“That’s a good idea. I’ll follow to make sure.”
The two men eased the slumped Fred over into the other seat, finding him sodden with his own fluid but breathing and conscious.
“Jesus,” he said, “I hurt everywhere.”
“Fred, I don’t see anything bleeding hard or spurting. I think he missed your arteries.”
“Just get me to the hospital.”
“Next stop,” he said, getting Fred set up for the drive.
He pulled back.
“You sure you’re okay to drive?” asked Charles.
“I’m fine, nothing seriously damaged. Say, who are you? Where’d you learn to shoot like that? You sure saved our asses. He was coming ’round to finish us.”
Charles turned his lapel to show his badge.
“Justice Department, Division of Investigation.”
“Man, you must be made of guts, the way you stood there while that sonovabitch unloaded on you.”
“Too stupid to know better, too old to care much,” said Charles.
The cop got behind the wheel and gunned the car through a tight U-turn and lit out up the road. Charles duplicated the turn and followed.
—
IT TOOK A WHILE for the scene to develop at the hospital. First it was just Charles sitting in the lobby, smoking, berating himself silently for wrong decisions. If he’d had that Thompson, he might have been able to bring down the shooter and take the others. With a couple of the better kids along, law school or not, the advantage would have been with them.
On the other hand, he knew if the shooter had had a Thompson, he would have been able to bring down Charles.
Charles also realized it had to be Nelson, with that small-scale machine pistol. Its short barrel and powerful kick made it hard to shoot well at anything except within contact distance. It had to be the gun he used on Carter Baum because the surviving witnesses had remarked on the excessive flash, which was the signature of the weapon. But he also decided to keep that fact from everybody until he’d cleared it with Division. It was a nice piece of intelligence, and he might need it, because he knew he could be harshly judged for his mistakes tonight.
Calming himself with the ritual of assembling the makings, he lit another cigarette. Meanwhile, two, then three, then six more State Troopers arrived, then an older fellow in a raincoat over a bathrobe to whom all deferred and Charles presumed was the superintendent or commanding officer.
Several of the State boys came over to shake Charles’s hand and tell him how much they appreciated his work. People kept arriving, in hastily thrown-on civilian clothes, perhaps other executives, detectives, maybe the dedicated State Police surgeon, Mount Prospect patrolmen and supervisors, someone from the State Attorney’s Office, and soon the waiting room was jammed, and outside more and more cars were cramming into the parking lot.
After a bit, the disheveled older man came over.
“I’m Claude Bevens, Superintendent of the Illinois State Police,” he said, extending a hand.
Charles rose to shake it.
“Swagger, Justice Department. Are your officers all right?”
“Both will survive, I’m told. Cross was only nicked; he’ll be back on duty in a week. Fred McAllister was all shot up, hit six times. But because he was low in the car and didn’t catch one in head or throat, they think he’ll be okay too, in time.”
“Glad to hear that.”
“My boys say you saved their lives. Say you shot it out with whoever that bastard was and damned near clipped him. You didn’t duck, flinch, drop, move, or anything, all those bullets from that crazy little gun bouncing all around you. I don’t know what stuff you’re made of, Special Agent, but I wish I had a little of the same.”
“Sir, I was in the war. I’ve been shot at before. A lot.”
“Most men run and hide.”
“Didn’t think about it. Too busy trying to drop that fellow.”
“Well, our detectives would like to take a deposition. I know you want to get back downtown and write this up for Mr. Purvis. Can you give us a few more minutes?”
“Sure.”
“I’m going to schedule a press conference for four p.m. today. Maybe you could be there for that? I’d like to get Mr. Purvis out here for it too. You deserve recognition for what you did. He should know, you should get some kind of medal.”
