“Now, wha—” Timmons began, when the first bullet hit him in the throat and the second, a split second later, under the left eye. They were only .25’s, from some piece of junk that wouldn’t shoot accurately over ten feet; the range was seven.
Timmons died clawing at the small hole in his face, which spurted blood like a broken pipe.
The black man ran by Jack Payne, pausing only to wink. It was Morgan State, as he was called, from the unit, Payne’s second in command, a great shot, a cool hand with a lot of in-country time behind him, good man in a gunfight. Then he was gone.
The tourist was crying and bleeding from the beating but otherwise unhurt, as had been the plan, for an innocent witness was the fulcrum.
The sirens began howling, and in a few minutes the first cop car would be here.
Payne melted into the dark.
She had brought the magazines, all the newspapers, everything that she could find or acquire in Ajo without making a big fuss.
It was ten minutes into the reading that Bob found the mention of Mike’s death. There it was in print. Somehow, that made it official.
Bob put the magazine down slowly, and stared out the window. He could see the bright desert light, the hot flat blue of the sky, an endless cruelty of needles spangling the low rills.
He just sat there most of the morning, mourning Mike and trying to figure who would kill him. Then of course he had it. To get his rifle from the trailer, of course, they’d have to shoot Mike. Mike wouldn’t have let them in, he would have stayed on station come hell or high water; and if they drugged him, that would leave traces.
He read the sentence again.
“Evidently aware that after his deed he couldn’t return to care for the dog, Swagger shot the animal once in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun and buried it in a shallow grave.”
All right, he thought, feel sorry for him later. You have some work to do.
But the pain of it amazed him. He realized in a tiny part of his mind he’d been harboring some kind of illusion until now; he saw himself back at the place, and old Mike come up to nuzzle him, to press his sloppy jowl against him and gaze up with those dumb, adoring eyes.
All right, he thought, you killed my dog. Now I got some work to do, so that I can settle up.
He read slowly, without hurry, each article, from the earliest Julie had been able to find—which meant the most inaccurate—to the very latest. Nothing showed on his face. He sat on his bed and read it all, straight through. Then he read it again.
He saw himself laid bare, penetrated, turned inside out. He was fair game for them all; everybody had a theory, an idea, a notion. He realized he was no longer his own property; his private self had been taken from him forever.
They had it right—but wrong, too, terribly wrong. They were looking at him from such a twisted angle.
“Swagger’s Navy Cross bespeaks his aggressive nature and his reckless will to kill and precurses the tragic events of March 1,” Time said.
It was the second highest award his country could give him; and he’d saved a hundred lives those two days in the An Loc Valley. They made it seem like a crime.
“Violence is inbred in the Swagger clan. His father, Earl Swagger, destroyed three machine gun nests one morning on Iwo Jima and returned to violent encounters in law enforcement, climaxing in a bloody shootout where he killed two men but died himself off Highway 67 near Fort Smith.”
They turned his old daddy, who only did his duty to country and state, into some kind of mentor in murder. Nothing about the lives his dad had saved in giving up his own against Jimmy and Bub Pye that terrible evening.
There was a paragraph recounting his lawsuit against Mercenary magazine, which had put a picture of him on the cover and called him the most dangerous man in America. It told how sly old Sam Vincent had shaken thirty thousand dollars out of their pockets and warned all those gung-ho books to stay the hell away. But then Time dryly remarked, “It is doubtful that Swagger could win his case today.”
He shook his head at all this, wondering what could twist people so. Where do these people come from? How do they learn things like this? Is there a school that teaches them? What gives them the damned right to just take over your life and bend it any which way they please?
