He stopped at the city desk to tell the a.s.sistant in charge of the cop shift that he had a story coming as a follow on the jail shooting.

"Yeah, Deirdre said you'd have something," the editor said as he looked through a sheaf of papers that Nick knew was a printout of tomorrow's story budget. Man, that woman was something, he thought, shaking his head, but with a smirk of respect at the corners of his mouth.

"How much s.p.a.ce do you think you need?"

Nick knew the question was really eighty percent rhetorical. By this time of day, most of the paper would already have been laid out and story lengths pretty much decided. He also knew the business, this paper in particular, and knew what length would be acceptable and wouldn't put a twist in anyone's shorts.

"Twelve to fifteen inches should be enough," he said.

"Sounds good," the editor said and looked at his watch. "You've got two hours, man. Early deadline because of the breaking stuff coming in late from Miami on the mayor being indicted."

Nick just nodded and moved away. Two hours to compose four or five hundred words. Easy. He might even get home to eat dinner with Carly. That was sometimes the blessing of early deadlines.

"Oh, and Nick," the editor said as he started to walk away. "Call that story VIGILANTE3 VIGILANTE3, and we'll use file art on Ferris again."

Vigilante. s.h.i.t, thought Nick. Where did they get that? TV? The Herald's Herald's Web page? He hadn't even written the piece and they were jumping to conclusions. Go write the story, Nick told himself. Go home. Keep your mouth shut. Web page? He hadn't even written the piece and they were jumping to conclusions. Go write the story, Nick told himself. Go home. Keep your mouth shut.

At his desk Nick charged up the computer and ignored the blinking message light on his phone. The top of the story was already in his head and he clicked it off on the keyboard:

On the hunt for a sniper with an unknown motive, police yesterday began a widespread, investigation to track down the executioner of convicted child molester and murderer Steven Ferris.Interviewing members of the Ferris family, the mother of the two children Ferris abused and killed and a witness who may have seen the triggerman Friday morning, sheriff's detectives put their efforts on a fast track to find the marksman who shot Ferris inside the fences of their own jail.

From there Nick rolled through the piece like a simple game of eight ball: quotes from Canfield confirming they were looking for a sniper, all of the statements from Margaria Cotton that Nick thought were relevant, the admission by Hargrave that Ferris's brother was not a suspect. Even if he was being given special access, Nick still wasn't obliged to ease up on his own reporting. He included the quotes from the witness who had seen someone dressed in black and carrying a satchel leaving the roof of the building across the street just moments after the shooting. Even though he knew it would be questioned by the editors, Nick omitted the worker's name. He knew that the guy would freak out if he saw his ident.i.ty in print and would swamp the paper with complaints that Nick had set him up to be a target of the killer. And who knew if he wouldn't be right? The editors didn't like unnamed sources and Nick would have to explain it, but he figured he was on solid ethical ground.

The other thing he left out was the presence of the federal agent. It wasn't necessarily a favor. Nick still didn't know what agency this Fitzgerald guy was from. And other than following similar shooting reports, he had no idea why the h.e.l.l the guy was here. The way he'd twitched up when asked about a military sniper made Nick nervous. Were the feds looking for a nutcase off the reservation of a military base? Had someone from the VA with a trigger finger gone wacky? Figuring no other media outlet was even aware of the feds' involvement, Nick decided to work the angle a few days, call a friend at the local FBI office. He might have just put it off as some weapons-tracing program ATF was running, but that wouldn't "fast-track" this specific investigation as Canfield had explained. And he sure as h.e.l.l wouldn't have prompted the Sheriff's Office into letting a journalist like Nick into the inner circle. Something was humming on a higher level and he put it on his priority list to find out where Fitzgerald had come from.

After maxing out the story at exactly sixteen inches, Nick read it through one more time for spelling of names and attributions, made an electronic copy for himself and with a touch of a b.u.t.ton shipped it to his editor. He slid his chair back and looked over at the metro desk to let him know and saw a knot of folks, including his man, an a.s.signment editor and a woman from the photo department having a close conversation. This sort of gathering was always ominous, and ninety-nine percent of the time they'd end their little conclave by looking for someone to do something for them.

