Point of Impact (39 page)

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?”

“Beyond
any
standards. Better than my own. Whoever loaded it knew a thing or two about precision reloading for accuracy.”

“Do you know who it could be?”

“Oh, I have an idea or two.” He moved on to other matters.

“Why didn’t you know you were being set up in New Orleans? I mean, you
knew
there was some other game going on, that they weren’t quite what they said they were.”

“You’re right. I was a goddamn fool. I think I wanted that Russian shooter, that T. Solaratov, so much it blinded me. I’d been thinking about him for so many years, not knowing who he was, only what he’d done, but just dreaming about going up against him. So I got careless and I got greedy. It’s killed more than one man and it sure as hell nearly killed me.”

“Was
there a Solaratov? Does he really exist?”

“I sure don’t know. What I do know is that these boys must have studied me like a bug on a pin for a long, long time. That’s how smart they were. They knew how to get inside and turn me like a key. Burns my ass even now thinking how stupid I was and how those smart boys played; I feel like I’ve been raped from the inside out.”

“They probably had a psychiatrist run a study on you. CIA is heavy into psychiatry now, it’s doctrine. And there’s a lot of CIA doctrine in this RamDyne.”

On the subject of his recuperation, Bob would say nothing, other than that a friend had helped him. But Nick put it together; he knew it was a woman, the woman who’d called him. With that fake country-western accent.

About his ordeals, after the bloody escape from New Orleans, Bob was not eloquent.

“Yep,” he said, “thought my hash was salted many a time. But somehow, I kept going.”

Nick had a funny moment here, calculating how he and Bob had been weirdly circling each other through this whole damned mess, how many times they’d moved through each other’s wakes. He shivered.

“I have to tell you if you ever get caught I can’t be of much help. If these guys have been as professional as you say, they won’t have made any mistakes. That setup in Maryland? It’ll be—”

“It is,” said Bob. “That was my first stop after I died. All those signs of that place are gone. The trailer that was their headquarters? Towed away. Turned out they just took out an option to buy an old shooting club property, put up twenty-five thousand dollars, then let it lapse. It’s back for sale now. Didn’t surprise me much.”

“Yeah. And on the other hand, the forensic and ballistic evidence against you is overwhelming. I’ve read the Bureau lab report. They got your rifle with your fingerprints and your reloaded cartridge and … the bullet. They couldn’t read the markings because the bullet was mangled and—”

“Yeah, I saw that in the papers. That’s why they haven’t done any shooting tests on the rifle.”

“Yes. If they get to court, they don’t want to say they tried but couldn’t get a match. It makes them look bad in front of a jury.”

“I get you.”

“But they have a very sophisticated test that analyzes
the metallic residue left in the gun barrel. And it said positively that the bullet that hit the archbishop was consistent with the metallic residue. That’s going to be hard to beat.” .

“I figured out how they did it, or how it
could
have been done.” He explained the concept to Nick.

“Okay,” said Nick, “yeah, I understand. Same bullet, slightly larger bore, paper-patching. But … you have to find some way to convince a
jury
. The jury won’t be able to follow something that technical; they’ll just look at the neutron analysis test—and Mr. Swagger, you are one screwed turkey.”

Bob nodded.

“They did a very careful job on me. But just maybe nobody’s quite as clear on all this as they think.”

“Let me tell you right now,” Nick said, “your best course is to hire a good lawyer. I can call the Bureau and we can work out some kind of deal. With my evidence and—”

But Bob was just looking at him.

“Son, I don’t think you understand. These boys killed my
dog.”

“I’m telling you, this is the twentieth century. You just can’t go to war on people, not in America. And that kind of attitude will—”

“Now, you listen here, Memphis. Even if I could walk out on this thing now as a free man, I wouldn’t. Those boys would scatter and slip into new identities or whatever it is they do. We’d never catch them. They’re too damned slick. They’d have gotten away with it. And in a year or so, when it was cool, they’d be back in business. What I mean to do is tether a goat and draw them in. They’ll think they’re hunting the goat, but the goat is hunting them. And who’s the goat? I’m the damned goat. The only thing is, this goat has teeth. This goat bites. Now this is hard, hairy work, Memphis;
there’s going to be some shooting and some people are going to die. It won’t be pretty and we’ll be all alone. It
is
a war. I didn’t start it, but by Christ I mean to finish it. Now, Pork, tell me—are you in or are you out?”

Nick thought of the pig-gleam in Payne’s eye; and this RamDyne with its willingness to do the hard thing; and he thought of how he’d been brutalized; and he thought of how confident and smooth and big these guys thought they were. And he thought about how they’d committed a war atrocity and gunned down women and kids.

And he thought about how he’d been dying to get back on a SWAT team.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”

Something hard and metallic flickered in Bob’s eye, like the shine of a brass cartridge as it catches a glint of light before the bolt locks vault-tight behind it.

“Now, what?” asked Nick. “I’ve got some great ideas about Annex B. It seems to me—”

“Hold up there, Pork. First thing is, we’re going to see a man about a rifle.”

“Partial body found in bayou,” proclaimed the cheerful headline.

“Go ahead,” said Shreck, “read it.” Dobbler squinted.