Niceville

diapers and stale coffee and cigarette smoke and a crowd of red faces and a lot of uniforms—state, county, Niceville PD, even some guys in suits who looked federal, a little apart from the others—and of courseeverybody crying and weeping and wailing or sitting around with that dead-eyed stunned look that people always got when something deeply massive has slammed into their lives. Four cops dead, one of them county. It was like an asteroid had smacked into the place.
    Coker and Jimmy Candles and Mickey Hancock stiffened themselves, took a deep breath, and waded into the crowd and manfully did all they could manfully do to comfort people who could not be comforted and to promise to smite a mighty smiting upon the killers.
    Reed Walker was there too, still wearing his black SWAT-style rig and a Kevlar vest, a long, lean blade of a guy over six feet, with shiny black hair and movie-star good looks, except for the cool flatness of his eyes and the hard line of his mouth.
    Walker drove a chase car for the State Patrol and had never wanted to do anything else. He was an adrenaline addict, crazy-brave, and, in Coker’s opinion, probably doomed. Reed saw Coker in the press and came across, threading through the crowd like a matte black barracuda.
    “Reed,” said Coker, “I’m sorry about Darcy.”
    Coker knew Reed Walker wasn’t going to mist up over Darcy. If anything, he had gone colder. Coker recalled that Darcy Beaumont and Reed Walker had gone through chase school together. Darcy was driving the blue Magnum that had caught Coker’s second round. Too bad. What’s writ stays writ.
    Reed shook his hand, looked around the room.
    “You’re a shooter, sir,” he said, in a low voice, his deferential tone as thin as window frost. “What do you make out of a guy who could take out four guys with four shots?”
    Coker gave it some thought. Walker wasn’t asking about training or background. That the shooter had to be a pro went without saying. A lot of amateurs can stitch up a shooting dummy neat as pins. Killing men requires something special. Killing four in cold blood, that requires a pro.
    “I figure a rogue cop,” said Coker, telling the kid the truth, “or maybe a Delta-level sniper home from the wars. Somebody used to killing humans.”
    Walker turned to look at him.
    “Sir, if it ever comes around that you have these guys in your sights, you know, like in a standoff or a takedown? Just kill them, okay?”
    “Son, if these guys ever get caught in something like that, you can bet they’ll never get out of it alive. A guy chilly enough to do what he did, that guy will not be coming in standing up. They’ll have to kill him. If they can. He won’t give them a choice. He’ll go down hard.”
    Generally, Coker hated to lie to anybody. Not because he had a moral objection. It was just that lying to somebody was a sort of cowardice, like you couldn’t handle what they might do if you gave it to them straight. So, as much as he could, he was telling this kid the truth.
    Walker seemed to get this.
    “If it ever happens, sir, I hope I’m there.”
    “If I can manage it, I’ll see that you are.”
    Walker smiled.
    “Thank you, sir. I’ll look forward to it.”
    So will I
, thought Coker, smiling at the guy, thinking that if he had a clean shot at Reed Walker he’d sure as hell take him out first.
    Be careful what you wish for, Reed
.
    Reed moved off into the crowd again, part of it but not in it, as if he had a space around him that no living person was ever going to fill.
    Looking at his back, Coker thought Reed was a cop born to die young. Somebody recognized Reed, an ER nurse he used to date, and she wrapped him up in a hug. The crowds closed around them like a wave, and Coker got pulled into the undertow himself.
    After a confusing flurry of hugs and tears and bleary red eyes and a lot of listening and nodding, Coker found himself by the water cooler with Billy Goodhew’s wife crying into his badge and his two girls, Bea and Lillian, staring up at him with their big blue eyes and their pale white faces and their open, shocked mouths.
    Looking down at them over the top of Billy Goodhew’s wife’s green-apple-shampoo-smelling blond hair—her husband’s dead less than a full day and she takes the time to shampoo her hair?—Coker tried to feel something like guilt, or even pity, but he couldn’t quite get there.
    Feeling things had always been a problem for him, even back in the Corps, but he