Nick pulled his chair back up to his desk and gave full concentration to his keyboard. It was seven thirty. He wanted to go home. He needed to be with Carly. Friday nights had been set aside for movies and popcorn and he'd been mostly true to that. He'd made a lot of those promises after the accident. He'd been guilty of not showing up on Friday nights, working big weekend pieces for the Sunday edition. He'd shortchanged his family. He hadn't been there when they needed him.

When he took a chance and glanced over at the group, the photo editor was shaking her head and walking away. The a.s.signment guy was looking at his watch. And Nick's editor just shrugged his shoulders and headed Nick's way.

"Hey, Nick. How's that piece coming?"

"Pretty close," Nick said. He hated lying. He'd always hated lying.

"Good, man. 'Cause we've got a situation."

Nick pushed his chair back. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. There's a multicar accident out on 1-95 down near the Hollywood Boulevard exit and, you know, traffic is h.e.l.l and backed up all the way to the Dade County line."

"Injuries?" Nick said, letting a forced pa.s.sivity mask his face.

"Yeah. But we don't know how serious. We've got a couple of reporters on their way."

Nick had done this dance a couple of times since he'd come back to work, and he felt a twinge of sympathy for the guy. But he was a police reporter. It was still what he did and in his business death was a regular staple of the news cycle.

"Those guys will do the scene, Nick, so we don't need you to go out there, OK?" the editor quickly said, trying to soften it. "But we're going to need you to do rewrite, you know, so we can try to make deadline with it."

"Yeah, sure. OK," Nick said, turning his chair and bellying back up to his keyboard. "Just give 'em my extension. I'll take the feeds." He did not look back at the editor's face and instead focused on the screen in front of him.

"And I'll ship this other piece to you in a minute."

"Thanks, Nick. I mean, you know, thanks."

Nick waved him off and let his fingertips start snapping at the keys. He called up a street schematic of the accident location on MapQuest. He tried to visualize the businesses and major landmarks along that stretch of interstate from memory. But the scenes in his head kept jumping back to December, two years ago. Christmas decorations on the pods around him. Diane Lade with her inevitable miniature tree on top of her computer terminal. An editor's voice: "Nick, we got some kind of wreck up in Deerfield Beach. Somebody T-boned a family van. Sounds like it might be a good story. Christmas decorations on the pods around him. Diane Lade with her inevitable miniature tree on top of her computer terminal. An editor's voice: "Nick, we got some kind of wreck up in Deerfield Beach. Somebody T-boned a family van. Sounds like it might be a good story."

His ringing phone snapped him back.

"Hey, Nick. Kevin Davis-I hear you're doing rewrite?"

"Yeah, Kev. You out there yet?"

"Just got here. Man, the traffic is way backed up. It looks like four or five cars from here. The location is about two hundred yards north of the Sterling Road on-ramp in the northbound lanes. I'll call you back when I get up there and see what's what."

Nick hung up and went back to his screen and tried to block out Christmas Eve.

He'd been wishing only that the night would end so he could go home and help lay out presents for his kids. He was looking for the swirl of blue cop lights and red ambulance strobes. He was walking up to the scene smelling the odor of raw gasoline and burnt rubber and recognized a motor patrolman he knew as a friend but was puzzled by the look on the guy's face. He got a glance at the wreckage in the middle of the intersection. Steel twisting in the shine of headlights. Maroon color. Same as his own van.

"Hey, Nick?" The photo editor's voice turned his head as she approached. "We've got this digital stuff that Lou got from the accident scene."

She laid the printed photos on his desk.

"He's sending them in from his laptop so we can make deadline. Thought maybe they'd help if you, like, needed a visual to put the story together."

Nick nodded, thanked her, but when she turned to go he shoved the prints over to the corner of his desk, partway under a stack of old newspapers.

