Free Niceville by Carsten Stroud Page A

just like her, Kate was instantly transfixed by Nick, utterly fascinated by his compact body, his strangely liquid walk, his aura of latent menace, as if he were a leopard who had climbed out of his pit at the zoo and was now pacing around McDonough Hall sizing up the gazelles. She had dug around a bit and found out that he was there to try on the law, having been offered a slot in the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s branch.
    When she had finally gotten up the nerve to talk to him, in the atrium at the Williams Law Library, his wry and totally unexpectedsmile and the way it changed the lines around his eyes had lit a slow fire in her belly.
    By the end of their first month together she would have opened a vein to take him home to Niceville. By the end of the fall semester, she had managed it. Her father, in honor of Nick’s first visit to Niceville, had come down from VMI to throw a semiformal bun fight for him at the Anora Mercer Golf and Country Club, where Nick first ran into Tig Sutter. By the end of the party Tig Sutter would have done anything to get this guy into the Belfair and Cullen County Criminal Investigation Division. By the end of the school term, Tig Sutter had, somehow, managed to do it.
    To Kate’s amazement and delight, Nick had taken an early out from the Army, giving up on JAG as a career and accepting a spot on Tig’s newly minted CID unit. He’d explained it to her in a way that seemed persuasive—loved her, loved the town, a chance to make a life for both of them—but she had the idea that, although he meant every word—lying wasn’t in him—there was something he was keeping from her, something to do with his service, something, she suspected, that had happened to him overseas. Figuring that Tig Sutter would know, since he was the guy who had hired Nick and he was ex-Army himself, she tried to oil it out of him over several near-lethal mojiitos at the Moot Court bar.
    Tig, who hated deception, had danced around it, confirming by his obvious unease that there really was something hidden there, so Kate kept at it, pushing the boundaries of their friendship a bit, but in the end he would only tell her, with affection, but firmly and finally, that although Nick’s service record was immaculate, covert combat always takes place in a cloud of ambiguity, and that whatever happens, or doesn’t happen, on a particular mission should stay there. That was the Army way, and it was Tig’s way, and if one day Nick wanted to tell her about it, whatever it was, or it wasn’t, if there actually
was
anything to tell, he would, but in his own good time.
    In the meantime, Tig told her he was happy for her, and Nick was a very lucky guy but he really needed to put her in a cab right now because there were two of her and the middle one was all blurry.
    Nick, true to his word, had done a full year’s course at Glynco in six weeks and four days, a record for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, making a solid friend out of Kate’s brother, Reed, whilethey were there together, and coming out third in his class. They had finally gotten married two years ago, and he was
still
here, still in Niceville, still with her, her husband, the capstone of her life, right now a soothing baritone rumble at the other end of the line, still talking about the shooting, patient, as he always was with her, laying the thing out for her.
    “The shooter was probably ex-military, but other than that, not much. Pretty cold killing. I figure the weapon was a Barrett, a .50-caliber rifle anyway, but instead of it just disabling the engine, the block blew up and a hunk of shrapnel killed the driver. Then he picked them off one by one as they drove into his sights. It’s possible that he killed the other three because once the first man was dead, it was just the orderly thing to do. Like housekeeping.”
    “Because once anyone dies in a robbery, the penalty in this state is always death?”
    “That’s it. But it’s just