They hadn’t missed a damn thing. They’d pried everywhere. The inside of his trailer was photographed. His books were listed: the writers found it amusing that among the loading manuals and the classic works on rifles and shooting, such a violent man had poetry by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, though it was noted that the works were “only bitter war poetry.” There was his gun rack in loving detail, the weapons cataloged and judged by reporters who seemed disappointed to discover that he had no “assault rifles,” as they called them. His rifle range was diagrammed. His two victories in the Arkansas State IPSC championships were probed. And he saw schematics of the shot he had supposedly taken in New Orleans from 415 St. Ann into Louis Armstrong Park. The madness of that second was broken down and analyzed, its physics and ballistics choreographed in infinite detail, its trajectories laid out in dotted lines to little X’s that marked the strike of the bullet, all of it convincing, all of it wrong. He saw stills drawn from the videotape of what went on at the podium, the fall and twist of the man he’d supposedly “hit,” the archbishop of whom he’d never even heard.
The completeness of it blew him away. They’d been so careful, they’d set it up so perfectly, and, worst of all, they’d known him so well.
Not these damn reporters who didn’t know a thing, but them, the Agency boys, whoever they were. They’d known him perfectly. It was as if they’d lived his life or gotten in his brain.
“You look so hurt,” she said.
“These people, they knew so much about me,” he said. “It’s scary how careful they were. Not that they took the time, but that they knew so much, they knew how my mind would work.”
He thought back to the moment when he’d been truly hooked: when they came up with a trophy he couldn’t say no to, the Russian sniper Solaratov, who he now realized probably didn’t exist. It was so perfect. They knew how desperate he’d be.
Then he discovered, from Newsweek, that the guy he’d jumped coming out of the house on St. Ann Street was named Nick Memphis and he was from the FBI!
Now here was something that twisted in his imagination. Memphis, Memphis, where’d he heard that damn name before? It hung there, tantalizing him until he remembered after a bit. Memphis was the joker in Tulsa who’d missed and hit some woman. His was the archetypal botched shot, the sniper who fouled up. And he, Bob, back in Maryland, had re-created the whole thing in front of the fancy boys while they were gulling him along with their “Accutech” stuff.
He wondered if this Memphis were a part of it. Then he remembered the stunned surprise of the man, the slack, dumb look on the wide face, his squirming, the easy way the 10-mil came out of the holster when he reversed on him, and he doubted it. If he were one of what Bob thought now merely as “Them,” he guessed that this Nick Memphis would have been ready and waiting. Besides, he wouldn’t have left his car with the door open and the key in so helpfully there right outside on St. Ann Street.
There was a picture of the guy, a blurry thing snapped out front of the New Orleans FBI headquarters.
“Agent Memphis, who missed collar, hurries to car,” the caption said.
It was the same man, equally disturbed, this time with a grave and somewhat embarrassed look to his face.
You screwed up, and now these people are going to nail you for it. You screwed up almost as big as I did, he thought.
Bob read on, looking for answers.
But there were only more questions.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Here I am, Nick thought, in Arkansas!
He was sitting around the temporary bull pen in the Mena, Arkansas, Holiday Motel, wading through the oceans of paperwork that attended the task force’s relocation from New Orlean
s to Polk County, yet at the same time managing not to grieve too overwhelmingly for the passing of Leon Timmons, dropped by a mugger in a New Orleans alley two days or so ago. He wished it didn’t please him so and he wished the publicity—HERO COP SLAIN IN FREAK CRIME—would go away, because his own incompetence was a part of the story.
“You sure you didn’t smoke poor Leon there, Nick?” asked the ever mischievous Hap Fencl. “You know, in blackface, with a little throw-down gun?”
The others had laughed; they couldn’t mourn the braying Timmons either, who’d made the Bureau look so bad.
But Nick just smiled grimly and stayed on station as the operation’s prime goat. Outside the window, the green and thunderous Ouachitas rippled away toward Oklahoma in the late afternoon sunlight. He returned to his document, a witness sighting report from the New Mexico State Police; a motorist claimed he’d seen Bob the Nailer, big as life, tooling down the highway in an ’86 Merc. That was the common element in the sightings: as if Bob would be so bold to bull on through in broad daylight, sure his courage and his determination would get him through. These people were imprinting their own sense of Bob on ambiguous events and coming up with the strangest stuff.
