Niceville

down a bit, not enough for them to let it out of the blanket, but at least it had stopped trying to shred them into human confetti.
    Nick could feel the animal trembling under his hands, and the heat coming off her radiated through the blanket.
    He generally liked cats better than dogs, and now he held her in close to his chest. She was thrumming like a bowstring as they went back up the stairs and into the kitchen area, Beau keeping a wary eye on the cat, holding the shovel like a baseball bat.
    “Put the shovel away,” said Nick. “We’re not going to brain a goddam house cat, are we?”
    “She gets away from you, I am. She’s as big as a lynx. Look at her eyes. That cat’s insane.”
    Nick looked at the cat, and the cat, going suddenly still, glared back at him, a fixed lidless stare, and Nick had the momentary illusion that a cold but intelligent entity was looking at him. The feeling passed, and it was just a cat.
    “Jesus,” said Nick, lifting it up. “What have you seen, cat? What the hell have you seen?”
    “We’re interviewing a cat?” said Beau.
    “She’s the only witness we have,” Nick answered. “I think she’s got some blood on her fur. Let’s start by seeing whose blood it is.”

Bock Gets More Consequences Than He Can Handle
    Bock had been one of the few people in Niceville, other than Byron Deitz, who had gone about his Saturday chores blissfully unaware of the hostage situation unfolding at Peachtree and Gwinnett.
    Once committed to a course of action, no matter how swinish, Bock possessed a work ethic second to none. After firing off three copies of the Kevin David Dennison e-mail to the church, the local newspapers, and Live Eye Seven quite early in the day, he had spent the rest of his Saturday morning diligently at work on the Littlebasket file, hunting for, locating, and then downloading the most sexually graphic, or simply graphically humiliating, of the hidden-camera shots Morgan Littlebasket had taken of his daughters, Twyla and Bluebell, as they flowered into womanhood.
    The selection had required some close concentration—how to choose for maximum pain and humiliation—but he finally got the job done around two, listening with half a mind to NPR on Sirius Satellite Radio, a rebroadcast of Garrison Keillor’s
Prairie Home Companion
—“The Joke Show,” as it happened, one of his all-time favorites.
    He’d have had a different morning if he’d been tuned to Fox, but he wasn’t.
    After Bock finished up the Littlebasket project—another difficult job well done—he used a hush-mail IP in Iceland to forward what he had titled
The Greatest Tits of the Littlebasket Girls
to the one person in Niceville who would get the biggest jolt out of them. Then he sat back with that
Tonto, our work here is done
feeling people get after a difficultjob. He poured himself a celebratory Stella and used his remote to fire up his immense Sony Bravia flat screen.
    Thirty seconds later, he was on his feet with his heart in his throat and Stella all over him. Bock stood there, riveted, transfixed, and, once he had confirmed that the hostage-taker at Saint Innocent Orthodox was in fact a Kevin David Dennison, a custodian at the church, for a short time wonderfully exhilarated by the adrenaline rush of raw power he was feeling, the godlike ability to hurt, anonymously, and from a safe distance.
    And then, gradually, as he considered the event more carefully, not so much.
    Although vicious, Bock was far from stupid, and as he absorbed the scope and severity of the incident playing out on his screen, his exhilaration ebbed away, eventually leaving him with yet another case of the crawling dreads.
    What had he kicked off, and what would be the repercussions, if the e-mails he had sent out, the tips that were the root cause of this confrontation, were traced back to his personal computer?
    The phrase
reckless endangerment
along with graphic visions of a tiny prison cell shared with toothless throwbacks from that
Deliverance
film came bubbling up from his lizard brain.
    He gave some thought—fleeting, rueful—to an attempt to retrieve the
Greatest Tits
file he had sent off only a short while ago, but gave it up as hopeless. Once sent, as others have learned to their sorrow, e-mails were as irretrievable as the snows of yesteryear, although they tended to last a hell of a lot longer.
    During this unhappy period, he had gotten up and hustled his naked butt into the bathroom, showered, and