In between the front of a squad car and the back end of a rescue vehicle he focused on a torn fibergla.s.s b.u.mper that had been split in two and could make out the jagged crease across a University of Florida Gator sticker that his wife had jokingly stuck on their b.u.mper just a few weeks earlier and he felt the constriction, like a knot of physical fear, rising up to choke him. He took three more steps toward the wreckage before his friend the patrolman could get to him and the view opened up to reveal a yellow sheet, that f.u.c.king yellow sheet, already spread over something in the road. He could feel someone's arms wrapping around his shoulders, more cops, more hands holding him back, and then he felt the rip of sound and pain that scorched the back of his throat when he started screaming.

"Hey, Nick, it's Kevin," the voice said and Nick realized that somehow he'd picked up the ringing phone without thinking about it.

"Yeah." Nick managed to cough out a response.

"Hey, man, you alright?"

Nick was staring out into the newsroom, seeing something he could not banish from the inside of his head.

"Yeah," he finally said into the phone. "I'm alright."

"OK, this is a bad one out here. They say the FHP investigator is on his way, so we're going to have to wait on the particulars 'cause they want everything to come through him. But from what I can tell we got at least two dead, maybe more. So I think we're going to send Lisa Browne over to Hollywood Memorial to check on victims over there, and maybe she can get some I.D.s from folks there. I'll just camp out here."

"Yeah, OK. That's cool," Nick said. "Give me what you've got so far."

He crooked the phone between his shoulder and ear and put his fingers on the keyboard to take dictation.

"You ready?"

"Yeah," Nick said. "Go ahead."

He got home at eleven thirty, came through the front door tired and drained. Elsa was on the couch, lightly snoring as a Spanish-language soap opera played low on the television and flooded the open room with a blue glow. Nick covered her with an afghan and then went to check on Carly. In his daughter's room he stood in the darkness until his eyes adjusted and he could see her pale skin against the pillow, her mom's profile, her mouth slightly open, and he was somehow soothed by the sound of her breath rhythmically sighing in and out. He sat down carefully and reached out and just with the tips of his fingers he moved a strand of hair off her cheek and lightly stroked her head. He used to play a game after the girls fell asleep in which he tried to match his breathing to the beat of theirs and found that he could never keep up with the air that filled and emptied from their tiny lungs. He tried that now, and then curled up on the end of his daughter's bed and closed his eyes with the odor of her comforter in his nose and fell deeply asleep.

Chapter 13.

Michael Redman tried again to close his eyes and sleep. He lay flat on his back, arms folded across his chest, fingers interlaced. His body was on the exact middle axis of the too-soft mattress, his legs stretched out to their full length and heels left hanging just beyond the foot of the bed. His head was square on the flat pillow, facing the swirled plaster of the old-time ceiling. If he could have seen himself from above, he would have recognized a soldier stiffened at something resembling parade rest, or a corpse readied for lowering into the earth.

Redman was determined to sleep this night, like all the other nights that he had been so determined. He'd been staring at the ceiling until he could see with frustrating clarity the patterns of cracks and fissures that were never meant to be seen. Like so many other nights, his peripheral vision had picked up the motion of the moon by the changes in the intensity of its glow against the hardwood floor and the low corner of one wall. He closed his eyes but again that empty, dark, nourishing nothingness would not come. Sleep. He'd lost that ability in Iraq, the ability to see nothing, to think nothing, to succ.u.mb to darkness. His ability to stay alert, trained into him for years as a law enforcement sniper, had become his enemy over the months and months of his deployment. He had so envied the young ones, the eighteen-, nineteen- and twenty- year-olds who could fall into their cots, pull the thin blankets over their heads and snore their way into oblivion for hours. As a cop, he'd trained himself to do that only after danger and the need for his service was past, after the crime-scene breakdown, after the target had been neutralized. But in Falluja and Mosul and Tikrit, the danger never really pa.s.sed.

