Niceville

leafed out. The first of the stars glittered up there and a crescent moon was gliding through wisps of cloud.
    He put his head back on the rough bark of the pine and stared up at the evening sky for a while, trying to will the pain away, which he had heard from his karate instructor that you could do if you tried hard enough and had the mental strength to go all Zen on the very idea of pain, which was really nothing but an illusion manufactured by your corporeal body and could easily be controlled and overcome by the forceful application of a truly transcendental mind. This turned out not to be true.

A Problem Arises for Byron Deitz
    Byron Deitz looked exactly like a guy with his name ought to look—a thick-necked heavy-bodied no-neck sort of guy with a shaved skull and a hard, unfriendly face and small, mean black eyes.
    If he was in the movies he’d have to play one of the evil baldheaded guys with black goatees who always end up getting a balsa-wood chair broken over their heads by the curvy chick in a thong bikini who’s only trying to stop him from pounding on the good-guy hero with the long blond hair.
    Byron Deitz would have totally deserved this treatment since he was a guy who spent a lot of his time looking at people and things he didn’t like and working out how to drive right over them.
    As a matter of fact, Deitz was driving right now, in his supercharged bright yellow Hummer, and listening to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” with the volume set to STUN , doing a scary one-forty down Side Road 336, taking a shortcut through the Belfair Range, heading for hearth and home—his very big damn hearth and home—in The Chase, as it happened, just a few blocks away from Delia Cotton’s old Victorian, where, right at this exact same moment, something odd and deeply disturbing was happening.
    Byron Deitz figured he could get away with doing a slick one-forty down SR 336 because every cop in the known universe was everywhere else looking for those outrageous pukes who had cherry-popped the First Third in Gracie and then eighty-sixed four cops and a news chopper over there on 311.
    Deitz had to admit that whoever they were, these pukes, they hadserious balls. That was shit-house-rat-crazy-fucking-brave. He’d have loved to have seen the look on the faces of the other cops in the chase when the first guy took a full-metal round straight up the beezer.
Holy Freaking Shit
wouldn’t quite have done justice to that moment.
    Deitz figured the sniper had to be military or an elite federal sharpshooter.
    And stony cold.
    A deeply ruthless prick.
    A guy like that, Deitz would be proud to walk him all the way to the execution chamber and pour him three fingers of bourbon before they strapped him down. Part of him was hoping they’d get away with it. But they wouldn’t.
    Pukes, even crazy-brave pukes, never got away with shit. Byron Deitz, who was ex-FBI, knew something about pukes. The “ex” part of Deitz’s career with the FBI wasn’t entirely his idea, but he’d gone along with it because the alternative was five to nine in Leavenworth.
    So now his career jacket was hermetically sealed by the order of a federal court judge, as part of a plea agreement, and therefore his professional reputation remained relatively unstained, other than in the long and darkly brooding memories of those four unfortunate men who had made the mistake of going into business with him. They were now pulling what should have been Byron Deitz’s five to nine in Leavenworth.
    Anyway, that unhappy time was all in the misty past, in his rearview mirror, as he liked to say, and all those grumpy former henchmen were just speed bumps on the four-lane interstate of his career. So, all in all, on this honey-colored Friday evening Life Was Good for Byron Deitz.
    Life Was Good partly because Deitz was making an outrageous amount of money running BD Securicom, an outfit providing perimeter security and on-site counterespionage services to several of the high-tech research firms that had established themselves in the northwestern suburbs of Niceville, in a gated high-security compound known as Quantum Park, home to a number of very anonymous feeder firms that subcontracted R and D for more well-known outfits with names like Lawrence Livermore, Motorola, General Dynamics, Raytheon, KBR, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin.
    The sprawling park in which these firms resided featured perimeter sensors and infrared trip wires and motion detectors