raised a hand, palm out, smiled.
    “Kindly shut the fuck up, son. You know why we’re here. We all know why we’re here. Twyla, anything you want to say before we begin?”
    “Jesus,” said Bock, in a