Iraq put the bug in his veins. He thought it would pa.s.s when he got back home, was back in his own bed, thought the resumption of routine in the real world would convince his mind that he could relax. But it never did. Instead it crept through his blood and into the tiny capillaries behind his eyelids and in the dark he would see the robes and hijabs hijabs and draped blankets float across his line of vision like the vestments of ghosts. And he could never see their faces. The scope only allowed a fragment of a hooded profile, the hook of a nose or jut of a chin. and draped blankets float across his line of vision like the vestments of ghosts. And he could never see their faces. The scope only allowed a fragment of a hooded profile, the hook of a nose or jut of a chin.

"Take the shot"

Redman's fingers twitched and he opened his eyes and cut them to the side where the moon glow had painted the far corner of the room. He tightened the muscles in his stomach and swung his legs off the bed and sat up. He had again sweated through the T-shirt he wore. He should have reacclimated to the South Florida humidity by now. He looked over at the window beyond his door-panel desk and saw that it was opened.

In his last few months in Iraq, the night air had been cold like he hadn't experienced since his years growing up in New England. He remembered thinking then that they were right about Florida thinning your blood. He recalled the tent barracks in Ramadi where he'd bunked in for a few nights with a National Guard unit from Florida. He'd recognized some of the cities they came from when the men were introduced. But by then he was used to being vague about his own background. As soon as the others saw the black, hard-sided case that protected his H&K sniper rifle, the whispering started.

"Hey, yo. The grim reaper, man."

"How many notches you think are on that stock?"

"I heard like fifty, man. Guy's the Marines' special weapon."

"f.u.c.kin' like to see him take out that G.o.dd.a.m.n mortar nest on the north quadrant. Maybe that's why he's here."

"No, that ain't why. I know why he's here," said a red-haired corporal who cut his eyes at Redman and then stuck a cigar in his mouth and walked out.

Redman had pretended not to hear. He remembered envying them and their loose camaraderie, but he stayed to himself. And they noticeably stayed clear of him. He'd watched their Texas hold 'em games from a distance, laughed inside when they told stories from the streets about Iraqi kids who thought the Americans wore air-conditioning inside their uniforms, and kept his head down when they shuffled in after a night patrol, exhausted from the six-hour flow of adrenaline and anxiety. After a few days awaiting his next a.s.signment, he'd purposely worked the mess line and cut the redhead out of a group and sat down next to him. The guy started to get up, but Redman put a hand on his forearm and the grip made the corporal tighten his lips into a line.

"Tell me something," Redman said in a nonconfrontational voice. "How come that cot across from me is always empty?"

Every other spot in the canvas Quonset was filled but one, an unmade bed where photos of a bright, white-sand beach and a Sports Ill.u.s.trated Sports Ill.u.s.trated glamour cover of the Miami Heat were pinned to the wall. Just above was a homemade banner that read: glamour cover of the Miami Heat were pinned to the wall. Just above was a homemade banner that read: ONE WEEKEND A MONTH ONE WEEKEND A MONTH MY a.s.s! MY a.s.s!

The banner's comment was a shot at the recruiting slogan to join the National Guard. Most of these guys, like Redman himself, had been weekend warriors with regular day jobs when they were called up for active duty. Now they'd been in Iraq for more than three hundred days. Redman remembered waiting for the corporal's answer.

"Randy Williams," he'd said, not moving his eyes off Redman's. "Best d.a.m.n soldier in the unit. Kind of man who'd do anything for you. Share anything with you. Watch your back and keep everybody loose but, you know, alert."

Redman had run two or three faces of guys he knew at home who were just like that, guys on his SWAT detail or duty shift that people naturally clung to, admired, depended on.

"n.o.body wants to move his stuff," the corporal had said. "They shipped his personal gear back to Fort Lauderdale with his body, but n.o.body wants him to be gone."

"How did he die?" Redman had asked in a soft tone.

"Sniper," the corporal had said, looking up, challenging-like. "We were on a daily patrol, broad daylight, looking for IEDs. Everybody was suited up with body armor and headgear. Williams was in the rear, covering our a.s.ses like always.

