Jonathon King - Eye of Vengeance

"So what do we do now?"

"We?" Hargrave looked up. "We?"

It was hard for Nick to look wounded; he'd made himself an expert at not looking wounded. "What, you're going to sit back and just wait for the next victim to drop?"

"No," Hargrave said. "I'm going to get a return call from the P.D. up in Birmingham on this Kerner shooting and keep all possibilities open."

He gave a nod in the direction of Canfield's departure.

"That's what he was saying, between the management-speak. That goes with his job, not mine."

The detective flicked a furry red blossom, which did indeed look like a bottlebrush, off the table with one finger and then stood.

"Speaking of jobs, Mullins. I see from the front page this morning that someone else has taken over your story."

You can tell a cop either accepts you or despises you by the tone he uses when he takes a verbal shot.

Nick grinned at the statement and answered with an edge of bravado. "No way, Mo. Nobody else has my story. Because I'm the only one who has the true one. This is no marauding killer," he said, thinking of the lead paragraph on Joe Binder's front-page piece. "This guy's got it all planned out."

Nick stayed off the sauce all day, passing by the urge to stop at Kim's Alley Bar on Sunrise when he drove out to the beach. Three years ago he would have slipped in, had a couple just to relax after a deadline, just to paint over the stress of the day, just to wash out the vision of another body bag or charred home or mangled wreck. Those were the excuses he gave his wife back in the days when he stumbled into the house late, after the girls had already gone to bed. When he repeated the excuses now to himself, they rang just as hollow, and he kept driving.

On A1A he turned left and then parked at the curb along the ocean. He was well north of the once-infamous Fort Lauderdale Strip, once the world-famous bacchanal of college kids gone wild. But the backdrop of Where the Boys Are had gone the way of most things money-driven. When the profit on kegs of beer and cheap hotel rooms couldn't stand up to family resorts and high-priced boutique stores, out went the old, in came the new. Yet it was still a wonder to him that this stretch of beach, from the road to the horizon, was sand untouched. The city had somehow worked it into a legal legacy that no buildings would go up on this stretch of land. Nick got out of his car and walked down to the tide mark and let the surf slosh white and bubbling over his ankles and up onto his cuffs. He thought of Julie, always with her feet in the water. His wife would pull the beach chair all the way down to the edge, even when she knew the tide was coming in, even when she knew she was going to have to change her position within the hour. The closer to the ocean you are, the less of the city you see behind you, she would say. It's more like being out there, floating, without a care in the world.

Nick had never experienced that feeling of floating. He had envied her that. Out on the horizon, the cobalt blue of the ocean water was meeting the azure of the sky, trying to meld, but unable to mix the line until dark. Nick felt the tingle in his right hand again and flexed the fingers.

When his cell phone rang the sound made him turn to look behind, like he'd been caught, like the truth had come out and someone would be standing there. He shook off the feeling and brought the phone out of his pocket. The readout on the incoming number was blocked.

"Nick Mullins," he said.

"I am deeply disappointed, Mr. Mullins," said a man's deep voice.

The tenor of the words immediately charged his nerves and Nick turned away from the ocean wind, cupping his hand over the cell to listen closer.

"Yeah? Maybe I am too," he said. "Would you mind telling me who you are and why you're disappointed?"

"You gave our story up, Mr. Mullins," the voice said. "I planned out a lot of possibilities, my friend. But I never figured you to give our story up to someone else."

Nick immediately turned and ducked his head and started back to his car to get out of the breeze so he could hear and think.

"Mike? Mike Redman?"

"I mean, come on, Mr. Mullins. A marauding killer? That guy Binder writes just like the rest of them. All flash and no substance. Although I have to give him credit for mapping out my use of your journalism to decide on who needed to be eliminated. But I have a feeling that was your work. Am I right?"

Nick opened his car, climbed in and closed the door to create a vacuum of silence.

"Christ, Redman. What are you doing, man? You're shooting people in the streets. That's not your training. I saw your work too. This is not what you do," Nick said, guessing at the words to use, trying to juggle what he knew with how he thought the sniper might be thinking.

"It's not what any of us were trained to do, Mullins. I went to war and killed innocent people, did everything the opposite of how I was trained. And now look at yourself. I've read every story you did on those scumbags over the years. You were the truth. And now you gave it up too. You handed it over."

Nick was silent. Had he copped out by quitting? Was the sniper right?

"OK, Mike. Maybe I did. But do you want to set it straight?" Nick said, scrambling to keep him talking, truly falling back on his training. "You and I could talk. We could do an interview. I'd get it out straight from you, tell the story the right way. The truth, like you just said."

There was the sound of a deep chuckle in the cell earpiece. The guy was laughing.

"See? You and I are a lot alike, Nick. You can't help but be the newsman. I can't help but pull the trigger. It's what we do," Redman said. "I'm not after publicity, Nick. I don't need any stories. Like I told you, I've got one more shot, tomorrow. One more piece of business, and it's for you. Then I gotta move on. Then I'm gonna get on with my life, Nick. And you can too. Don't you see? We're a lot alike, you and I."

Nick felt the conversation slipping away. He'd lost interviews before, had them stop before he had the answers he needed.

"Wait, wait, Mike," he nearly yelled into the phone. "What do you mean, for me? Who's for me, Michael? The Secretary of State doesn't mean anything to me, Michael. I only wrote that quote. It wasn't me that said it."

There was no response. But no dial tone either.

"Is it Walker? Do you know about Walker, Mike?"

Nick's voice was still rising, reverberating in the closed space and buffeting back on his own ears.

"Hey, don't put this on me, Mike. I'm not out for retribution. Mike!" Nick slapped his right hand against the steering wheel in anger and frustration. "Redman?"

Three electronic beeps and the line went dead.

Nick sat back in his seat and stared out at the horizon. And then dialed Hargrave's number.

At six fifteen the next morning Nick was sitting in his car, parked next to the Dumpster, down the street but well within view of Archie's Tool Sharpening Shack.

After talking with Hargrave, he'd gone home last night and had dinner with Carly and Elsa and tried to put on a clear-headed, smiling act. But when he went quiet in the middle of a conversation about his daughter's science lesson on the African desert's effect on forming hurricanes, she looked up and saw his eyes staring out through the window. She turned to Elsa, but the nanny only shook her head and said, "It's OK, Carlita, he will be back."

They pretended not to notice and in a few minutes Nick was back, rejoining the discussion as though no lapse had occurred.

Later in the evening Nick helped with Carly's math homework and then gave her an early good-night kiss and went out to the patio. He slept in the chair and, almost as if an alarm sounded, he woke at five AM, took a shower and drove to this spot.