“Sir, if you could do me a favor, it would be to leave my name out of it. Our Director is very particular about individual agents getting special credit. Between you and me, he’s a little fed up with Purvis for getting so big in the papers, and the rumors say Purvis’s position is shaky. I’d be happy to talk to your detectives, and feel free to communicate with Purvis or Mr. Cowley, but putting me behind microphones in front of cameras won’t do me no good at all.”
“You sure? These are times when we all need heroes to believe in.”
“It’s my best move.”
“Okay, Justice. It’s your call.”
18
BLUE EYE, ARKANSAS
The present
“NOTHING,” he said to Jen over the phone from his hotel room. “I am out of leads and real low on hope.”
“Well,” she said, “you are not known as a quitter, so I know you’ll break this one open just like you did with that Russian woman sniper.”
“But I had leads with Mily Petrova. Plus, I liked Mily. This old man’s an undertaker with an attitude. What’s his problem, anyhow? He won’t let anybody near.”
“He doesn’t care for fools. Sound familiar?”
“The old buzzard left nothing behind him, and there’s nothing in the records. The hints are all circumstantial, and while they suggest, you couldn’t go to the bank with ’em.”
“I know that—”
“Well, wait,” he said. “To be fair, the Historical Society let me go through the photos again, and I did fetch one from December of 1934, when he was back on the job, and no mention had been made of his five-month absence. Silly picture, ‘Sheriff Swagger awards the 1934 Crossing Guard of the Year with a gold plaque.’ Small-town-newspaper stuff not important to anyone except the little girl who was in the picture. So—”
He paused. Time passed, the universe began to move again.
“There you go,” she said.
“She’d be ninety-four, if she was still alive. The chances are small that her mind is clear. And even smaller still that she’d remember having her picture taken with a sheriff in early December eighty-three years ago.”
“But you do have her name.”
“The newspaper gives her name as a Mary Sue Bridgewater.”
“There’s your lead,” Jen said.
So the next morning he called Jake Vincent in Little Rock, asked Jake to recommend a good private detective, got an outfit the firm had worked with many times, and via Jake soon found himself talking with an investigator, and he laid the specifics before him.
“It is a long shot, Mr. Swagger,” said the professional detective. “But we have document specialists who will go through census records, tax records, newspaper obits, property deeds, anything on paper, and if ninety-four-year-old Mary Sue Bridgewater is still breathing somewhere in the continental U.S., we’ll find her for you.”
“Thank you, I appreciate it.”
But that left him with but one task that he could do himself and it was as foolish a fool’s errand as any fool had ever thought up.
He had the Xerox of the strange “map” from the strongbox, where the badge, the gun cylinder—or was it from a car, an airplane, a refrigerator, a locomotive, or a popcorn popper?—the Colt pistol, and the thousand-dollar bill had been found. It was an aerial scheme of what appeared to be a wall, presumably some structure’s external wall. It sported two window wells, or that’s what he assumed the indentations in the wall had to be, and from the
second one, on a northeastern angle—again assuming the map was oriented with north at the top—ten dashes stood for ten steps to a circle, which Bob assumed was a tree, and on the other side of the trunk were three more dashes leading to an X. X marks the spot. X the unknown. The X factor. Mr. X. X!
Bob realized it could be no dwelling on the Swagger property, because at no place in the house he grew up in, and Earl before him, and even Charles before that, had there ever been two windows as close together as these seemed to be, assuming they were windows, assuming this was a map and not a doodle, assuming this, assuming that.
It’s so thin, he thought. Everything about this old bastard was thin. He sure as hell didn’t want anybody poking into his business, and he’d either left no tracks or carefully erased his own.
At any rate, Swagger’s solution to this problem was short on insight, long on labor. Out of the same Historical Society, he’d come up with a telephone directory, fortunately quite brief. He guessed that his grandfather’s acquaintance circle would have mostly been prominent civic types. He was “The Sheriff,” after all. So Swagger found the town municipal guide, wrote down the names of all of 1934’s county officials—there were twenty-one—and then looked them up in the phone directory, yielding twenty-one 1934 addresses, most in what had been the “quality” section of town in those days. Then he added doctors and lawyers. So after much listing and recording, he finished up with thirty-nine addresses.