"There was one shot and everybody heard it. But the sound was from so far off, some of us didn't even turn on it. Then Murray started yelling and we looked back and Randy was down. One f.u.c.king shot, man. He was still twitching on the ground. Murray got his hand over the hole, but the blood kept running out and n.o.body saw the exit wound till we turned him. Round went right through his neck, ripped out his carotid. f.u.c.king sniper knew exactly where to hit him. Above the armor, below the helmet. Wasn't nothing any of us could do."

Redman could still recall his own reaction to the story. Ground-level shot, he'd thought, immediately working the angles. Probably taken from a wall or a window as the squad moved by. You had to lead the target, gauge his foot speed, fire and let him walk into it. It was beyond lucky and obviously everyone in the redhead's unit knew it. The corporal's eyes had shifted to the table and Redman waited out the silence.

"They got 'em too," the redhead finally said.

"I'm sorry?" Redman said, not understanding.

"They got snipers too," the corporal had repeated. "We ain't the only ones in the world who can shoot straight."

Redman sat on the edge of the bed, sweating in the late-night Florida heat, remembering the words, watching the moon glow creep across the room, remembering that night in Iraq when he'd tried to rationalize his talent yet again. You take out the ones that might easily do the same to guys like Williams. That's why you do it. But Redman's targets in Tikrit weren't in uniform. And the sniper who killed Williams wasn't just taking out anything that moved like Redman had been asked to do. Redman knew he should rationalize it. In war innocent people get killed for the greater good. But he was sick of not knowing. Yeah, he was a trained killer, but the difference was that back at home, working for SWAT, you acted on intelligence. You knew who you were killing: Bad Guys. When he got back home, he would always know. When he got back, there wouldn't be any questions. Those who deserved to die were the ones who were going to die.

Now he was home and Redman stood up from the bed, stepped over to the table and opened the file once again. On the yellowed newspaper clipping was a mug shot, a photo the Daily News Daily News had reprinted from the arresting agency. The man's hair was leaning to one side, all tufted and tilting. His chin was up, maybe just because the booking officer ordered him to, but Redman could swear he saw a hint of a c.o.c.ky grin pulling at the corner of the man's mouth and the light in one of his eyes. had reprinted from the arresting agency. The man's hair was leaning to one side, all tufted and tilting. His chin was up, maybe just because the booking officer ordered him to, but Redman could swear he saw a hint of a c.o.c.ky grin pulling at the corner of the man's mouth and the light in one of his eyes.

The story detailed how the man had come home, slapped his longtime girlfriend around and then, during an argument, had sloshed rubbing alcohol over her head and body, rubbing alcohol she had used to ease the pain of her sickle-cell anemia. And then the boyfriend whom she thought she loved struck a match and set her aflame.

The story also detailed the man's history of domestic abuse and a harrowing line from the woman's eleven-year-old daughter, who described how she'd come to her mother's aid and had to "slap the fire out of my mama's hair." The man's defense attorney had argued that the two were smoking cocaine and the alcohol had simply spilled and caught fire by accident. A plea bargain was struck. Attempted murder. Redman had already looked up the man's DOC file on a computer at the public library. He was already out, after seven years.

It was clearly wrong, Redman thought. The story was perfectly clear and convincing. No rationalization possible. A man tried to burn his sick girlfriend to death in front of her own daughter. In the light from the window he scanned the face again, memorizing the shape and profile. This man deserved to die. He shifted his eyes next to the photo. In Times Roman type, fourteen-point, was the byline that proved it:

By Nick Mullins, Staff Writer

Chapter 14.

Nick spent the weekend with his daughter, trying as best he could to give her his full attention. He still cheated her out of at least half of his conscious thought.

On Sat.u.r.day morning he got up and found Carly in her usual spot, camped out in her pajamas, legs curled up under her just like her mother used to do and watching cartoons with a Pop Tart and gla.s.s of dipping milk in front of her. He made coffee and settled down next to her without saying a word and aimed his face at the screen.