And with that he was gone. He talked and talked and talked. He couldn’t shut up. It just came out of him. It was like a purging. All the information he’d stored, all his doubts about Bob Lee Swagger’s guilt, all his fears, his terror, worst of all, of his own inadequacy, it all came out of him. He talked for days, for years. In the end, he wore them out. He beat them by talking.
It was dawn. The crickets had shut up, even, he out-talked the crickets. Outside, the sun was rising, turning the day pale and green. Outside, Nick could see, everything was green. It was a wild driven craze of green, a dangerous green. They were near a river or a swamp; there were trees everywhere. The road was a dirt track. He was tired. He was so tired. Now all he wanted to do was rest.
But they had him up.
“I just want to sleep,” he said.
“Nah. You want to go to the bathroom, right?” said Tommy.
“Nah, I wanna sleep.”
“Shit. Walk him around, okay.”
“You got it all, Payne-O?”
“Hey, can you think of anything I left out? This guy would sing the birdies out of the sky now.”
“Ah, let me see. Let me check the list.”
“It’s all checked off. It’s all on the list.”
“Okay, you know the drill. Tommy, he’s your buddy. You handle it. Pony, you stay with him. We’ll leave you here. You wait till he pisses. Meanwhile, I gotta get the tape back ASAP.”
“You got it, Payne-O.”
Still crushed by the drug, Nick could at least put it together. He had no will and he had no pride.
“What are you gonna do to me?” he asked.
“What do you think, fuck?” said Payne. “You crossed the line. You been a-messin’ where you shouldn’t a been a-messin’, and now the boots are gonna walk all over you. Someone’s still got to do the hard thing, you little shit. You didn’t have to find out about it. It was your choice. But now you’re the hard thing, kid.”
“National Security at Risk. Lancer Committee requests no further action be taken. Refer to Annex B,” Nick quoted, but the irony was lost on them.
The two of them got into the surveillance van and drove away. Nick watched as the van disappeared down the dirt road, leaving a skirt of dust in the empty air.
Nick looked around. It was quite a beautiful place, actually. Completely deserted, but a kind of river basin, where the swamp momentarily yielded to a broad yellow-green meadow. A few hundred yards away the trees were dense and the land looked soupy. Here, in the fragrant morning, the land was solid. His car was parked over there, and another one.
Nick turned. Tommy and the other guy were eyeing him balefully. He twisted on his cuffs; they would not give. He could run, but to where? There was no place to run to.
“This is all wrong,” he said. “I haven’t done anything.”
“It ain’t about doing things wrong. It’s about knowing too much. It’s how these things work, man. It’s how they always work,” said Tommy. “You want a Coke or a cup of coffee? We have a thermos, Nicky.”
“No.”
“Nicky, I hate to tell you, you ain’t no superman. You’re gonna have to piss sooner or later. It’s the nature of the beast.”
“What’s with the pissing?” he asked.
“You got too high a concentration of pheno-B in you. You piss, it gets down to levels where it can’t be spotted. See, that’s why we got to wait. Sorry about it. Enjoy the morning. Just relax. It ain’t gonna be nothing.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Nicky, I seen a lot of guys check out. And my time will come soon enough. So let’s just get through it as quickly and easily as possible. Don’t cry or beg or nothing.”
“Fuck you, I’m not going to cry or beg.”
“Usually, they do,” said Pony. “Usually they do.”
Nick waited until his bladder betrayed him. It had to, finally. He fought it. But then Tommy said, “Hey, why put yourself through that? It ain’t gonna matter much, really. I mean, is it?”
So finally he said it. “Have to go. Undo my hands.”
“No can do, pard. You know that. Pony, undo his pants for him. Don’t touch him. Let it be natural.”
God, he hated them! It was the little touches of solicitousness, the softly remorseless way in which they did their job.
Pony, young and muscular and vaguely Latino, undid his pants. He was able to urinate himself dry, a last, long dying arc of life in the bright morning light in the blazing green of the swamp.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Fuck you. Get it fucking over with.”