Thus, he spent the next two days visiting each one, peering from afar, as he compared windows and wall variations and tree occurrences with the map, and if he noted a possibility, he knocked, introduced himself, and was allowed to circle the house perimeter—assuming the house had been built before 1934—and of the thirty-nine addresses, thirty-three remained, him searching for that magical arrangement of windows and a single tree, along a wall that itself was oriented to the north.
The result: nothing.
Nights, he went through old Vincent family scrapbooks, just hoping, but the result was the same. The Vincents knew other old Blue Eye families, and he had access to a batch of other albums, and were he writing a book on the agrarian aristocracy of Polk County in the ’30s, he’d have been all set, for he saw lots of men in three-piece suits, ties tight, with fedoras low, at backyard parties with women in tea dresses of flowery, flimsy material, all of them prosperous and well pleased with their place in time and society. But of the man-killing sheriff and war hero, not a thing. Had the sheriff exiled himself or did he prefer people lower in the order, or, even more likely, he preferred nobody, nothing. He was a loner on his family farm, working his guns, doing his hunting, and maybe as an alpha he had some low-grade gofers around happy to do his bidding in exchange for the presence of the genuinely heroic. But if this even happened, it left no record.
At the end of his two days of labor in Blue Eye, he had learned exactly nothing.
19
CHICAGO
July 16, 1934
WHEN HE FINALLY LEFT THE HOSPITAL, Charles drove straight downtown, arriving at the office at 7 a.m. He went up to nineteen and sat down at his typewriter and clacked out a bare-bones report of last night’s incident over two carbons, including the info that he’d prevailed on the State cops to keep his name out of the papers, then put the original on Sam’s desk, the first carbon on Purvis’s, and the third on Hugh Clegg’s.
Then he went downstairs, went to the nearest Toddle House, and had himself a breakfast of eggs and bacon. And a pot of coffee. He figured it was better to work straight through the day than to go home, nap, and come in by 2 p.m.
When he got in, he went straight to his desk. His schedule was to work through a pile of reported “sightings” of the bad boys, most of which could be checked out by phone. If he was dissatisfied with that conversation, he’d put in for a car and put it on his list of face-to-face interviews. Then at 1 there was a meeting of the Dillinger Squad with the Gang Intelligence Squad—the police’s Dillinger Squad—at Central, to share information and coordinate strategy, though Charles thought it was mostly silliness and fantasy. From 4 to 5, he was to be at that same installation’s firing range, where he was going to run three newly arrived agents through his course of fire, evaluate them, see who had the gift and who’d best be kept behind the lines. Looking at the files, he saw one had served in the Michigan State Police for seven years, and he assumed that fellow would already know a thing or two.
But of course the incident of the night before had to be processed, and who knew how long that would take, so the schedule was pretty much up in the air. He worked steadily through the morning at his desk, on the phone, and at around 11 a call came; it was Purvis’s secretary, Mrs. Donovan, saying that Mel would like to see him. He rose and walked through the office, which was suddenly uncannily silent. When he got to the hallway that led to the offices, he turned, curious, and saw every agent in the place staring at him. And then they stood. And then they clapped.
“Swell, Charles,” said Purvis a few seconds later in his office. “As you can see, word has gotten around. Cops talk to other cops, and some of those other cops even talk to us.”
“Yes sir,” said Charles. He sat at a table across from Purvis and Clegg. Sam sat off a little, not exactly at the table, content not to face him or dominate the chat.
“You are to be congratulated,” said Purvis. “I had a call from the State Police Superintendent by seven a.m., and he told me one of my agents had saved two of his officers’ lives, and had shot it out with at least four or five heavily armed men—men with automatic guns, in fact—and had driven them away. That makes you an official hero, and, as you know, we haven’t had many heroes around here lately.”
