Niceville

had learned to fake it pretty well, since faking empathy was a basic job requirement in uniform police work.
    The closest he got to feeling anything tonight was feeling Georgia Goodhew’s luscious tits pressing up against him—she had a real fine chassis—and feeling that maybe he should make it a point to drop byher house later in the week and see if he could comfort her some more. Coker hugged her in close and let her smear her black eyelash crap all over his number three service tunic, wondering if he could actually nail her, wondering what she’d be like when she really got her siren on, and also wondering whether that greasy black mascara crap would ever come out of his shirt.
    Later, when he finally got home to his big old rancher in The Glades and rolled his duty car into his garage and climbed out, he was not at all surprised to find the muzzle of Charlie Danziger’s pistol shoved hard into the back of his skull.

Saturday Morning

Nick and Kate Wake Up to Storms
    By the morning, as if sensing that Niceville needed a good shower, the clouds had rolled in from the southwest and a blood-warm rain was hammering against Nick’s bedroom window. He was already awake, had been lying in the growing gray light listening to the tidal ebb and flow of Kate’s breathing, the warmth of her body along his left side, the scent of her on his skin and on his lips and in his hair. Considering how the night had passed, he should have been warmed by a sensual afterglow, calmly adrift in the blessed memory.
    But Nick was not drifting.
    Nick was lying there waiting for the alarm to go off and trying to find the nerve to talk to Kate about something so volatile that he was afraid to start, having to do with an old Army friend and the favor Nick had asked of him. He was wondering whether he would still be living at home by the time they finished talking about it.
    Kate, a lovely woman and one of the sweetest-natured girls Nick had ever met, also had a volcanic temper, and when she started to heat up a wise man got the hell out of range. It had taken Nick a while to get this straight and he still had a small scar on the side of his temple where he’d zigged when he should have zagged and caught a high-velocity coffee mug on its way past his head. She had been terribly sorry she’d drawn blood, but not sorry that she’d hit him.
    Kate stirred at his side and he felt that subtle but palpable change in her aura as she slowly woke up to this gloomy Saturday morning.
    “Nick,” she said, reaching for him, “how long have you been awake?”
    He rolled onto an elbow and stroked a strand of auburn hair out ofher eyes, looking down at her. She smiled up at him, her expression soft and full of trust and affection.
    They had a good marriage, a very good marriage, and Nick knew he was a lucky man.
    “Awake? Maybe an hour. You were having a dream.”
    “Was I?”
    “Yes. You remember it?”
    She closed her eyes, thought.
    “Yes. Something stupid about a woman in a green dress and her big ugly cat. She wanted to come inside the house and for some reason I didn’t want her to come inside.”
    She looked up at him.
    “You don’t look all that rested either. Were you thinking about the shootings?”
    Nick’s face hardened up for a moment, and then softened again.
    “For a while, yeah.”
    “Will you have to do anything more about them? Other than walking the site with Marty and Jimmy?”
    “Probably not. The Feds will take it over, because the First Third is a national bank. We won’t get much of it, other than some stuff around the edges.”
    “I guess Reed will be going to the funerals. Will you?”
    Nick shook his head, looked away.
    Kate remembered that Nick had probably seen enough military funerals to last him a lifetime.
    She changed the subject.
    “You went for a run, after I fell asleep, didn’t you?”
    She gave him an up-from-under look.
    “I’m amazed you had the strength.”
    Nick smiled down at her.
    “I had to get out of the house. You were going to kill me. So I had a shower and then I went for a run along Patton’s Hard.”
    Nick didn’t feel like telling her that he had gone to Patton’s Hard to take care of some pressing business—what he liked to call a “no-warrant takedown.” Nick had some reason to believe there was a serial rapist operating in the area, a snake-mean sadistic pig who had, so far at least, been too smart to get caught.
    So Nick went out every night on Patton’s Hard, looking