Man without a gun has got no chance, Bob thought. Man has a gun, he has a chance.
With a thumb as big as a brick, he pawed the magazine release. The mag fell out and he saw the agent had it loaded brimful with hollowpoints, like little brass Easter eggs down there. He sneaked a look to see if the man had the chamber stoked, and the gleam of brass from the seated cartridge answered him. Would they stand up under a soaking? Only one way to find out. He slid the magazine back, felt it lock and with a same brick thumb got the hammer back and locked.
He sat back, wishing he had more strength to find a position, or a trail, some place to hunt from, a good place to shoot from, a brace, anything. He had none of it. Only the gun. Overhead, the sun filtered through the dense tree cover, thin, not yet eight he reckoned. The shadows were blurry. Or was it his eyes going? Was he sliding off into nothingness, bled out like a deer shot quickly and not well.
He was hallucinating again. Strange, at this time he thought of Donny Fenn and all the scary moments in the boonies, and how at the real crazy-ass seconds, Donny’d begin to laugh a little, a hysterical giggle.
Donny, boy, you’d be laughing today if you could see old’ Bob and what’s become of him, sitting on his wet ass in some bog waiting on death or a creature.
But Bob couldn’t laugh. He tried to settle back. Seemed like there was a dim memory of sitting in the rain a while back a whole night through, waiting on Tim, the whitetail buck with the twelve-point spread. That was a long wet wait, wasn’t it? Oh, that was a hunt! He remembered the way Tim came blasting out of the foliage, like a ghost or a miracle, and how the rifle came up to him and he fired and knew how well he’d fired. That was a night, wasn’t it? Hit Tim above the spine with a bullet cast from epoxy; must have weighed less than 25 grains, atomized when it hit the flank but the shock knocked the sense out of Tim for a good five minutes.
He remembered sawing the antlers off.
Nobody going to kill you to hang your head on a wall, he thought.
Go on, boy. Git.
He remembered the creature leaping away when it came out of its coma, full of juice, crackly with life.
He laughed crazily.
They sure tried to hang my head on a wall.
Then Bob looked up and there it was. Late, it was drinking late. Maybe so deep here in the swamp there were no men and so there was no fear. Bob didn’t know. He just heard the rustle of twigs snapping, saw a flash of color.
It was some sort of ugly spotted pig. Bob watched it emerge from the dapples of the trees maybe seventy-five yards out. It was ugly as an outhouse on a hot day, and yet when Bob saw it he almost cried for the second time in his life, the first being when he was alone at nine and had gone off onto the hill after Major Benson had come to tell them his daddy was dead out near Fort Smith.
But Bob didn’t cry. He made ready to shoot.
The damned gun was new; suddenly it felt different than his old Colt automatic, as if it were fighting him. Squeezing his left hand around the right, printing down on his right thumbnail with his left, his elbows locked between his pressing knees as he sat in a modified isosceles, fighting the tremors of exhaustion that nuzzled through his wrists and tried to betray him in their treacherous way.
Front sight. Front sight. Front sight.
That was it. That was the key, the rock upon which the church was built. You had to see the front sight with a pistol, and let the target be a kind of hazy blur in the far distance. Otherwise, nothing good happened at all.
Front sight, front sight, front sight.
In the notch of the rear sight, a frame, he saw the huge red wall of the front. There was only front, rock steady, big as Gibraltar or Mars, Bob bending into it with every last thing, and the pig a kind of soupy blur, its details lost in the distance, just a splotch of movement against the stability of the greenery.
He hoped that damn cop had zeroed it well. He hoped the water hadn’t deadened the primers or ruined the powder in the case.
Bob was so poured into the shot he didn’t hear the noise at all or feel the recoil, as the big pistol whacked back. What he saw was the pig speared through the spine by the lead, which, entering its tough hide, ruptured; it hit and broke the spine.
