“If a jet’d come along and a sonic boom would hit, maybe it would drop,” said Roger Deacon. “You could probably call the air force on your phone, Red.”
“Damn,” said Red.
“You could explode another car bomb,” said Jeff. “That might loosen it.”
But Neil had the best idea.
“Order it to drop,” he said. “It knows who you are.”
“Damn right,” said Red. “Everybody does.”
He squinted, assumed the position of an especially pugnacious bulldog and issued his command: “Ball! Drop!”
Damned if it didn’t.
Red sat around the nineteenth hole with his fellow Rich Boys, choosing a very expensive twelve-year-old George Dickel Tennessee bourbon as the night’s poison, finding himself in a boisterous mood. He said he’d let poor Jeff off the hook on his thousand if Jeff would just pick up the tab. Jeff agreed and Red set out to drink a thousand dollars’ worth of Dickel. He wasn’t celebrating too soon: he was trying to get a certain part of his brain disengaged from the drama that was surely playing out seventy miles to the south even now, in a forest battleground.
If he let himself think on it, he was sure he’d die. His heart would go into vapor lock; he’d pitch forward in rigor mortis and they’d have to cut him out of his golf shoes. He’d end a joke: the total golfer who died in a bright red (his favorite color) Polo shirt and a pair of lemon-yellow slacks.
“You okay, Red?”
“Yes I am. Tell that gal: another round.”
“Red, you are so generous with my money,” said Jeff, though not bitterly. “Damn, I have to give it to you. You always squiggle out. I got you on the goddamn hook and presto, you’re off it!” But it was said in something like respect.
“Many a man has thought he had me on the hook, only to find out the hook was in him,” said Red, as the girl deposited another Dickel straight up before him. He took a hit: blam. Hot, straight and tough, just the goddamn way he liked it.
“Hey, Red, got a question for you.”
“Shoot, son.”
“Have you heard the Holly Etheridge rumor?”
“Every goddamn one of ’em.”
“No, I mean the rumor.”
“Which one would that be?”
“It’s all over town. He’s your friend, you’d know.”
“He isn’t my friend. He went to Harvard. He ain’t hardly ever come back to the old stomping grounds. Hell, he went to prep school in Washington, D.C. St. Albans School, I think. He ain’t no Arkansawyer, I’ll tell you that. I know him some.”
“They say he cut a deal with old Mr. You Know Who, the front-runner. He’d drop out early and work behind the scenes … and that would get him the vice-presidential nomination.”
Roger Deacon pitched in with a comment. “We have been his local media buyers for eighteen years, and believe me, if Holly Etheridge were going on the national ticket, we’d know it by now. You have to buy into prime time early. It’s too late otherwise.”
“You ain’t thinking right, Rog,” said Red. “It ain’t a senatorial race. The buy would come from national party headquarters and not in his name. You check, and I’d bet you’ll see the parties already got money down on the time they need, through one of the big Little Rock shops.”
“So it is going to happen, huh, Red?”
“Neil, I ain’t heard diddly about old Holly. He’s too busy trying to fuck every living female between Maine and Southern California. I think he’s made it through Illinois and is just starting on Missouri.”
“I don’t think he’s given up his national ambitions,” said Jeff. “His daddy gave him an order, and one thing about Holly, he always obeyed his daddy. I think I ought to give him a call. He’ll probably end up looking for a good chief of staff. Maybe I’ll be moving up to Washington.”
“Shit, his team is set,” said Red. “I shot sporting clays with Judge Myers a few weeks back, and he’s the boy with the inside track. But he didn’t say nothing.”
“Holly may surprise us yet,” said Neil.
“We made a hell of a lot of money off that goddamn road he wanted to build for his daddy, though,” Red said.
“Hear, hear,” cheered the Rich Boys, for they too had made money, even at some remove, from the $90 million that the federal government had poured into Arkansas to build the Boss Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway down to Polk County.
It went on that way until eleven, when Red finally broke it up. Toward the end, as the booze wore off, he found himself becoming morose and mean-spirited. The vibrator on his beeper had not gone off.
What did it mean? What was going on? It was so goddamned perfect.
He pushed aside his fears and went to the car, but for the first time in years, his two obedient, discreet bodyguards irritated him, though they were so steely efficient there was no cause for the annoyance. They just bugged him tonight.
He said, “I’m going to the lounge, not home.”
“Yes sir,” came the reply, untainted by human emotion.
He climbed into the big S-class and turned right, down Cliff Drive and back toward the city, instead of left toward his big white house overlooking the airport. At the halfway point, he called the Runner-up.
“Hello?”
“Beth, honey, something has come up. I’ve got to nurse one through the night.”
“Sweetie, are you all right?”
“I am fine. And soon, I’ll be finer.”
“Are you sure?”
Dammit, even she was irritating him tonight.
“Yes! Yes, everything is fine. You know what I want you to do? Plan a vacation. A nice one, the whole family, both families, Hawaii, we’ll rent out a goddamned island to ourselves. Your mother, even. All right?”
“Yes, Red, honey.”
“Your brother. He can come too. That’s my babe.”
