Eye of Vengeance Read Free

words on an empty notepad in front of him. “The word rolling through here was that a guard got hit.”
    “Ha! Donny Strock was standing right next to the guy and caught a little blood splatter, but according to the boys down there, the shooter got what he wanted, one clean head shot, and that was it.”
    “Where was it, Jim?” Nick said, trying to see the scenario in his head. He was familiar with the layout of the jail and the attached courthouse. “This wasn’t some kind of Jack Ruby thing, was it?”
    “No. No. It was outside, Nicky. Just as they were walking this asshole up the steps to the rear intake door. The security gate back there was already closed. It was a long-distance shooter is what the guys said.”
    Nick knew from covering too many perp walks the layout of the jail’s sally port. They always kept the reporters and photographers out on the sidewalk. The automatic gate was always closed before the bus or van guards even opened the doors and led the prisoners out.
    “Any I.D. on the dead guy, Sarge?” he said.
    “You ain’t quoting me, right, Nicky?”
    “Have I ever?”
    “I hear it was that asshole who raped those two little girls a few years ago and then killed them when they threatened to tell,” he said and then went silent, trying to remember the name, just like Nick was.
    “Come to think of it, that was probably one of your stories, wasn’t it? The woman was homeless and sleepin’ in the park?”
    The communications guys were notorious for scanning the newspapers for crime stories, mostly to laugh at how the department put out the news versus the way they knew it really went down. Since Nick talked to them every day, they especially liked to stick him when he got it wrong. They also paid attention when he got it right.
    It didn’t take Nick three seconds to come up with the name of the killer: Steven Ferris.
    “Yeah,” Nick said. “He was one of mine.”
    “Well, somebody just saved the taxpayers some money. We’ll be toasting the shooter over at Brownie’s tonight.”
    “Have one for me, Sarge,” Nick said. “And thanks.”
    Nick hung up the phone, stuck a pad into his back pocket and started for the elevators, synapses clicking, trying to set up the scene in his head. One of the most notorious pedophiles and child murderers in area history had been assassinated on the jailhouse steps. How do you play that? It was bound to go out on the front page. He remembered the reaction to his stories three years ago, the fear in the neighborhoods. Schoolgirls swept off the street and killed on their way home. People would remember. Nick was going to have to put Robert Walker aside, shift him into that corner in his head where he had been festering for all these months. Nick had just begun to believe that he could control him, keep him back in that dark spot. But now Walker was out walking the streets and the memory was loose.
    He stopped at the assistant city editor’s desk on the way out.
    “I’m going over to the scene. It’s a shooting, but my source says that no guards or cops were hurt,” Nick said. “It might have been a prisoner. I’ll call you guys when I find out something definite.”
    “No cop-shooting?” the editor said, letting a tinge of disappointment slip into the question.
    “No.”
    “No jailbreak?” The guy was hoping at least for plan B.
    “No.”
    “Trigger-happy officer?”
    Nick was walking away.
    “I’ll call you guys when I find out something factual.” He thought he was being nice. OK. Maybe he did emphasize the word factual.
    He went directly to the editorial research room around the corner and got the attention of Lori Simons, who was experienced enough not to flinch when reporters called her office the morgue or the library instead of the research center.
    “Hey, Nick, whatcha need?”
    “Hi, Lori. I need everything you can search up on a guy named Steven Ferris, pedophile who killed two little girls about four years back.”
    “I