“Thank you, Mr. Purvis.”
“We’ve all read the report by now,” said Clegg, who technically had no authority over Charles but whom Purvis had included almost as an invitation to take a swing at him and see if he could land one, as Clegg was not in the Purvis camp and therefore not in the Swagger camp. “But perhaps you’d take us through it orally.”
“Yes sir,” said Charles, and proceeded to narrate the events of the evening.
“When I left,” he concluded, “I was assured both troopers McAllister and Cross would make it and be back on duty fairly quickly.”
“Charles,” said Purvis, “after a gunfight, many men need a day off, to get rid of the shakes, to refuel emotionally those feelings which were spent in the rush under fire, to consider, to gather, to relax. Do you need that?”
“I’ve been shot at before,” said Charles, “and it ain’t fun, but I’m okay. No shakes, no nightmares, no cold sweats.”
“Agent Swagger,” said Clegg, “no one here is questioning your heroism, but it has occurred to me that certain of your judgments leading to that heroism might need further explanation.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” said Charles.
“I know you were an expedient—expeditious—hire and didn’t attend the academy, or even the one-month special crash training program that some of our recent agents have been through, and your grasp of our regulations could well be shaky. But that can’t be an excuse. So we have to look at your decisions and our regulations anyhow. Those regulations specifically preclude you acquiring sources but refusing to disclose them.”
“He did inform me of a source, let the record show,” said Purvis somewhat testily. “There was no formal ‘refusal to disclose.’ I never asked.”
“It seems rather sketchy to me,” said Clegg. “And I’m sure Washington will conclude the same.”
“I had no reason to place any faith in this source,” said Charles. “I had no idea if he was square or not. It could have been an ambush too. Or some kind of double cross. Or some prank or stunt the Chicago cops decided to play on us. So, yes, my decision, no one else’s, and against the advice of Mr. Purvis, I decided to go out alone, that’s all. If someone was going to get shot, I prefe
rred it to be me and not anyone else.”
“Yes, but if you’d run it by all of us instead of just mentioning it on the fly late in the afternoon, we might have insisted on a full effort and you’d have been out there with ten men and ten Thompsons. Then you wouldn’t have just ‘driven them away’ but killed or arrested them.”
“I understand that. While you’re at it, I made another bad decision. Inspector Purvis tried to get me to take a Thompson. With one Thompson, I believe I could have closed them down, never mind ten. That was bad judgment on my part. I couldn’t do much but make noise with a handgun.”
“State Police investigators found a straw Panama in the gully whose brim had been shredded by a .45,” said Purvis. “That had to be your shot. With a handgun. From one hundred and fifty measured yards.”
“That was the hold. Another shot without a breeze and I’d have nailed that little peckerwood between the eyes.”
“But your superb marksmanship shouldn’t deflect from questionable judgment,” said Clegg, not looking at Purvis.
“Mr. Clegg, more men don’t necessarily mean better outcome. Little Bohemia, for example. But also the war, where I led many a raid and saw them go wrong all the time and boys killed out of stupidity. Operating with a team at night takes a lot of experience, a lot of planning, a lot of communication. I didn’t have time for none of those things, so I made a judgment it was better handled by one man. I didn’t want these kids, many of whom have never shot for blood or been under fire, running around in the dark with Thompsons and Browning rifles. Night battle ain’t twice as hard as day battle, it’s ten times as hard. We ain’t ready for it. Nobody is ever ready for it, but these young fellows, no matter how brave and enthusiastic, really ain’t ready for it.”
“Well said, and duly noted,” said Purvis.
“Well, let’s go to the issue of the Thompson, then. Or the Browning rifle. If you would have had them—hell, if you’d had the Model 94 my dad hunted deer with in the Mississippi woods, with your formidable marksmanship skills, you might have tagged Nelson and two or three of his pals.”