Free Stand Your Ground by William W. Johnstone

been discovered in a motel in Virginia, not far from Washington, D.C. The police were being stingy with the details, of course, but a source close to the case had leaked the fact that the woman had died of a broken neck and her death was considered a homicide.
    That was a damned shame, thought Kincaid. He didn’t know the senator, didn’t agree with her politics at all—she’d made a habit of saying inflammatory things about the military, about the Second Amendment, about economic redistribution—but still Kincaid hated to hear about anybody being murdered. Life was a precious thing and shouldn’t be squandered.
    Well, most of the time that was true, anyway, he told himself. Anybody who had killed as many people as he had ought to qualify such statements.
    The only things the cops were admitting at the moment were that they had no suspects and no clue as to the motive behind the senator’s death. When the report was over, Kincaid pushed the tuning button on the Jeep’s steering wheel, found a metal station playing a Hammerfall song, and cranked up the volume as he drove toward the cliffs, shining red in the morning light.

    Charles Cobb’s hand hovered over the butt of the revolver holstered on his hip. As he waited for the other man to make his move, Cobb kept his breathing steady. A man needed calm nerves at a time like this.
    The other man—visible only to Cobb since he was imaginary—slapped leather. Smoothly, Cobb pulled the double-action Colt .45 and squeezed off all five rounds in its cylinder in less than three seconds. The shots came so close together they sounded like one long roar instead of individual blasts.
    As the echoes rolled away across the flats, Cobb studied the target he had set up. The shots had a nice grouping, all within the chest of the man-shaped silhouette. Cobb didn’t think his draw had been quite as fast as the others he had made earlier that morning, but it was still pretty fast.
    He reloaded the Colt and returned it to the gunfighter’s leather he wore. Other than the holster and gun belt, he wore his regulation uniform because he was taking the afternoon shift. Most of his officers were football fans, so they could see the NFL games that way. Cobb enjoyed watching football, but he didn’t really keep up with it. Baseball was his game, yet another way in which he was sort of a throwback.
    Nobody expected a black man to be interested in Old West gunfighters, but ever since seeing Western movies starring Fred Williamson and Jim Brown when he was a kid, deep down Charlie Cobb had wanted to be fast on the draw. Police work gave him a familiarity with handguns, so eventually he had taken the step of getting a Colt .45 replica and starting to practice with it. He wasn’t married, so he had his work and his hobby, and he devoted long hours to both of them.
    He was pretty good with the Colt by now, he thought. Probably nowhere near as fast as the true pistoleers like Wild Bill Hickok, Smoke Jensen, Ben Thompson, John Wesley Hardin, and Frank Morgan, but still pretty slick on the draw. Of course in this modern era, five rounds in a revolver didn’t amount to much—he kept the sixth chamber empty, just like the old-timers—but Cobb still took pride in his ability.
    He had driven out to his favorite spot to practice, several miles north of town, the same way he did most Sunday mornings. There were no houses anywhere around, so the shots wouldn’t disturb anybody. And nobody could see what he was doing and make fun of him, either.
    He packed up his targets and headed back toward Fuego. He had driven about a mile when his cell phone rang. There was no service in the area where he practiced, but Raymond could reach him there on the radio if something important came up.
    It was the station calling now, Cobb saw as he picked up the phone from the seat beside him. He thumbed the button to answer it and asked, “What is it,