Niceville

“happened upon” in the course of his day job. Risky to use too many of them, because a smart cop, given enough incidents, would figure out what the linkages were.
    No, stick to random, and be anonymous. Implacable. Do a few dryruns to warm up, take on people no one would ever be able to connect to him, while he studied and adapted and improved. That way, if he made some early mistakes—and everybody did—he wouldn’t be on anybody’s list.
    But where to start?
    He sat back in the chair, had some more of his Stella Artois. Where to start?
    He needed a
victim
, somebody he had no connection with, but somebody who was … vulnerable. Somebody with secrets hidden away. He sat there and stared at the screen for a while, his rat-mind nibbling away at the problem.
    Where was there an obvious nexus between the information universe and people with secrets?
    Criminals.
    Criminal records required access to the National Crime Information Center, which he did not have and could not easily get.
    How about employment records?
    Human resources files?
    Hard to get at those without leaving a trace.
    Come on, Tony.
    Think.
    Secrets.
    Okay.
    Sex offenders had secrets.
    Was there a National Sex Offender Registry?
    A couple of taps showed him a site called the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website. If he agreed to accept the terms, he could enter any name and the website would tell him if that name had ever been on any city, state, or federal sex offender list.
    He sat back and looked at it, thinking hard. There was no point in just entering random names from the Niceville phone book and hoping to get lucky. He had to start at the other end.
    Sex offenders liked to be around kids, didn’t they? So how many guys in Niceville worked around kids? Social workers. Cops. Playground supervisors. Coaches. Teachers.
    But they’d all have been checked out, right? As a city employee he knew that everyone who was bonded and everyone who applied for anykind of license to work with kids or in schools or in hospitals or church groups had to be checked out for anything criminal.
    But how well?
    How far back?
    How … 
carefully
?
    Worth a shot, he decided.
    Worth a shot.

How Things Were Going for Merle Zane
    For a long time Merle just ran, through the brush and the branches, over deadfalls and under boughs, getting his face lashed and his hands bloody as he put as much distance between himself and Charlie Danziger as he could manage in as short a time as possible.
    A few hundred yards into the forest the dense underbrush gave way to a padded carpet of dry pine needles. The trunks of the trees were spaced much farther apart in this section of the forest and even in the dim light he found he could cover the open ground much more easily.
    He was vaguely aware that the forest had changed in some indefinable way, and now the golden twilight that poured down from the canopy and shimmered in between the upright pillars of the trees and spread itself on the red carpet of pine needles reminded Merle of being inside a huge silent temple.
    His vision was blurry and his head was light, but all in all he felt better than he would have expected to after getting shot in the back. He didn’t take too much comfort from this. Although he had never been shot before, he knew that in the long run, unless he could get some medical attention, he was in pretty big trouble.
    He could see that the wound in his right shoulder was just a glancing one. It occurred to him that only someone who had actually been shot was qualified to use the word
just
when describing it.
    But other than being ugly and bleeding like a stiff punch in the nose would bleed, he wasn’t too worried about it. It was the bullet hole in his back that sort of preyed on his mind.
    For the first few minutes after he got hit there wasn’t a whole lot ofpain. It was more like somebody had smacked him in the small of his back with a baseball bat. Everything around the impact area had gone numb, as if it had been frozen.
    Then the cold and the numbness began to fade away and the pain had set in. And this was serious pain. Ten minutes after it first started in on him he was sitting on the ground gasping and sweating with his back up against a tree and his legs splayed out in front of him, and he was, as the saying goes, in a world of hurt.
    He looked up at the sky, pale glowing gold and blue through the black tracery of the branches. It was early spring yet, so the trees hadn’t fully