Niceville

the guy’s temple without hitting the folks on that butt-ugly couch.
    Then he went back and made sure of the brass casing sticking up out of the ejector slot, sighed, and waited. Jimmy Candles was back in a minute.
    “Am I seeing a stovepipe round, Coker?”
    “That’s what I’m seeing. Little piece like that, you don’t hold it steady when you fire it, the slide won’t come back far enough, and the spent casing gets jammed right there, sticking up out of the ejector slot.”
    “Does he look like he sees it?”
    “No,” said Coker, after checking. “He’s busy with the phone. But that ain’t going to last.”
    Coker heard a muttered side-talk conference over the headset, muted and muffled by Jimmy Candles’ hand. Then he was back.
    “Hold on, will you?”
    “I’m here. But hurry up. I got to piss.”
    A silence, and then Mavis Crossfire came on.
    “Coker, you sure about this?”
    “I’m sure it’s a stovepipe jam, Mavis.”
    “He doesn’t come across like a guy knows weapons. How long you figure it would take an amateur to clear that jammed casing, rack a round, and fire at somebody coming in through the door?”
    “Jeez, Mavis. Where are you? I can’t see you. I can hardly hear you.”
    A silence, then a whispered reply.
    “We’re right outside the office door. In the hallway. We got a ram with us.”
    Coker really liked Mavis Crossfire.
    Everybody did.
    She was a stand-up and a cop’s cop. He’d rather see that moron janitor get his ticket punched than have anything happen to Mavis Crossfire.
    He leaned into the scope, zeroed the crosshairs on the guy’s temple, slipped his finger inside the trigger guard, eased the blade back a hair … another faint tick he could feel in his finger … as the sniper he had the right to make a judgment shot … he could do it now … tick … tick …
    Shit
.
    He pulled his finger out, softened a bit.
    “Okay, how about this? I keep the scope on him, we count down from five, you take the door, come in fast but keep out of my line of fire. I want to have a clear head shot if he manages to un-jam that thing. You know where I am?”
    “We do,” she said, a faint whisper now. “You’re across the street, the second floor, the open window above Perky’s Pizza Palace.”
    “Okay. We’re going to do this? You sure?”
    “Long as you’re right about that stovepipe. ’Cause if you’re wrong and I get killed, my ghost is going to come haunt your belfry.”
    “I don’t have a belfry. You’ll have to haunt my garage. You ready?”
    In his mind Coker could see them, out in the hall, looking at each other, doing a gut check.
    “Okay. We’re ready.”
    “Okay. Here goes, Mavis. Countdown. Start. Five … four … three …”
    He put his eye to the scope, settled into calm, finger on the trigger, let out a slow breath …
    “Two … one …”

Kate Puts Dad on the Hook
    On his way to the lab with Delia’s cat, Nick got on the phone to Kate, catching her on her way back to the house.
    “Kate, where are you?”
    “Almost home. Where are you?”
    “On the way to the crime lab with a cranky bloodstained house cat that’s gotta weigh in at fifty pounds.”
    “So just another day at the office, then?”
    Nick laughed, but there was still something odd in his voice, and she could hear it.
    “You okay, babe?”
    Nick was going to tell her
yes
, but then he thought, what the hell. She wouldn’t have asked if she hadn’t heard very clearly in his voice that he was far from okay.
    Beau was staring at him sideways, obviously still shaken and upset by what he had seen in Nick’s face at Delia’s house in The Chase.
    Nick figured Beau was seeing the first hairline crack in his idol. Good. Beau needed to be his own man, not somebody else’s sidekick.
    Kate was still waiting for an answer.
    So Nick gave her the basics, telling it without any editorial spin, or any attempt to play it down. She asked a couple of good questions but mainly she just took it in.
    The fact that Beau had been through it too made the whole thing easier to tell, and now, as Nick came to the end of the story, they were both hanging on Kate’s answer, as if she could make some sense out of it, maybe because she was a woman.
    “The black figure you saw in the glass—?”
    Nick’s chest closed up.
    She was going right for the heart of it.
    “That sounds like something you might have seen in the Middle East, doesn’t it?”
    “Yes,” said Nick, staring