Niceville

squeak, feeling his bones go soft and his cheeks sag. His head felt like a helium balloon and the room turned to white light. He sagged to the right, flopped over onto the arm of the couch, his lids fluttering. Bock had left the building. Twyla watched him for a moment, reached out and pressed a finger into the side of his neck, took it back and wiped it off on her jeans. She looked over at Coker.
    “Fainted.”
    Coker twirled the heavy revolver, grinned through the smoke at Twyla.
    “Tough guy.”
    “Are you going to kill him?”
    Coker twirled the gun again.
    He liked doing that.
    “I don’t know. Do you
want
me to kill him?”
    Twyla considered the flabby pile of guts in front of her. After a while, she shook her head.
    “No. He’s just too … pathetic.”
    “What
do
you want to do with him? You want to geld him, gonna be messy. We’ll have to find tin shears, a drop cloth, maybe some duct tape.”
    Coker was only half kidding.
    She thought about it.
    “We could bring him to court?”
    “Court? Which court?”
    “Your court. Coker’s Court of No Appeal.”
    “Why? What use is he? Donny Falcone’s a rich dentist. This guy’s just a skanky little pervert.”
    Twyla looked at Bock’s fish-belly skin and his pouchy face, listened to his labored breathing, and then she took in his room packed with computers, his communications gear, his wide-screen monitors, his ham radio, his CB set, his printers and scanners and all the piled-up storage disks.
    “But maybe he’s more than that too. Maybe he’s an
enterprising
skanky little pervert. I cannot believe, looking at this setup he’s got here, that Bluebell and I were the only people he’s been fucking over. I think it’s his hobby.”
    Coker took that in. She had a point.
    “So,” he said, meditating upon it, “when he comes around, maybe we start asking him what the fuck
else
he’s been doing?”
    “And who he’s been doing it to.”
    Coker looked at her, reappraising. He felt himself growing quite fond of Twyla. You never knew where life’s opportunities were to be found. She was a smart girl. She had depths. She’d have to be watched, but she had depths.
    So they waited, listening to Bock wheeze and snuffle and flutter. Twyla poured them both another Stella and Coker worked through two more Camels.
    A while later Bock came around with a jerk and a snort and a yelp worthy of Mrs. Kinnear’s shi-tzu, his eyes blinking, his hands flapping like little pink flippers. He sat up, saw that they were still sitting in front of him, took in the fact that it hadn’t all been some horrible dream. He began to weep in a drizzly, snuffling sort of way.
    “Jeez,” he said, after a bit, wiping his nose on the back of his hand, “what do you guys
want
?”
    “What have you got?” asked Coker, twirling the revolver again and smiling at Bock through a cloud of smoke. Bock brightened a bit, looked hopeful.
    “You mean like money?”
    “Nope. Got enough money already.”
    “Then … what?”
    “Twyla here thinks you’re an enterprising young guy. What I wanna know, is she right?”
    “I don’t know what she means.”
    Coker cast his gaze to heaven, then back.
    “Sure you do. Twyla here figures she’s not the only person you’ve been fucking over. She thinks that fucking strangers over from the safety of your little hideout here is kind of your hobby. What you do for kicks. Know what? I think she’s right.”
    Coker leaned forward, got in Bock’s face.
    “So here’s the deal, Tony. I like to know useful things. If you can tell me a useful thing, maybe I won’t let Twyla here start in on you. She’s Cherokee, you know that? I think you guys invented scalping, didn’t you, Twyla?”
    “That was the Huron. We did noses and lips.”
    Coker shrugged, smiled at Bock through the smoke. Bock blinked back, glanced over at Twyla, flinched away from her flat glare, swallowed hard, took a moment, and totally ratted out Andy Chu.

Nick and Kate and Kate and Nick
    They were sitting at the breakfast table with the morning papers, toast and jam and black coffee. Neither of them had slept at all. They’d stayed up and talked all night. Nick was supposed to take a chopper up to VMI to look into Dillon Walker’s disappearance, but he wasn’t ready to leave, and Kate wasn’t ready to let him go yet. The morning was sunny and fresh and cool and it was hard to square the view out the window with what had happened last night. Nick was scanning the