Nick, in his own spider hole in the vastness of Hard Bargain Valley, threw the bolt and tried to bring Bob’s Remington to bear on the party of five in the open. A sudden wave of weakness thundered over him.
Jesus, he thought, you just hit a thousand-yard shot!
He started to tremble.
The woman screamed, but Payne pulled her down, twisted her to brandish the shotgun, and didn’t panic.
Bob said to the colonel, “My boy just tagged your boy. You’re all alone.”
The colonel was calm. Maybe a half-smile played across his mouth. At some not so secret level he was a happy man.
“It doesn’t mean a thing, Swagger,” he said, thinking quickly. “Now let me tell you what’s going to happen. Nothing’s changed. Only thing we want now is out. We’re going on a nice slow walk out of here with the woman and with the cassette and the documents. You follow, she’s wasted. So don’t you try a goddamn thing. You put the gun down. You got that?”
“I’ll kill this fucking woman,” said Payne. “You know I will. I got the gun taped to her head. I swear, I’ll blow her away. Now you back off.”
Bob dropped the knapsack. Only his hand wasn’t empty. It held a Remington 1100 semiautomatic shotgun, cut down to pistol grip and sawed-off barrel.
Nick’s second mandate was Shreck. He disengaged the rifle from Lon’s spider hole and brought it to bear on the five figures five hundred yards to his left.
Goddamn!
He could only see the tops of heads. The action had come to play in one of the subtle folds in the earth that ran across the valley floor and his targets were beneath his line of vision.
Which one was Shreck?
He couldn’t tell.
Oh, Christ, Bob, he thought.
He looked around desperately, seeking a tree he could climb to get some elevation into the fold, but there was nothing. He put the rifle down, drew his Beretta, feeling helpless rage.
“Put the gun down,” said Payne. “I’ll blow her fuckin’ brains out.”
“He will, you know,” said the colonel.
So here we are, Bob thought. Come a long way for this party. Let’s see who’s got the stones for close work.
Bob leveled the short, mean semiautomatic shotgun at Payne. Payne could see the yawing bore peeping out from the forestock.
“He isn’t going to shoot,” said the colonel forcefully. “Payne, he’s bluffing, he doesn’t have a shot.”
“I’m not going to shoot,” said Bob. “Here’s the damn deal. I put the gun down, you cut the girl free. Everybody walks. Okay?”
Dobbler backed away nervously.
“Done,” said the colonel. “The smart move.”
“Okay,” said Bob. “I’m going to count to three, then I’m putting the gun down. Nobody get excited here.”
“Do it slow, Swagger,” said Payne.
“One,” said Bob, and then “Two,” and then he fired.
Payne was astounded that it happened like this, the crazy fucking fuck, the moron, he actually fired, and in the explosion he fired too, sending the woman to hell, fuck them all, fuck all who fucked with Jack Payne, soldier and killer of men.
And he felt the gun buck and knew the woman’s head was gone, except that it wasn’t, for she fell backwards somehow, screaming in terror but intact and he fired again, felt the impulse to squeeze run from his brain down through his arm to his finger, felt it squeeze, waited for the gun to go off.
Only then did he realize he was squeezing a phantom finger on a phantom hand.
Swagger had blown a charge of double-ought clean through his elbow from a range of two feet, literally severing it. The hand still grasped the shotgun bound in tape to her skull; it simply was no longer attached to him.
In horror, Payne held his stump high, and watched jets of bright blood pulse out into the clear fall air. In that second the incredible agony of it hit him.
“You fucker,” he screamed. “You fucker!”
Bob put the muzzle of the Remington against Payne’s stout little chest, and sent a deer slug through the Kevlar vest that tunneled to his spine. Payne disappeared as he collapsed.
