Niceville

pushed the rusty chain-link gate open, stepping carefully through the random clumps of dog crap that stuccoed Mrs. Kinnear’s scruffy patch of backyard.
    Then, and slowly, with a bitter burn in his belly, he climbed the creaking wooden stairs to his three-room flat above Mrs. Kinnear’s garage.
    Home again home again hippity-hop
, he said to himself, opening the door. He’d always said this to the Effin Cee when he got home from work. She used to smile when he said this, but after his coming home started to mean she was going to get smacked around some more she stopped smiling when he said it. But he kept right on saying it anyway.
    Bock was that sort of guy.
    The apartment smelled of stale coffee and the Chinese takeout he’d had for breakfast but was otherwise very neat and orderly, if rather severely overstuffed, being packed full of everything the Effin Cee had let him take, mainly what had been in his private gentleman’s retreat in the basement back at Saddle Creek Drive.
    What he had been
allowed
to take, under the watchful eyes of a coupleof plus-size Niceville cops, consisted of a large brown leather sectional sofa with a matching ottoman, a brand-new forty-two-inch flat-screen Sony Bravia on a black lacquer sideboard, a bar fridge right beside the sectional, well stocked with Stella Artois beers, a narrow desk along the window wall with a Dell PC and a twenty-six-inch HD monitor, a ham radio set, a CB radio, a Direct TV satellite dish, a second computer, a silver Sony laptop actually owned by the NUC—the Niceville Utility Commission—his employer, but his to use as he pleased on his off hours, and a high-speed broadband Internet connection that, after losing a long and vexatious argument with Mrs. Kinnear, who was tighter than a gerbil’s colon, Bock had personally paid to have installed.
    There was a small galley kitchen, a cramped and windowless bedroom barely big enough to hold his singleton cot, a bathroom that was not much of an improvement on a Porta-Potty, and a porch overlooking Mrs. Kinnear’s gruesome backyard, where, if he was so inclined, he could sit on a soft summer evening with a cold Stella in his hand and watch Mrs. Kinnear’s demented shi-tzu—a perfect name for the little rodent, since his capacity for fecal production seemed inexhaustible—do his business all over the lawn, in between random episodes of high-pitched yapping.
    However, tonight Bock did not choose to do so, because, on the way home from the courthouse, still writhing under the lash of Judge Monroe’s scathing words, he had experienced a kind of dark-side epiphany.
    Bock was a proud man, and not utterly uneducated. He was, after all, a graduate of East-Central-Mid-State-Poly and held an Advanced Degree in Eco-Sustainable Energy Systems with a minor in Information Technology. Therefore Judge Monroe’s complete dismissal of his entire person had bitten deep into his soul and the marks remained there still, a festering sore that would have to be cauterized in the fires of retributive justice.
    The question was how, and his recent epiphany revealed the first stirrings of an answer. A lone man seeking justice against an oppressive system had to move with subtlety and guile. Since they were all so damned sure of their better angels, maybe that was where they were most vulnerable. The central idea of his epiphany was to attack themobliquely. How? He had the resources right in front of him, the computers and the Internet.
    Therefore, tonight, instead of his usual hectic interlude with Internet porn, he popped himself a frosty Stella, sat down at his desk, opened up a Word document, and began to type.
    A few letters.
    A beginning.
    THE INNOCENCE PROJECT
    He sat back, stared at the words floating in the middle of a glowing white field, pulsing with possibilities, gathering himself, feeling a hot rush in his lower belly.
    Innocence
was exactly the word.
    Bock’s short but memorable experience of the world had led him to conclude that no one was
innocent
. Certainly not the Effin Cee, and that little bitch of a daughter—who probably wasn’t even his—was not much better.
    How about Miss Barrow, his dozer-dyke lawyer?
    Hell no.
    She’d probably taken a bribe to lose his case. And there were lurid rumors about her private life circling the town.
    How about Judge Monroe?
    Everybody thought he was a pillar of the judicial community. But nobody was a pillar, not if you looked close enough. Every pillar had cracks around