Niceville

but Tig seemed to be done.
    He wasn’t.
    “And you got nothing to add, Nick?”
    “Not a thing. Good for Boots. Oughta get an attaboy for nailing that cockroach. Nobody else could. Sometimes you just get lucky.”
    Tig was quiet. Then he said, “Well, it doesn’t pay to get too damned lucky. This kind of thing happened again, we’d have to figure we had some sort of vigilante thing going on. Remember that guy last year, in The Glades, we found him lying beside his car, in his garage, somebody took a bat to him? Every bone in both legs smacked into splinters? Never gonna walk again?”
    “DeShawn Coles. Ran underage whores out of the Double Deuce in Tin Town. Mean as a razorback hog. We were looking at him for pouring bleach down the throat of a little runaway named Shaniqua Throne, but she died before she could ID anybody.”
    “Yeah. Him. Thing is, once, it’s chance, twice, it’s a coincidence. Three times—that’s different. Gotta start looking at it. A vigilante, hell, even the Feds would start looking at that. And the press would suck it up like a dual-bag Dyson. They’d never lay off till the guy was caught.”
    “Yeah,” said Nick. “I can see that.”
    “Yeah. So can I.”
    Now Tig was finished.
    Point made.
    Some air came back into the room.
    “Okay,” said Nick. “Well, I’ll go jump on the Cotton thing, then?”
    “Yes,” said Tig, leaning back and folding his arms across his big bony chest, cracking a broad smile. “Right after the Teague thing. Check that out, and then go see what happened to Delia Cotton. You go do that. Maybe it’ll take your edges off.”
    “I have edges?”
    “Just go, will you?”

Tony Bock Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone
    Like the boy in the fairy tale who stole these magic beans from the evil giant and planted them in his garden by the light of the silvery moon and then woke up the next day all crazy with excitement to see what radical magical delight had popped out of the … well, Tony Bock woke up in his over-the-garage flat in The Glades late on Saturday morning in that kind of state, anxious to see what his e-mail to the County CID about this Kevin David Dennison had wrought. It was a question about which Bock, in the cold light of dawn, was sorely conflicted.
    He was partly on fire to see what had happened and partly sick with dread that in some totally unexpected way he had thoroughly buggered up his life with some obscure but legally cataclysmic blunder—abuse of the Internet? crossing phone lines in the commission of felony privacy invasion?—and was therefore about to reap the ugly reapings of his heedless night before.
    No, he had to know NOW.
    Bock couldn’t even wait to brush his teeth or have some coffee or even get decently dressed. He sat down and fired up his computer, started a search string looking for any news of
Kevin David Dennison Saint Innocent Orthodox Niceville CID
and was, a few minutes later, oddly relieved when the string retrieved nothing at all.
    So, as of this point, no action from the forces of justice. His heart rate began to return to normal. He leaned back and reached—out of habit—for one of the few cold Stellas that had survived his winnowing hand the night before.
    He popped the cap with an opener shaped like a naked woman, leaned back in his chair, sipping from the bottle, and began considering the state of his world. Okay. Fine. Nothing yet.
    He would have to be patient.
    Remember the spider who waits?
    The lion that lieth in the long grasses?
    Fine.
    A pause here for self-examination.
    What exactly was he feeling?
    Now that his fear was gone, or at least temporarily abated, Bock was feeling…
    … 
disappointed
.
    He had, without reason, hoped that there might be something like an arrest notice—a suicide after a running gun battle with the cops was too much to hope for—or that at least there would be some kind of ripple on the surface of the Niceville community that suggested an investigation was under way. And, he suddenly realized, there might well be.
    After all, the cops weren’t going to
alert the media
on the basis of an anonymous e-mail tip, no matter how well composed and electrifying.
    No, of course; they were quietly looking into the thing first, which was only right and proper.
    Bock reminded himself, again, that in this new enterprise, he would have to be patient …
    … and judicious …
    … and …
    … well … fuck that.
    Let’s face it—he was still pretty