In the same attenuated microsecond, Shreck broke through the shards of disbelief that clotted his actions and yanked the Marlin up to put a shot into Bob, but he was not quite fast enough. Bob, pivoting through a short arc to his new target, beat him by a clean tenth-second and double-tapped a pair of deer slugs through Shreck’s vest so swiftly the blasts seemed like a single sound. Their roar hit the mountains and rolled back across the valley and still vibrated in the air as the colonel’s legs went and he toppled backwards.
Shreck felt no pain. He lay on his back in the yellow grass. He thought of landing zones, frontals, good men dead in far places, K-rations and C-4, and that bitch duty whom he’d never once betrayed, always doing the hard thing.
Bob stood over him. Shreck blinked and felt his fingers turn to feathers. He had no legs, he had no body. He was very thirsty and confused. Then he realized: it had finally happened.
“I deal in lead, friend,” Bob said, and fired another deer slug into him. It blew out his heart.
In an instant, Bob ran to Julie.
“Okay, okay, honey, it’s all right,” he said to her, taking her in his hands. “Don’t move, don’t jerk, just be calm, we’re almost home free, Dobbler, Dobbler; goddammit, come here!”
He tried to get her to lie still, terrified that a sudden motion might somehow trip the trigger. She was blinded by the tape and making mewling noises, but now he got his arms around her, squeezing her tight, just to hold her steady against his own strength.
“Now, just relax, baby girl, please, just relax.”
He reached into his boot and drew out his razor-sharp Randall Survivor. Looking at the knotted strands of black tape he was at first unsure where to cut, afraid that if he cut too savagely, the vibration on some unseen strand of the stuff might fire the gun. Very carefully, he began to slice through the strands around her face until he’d freed it and peeled the strands away. One by one they broke, but the gun did not budge.
“Okay, okay, we’re almost there, nothing’s going to happen to you, we’re almost home free.”
Gently he rotated her trembling head and inserted the blade in a knot of tape right under the muzzle and began to saw. The edge devoured the tape, one by one popping the individual links. But the gun remained jammed against her and seemed a living thing, a snake almost, with its fangs sunk crazily into her skull. He didn’t want to touch it; he could see that the safety was off and that the weight of Payne’s dead finger still lay across the trigger.
He sliced another strand of tape and the gun seemed to loosen and slide. The breath came so hard to him he thought he’d pass out and someone seemed to be pounding a kettledrum against his ears. Then another strand went, and the gun dropped and Bob had the thing, free and clear.
He looked at it. Soaked in blood, one of Payne’s tattoos remained visible, AIRBORNE ALL THE WAY, it said. You got that right, son, he thought and heaved the goddamn thing as far as he could. It landed in the grass fifty feet away, and did not go off.
“Oh, Jesus,” she was saying as he pulled the tape from her face.
“You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re fine, we made it.” He hugged her, held her very tight.
Dobbler was crouching beside them. He lifted one of her eyelids, looked into her pupil, read her pulse.
“What did they give you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, you’re stable. Bob, give her your coat. The danger is shock. If we keep her warm, there should be no problem.”
She lay back, clutching the coat.
“It’s all over. We’re home free, I swear to you. Nobody can hurt you now or ever again.”
He set her down on the grass, where she settled in, though she did not want to let go of his hand. But he had some other business still.
He drew the doctor away from her until they
confronted the bodies in the grass. Dobbler stopped and stared.
“G-god,” said Dobbler. “I can’t believe we—”
Bob silenced him.
Four feet apart, Payne and the colonel lay in the yellow grass. The colonel’s eyes were open, Payne’s were closed. Payne’s grotesque stump still gushed a magenta delta into the yellow grass. The vests, however, constricted the blood from the chest wounds in both men; only the burned puckers where the slugs had blasted through signified the cause of their deaths.
“Look at them,” Dobbler said, half in shock. “I can’t believe—”
“They’re men. Shoot ’em, they die, that’s all,” said Bob. “Listen here, we don’t have much time. I’ve thought this out carefully.” He reached into his shirt and pulled something out. Dobbler saw that it was a money belt.
“There’s seven thousand dollars in here. It’s all I have left from my magazine money. You take it.”