He hung up, crossing Rogers, turning in toward town, took his next right and followed the progressively seedier Midland Boulevard until at last he came to Nancy’s. His parking place was wide open, as usual, and he pulled into it. As he leaped out, his two bodyguards seemed to materialize from nowhere and took up position next to him.
He threw open the door and about six dreary drunks and four dreary pool players looked over at, his magnificence and withered in it; he blasted through, telling Fred the night barkeep just one word: “Coffee.”
In his lair, he felt a bit more relaxed. Here at last was a world small enough and known enough to be completely dominated. He sat at his father’s old desk. He felt comfortable. He set his folder on the green blotter before him and willed it to ring: Phone! Ring! But unlike the golf ball of late afternoon, it did not obey him. What adventures could it be concealing? What extraordinary battle, what act of profane violence, what deliverance or destruction?
He tried to shut it out by concocting a plan to implement if he were to fail utterly.
Swagger lives. Swagger kills both men. No, worse, Swagger captures poor Duane, who spills the beans about the Bama connection. What would Swagger do next?
He’d come after me, he realized.
He leaned out and gestured to his bodyguards.
“It is very possible,” he said, “that a very tough man will be coming after me in the next few days. Not sure, but possible. Therefore y’all will need to be at your absolute tops. Understood?”
“Yes sir,” said the talkative one.
“We go into Condition One, all the way. We’ll need support teams, aerial surveillance, motion detectors, the works. I ain’t going to give it up without a fight.”
“We’ll get him, sir.”
Maybe, he thought, that would be better: face it, do it, get it over with. He and Swagger, man-on-man.
Then he laughed.
Swagger was too good. That would be suicide.
He looked at the phone.
Damn you. Ring!
But it wouldn’t.
The hours leaked by. He read the papers, tried to work on hi
s books, had a lot of coffee, watched some TV on a ratty black-and-white. He may even have dozed for a time, for it seemed that there was a moment when it was dark followed by another moment when the dawn was suddenly breaking. He went out, looked down the broad boulevard that was still lifeless. Odd, even a slum like north Fort Smith could look pristine and wondrous in the first wash of moist, dewy light. But he knew his sentimentality was phony, more a function of stress and exhaustion than genuine feeling.
Now he began to feel sorry for himself. It went with the territory, the long night nursing through a crisis that he himself was incapable of influencing at this point, one which he must fight with surrogates.
He mourned his father, that great man. He wondered again at the great bitterness of his life: who had killed him? He missed his two wives and his five children. He missed the boys at Hardscrabble, the men he hunted, fished, flew to Super Bowls and occasionally caroused with. He mourned his life: was someone going to take it away from him now? At least his children would know who killed him, more than he knew of his own father’s death. He saw Swagger as a pale-eyed avenger, a figure of death, come to take it all away. Part of him yearned to fire both barrels of that expensive Krieghoff into Swagger and blow him to shreds. He calculated: two blasts of Remington 7½ from five feet, that’s almost sixteen hundred pieces of bird shot delivered at over 1,200 feet per second, hitting him that close, before the shot column opened up into a pattern but instead traveled through space with the energy and density of a piston. Wow! Total destruction.
But in the end, he weakened. His warrior spirit was spent. His dick was soft and would never be hard. He needed sleep, he needed help.
He faced the phone. It was nearly seven.
I can take it no more.
I have to know.
He dialed Duane Peck’s number. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and Red feared that catastrophe had occurred. His heart bucked in terror.
But on the fourth ring Peck answered.
“Yeah?”
“What’s happening, Peck?”
There was a pause that seemed to last an epoch in geological time as ice ages rolled down from the north, then retreated, whole species were created and evaporated, civilizations rose and fell, and then Peck said, “It’s over. Got ’em both.”
“Goddammit! Why didn’t you call me?”
“Ah—” began Duane.
“I told you to follow orders exactly. Don’t you get that?”
“Yes sir,” said Peck. “Sorry, I—”
“Is the general all right?”
“Yep.”
His heart soared in gratitude and intense pleasure.
“Bury the bodies, get the general home and disappear for a week. Call me next week. I want a full report.”
“Yes sir,” said Peck.
Red snapped off to the dial tone, the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.
40
Russ had an instant of clarity: he thought, I’ve finally done it. I’ve pissed him off so bad he’s going to beat the shit out of me.
For even as the snake’s rattle registered in his brain, Bob had turned and driven savagely into him, knocking stars into his brain behind his eyes, taking his breath from him, forcing him in a wild plunge to the precipice of the creek bed where he panicked at the instant surrender to gravity. Yet through his fear as he fell, literally in Bob’s arms, toward the black cold water, he heard one other thing.
This was the sound of a whip crack next to his car, for the air was full of buzz and fury, a sense of presence that Russ couldn’t identify, for it had no real antecedent in his life. And as he fell toward the water he also noted the appearance of explosions of some sort, on the far bank, geysers of earth spouted upward, filling the air with grit and dirt, but fastfastfastfast, so fast he couldn’t believe it and—
The water was cold. It knifed through him. He shivered like a dog, breathed some in (it tasted like cold nickels in his throat), and he fancied he saw black bubbles climbing until he broke free of Bob and started to rise, but Bob had him again and smashed him forward into the bank as three more silent blasts erupted into the dirt above and seemed to turn the darkness gray with haze and dust to the tune of three more whip cracks.