The phone rang across the room and somebody else got it.
“Hey, Nick, it’s for you.”
Nick turned to the phone.
“Nick Memphis.”
“Nick, it’s Wally Deaver.”
A little burst of excitement went off in Nick’s chest.
“Wally, Christ, how are you? You got the pictures?”
“Yeah,” said Wally and Nick didn’t like the tone in his voice.
“It’s not him?” he asked quickly. “That’s not the guy you talked to in Cartagena? That’s not Eduardo Lanzman of the Salvadoran National Police?”
“Shit, Nick. That’s the terrible thing of it. I wish I could say one way or the other. I wish I could just tell you. But … I don’t know. I was only with Eduardo during the meetings which lasted maybe a day or so. Two days max. And a bunch of us went out to dinner, had a few drinks. I can’t say I knew him well. We exchanged cards, you know, the way cops do. Now these pictures—”
“Yeah.”
“Nick, death doesn’t do anybody any favors. Maybe this is the same guy. Maybe it isn’t. It could be. It might be. Maybe it is. But … maybe it isn’t. You didn’t have the passport photo?”
“It didn’t look a goddamned thing like him.”
“What about any corroborating evidence?”
“Nothing. It all checked out, at least as near as we can tell. You know I can’t get budget to go down there. And the Salvadorans, they say they don’t know him at all, except that this is through our formal liaison with them which is run by the State Department, which means it’s got to go through so many layers—”
“Yeah, that’s why I bailed out, Nick. So many layers. Look, Nick, to be fair, it’s a pretty dead horse without corroborating evidence. I mean, in good conscience, I couldn’t go before a grand jury and—”
“Yeah, sure, I understand.”
“Great.”
“But tell me this. It could be. Just maybe, just somehow? At the outside.”
“Okay, Nick. Yeah, yeah. It could be.”
“Great, Wally.”
“But Nick. Don’t bet your career on it.”
“Sure,” said Nick. “I won’t.”
But he realized he already had.
She was rebandaging him.
“You must be a very tough guy, Sergeant Swagger. Looks to me like there isn’t a weapon made they haven’t tried out on your hide. You’re a one-man proving ground.”
“They had some fun with me, ma’am.”
“I count—what, four gunshot wounds? Old gunshot wounds, that is. As opposed to the two new gunshot wounds, which resulted in three holes. The hole total comes out to—five? Six? You’re a piece of Swiss cheese, Sergeant.”
“I was only hit three times. Twice the first tour, none the second, then the bad one, the bullet in the hip that ended the third tour. They had to glue and wire the whole gizmo back together again. Don’t know how they did such a thing. I thought I was set for the wheelchair my whole life. And that one old hole isn’t a bullet.”
“What is it?”
“You’re not going to believe this. It’s from a curtain rod.”
“Oh, now there’s a new weapon. Your wife, I presume, and I’ll bet you gave her very good reason.”
He laughed.
“My aunt. My mother’s sister. A sweet woman. I was helping her in the farmhouse. 1954. I was eight. She lost her balance and the curtain rod she was hanging fell and she fell on top of it and it went through my side. It didn’t hurt much. Bled a lot, didn’t hurt much.”
“I’ll bet.”
“That was before my daddy died. The year before. It was a happy year, I remember. Now let me ask you: How long before you think I’ll be able to get out of here? The longer I’m here the more danger I’m putting you in.”
“Another few weeks. Don’t worry. The neighbors have seen men live here before. I’ve been around the block a few times myself.”
He just nodded blankly. This didn’t please him, though he didn’t want to face it.
“How long has it been?” she said.
Since when? he wondered.
“You don’t even know what it’s called anymore? You know. With a woman. Wo-man. Female.”
“Oh, that? I don’t know.”
