Coker’s shift ran a lot later than he wanted it to, but all the off-duty guys had come in to help look for the shooters and provide moral support for the survivors, so bailing on all that gung-ho Semper Fi brotherhood-of-the-badge horseshit, and the holy righteous wrath that went with it, would have looked pretty cold-assed.
Around eleven he and a couple of his platoon mates, Jimmy Candles and Mickey Hancock, the shift boss, dropped over to Cedars of Lebanon to see the families of the guys who had gotten killed that day.
This was where the bodies had been taken for the final ME’s report, which was being prepared right now, the forensic autopsies, and all that CSI poodle-fakery.
Coker wasn’t too worried about them finding anything they could use. The only place CSI clues ever solved anything serious was on television.
Even if they figured out the weapon, the good old U.S. of A. was jam-packed with Barrett .50s in civilian hands, thanks to the NRA.
There was Billy Goodhew’s sexy young wife over there, looking weepy, her nose running. Billy Goodhew had been in the county car following right behind the dark blue interceptor, a kind of goofy but brave and highly motivated guy with two tiny girls named Bea and Lillian. Billy had gotten Coker’s second round smack in his kisser. Coker had seen him take it—he liked the kid but it had to be done, and what’re you going to do?
Money for the taking?
Take it.
The world was a mean place and people had to look after their interests, and one of Coker’s interests was in not ever being as dirt-poor and utterly miserable as his alcoholic parents had been.
Taking a long view, for cops, and for combat soldiers, it was Coker’s firm belief that the major glory of the job, and most of the thrill of it, was that you could get killed doing it.
Every now and then somebody actually died on the job. Coker felt that line-of-duty death was like the jalapeños on a chimichanga; it added spice to patrol work that could be pretty damn boring most of the time.
Anyway, there it was: Billy Goodhew was going to his grave without a head and his casket welded shut and Coker and Mickey Hancock and Jimmy Candles, as the senior vets in the platoon, felt they ought to go around and see the families, who were sitting in the lobby of Cedars with about fifty other people, mostly relatives, a few friends.
No newspeople allowed inside.
The newspeople were flitting around out there in the parking lot like a circling cloud of vampire bats, maybe ten or eleven satellite trucks from all the local affiliates and the national cable outfits.
On the way from his patrol car Coker got blocked by a wispy but loudmouthed and universally loathed Cap City news guy named Junior Marvin Felker Junior—known to the cops for reasons lost in time as Mother Felker—who stepped up sprightly and stuck a fat furry mike in Coker’s face and asked him how it felt to have all those dearly beloved cop buddies shot dead in one day.
Coker, always ready to help Mother Felker have a bad day, helped him chew on his fat furry mike for a good long while until Jimmy Candles and Mickey Hancock finally got him to let go. They left Felker lying on his back with blood running from his mouth, screaming something about lawsuits and damages and freedom of the press, in the middle of a glare of lights and mikes, surrounded by all the other hapless media mooks—including his own camera guys—who had done nothing at all to stop what Coker was doing but had somehow managed to get it all on tape.
Inside the hospital it was all white lights and the smell of Lysol and diapers and stale coffee and cigarette smoke and a crowd of red faces and a lot of uniforms—state, county, Niceville PD, even some guys in suits who looked federal, a little apart from the others—and of course everybody crying and weeping and wailing or sitting around with that dead-eyed stunned look that people always got when something deeply massive has slammed into their lives. Four cops dead, one of them county. It was like an asteroid had smacked into the place.
Coker and Jimmy Candles and Mickey Hancock stiffened themselves, took a deep breath, and waded into the crowd and manfully did all they could manfully do to comfort people who could not be comforted and to promise to smite a mighty smiting upon the killers.
Reed Walker was there too, still wearing his black SWAT-style rig and a Kevlar vest, a long, lean blade of a guy over six feet, with shiny black hair and movie-star good looks, except for the cool flatness of his eyes and the hard line of his mouth.
