Comes a Horseman by Robert Liparulo

required him to wear his pistol whenever on duty, which included Bureau-related travel. The Federal Aviation Administration understood the need for certain law enforcement officers (LEOs in cop-talk) to carry weapons on board and accommodated that need—provided the LEO completed an FAA class on the subject and adhered to strict guidelines. One of the guidelines prohibited “boarding an aircraft armed within eight hours of consuming alcohol.” Best Brady could figure, he’d stopped drinking—the term passed out never occurred to him—around midnight. Despite feeling sober and alert, technically he violated a federal law when he boarded at 6:25 a.m. Technically.
    He envied Alicia’s expediency. She never let something as trivial as the law hinder her pursuit of a felon. If the irony of that ever bothered her, she kept it to herself. Certainly, she wouldn’t kill without provocation or steal for her own gain. Stomping on the civil rights of a perp was, however, less problematic. So was conveniently forgetting protocol, the accumulation of which Alicia thought of as weights on her ankles in the race for justice—and of which Brady thought of as a wall that delineated cop from crook.
    He had never made a show of following proper procedure or pointed out when others didn’t; he’d done his puritanical best silently, believing that acts of virtue were done for oneself or for God, not for others.
    Brady had always been the kind of person who paid separately at hotels for in-room movies, though they were always as innocuous as, say, The Lord of the Rings or Remember the Titans , so they wouldn’t be charged to his Bureau MasterCard. He wondered now why he’d been so fastidious. Since Karen’s death, he’d found himself increasingly willing to initiate or overlook lapses in protocol. While he had never believed good behavior should earn him special consideration in the blessings department, he had thought it should count for something when it came time for the Big Guy to pick who got needlessly slaughtered by a drunk driver and whose life would be ripped apart by the event.
    The realization that bad things happen to good people did not give him a feeling of being a kindred spirit to fellow sanctimonious saps as much as it got him thinking the opposite was equally true: good things happen to bad people. Not that white lies and small vices made people bad, but he had become aware of how many of his colleagues—mostly hardworking, decent agents with excellent reputations for closing cases—did let the government pick up the tab for their hotel movies and room service, and did stretch truths to secure search warrants, and did apply intimidation tactics to uncooperative witnesses. Essentially, they breached all sorts of ethical, legal, and moral principles, to varying degrees. Some claimed that in the current climate of “criminal rights,” it was the only way to get bad people, truly bad people, off the streets.
    And nailing bad guys was something he yearned to do now, even more than before. Aside from time with Zach, helping put bad guys away was the only balm he’d found to soothe his anguished soul. If he had come to view his life as a vandalized, dilapidated house with ripped-apart furnishings and graffitied walls, locking up a perp felt like repairing a smashed figurine and placing it back on a shelf. And if bending a rule or two—or more important, developing an attitude that breaking rules in the name of expediency or tough-mindedness—got the job done, then that was for him.
    The passenger on his right, a broad-shouldered business type, attacked the morning’s Wall Street Journal with aggressive eyes and furiously page-turning hands, as though fully expecting to find personal libels hidden among the text and tables. To facilitate his search, Mr. Business annexed the airspace in front of Brady’s face, snapping the paper wide to scan its