Niceville

the other side of the teak panels the Tulip River was hissing like a big brown python.
    Bock was wearing all black for the meet because he felt it made him more intimidating, whereas it actually made him look like an off-duty mall cop. He ordered a drink they were calling a Tequila Mockingbird and received it from a girl with her knockers overflowing their C cups like melting ice cream cones and a smile that would have warmed the cockles of a dead man. Bock might as well have been a dead man, for all he gave a damn right then, although they were lovely to look at, in an abstract if-only-my-life-were-different way.
    Most of the tables had been empty when he got there, except for one a few yards away, where he noticed a couple of guys sitting quietly, one white guy, lean and kind of scary-looking, in charcoal suit pants and a crisp black dress shirt, with short black hair going white at the temples and these odd gray eyes that, when he had glanced over towatch Bock take a chair, seemed to have him bagged and tagged in under two seconds.
    This unsettling guy was sitting with another guy, a black guy as large as the federal deficit and so muscular that if he’d wanted any more muscles he’d have had to hire someone to carry them around for him. The black guy was sitting canted to the left as if he had hurt his right butt cheek or something.
    These guys were up and gone a few minutes after Bock arrived, long before he got the Tequila Mockingbird down to its slurpy bits, the lean white guy giving Bock a long backwards glance as they paid up and split.
    Perhaps they sense my power
, Bock was thinking, before the profoundly humiliating purpose of this meeting came crashing back to his surface.
    In that connection, Bock, being a man of the world and capable of bold strokes in a crisis, especially a self-inflicted one, as most of his were, had taken some precautions about this meeting with Andy Chu. Firstly, he had a small voice-activated Pearlcorder hidden in his pants, attached by a thread-thin cable to a mike that looked like a button sewn into the pocket of his black shirt, and he had a tiny video camera hidden inside a fake pen stuck in the same shirt pocket.
    Furthermore, in case this Andy Chu person got violent, Bock had an impressive mail-order badge made of genuine chromium-plated German silver and a laminated ID card that certified Bock as a Bail Bond Recovery Agent fully empowered with all the power that mail-order badges can confer.
    And, as a backup, he had a collapsible steel baton stuffed into the back of his pants.
    Tactically speaking, this last had not been such a good idea, since it kept sliding down into the crack of his ass. Next time he’d put it in his pocket, but it was too late to move it now.
    So, there Bock sat, generally pleased with all these careful preparations, plus feeling the fortification that comes naturally from the rapid inhalation of three consecutive Tequila Mockingbirds in under thirty minutes. He was becoming much more confident that, in the event that bold assertive action should ensue, he would be ready to do whatever was needed in the sacred cause of Tony Bock Getting Away with Stupid Shit.
    Over the next hour, as Tony Bock lapped up a fourth Mockingbird, the deck tables filled up with happy chatty college types in loud shirts and cargo shorts with their ball caps on backwards.
    Bock watched one guy with his ball cap turned around so the bill was hanging down his neck and the guy was literally shading his eyes from the sun with his left hand.
    What a complete putz—turn the cap around, you dipshit dork
.
    He was still looking at the guy with withering contempt when a skinny shadow fell across his table and he looked up at the silhouette of a slender bite-sized guy in a white short-sleeved shirt and beige nerd-slacks.
    Bock, who had forgotten that he too had his ball cap on backwards, used his left hand to shade his eyes and managed to make out the features of a small-boned Asian guy, beardless, wearing wraparound iridescent bug-eye sunglasses and a diffident smile. The guy actually put out his hand.
    “Mr. Bock, I am Andy Chu.”
    Bock, seizing the high ground right off, glared at the boy’s hand as if it were a dead bat. The boy withdrew it and took a chair, still smiling.
    “How do you know who I am?” asked Bock. “We’ve never met. I don’t know who the hell
you
are.”
    “Well, I am Andy Chu and forgive me if I feel we have already met,” said Chu, picking up the