“I—”
“Now just listen. I want you out of here and gone before that damned boy shows up with his badge and remembers what he does for a living. You see that white pine at the far end of the valley?”
He pointed to the tree.
Dobbler nodded.
“At the tree, you’ll find a creek bed. You follow it about seven miles, mostly downhill, to a river. You can follow the river either way, it doesn’t matter. If you walk hard you’ll come out of the forest around three tomorrow on U.S. Route two-seventy. Flag down the Greyhound that makes the four P.M. run to Oklahoma City. Take the money. Disappear. Start a new life.”
Dobbler looked at him in shock.
“But—You need a witness. You need someone to testify. You—”
“Don’t you worry about me, Doc. You did your part. It doesn’t matter what came before. You go on that stand and you’ll be in a mess that’ll destroy you forever. I know. I’ve been there. Take your freedom and go.”
“But—”
“But nothing,” said Bob. “Now get out of here before that damned kid shows up.” He pushed the doctor along and then watched as the man, confused at first, but then with more spirit in his step, made a beeline for the white tree. Soon, he had disappeared.
Bob returned to Julie. She lay quietly in the grass, breathing softly.
He knelt. Her hand came up and touched his. He bent and kissed her on the lips.
“We’re going to have plenty of time together,” he whispered. “I guarantee it. Now I have just one little thing to do.”
He went to the knapsack, still lying in the grass.
He opened it and removed the green plastic bag that held Annex B and the cover letter. He ripped it open, took out the paper. He couldn’t wait for the sun. He pulled out a Zippo lighter that said USMC and beneath that SEMPER FI, a souvenir of the days when he smoked. He ignited it, held the bright, small flame against the corner of one of the pages, watched the flame begin to spread. In seconds, Annex B was engulfed. He held it until he could hold it no longer, then tossed it. It burned to ash.
“Stop it! Stop it!”
It was Nick, yelling at him from two hundred yards away. He began to race toward him. “What are you doing? Jesus Christ!”
But Bob now grabbed the video cassette. He placed it on the ground and drove his boot into it, smashing the plastic. He pulled the tape out into a loose jumble, leaned over and lit it. It went like a flash and was gone in seconds.
“Jesus fucking A, what are you doing?”
Nick stood over him, dark with anger.
“That’s evidence! That’s the goddamn evidence that can get you off the goddamn hook! What the fuck are you doing?”
“You know what I’m doing,” Bob said.
“Bob, I—”
“Now you shut up, boy, and you listen. It’s over. These boys are in the goddamn body bags now and what they did is going in there with them. And that’s where it’ll stay. There’s nothing left to tell elsewise now.”
“You’ll go to—”
“Nick, you saved my ass with that shot. We’re even up now, and you have to be your own man and make your own decisions. You’re free of me, do you get it?”
Nick looked at him, openmouthed.
Then they heard the helicopter and turned to see a Huey hurtling low over the far end of the valley.
Oh, Christ, thought Nick. It’s Howdy Duty time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
It amazed Nick that they worked so hard when he was so willing to tell the entire truth from the start; he even waived his right to legal counsel without giving it a second thought.
“Hey, I don’t need it. You’ll see. I don’t need it.”
But they insisted on working hard; it was the Bureau way.
They had removed him to a safe house outside New Orleans, an estate out in Lafayette Parish, not far from a swamp; and there they set to their labors for close to a month. Their first go-round was the friendly approach, with his old buddy Hap Fencl and his ex-partner Mickey Sontag.
For a time it was like the good old days in the New Orleans district office bull pen on Loyola Street, the three of them just swapping yarns and laughing it up and having a great time. But underneath there was serious business, and Nick let it all come out. He told everything from his procurement of the Bureau RamDyne file (though he overplayed his pressure on Sally to spare her what trouble he could) to his abduction by Jack Payne and his henchmen, his near fake-suicide in the swamp, and the private war he’d fought with Bob Lee Swagger against the agents of RamDyne.