They zipped and buttoned him up and led him down to the river. It lapped against the mud. A dragonfly flashed in the sun, big and prehistoric, like something liberated from a million or so years in amber. Nick was pushed to his knees.
He felt a belt being strapped around his waist. Then his left arm suddenly wore a new manacle, something attached to the belt. Jesus, they had equipment for this! That’s how thought out it was, how perfect. They had a drill. They’d done it a thousand times!
Something was thrust into his hand; his fingers recognized the familiar contours of his Colt Agent. He tried to pull the trigger but it wouldn’t budge; they had something wedged under it. He felt a binding of tape being wound about his knuckles, locking the small pistol in his grip.
“Hold his head back, Pony,” Tommy said. Pony grabbed Nick by his hair, and pulled his head back. It fucking hurt.
“You motherfucking pricks,” he screamed. “God, don’t do this to me, don’t do this to me. Tommy, Christ, please, I was your buddy.”
“No, Nicky. You was just a fed, man. I can’t cut you no slack. I got my job to do, man.”
Nick heard a click behind him, and the first set of cuffs came away, freeing his right arm; but immediately it was ridden into submission by the full force and thrust of Tommy Montoya at his right.
“Okay, Nicky, don’t fight me. Over in a second.”
“Please don’t do this,” Nick begged.
“Okay, Nicky, up we go.”
The man forced Nick’s arm upward in an arc, curving the hand toward Nick’s temple. His own hand was his enemy. Nick fought with all the strength he had, but the two men stood over him in postures that put the complete physics of leverage on their side. He saw his hand rise toward his head, guided by both muscular arms of his murderer. It was clear how it had to go; the arm would rise until the muzzle touched his temple; then Tommy would pull whatever he’d wedged behind the trigger—a RamDyne improvised suicide replication plug, part Number 4332 from the RamDyne Catalog, available to your friendly secret police force, no doubt—and crush Nick’s trigger finger. The gun would blow Nick’s brains out. He’d be found in the weeds by the river, his hand locked around his own pistol, his own car close at hand. There’d be no other physical evidence. They’d thought of everything. It was so fucking professional!
Nick strained against his own hand.
“Oh, Jesus, oh, Christ, don’t do this.”
“Just—ah, almost, there, don’t fight it, goddammit, don’t fight it!” And the gun rose and rose until at last Nick felt it touch the fragile shell of his temple. It felt like somebody pressing a penny against him. Through his strained peripheral vision he could see Tommy laboriously working on the gun, getting his own gloved finger half into the trigger guard, making ready to pull the plug.
“Watch yourself, Pony,” Tommy said, warning his partner to steer clear of spatter, “I’ve almost got it, ah—”
Tommy Montoya’s head exploded.
The sound of the report reached them.
Across the river a cloud of angry white birds rose as one in clattering agitation, rudely bumped from their perches by the rifle shot.
Nick, freed of half his constraint, turned to the other man, Pony, who stood still stupefied, not getting it.
But Nick got it.
“You’re dead, motherfucker,” he said, and at that precise instant the second bullet found Pony cente
r chest, blowing through his heart. He pirouetted to the ground, the destroyed heart spurting blood as he fell.
The birds cawed and seethed in the air. The wind rose and whistled.
Nick sat back. His arm ached. He wanted to throw away the pistol, but couldn’t, because it was taped to his hand. He figured the key would be somewhere on these two clowns.
He looked around and saw a man wading across the river. He was tall and rangy and tan, beardless now, in blue jeans and a tired blue denim shirt. He wore a baseball cap that said RAZORBACKS on it. He had harsh, gray, squirrel-shooter’s eyes, unmirthful, focused, unafraid. His mouth was grim. He was quite tall.
He carried a fat-barreled Remington 700 rifle with about a yard of scope atop it. He carried it like a man who knew a little something about rifles.
He walked up to Nick.
“Mornin,’ Pork,” said Bob the Nailer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Nick looked at him with love-filled, moronic eyes.