The animal squealed as death closed it down, then a spasm of fury rocketed through it. It tried to climb to its now stunted and shaky legs but, having a broken spine, was unable to direct the last part of its body to obey. Then, with a last quiver, it went quiet.
Bob got himself up. Still woozy, still soaked, he felt death in his own limbs, stalking through his body, hunting him. But he walked onward, dazed, kept sane only by the smell of the burned powder that his nose picked up in the riotous odors of the swamp, a familiar thing onto which he could lock. He wobbled to the pig, then collapsed as he reached it.
It weighed about forty pounds. It was about three feet long. It smelled of manure and offal. Its snout was curiously delicate, as if designed by an angel; its lashes, fleecy at the closed slots of its eyes, were also delicate, like a child’s.
The bullet hole was an ugly blister over the shoulder, but there wasn’t a lot of blood seepage. It hadn’t come out, unlike the bullet Payne had put into him, which is why he had lived and the pig had not. Served Payne right for using something tiny like a nine. Payne had broken the one true moral law of hunting: use enough gun.
Some day, I’ll use enough gun on you, Payne.
Swiftly he got out his Case XX, still secure in the watch pocket of his Levi’s, thanking God for a good Case knife that would hold an edge all down the many years and thanking God also for his own stubborn ways that made a small knife as much a part of daily dressing as boots and socks.
Turning the dead animal so that its soft belly was finally exposed, he had a moment of crisis. Felt as if he’d fallen out of his own body there for a second. A wave of hallucination crashed over him. He forgot everything. But then it came back and he found himself with the knife and the dead animal and he butchered it swiftly.
Bob wanted the liver, which he found, a treasure amid the gore, and ripped it out, feeling it hot because it was so soaked in oxygenated blood.
The liver was richest in nutrition and tastiest this side of a fire. Bob tore off a bite, stunned at the intensity of the flavor and the sense of richness; it made him dizzy it was so powerful. He ate some more, chewing ravenously, amazed at how hungry he was; how desperately he needed it. He ate and ate until the liver was gone.
I am alive, he thought.
Then he heard the roar of a chopper, and dropped. A Huey sped low above the riverbank, blowing the trees left and right as it hurtled along.
They’re looking for me, he thought, with a wave of regret at the complications of his life. Then he picked up the carcass, slung it over his back and headed deeper into the swamp.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dobbler always found Shreck’s occasional absences frightening. The customers here at RamDyne were tough guys, like cops or soldiers, or if not tough, they were distant, techno-nerd types, and both groups looked upon the large, soft psychiatrist with an attitude characteristic of their professions: either contempt or indifference, depending. So the doctor tended to sit in his grubby little office when Shreck wasn’t around to act as his sponsor in this strange world.
The RamDyne offices—offices wasn’t exactly the right word—were located amid the cargo terminals and warehouses of Dulles International Airport, just south of Washington, D.C. They were a shabby warren of jerry-built light-industrial units sequestered behind double Cyclones that wore double spirals of razor wire, guarded viciously by armed men. The sign next to the guardhouse at the sole entrance said only BROWN EXPORTS, without corporate logo or escutcheon. It had a prosaic, unexceptional quality to it, and the guard who always looked fiercely at Dobbler, as if he never recognized him after a full year on the payroll, went with the outfit’s bunker mentality.
Dobbler’s office was a dingy closet unbecoming an assistant professor at a junior colle
ge in Idaho; with concrete floors and surplus wardroom furniture, it looked like the office of a doomed teacher who never would get tenure and would live forever on the hook of his department chairman’s whim. Everything in it was junk, from the sagging bookcase to the desk scratched with strange initials to the ancient safe for confidential documents. It even had bars at the window, an irony not lost on Dobbler. The fluorescent light was imperfectly calibrated, and threw shadows no matter how you sited yourself in it, that is, when it wasn’t flickering wanly.