“You ought to see this damned guy in a fight, Hap,” he heard himself saying in awe. “This is the best gun-fighter this country ever produced. He doesn’t miss, he doesn’t panic, he doesn’t quit thinking and he never gives up. He’s fantastic.”
He got to the embarrassing part, too.
“Look, I may as well be up-front with you guys. I did represent myself as a federal officer when I was officially on suspension. I did it over the phone at least two or three dozen times and in person at least three times. So are you going to bust me? Hell, I broke the New Orleans thing for you, gave you the biggest scoop you’ll ever have.”
They laughed and wrote it all down, asking gentle questions, coming back the next day with other questions.
But they wouldn’t tell him anything else, either.
“So where’s Bob? What’s become of him?”
“Nick, I think they have him in a safe house too, going through the same kind of debriefing. Truth is, I don’t really know. Would you mind if we got back to you, Nick?”
“No, sure, no problem.”
This went on for two weeks.
Then, suddenly, Hap and Mickey were gone. Instead, along came two hard-eyed guys from what Nick assumed was the crack counterintelligence squad called Cointelpro, expert interrogators. They were very, very smart, much smarter than Hap and Mickey. And, naturally, distant; not hostile so much as remote, utterly professional. They were like sharks; they ate him alive and seemed to know the material as well as he did. They pored through it—and him—for minor inconsistencies, for small glitches, as if they wanted the lint of the operation and not the truth.
But he cooperated, again offering eagerness as his only defense, holding nothing back, telling everything, everything.
“Now the bills he used to finance the operation—”
“It wasn’t an operation. We just made it up as we went along. Anyway, he’d evidently cached quite a bit of cash from that lawsuit plus some guns in the mountains and when he got back to them before we ran into him at the health complex, he must have dug it up. He always had cash, he always paid cash.”
“You can’t trace cash, not old, small bills. He had plenty of old small bills.”
“Cash isn’t a crime. At least it didn’t used to be. What have you got him on? A few minor car theft charges for which there’s really no proof, and no prosecutor would bring to court. The rest was self-defense. He never shot a man who wasn’t trying to kill him or someone else. He was gre
en light all the way.”
“New Orleans.”
“New Orleans! I told you, it was a professional setup! They used a different rifle to shoot a bullet that had been already fired out of his rifle. They had a great shot, Lon Scott, in the steeple. It’s possible, you know it’s possible.”
“Okay, Memphis, this isn’t the time to argue. Now could we go back to—”
Then, finally, there were the scientific gentlemen. Nick took three polygraph tests, and volunteered to undergo both hypnosis and sodium pentothal treatment. He was probed, drugged, pricked, psyched, drained and squeezed. He got through it all with only moderate testiness: old Nick, everybody’s helper, friend to all men, duty hound, stalwart and chum.
One day, late in the process, he was told he had a visitor. Blinking, he went outside to the porch, there to discover the nervous Sally Ellion awaiting him.
“Hi! God, Sally, hi, how are you, Jesus, you’re looking great!”
And Sally was looking great.
“Hi, Nick. How are you?” She still had that soft Southern accent, as if the Mississippi itself poured through her words.
“Oh, I’m okay, you know. I’m fine. I’m sorry I haven’t called you. They’ve got me pretty busy and I don’t think they’re going to spring me soon.”
“You’re not in any trouble, are you?”
“Nah. Nah, I’m fine. I want to work with the guys and get this all straightened out. It’ll be fine, you’ll see. I’m hoping that when this is over, we can go out to dinner again. That was great fun. How are you?”
She looked terrific to him.
“I’m okay. Nick, they came to me and wanted—”
“I know, I know. Just tell them the truth. You didn’t do anything wrong. Remember, you didn’t know I’d been suspended when you gave me that file. You’re okay, don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried about myself, Nick. I’m worried about you. He said you might have broken some laws. He was very upset about what might happen to you.”