Niceville

while the guy in the janitor’s suit really was a convicted sex offender back in Baltimore, it was a lousy beef.
    “Waddya mean a lousy beef?” said Nate Crone, one of Tig’s CID guys. They were all sitting around the office watching the thing on the squad room television. “What about the cell phone cluster around the schoolyards and swing sets?”
    “He’s a
gym coach
,” said Tig, grumpy, trying to watch the screen. “Part-time. He was coaching the parish soccer team.”
    “Horseshit, boss. He’s dirty as my dick,” said Nate, who was young enough to still think that all civilians were just degenerates who hadn’t gotten up the balls to go do something unspeakable yet.
    Tig sighed, thinking,
Okay, a teachable moment, as the president likes to say
.
    “Nate, all of you. Listen and learn. This is why I didn’t want to do anything before we got the Maryland report. It turned out the charge was based on some photos he had taken of his two-year-old daughter in her bath and then been stupid enough to take to a photo-mat, where a radical feminist clerk, caught up in that mid-eighties horseshit thing about Satanic child abuse, calls in the cops.”
    “Why’s he taking nudie shots of his naked kid?”
    “This was
then
, Nate. The eighties. Nobody does it now, because we’re all scared shitless, and this kind of crap is exactly why. The Baltimore ADA, another feminist crusader, bulls the case through, getting a conviction in spite of the appeals of the guy’s wife and his employer. So he does six months, getting beaten up and butt-fu … getting sexually assaulted every other day by actual sex offenders.”
    “Good. Pedophile creep. Hope he gets some more of it when he gets back there.”
    “Nate, button it. Anyway, he finally gets early release. Since he wasn’t actually a
real
sex offender, he found it pretty easy not to assault his children over the next twenty years. He raises two kids, loses his wife last year, goes on being a solid citizen right up to today, and by the way, both of his kids are being flown in right now from Baltimore to beg the guy to give himself up.”
    “Then why’s he waving a gun around at two kids and a pastor?” said Nate, unwilling to surrender the warm glow of his self-righteous preening.
    “I think I just explained that. Guy’s been through a lot, now here it’s all happening again. Thanks to one sleazebag snitch with a grudge against him. He just … lost it. It happens.”
    “Screw him,” said Nate, whom Tig was beginning to actively dislike. “Coker should just drill him and end it.”
    “Nate, no offense, but you’re actually kind of an asshole,” Tig said, more in sorrow than in anger, giving up on Nate and going back to the television, where it looked like things were coming to some sort of crisis point.
    Coker’s earpiece popped and cracked—he heard a sound like a small firecracker from across the street—all the cops down in the street flinched—and then he was hearing the voice of Jimmy Candles in his earpiece, his official voice, now speaking for the record.
    “Coker, Little Rock thinks we can’t let this run on. He’s not cooperating at all, he’s just fired a warning shot into the ceiling, the kids are going nuts, the priest just peed himself, and the guy’s getting freakier every second.”
    “If you want him, Jimmy,” said Coker, in a flat, businesslike tone, looking through the scope at the target, and then looking harder. “I got him. Anytime. But maybe you want to put a pair of binoculars on that Llama .32 he’s waving around, before you green-light this thing.”
    “Just a minute,” said Jimmy, clicking off. Coker looked away from the scope and watched as Jimmy Candles, the tall blond guy in the black fatigues standing in the middle of the platoon ring, raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and stood there for a while, focused, silent.
    Coker went back to his scope and steadied his crosshairs on the janitor’s left hand, which was not being waved around so much while the guy was on the phone to the negotiator.
    The small steel pistol, a semi-auto with a slide on the left-hand side of the frame, had a small brass tube sticking straight up from the ejector slot. Coker spent some time making sure of that brass tube, and then he watched the janitor talking on the phone.
    He had studied the backstop and come to the tactical conclusion that even through the glass of the office window he could still put a nice neat hole in