Russ had come to rest in the lee of the shallow bank. It was about a foot deep, a narrow gulch. The water cascaded over him, swift and numbing. He gasped for air and understanding.
“Sniper,” hissed Bob. “He’s up there on the elevation above the path. Infrared. The snake, Russ. I heard the snake.”
All was silent except for the rush of the cold, cold water over their limbs.
“Fuck,” said Bob. “Ain’t he a smart one, though.”
“Can you see him?”
“Russ, he’s got infrared. He can see us. We can’t see him.”
Russ rose as if to peer over the lip of the bank, but Bob pulled him back.
“He can shoot your eyes out. He can see you. You can’t see him.”
“It was so close.”
“What you heard was sonic boom. He has a silencer. You can’t hear his muzzle blast.”
It dawned on Russ where they were: no longer in the precincts of paranoia, where every living thing seemed a threat, but in the actual universe of hurt, where every living thing is a threat. This was it, then: the ultimate existential horror of the sniper’s world—to be hunted in a dark forest by an invisible antagonist who could see you when you couldn’t see him, who could fire without giving his position away and to be, yourself, unarmed.
Not unarmed: Bob had his .45 out.
“Can you get him?”
“Not likely. He don’t have to close. Fuck! Smart motherfucker.”
“Who is it?”
“What the fuck difference does it make?”
But then he knew.
“Preece. It’s his specialty. Goddamn. So smart.”
“Preece! How—”
“Don’t think about that now. Think about where we are, what we got.”
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Welcome to the club, sonny.”
In the dark, Bob’s features screwed tight in concentration. He looked both ways up the creek bed, threw himself into the problem, searching his mind to recall the terrain that lay between himself and the car, where he had a rifle.
“All right,” he said. “Here’s the deal. You work your way up the creek bed, about a hundred feet. You stay low, you stay in the water. He’s scanning right now. I’m going to work my way in the other direction. In four minutes, when you’re set, I’ll make my move and try and draw him away. When I go, loudly, you go softly, back—”
“To the cabin?”
“No! There’s nothing there but death. You back up into the woods and find someplace to go to ground. I don’t want you moving in the dark. He’ll find you. Remember: it’s alight. A black light, but a light. If you ain’t in the light, he don’t see you. Then, in daylight, that rifle is more of a problem than a help. Here.”
He gave Russ the compass.
“This’ll get you through the woods. After first light, you make good tracks. There’s a hill behind us, I don’t want you going up it. You cut back around it. Then you head due west by the compass, and soon enough, maybe fifteen miles, you pass Iron Fork Lake; five miles past that, you’ll come to 271. You call the cops, you tell ’em what’s happening. Meanwhile, I’ll try and make it back to the car and get my rifle. Then I’ll hunt this motherfucker down and fucking nail him.”
His face was a hard mask, set in stone and psychotic anger.
“He’ll kill you,” Russ said, the simple truth. “You don’t have a chance against his stuff.”
“It ain’t the gun, sonny. It’s the operator.”
Preece felt neither rage nor panic. He did not curse his luck or wonder what could possibly have alerted the two and caused them, in some incredible way, literally to disappear as hi
s first brilliantly placed shot rocketed toward them. He recovered quickly, but they spilled into the creek bed exactly as he reacquired them and his next four rounds puffed against the far bank.
In the circle of the scope, in the cone of black light, it was bright as green noon. There was some verdure reflection but not much: it was like peering into a tinted photographic negative, a soupy, almost aquamarine world brilliantly illuminated by the infrared searchlight.
He scanned up and down the creek bed, knowing that Bob would realize that to stay put would be to die. Bob would have to make some kind of move: it was his nature. Now, how would he go? The creek bed was like a narrow trench about three hundred feet long at this point, and only deep enough to sustain cover for about one hundred feet. He could snake out either end, or he could go over the top, fading into the woods. But that would take him straight against the incline of the far hill; he’d be staked out against the rise like a butterfly on a pool table.
No, Bob would go out either one end or the other, and that was the problem with Preece’s system. It depended on a beam of invisible light, which gathered strength by focus. It was not powerful enough to illuminate both ends of the creek. Therefore, he had to scan continuously, covering the one, then the other—or figure out which one Bob would choose. It occurred to Preece to move lower down the slope to lessen the angle to the trench: in that way, he’d narrow the degree of muzzle arc he’d have to cover from one end to the other. But at the same time, suppose Bob moved when he himself was moving? Could he recover to shoot in time?
No. Stay put. Be patient. You have the great advantage. Do not squander it. Be strong, keep the heart hard. Keep scanning.
Then, at the far end of the trench, back toward the cabin, he saw a target. The cross hairs came onto him. Head shot, he thought. Very carefully, Preece began to take the slack out of the trigger.
Russ watched Bob slither away down the creek bed, totally animal now, feral, intense, driven. Bob was out of sight quickly in the dark, and he moved so expertly he made no noise. It was his gift: he vanished.