But it wasn’t as if Dr. Dobbler had the worst office; Colonel Shreck’s, in another building, was equally crummy; it was just a bit bigger, with a moth-eaten sofa near a window that yielded a vista of cargo planes taking off or landing. It didn’t even have a bigger safe, but exactly the same beat-up model as Dobbler’s. The doctor often wondered if it had the same combination!
Dobbler now sat in his office, trying to focus on the problem before him. He found the silence ominous, as if a spell had been cast by the freakish escape of Bob Lee Swagger. And that, in fact, was the problem Dobbler now faced.
The last words from Shreck had been simple.
“Doctor, go back over the documents. Tell me where this asshole went.”
Dobbler answered tentatively, as he always did.
“Y-you don’t think he’s dead?”
“Of course not. Now, I’ve got to go out of town for a few days,” said Shreck. “Try and let me have a report when I get back. I have the utmost confidence in you.”
Before Dobbler the material fluttered in and out of focus.
Concentrate, he instructed himself. Man on the run. No friends. Where does he go? Where can he go? Who would have him?
He had the files of data assembled by Research in its first evaluation of the subject and his own psychological reports.
Breathing heavily, he began to shuffle through them. Bob’s life in the years before his recruitment seemed comprised of two things: his guns and his long walks through the Ouachitas. He was hiding from the world, Dobbler thought, feeling himself unworthy of it.
The detritus of Bob’s life spoke of no warm personal relationships, at least not outside of Polk County. His only friend was that crotchety old Sam Vincent, who’d helped him sue the magazine. If he were alive, he might eventually try to return to Polk County, and maybe to Sam. But now, on the run, where would he head? There was no indication—no sisters, no brothers, no old Marine buddies, no women, not a thing. The man was too much like some kind of exiled warrior—Achilles sulking in his tent came to mind—to need companionship of any kind.
Even the financial records, uncovered by a credit agency, confirmed this pattern. Clearly, Bob kept his finances in control by iron discipline—he could live off his fourteen-thousand-dollar government pension because his expenses were low and he had no creature comforts, no interest in clothes beyond their function, no travel or diversion. There was no record of what he’d done with the thirty thousand dollars he’d received from the magazine in his out-of-court settlement. He had a credit card—a Visa, from the First National Bank of Little Rock—but the reason seemed to be convenience; he could make telephone purchases of reloading components and shooting supplies, thus saving himself time and trouble writing up orders. He bought his clothes from Gander Mountain, Wisconsin, his powder from Mid-South Shooter’s Supply and a couple of other places. He lived to shoot, that’s all; and, Dobbler supposed, he shot to live.
Would he run to shooters?
This was an alien world to Dobbler, so he tried to imagine it. Then he realized that from what little he knew of shooting culture, there’d be no place in it for Bob. Those folks tended to be conservative rural Americans; they’d have no sympathy for a man whom they thought had winged a shot at the president of the United States. Which left him with …
In several hours of close scrutiny, he came up with nothing. He looked around; it was late in the afternoon. The place was quiet. There were no answers anywhere. He was ready to give it up. Maybe tomorrow he’d notice—
And then he saw it.
He looked, blinked, squinted, looked again. It was so little. It was so much nothing. It couldn’t be.
It was a telephone billing on Bob’s December 1990 Visa bill.
A place called Wilheit’s, in Little Rock. The phone number was given.
It seemed … familiar.
He rifled through the credit report, looking for the other Visa bills, and found nothing until … December 1989. Wilheit’s.
Quickly he found December 1988 … Wilheit’s.
The bill was roughly the same, seventy-five dollars.
What was Wilheit’s?
He called the number, and waited while AT&T shunted the connection through dialing stations and off satellites, and the phone rang, sounding far away, and then was answered.
“Hello, Wilheit’s, c’n ah hep you?” was how Dobbler heard the Little Rock accent.
“Er, yes. Um. What do you sell, please?”
“Whut do we sell?” said the voice.
“Yes. What sort of establishment are you?”
“We’re a florist, son. We sell flowers.”
“Ah,” said Dobbler, hanging up.