“A month? A year? Ten years?”
“Not ten years. More than a year. I’m not sure.”
“You could live without it that easily?”
“I had other things to keep me busy.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He paused, considering it.
“I didn’t want the complications. Someone said, ‘Simplify, simplify.’ ”
“Ann Landers?”
“No,” he said earnestly, “it was some old guy called Thoreau. He went and lived by himself, too, as I understand it. Anyway. I wanted to simplify. No wants, no needs, no hungers. Only rifles. Crazy as hell now that I think of it.”
“So you went off and became Henry Thoreau of Walden, Arkansas?” Julie said.
“I was at my best with a rifle in my hand. I always loved rifles. So I decided to live in such a way that the rifle would be all I needed. And I succeeded.”
“Were you happy up there in your trailer in the mountains without any people?”
“I didn’t know it then. I suppose now that I was. I was raised and then trained not to think a lot about how I feel.”
It was twilight of the third day since he’d been awake. The sun suffused the room with an orange glow. The quality of light was almost liquid and held everything it touched in perfect serenity. Her face had acquired a grave look in this fantastic light; and he loved the way she had of slyly making him see how ridiculous he could be. She seemed like some kind of angel to him, so radiant a savior that he could not hold her strong gaze and instead looked out the window, to where the mountains stood like a savage old bear’s teeth on the rim of the earth. He remembered looking at her picture in the boonies. Donny always had it with him.
“Why is it men like you always have to be so alone?” she asked. “Why do you want to live by yourself and contrive situations under which you can go against everybody to prove how smart and tough and brave you are?”
Bob had no answer.
“You see, you make it so terrible for us,” she said. “For the women. Because normal men want to be like you, they learn about you from movie versions of you, and they try for that same laconic spirit, that Hemingway stoicism. They manufacture themselves in your image but they don’t have the guts or the power to bring it off. So they just exile themselves from us, pretending to be you and to have your power, and we can never reach them. Are you aware that Donny was scared every single day? He was so scared. He was no hero. He was a scared kid, but he believed in you.”
“It doesn’t mat
ter if he was scared. He did his job; that made him a man. That made him as much man as there is.”
“I’d rather have a little less man, who is alive now and could sleep with me, and be father to the children I never had and never will have. His being a ‘man’ didn’t do me a hell of a lot of good. It’s the same craziness that makes these poor Indian boys cut each other up on Saturday night. What do they get out of it, I wonder?”
“It can’t be explained,” he said. “It can be foolish as all get-out, yes, ma’am. It doesn’t make much sense. But I was just taught to hurt no man except the man who hurt me and mine. I have no other star to steer by. That and to do my duty as I understand it. If I followed those two rules, I’d be okay.”
It was so quiet you’d have thought it was the last second before a nuclear bomb was to go off, ending life on this earth. But instead, through the metal walls of the trailer, there came the shriek of a child.
Something came into her eyes and onto her face that he’d never seen before; it was pain.
“And I suppose the joke is, none of us care about that kind of man, the kind that you want to be. What we want is the kind that would stick around and be there the next morning. Mow the grass. Bring home a paycheck. That kind of man. And I see how funny that is now,” she said, her anguish suddenly palpable. “You come in here, and I care for you, patch you up, and hide your car and get myself so deep into this I can never, ever get out, and never, ever have a normal life … and you don’t care. You have to go off. And be a ‘man.’ ”
After a time, he said, “I didn’t just come here because I had to. I came because I wanted to. A long time ago in Vietnam when Donny Fenn showed me his young wife’s picture, I had a moment where I hated him for having such a woman waiting for him. A part of me wanted him not to make it, and wanted to have you for me. But that passed when I saw what a damn fine boy he was, and how he deserved the very very best. And he had it, I see that now.”
She touched him. A woman hadn’t touched him in years, really touched him so that he could feel her wanting in it. Maybe no woman had ever touched him like that. It had been many years.