“You’re some sorry sight, sonny,” said Bob. “Chained and trussed like a coon in a bag after a hunt. Those boys were about to have your patty-cake butt for breakfast.” Nick watched him go over to each of the bodies, and search them for keys and papers.
He plucked two keys out of the late Tommy Montoya’s pocket and came back over to take the cuffs off Nick.
“Goddamn,” he said in disgust, “these boys even had a rig for phony suicide.”
He stripped the tape from Nick’s fist. Nick kept looking at him stupidly while he freed the little Colt Agent. It fell to the earth. Swagger bent and picked it up.
“You’re not going to shoot me with this little bitty gun, are you, Pork? I couldn’t be sure the last time.”
Dumbly, Nick shook his head.
“Here. Don’t lose it. Now come on, boy, we’ve got to get these two pieces of human shit into the water, and more or less sanitize this area. You don’t want the Louisiana State Police on your ass, do you? I sure don’t, no sir. I’ve seen enough damn police to last me a century.”
With that, he laid his rifle down on the hood of Nick’s car and bent to one of the two bodies. As he bent, Nick saw that he had a Colt .45 automatic wedged cocked and locked into his jeans in a high hip-carry holster. The pistol was a custom job, with low mount sights and neoprene combat grips. It was the sort of pistol a man who has thought a lot about pistols might carry, as were the three spare magazines in Sparks mag holders on the other high hip.
Bob pulled each of the bodies to the lip of the river, and launched them with no ceremony at all. They sailed sluggishly out into the current, held afloat by the bladders of air trapped in their clothes; each man trailed a slick of blood.
“We’re going to make some damn ’gators happy today, that’s for sure,” Bob said. “Now come on, boy, don’t just sit there like a toad on a rock, get a move on!”
But Nick had lapsed into some kind of poststress letdown and was incapable of operating rationally. He just stared at Bob, eyes wide open, mouth agape, while Bob went to the men’s station wagon. Finding nothing to interest him, he turned the key, gunned the engine, drove off the dirt road, aimed at the swamp, stepped out of the car and bent over, and with one hand gave the gas pedal a goose. The car took off with a squeal, blew through some weeds, sloshed into the river and disappeared under the surface in a commotion of bubbles and oil stains.
He turned.
“Now your car, sonny. Can’t leave evidence. I’ll buy you a new one some day, okay?”
Nick watched him repeat the ritual, and his little Dodge, once the pride of his life, disappeared in the black, quiet water.
“Okay, boy, take a last quick gander. Police up anything that doesn’t belong. Come on, boy, just don’t sit there like something’s got a hold on your pecker, do something. Shit, you are some kind of lazy-ass yankee dead dick.”
By this time, Nick could get himself up, but he didn’t answer and he left it to Bob to do most of the checking.
“Okay. Time to take the freedom bird back to the world.”
They walked a half mile down the road and found a white pickup pulled off under some trees. Nick, still silent, climbed in. Carefully, Bob drew a rifle case out from behind the backseat, wiped down and inserted his Remington, then climbed into the driver’s seat. “Put your seat belt on, dammit,” he said. “I’m not having you crash through the damned windshield.”
Nick stared ahead, not registering anything as the swamp gave way to fields, to crops. On they drove through Louisiana in Bob’s white rattling pickup, leaving the bayous and New Orleans miles and miles behind.
Finally Bob asked, “Hungry? There’s a goddamned sandwich behind the seat and a thermos of coffee.”
“I’m all right,” said Nick. They were his first three words.
An hour later, just past the Arkansas line, they stopped at a diner by the roadside in a town called Annalisla.
“Need a burger,” said Bob. “Hungry.”
He got out of the car and went in. Nick watched him walk. He never looked back, his eyes kept straight ahead, his shoulders gunnery-sergeant erect, his bearing precise. Nick stirred himself at last and followed. Bob was sitting in a booth at the far end by himself. A girl came, and they ordered a burger and coffee for Bob and scrambled eggs for Nick.
Nick spoke at last. “Thanks. That was fantastic shooting.”