Now who on earth would Bob Lee Swagger be sending flowers to every December? A Christmas thing? But Bob wasn’t a Christmas sort of guy.
Jack Payne was not a happy camper.
Like the other two men who had been in the room at the time, he was haunted by the resurrection of Bob Lee Swagger.
Since then, Jack had stayed clear of the colonel, knowing he’d probably have to answer for the blown shot.
But how could it have been blown?
Well, someone on the team had said, the damn Silvertip probably didn’t open up, that’s all, so it just went on through, and old Bob fought his way through the shock, and was up and running. He was a Marine, see, Marines are tough.
No, Jack thought there was something else. It was his own rotten luck with a handgun. In truth, he hated pistols. That’s why he carried the cut-down Remington, because almost was good enough with six 12-gauge double-oughts at your fingertips. In Vietnam once, his first tour, ’62, Jack just a scrawny corporal, he had been on the way to the shitter and looked up in horror as a gook came at him with a bayonet on an old French boltgun and sheer murder in his eyes. Jack had left his carbine somewhere and pulled a .45 and squeezed off seven quick ones as the little man charged crazily at him. He missed all seven. Missed them all, fell to his knees and waited for the blade. What happened next was that from thirty yards some guy with a grease gun cut the gook in two—literally, into two pieces—and Jack lived to fight another day. But he hated that moment because he had pissed and shat in his pants as he went to his knees, knowing he was finished and too weak to do anything.
“Hey, Corporal, you’d best git yourself a pair of diapers,” his A-team leader had said to him after the firefight, and the whole goddamn team erupted in laughter. That’s what he hated the most, the fury of the humiliation. And that’s when he swore he’d never carry a handgun again and he’d never humiliate himself again.
But now Swagger had humiliated him twice.
That’s all right, Payne had told himself. I’ll get me another shot at you and this time I’ll put two, three, maybe all six double-oughts into you, motherfucker. Some of these kids on the team think you’re some kind of bull-goose macho motherfucker, some kind of supercracker, a Dixie boy full of piss and leather; not me, Swagger. Double-ought cut you down to your rightful size real good.
Then Jack snickered, remembering.
I already started having my fun with you. I killed your fucking dog.
A thousand leads, a thousand nothings. The man had just vanished. Nick, now more a glorified clerk than an actual federal investigating officer, sat in the office for twelve hours at a stretch and watched every single lead dissolve into wisps, every report fizzle, every trace turn up counterfeit.
The other men didn’t like to be seen talking to Nick
. They’d deny it, of course, but he noticed that when he joined a knot of kibitzers on the rare down minutes, one by one the guys would peel off and he’d be stuck facing a blank wall. Only Sally Ellion always said hi because she was too pretty and popular to run any danger of career contamination. She once even told him she was sorry he was having troubles.
“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” she said.
“I’m sure it was,” he replied.
“I heard that you might be going to another office.”
“Yeah. Well, not for a while, not until this thing gets done. They need bodies now. Somebody’s got to wash out the damned coffee cups. But I’ll probably be heading out. Maybe not such a bad thing. New Orleans hasn’t really worked out. I’ll get a start somewhere else.”
“I know you’ll do well, Nick,” she said, “wherever you go.”
He smiled; she was a nice girl.
Meanwhile the office pool was running odds of eight to one that Bob was dead; no man could disappear so completely from the largest federal manhunt in history, leaving no traces at all. Especially a man who, as reports developed, hadn’t a friend in the world, had no network of allies, no organization, no peers. The complete and absolute loner.
But meanwhile Nick clerked and cleaned for the firststringers, bearing his humiliation with as much dignity as he could muster; and maybe it was while he was washing out the coffee pot that he had his bright idea.
Don’t do this, he said to himself.
You are in deep enough trouble already.
Man, they are going to eighty-six your ass out of here if they catch you.
And it’s so unlike you to do anything at all contrary to official policy.
But … it was such a good idea.
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