Niceville

here.”
    “Mr. Christian Bock?”
    A mild meek voice, definitely not a cop voice. Some cubicle-rat for a telemarketing firm.
    Bock reached down deep for intimidating syntax.
    “Yes. Whom is this to whom I am speaking?”
    “My name is Andy Chu. Have you got a moment?”
    “I don’t know an Andy Chu. What’s this about?”
    “I’m the IT tech here at Securicom, Mr. Bock. I can hear your television set in the background. Are you by any chance watching the coverage of the hostage-taking at Saint Innocent?”
    “Yes. I am. Everyone is. So what?”
    On the screen, something was happening—the cops were all ducking behind their cars or racing for cover behind buildings. The news pixie was talking too fast into her mike, breathlessly squealing
Shots fired shots fired OMG
.
    “My goodness,” said Andy Chu, a placid voice with a hint of Asian in it. “Looks like things are going downhill pretty fast, doesn’t it?”
    “Look, whoever you are, what the hell do you want with me?” asked Bock, faking puzzled impatience, although his heart was telling him to brace himself for something deeply ugly.
    Chu paused, and then, although in the mildest and most conciliatory of tones, he spoke the four words that will always strike mortal terror into the hearts of even the most stalwart men.
    “We need to talk.”

Coker Sorts the Wheat from the Chaff
    Coker had taken a firing position five feet back from an open window inside a vacant apartment over a pizza parlor across Peachtree from the rectory of Saint Innocent Orthodox, with a good clear line of sight through the thin glass window of the rectory, where, beyond the partially closed venetian blinds, he could see the figure of a stout apple-faced middle-aged man with a bald head and tortoiseshell half-glasses perched on his flushed, sweaty face.
    The man was wearing a dark green uniform with the name KEVIN stitched on the front right pocket. He was holding a black phone to his ear with his right hand and was waving a small stainless-steel pistol around in his left.
    In the background, directly behind the man, Coker could see three people lined up on an overstuffed couch, a willowy-looking young man with his arms protectively wrapped around two little boys, all three of them literally bug-eyed with fright.
    Coker was also aware of what they were sitting on—an overstuffed couch in bug-splatter orange with big blue flower blotches all over it; a classic seventies atrocity that Coker felt could only be improved by bloodstains and bits of human skull.
    From where Coker was sitting, the young priest could just as easily have been using the kids as shields to hide behind, but then Coker was a suspicious sort of guy, although he did try to think well of civilians, even if they were gutless pencil-neck pastors with lousy taste in furniture.
    Coker was sitting in a wooden chair, his suit jacket draped neatlyover the back of it. He always wore a nice dark business suit with a shirt and a tie for this sort of thing, feeling that the serious nature of the work called for serious clothing.
    He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and his elbows braced on top of a heavy dining room table that he had forced two grumpy Niceville cops to hump up the back stairs from the pizza parlor downstairs.
    His right eye was hovering close to one end of the Leupold scope he had fitted to an SSG 550 semi-auto sniper rifle firing a 5.56 round, a Swiss-made jewel of a killing machine, with adjustable cheek-piece and shoulder-butt support, a two-stage trigger he had fine-tuned himself, a heavy hammer-forged barrel, a forward bipod, and an anti-reflective screen over the long barrel, so that heat rising off the barrel wouldn’t cause air ripples in the scope image: all in all, a sniper’s dream and a privilege to kill with.
    Through the scope he could see the short round man pacing back and forth through his crosshairs, and in his ear he could hear the laconic talk going on between Mavis Crossfire, who had command of the scene, and Jimmy Candles, Coker’s platoon mate.
    Mavis and Jimmy were discussing the informal pool that had started up between the various cops attending regarding the likely outcome of this afternoon’s festivities, with Mavis putting ten dollars into the guy getting his fontanel remodeled by a couple of HV rounds from Coker’s SSG, and Jimmy Candles going for a disappointing but peaceful resolution of the thing, mainly on the grounds that word had come down from Tig Sutter that