Walker drove a chase car for the State Patrol and had never wanted to do anything else. He was an adrenaline addict, crazy-brave, and, in Coker’s opinion, probably doomed. Reed saw Coker in the press and came across, threading through the crowd like a matte black barracuda.
“Reed,” said Coker, “I’m sorry about Darcy.”
Coker knew Reed Walker wasn’t going to mist up over Darcy. If anything, he had gone colder. Coker recalled that Darcy Beaumont and Reed Walker had gone through chase school together. Darcy was driving the blue Magnum that had caught Coker’s second round. Too bad. What’s writ stays writ.
Reed shook his hand, looked around the room.
“You’re a shooter, sir,” he said, in a low voice, his deferential tone as thin as window frost. “What do you make out of a guy who could take out four guys with four shots?”
Coker gave it some thought. Walker wasn’t asking about training or background. That the shooter had to be a pro went without saying. A lot of amateurs can stitch up a shooting dummy neat as pins. Killing men requires something special. Killing four in cold blood, that requires a pro.
“I figure a rogue cop,” said Coker, telling the kid the truth, “or maybe a Delta-level sniper home from the wars. Somebody used to killing humans.”
Walker turned to look at him.
“Sir, if it ever comes around that you have these guys in your sights, you know, like in a standoff or a takedown? Just kill them, okay?”
“Son, if these guys ever get caught in something like that, you can bet they’ll never get out of it alive. A guy chilly enough to do what he did, that guy will not be coming in standing up. They’ll have to kill him. If they can. He won’t give them a choice. He’ll go down hard.”
Generally, Coker hated to lie to anybody. Not because he had a moral objection. It was just that lying to somebody was a sort of cowardice, like you couldn’t handle what they might do if you gave it to them straight. So, as much as he could, he was telling this kid the truth.
Walker seemed to get this.
“If it ever happens, sir, I hope I’m there.”
“If I can manage it, I’ll see that you are.”
Walker smiled.
“Thank you, sir. I’ll look forward to it.”
So will I, thought Coker, smiling at the guy, thinking that if he had a clean shot at Reed Walker he’d sure as hell take him out first.
Be careful what you wish for, Reed.
Reed moved off into the crowd again, part of it but not in it, as if he had a space around him that no living person was ever going to fill.
Looking at his back, Coker thought Reed was a cop born to die young. Somebody recognized Reed, an ER nurse he used to date, and she wrapped him up in a hug. The crowds closed around them like a wave, and Coker got pulled into the undertow himself.
After a confusing flurry of hugs and tears and bleary red eyes and a lot of listening and nodding, Coker found himself by the water cooler with Billy Goodhew’s wife crying into his badge and his two girls, Bea and Lillian, staring up at him with their big blue eyes and their pale white faces and their open, shocked mouths.
Looking down at them over the top of Billy Goodhew’s wife’s green-apple-shampoo-smelling blond hair—her husband’s dead less than a full day and she takes the time to shampoo her hair?—Coker tried to feel something like guilt, or even pity, but he couldn’t quite get there.
Feeling things had always been a problem for him, even back in the Corps, but he had learned to fake it pretty well, since faking empathy was a basic job requirement in uniform police work.
The closest he got to feeling anything tonight was feeling Georgia Goodhew’s luscious tits pressing up against him—she had a real fine chassis—and feeling that maybe he should make it a point to drop by her house later in the week and see if he could comfort her some more. Coker hugged her in close and let her smear her black eyelash crap all over his number three service tunic, wondering if he could actually nail her, wondering what she’d be like when she really got her siren on, and also wondering whether that greasy black mascara crap would ever come out of his shirt.
Later, when he finally got home to his big old rancher in The Glades and rolled his duty car into his garage and climbed out, he was not at all surprised to find the muzzle of Charlie Danziger’s pistol shoved hard into the back of his skull.