Niceville

around the wound dry enough so the duct tape would stick to it. He managed, after several tries, to tape the plastic film down on three sides, remembering to leave the fourth side open.
    As soon as he got the plastic in place, the sheet flattened out against his ribs as the lung contracted. The plastic being open on one side meant that it worked like a valve, closing to allow the lung to get some negative pressure going and pull in some air, but opening back up to allow air out so the lung could expand again. People who do not have sucking chest wounds call this process breathing. Being able to breathe made a few other things more feasible, like getting the hell out of Dodge. It took him ten painful minutes to get the duffel bags into the trunk of the beige Chevy. Money might be the root of all evil, but two million in stolen cash was mainly a hernia risk.
    He started the car, rolled it out into the clearing, got out, scanned the forest all around looking for any sign of Merle Zane. The light was fading quickly. Or maybe he was dying.
    Didn’t guys say in those old movies,
Wyatt, everything’s getting dark
when they were dying of a gunshot wound? He looked down at his cowboy boots—his best navy blue Lucchese cowboy boots—and noticed that they were spotted with blood.
    It was a comfort to him that if he was about to die, at least he’d be doing it with his boots on, in the tradition of all the great gunfighters.
    But, since he wasn’t quite dead as of yet, there was nothing left to do but light up a road flare and toss it into the barn. He was two hundred yards down the track when the twilight sky behind him turned into red fire.

Tony Bock Has an Epiphany
    Lanai Lane was one avenue in a long, spreading fan of interlacing streets, each of them lined with identical small yellow brick Art Deco bungalows alternating with identical ranch-style homes, all built back in the early fifties as part of a housing development called The Glades.
    The Glades once stood apart from Niceville, cherishing an air of suburban exclusivity, but over the years Niceville had slowly grown out to envelop it and now even the name—The Glades—was remembered only by what remained of those bright young families, fresh from the Second World War, who had moved in to do their part in the construction of the Great American Dream.
    Most of these postwar families had flourished along with their hope-filled nation, planted trees and gardens, built fences and watered lawns and walked across those green lawns on soft summer evenings to meet the neighbors and share some iced drinks and watch their kids grow up through the Eisenhower years, the Nixon years, the Vietnam War, the counterculture, the nineties, Reagan, Clinton, September 11, and the wars that followed on.
    During the inexorable progression of these times, the original Glades families had grown old and lost their mates and were seeing less and less of their kids while their friends and neighbors died off steadily, names being ticked off a list.
    Now, in a brand-new century, the live oaks planted as skinny saplings before the Civil War were large enough to reach across the narrow roads and touch branches, a broad green canopy draped in Spanish moss and sheltering a sun-dappled timeworn community composedmainly of solitary old women living on pensions, a few renters escaping from Tin Town, and here and there a black or Hispanic or Muslim family passing through on their way up the reasonably steady achievement ladder of Niceville society.
    In a few of the old Glades houses, where the elderly solitaries who owned them were willing to take a chance on a stranger, for the money or the company or the safety, some lone male would take up residence in a basement suite or an apartment over a garage, usually someone new to Niceville and trying to find a job, or a businessman just transferred in and scouting out a place to set up his family.
    At 3156 Lanai Lane, the solitary man in the flat over the garage, resident there for eight months, ever since he had been forcibly removed from the family home on Saddle Creek Drive, was a newly divorced man by the name of Tony Bock.
    This warm Friday evening a joyless Tony Bock parked his lime green Toyota Camry in the tiny space allotted to him by his landlady, a Mrs. Millie Kinnear.
    Bock gave her a sardonic wave as she twitched the curtain open to scowl at him—they were not on good terms—as he passed down the lane to the rear of the house, where he