“I had to wait till the light was on them properly,” Bob said. “I wanted to shoot out of the sun. I was afraid the damn birds would take off and tell them where I was. But it worked out.”
“How do you throw a bolt so fast?”
“Practice, son. I’ve done some rifle shooting over the years.”
“I saw you die. I saw the flames at the church. I was there when they found the body.”
“Son, the closest I came to dying was when I walked away from you and you had that bitty little Colt. You were the only man that had me that day.”
“I don’t—”
“I’d been there over three days. The body you found belonged to a sad old boy named Bo Stark, dead by his own hand in a garage in Little Rock, and buried in the Aurora Redemption Baptist graveyard by myself and the Reverend Mr. Harris last year, a few months before all this started.”
“But the dental rec—”
“Bo went to my same dentist, Doc LeMieux. Night before all that at the health complex, I broke in, and just switched his X rays with mine, easy as you please, because Doc LeMieux just has paste-on labels on the files. Old Bo finally did somebody some good in the world, even if it was a few months after he departed it.”
“The flames. You were in—”
“I wasn’t in anything, Memphis. As that church burned, I was twenty feet below it and a hundred feet to the west, in a limestone cave, drinking an RC Cola and eating a Moon Pie. There’s a trapdoor under the altar, built back in the days when some people ran runaway slaves up North, until they were burned out by some bad old hill boys. Heard the stories myself, from my granddaddy. I knew the church would burn; I knew it would collapse; I knew Reverend Harris was raising funds to build a new church. Everybody’s happy now. You boys especially: if you found a body, you’d not be likely to keep digging through the damned ruins.”
“Jesus,” said Nick.
“I am a very careful man, Pork.”
“Jesus,” said Nick, again.
“I had to have the freedom to do some looking into some matters. Being dead was the only way I could figure. And so I’ve been looking into things. And then I decided that I needed help. Only man I could trust was you, because you’d had a chance to kill me and didn’t. So I was going to pay a visit on you at your house. Only, when I got there, I saw a fellow driving out in your car. He was one of the fellows I saw on a shooting range in Maryland some months back. Was Payne there?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so,” said Bob. “That boy gets around. Payne shot me in New Orleans. Payne shot my dog in Blue Eye. Sooner or later, time will come to settle up
between the two of us.”
The girl brought the food. Nick found he was ravenous.
“So who were they?” Bob asked. “Do you know?”
Nick took some pride in his answer. He thought if anything, this might impress Bob Lee Swagger.
“It’s an outfit called RamDyne.”
“An Agency front? I figured Agency. Only Agency works that professionally.”
“No, they’re not Agency. They’re something else—but maybe invented by the Agency in the year 1964, certainly under the protection of the Agency, certainly useful to the Agency. But they’ve become something of their own, and they take pride in their professionalism and their ability to do the right thing, the hard thing. Motherfuckers, I’ll tell you that. Been in some shit. While you were fighting, they were all over ’Nam selling torture instruments and guns to the secret police.”
“You got any names for these boys?”
“You know Payne. Ex-Green Beret master sergeant. The head man is an ex-Green Beret colonel—”
“Tough-looking guy, fifties, hooded eyes, seen some shit in his time?”
“I’ve never seen him. His name’s Shreck. Saw a lot of combat, but he was court-martialed in 1968 for torturing VC suspects.”
“I can believe that. I’ve met him. Hard-core, the whole way.”
“But RamDyne predates Shreck. He may run it now, but it was there before him. It’s … it’s somehow connected to other stuff. I don’t quite know what they were up to. Do you?”
Bob laughed.
“I got some ideas.”
“So tell me. Tell it to me all. You’ll never have a better audience.”
“All right,” said Bob. “Let’s get some coffee to go, and I’ll tell you as we drive.”
They paid for the food and coffee and went back to the truck. Bob pointed the vehicle north, and began to talk, beginning with the visit of the men from Accutech all those months ago. And Nick was right; he was a great audience. He was all ears.
Bob talked for more than an hour and a half. Now and then Nick would interrupt with a question.
“The ammunition in Maryland? It was accurate beyond factory standards?”