Point of Impact (28 page)

“She a girl and a half,” he said again.

“She sure is,” said Payne. “Now where the hell we goin’?”

“Up here. Turn right, then behind the restaurant you
turn left and we head down the alley. She’ll be in back, where the dancers park.”

“You sure know this town.”

“Know it well, that I do,” said Timmons, almost singing with anticipation. He was a happy man.

The crowd thinned as they turned off Bourbon down Toulouse and then saw the alleyway, a small gap, just the width of a car, between the old brick buildings. They turned into it. It smelled of old garbage and piss.

Up ahead, however, there appeared to be something of an altercation. It was difficult to make out, but it looked as if a large black male was beating on a small white male.

“I do believe,” said Jack Payne, “that that’s a crime, isn’t it?”

“Oh, shit,” said Timmons. He reached under his jacket, and from the high-hip holster withdrew the famous Beretta and advanced at a coplike gait, yelling, “Halt, Police! Goddammit boy, y’all stop that.”

Payne watched him go with something that wasn’t quite sadness, for he truly detested Timmons, but out of some sense of camaraderie. The two had shared a lot, after all, and each had come to recognize the other as a man who walked the same side of the street.

“Goddamn, I say,
stop
!” shouted Timmons. He fired a shot into the air, and then rushed in harder, a little surprised that the black man hadn’t cut and run, as was customary. He stopped short when he saw that the black man had a pistol of his own, which had come from nowhere.

“Now, wha—” Timmons began, when the first bullet hit him in the throat and the second, a split second later, under the left eye. They were only .25’s, from some piece of junk that wouldn’t shoot accurately over ten feet; the range was seven.

Timmons died clawing at the small hole in his face, which spurted blood like a broken pipe.

The black man ran by Jack Payne, pausing only to wink. It was Morgan State, as he was called, from the unit, Payne’s second in command, a great shot, a cool hand with a lot of in-country time behind him, good man in a gunfight. Then he was gone.

The tourist was crying and bleeding from the beating but otherwise unhurt, as had been the plan, for an innocent witness was the fulcrum.

The sirens began howling, and in a few minutes the first cop car would be here.

Payne melted into the dark.

She had brought the magazines, all the newspapers, everything that she could find or acquire in Ajo without making a big fuss.

It was ten minutes into the reading that Bob found the mention of Mike’s death. There it was in print. Somehow, that made it official.

Bob put the magazine down slowly, and stared out the window. He could see the bright desert light, the hot flat blue of the sky, an endless cruelty of needles spangling the low rills.

He just sat there most of the morning, mourning Mike and trying to figure who would kill him. Then of course he had it. To get his rifle from the trailer, of course, they’d have to shoot Mike. Mike wouldn’t have let them in, he would have stayed on station come hell or high water; and if they drugged him, that would leave traces.

He read the sentence again.

“Evidently aware that after his deed he couldn’t return to care for the dog, Swagger shot the animal once in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun and buried it in a shallow grave.”

All right
, he thought,
feel sorry for him later. You have some work to do
.

But the pain of it amazed him. He realized in a tiny part of his mind he’d been harboring some kind of illusion until now; he saw himself back at the place, and old Mike come up to nuzzle him, to press his sloppy jowl against him and gaze up with those dumb, adoring eyes.

All right
, he thought,
you killed my dog. Now I got some work to do, so that I can settle up
.

He read slowly, without hurry, each article, from the earliest Julie had been able to find—which meant the most inaccurate—to the very latest. Nothing showed on his face. He sat on his bed and read it all, straight through. Then he read it again.

He saw himself laid bare, penetrated, turned inside out. He was fair game for them all; everybody had a theory, an idea, a notion. He realized he was no longer his own property; his private self had been taken from him forever.

They had it right—but wrong, too, terribly wrong. They were looking at him from such a twisted angle.

“Swagger’s Navy Cross bespeaks his aggressive nature and his reckless will to kill and precurses the tragic events of March 1,”
Time
said.

It was the second highest award his country could give him; and he’d saved a hundred lives those two days in the An Loc Valley. They made it seem like a crime.

“Violence is inbred in the Swagger clan. His father, Earl Swagger, destroyed three machine gun nests one morning on Iwo Jima and returned to violent encounters in law enforcement, climaxing in a bloody shootout where he killed two men but died himself off Highway 67 near Fort Smith.”

They turned his old daddy, who only did his duty to country and state, into some kind of mentor in murder.
Nothing about the lives his dad had saved in giving up his own against Jimmy and Bub Pye that terrible evening.

There was a paragraph recounting his lawsuit against
Mercenary
magazine, which had put a picture of him on the cover and called him the most dangerous man in America. It told how sly old Sam Vincent had shaken thirty thousand dollars out of their pockets and warned all those gung-ho books to stay the hell away. But then
Time
dryly remarked, “It is doubtful that Swagger could win his case today.”

He shook his head at all this, wondering what could twist people so. Where do these people come from? How do they learn things like this? Is there a school that teaches them? What gives them the damned right to just take over your life and bend it any which way they please?

They hadn’t missed a damn thing. They’d pried everywhere. The inside of his trailer was photographed. His books were listed: the writers found it amusing that among the loading manuals and the classic works on rifles and shooting, such a violent man had poetry by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, though it was noted that the works were “only bitter war poetry.” There was his gun rack in loving detail, the weapons cataloged and judged by reporters who seemed disappointed to discover that he had no “assault rifles,” as they called them. His rifle range was diagrammed. His two victories in the Arkansas State IPSC championships were probed. And he saw schematics of the shot he had supposedly taken in New Orleans from 415 St. Ann into Louis Armstrong Park. The madness of that second was broken down and analyzed, its physics and ballistics choreographed in infinite detail, its trajectories laid out in dotted lines to little X’s that marked the strike of the bullet, all of it convincing, all of it
wrong. He saw stills drawn from the videotape of what went on at the podium, the fall and twist of the man he’d supposedly “hit,” the archbishop of whom he’d never even heard.

The completeness of it blew him away. They’d been so careful, they’d set it up so perfectly, and, worst of all, they’d known him so well.

Not these damn reporters who didn’t know a thing, but them, the Agency boys, whoever they were. They’d known him perfectly. It was as if they’d lived his life or gotten in his brain.

“You look so hurt,” she said.

“These people, they knew so much about me,” he said. “It’s scary how careful they were. Not that they took the time, but that they
knew
so much, they
knew
how my mind would work.”

He thought back to the moment when he’d been truly hooked: when they came up with a trophy he couldn’t say no to, the Russian sniper Solaratov, who he now realized probably didn’t exist. It was so perfect. They knew how desperate he’d be.

Then he discovered, from
Newsweek
, that the guy he’d jumped coming out of the house on St. Ann Street was named Nick Memphis and he was from the FBI!

Now here was something that twisted in his imagination. Memphis, Memphis, where’d he heard that damn name before? It hung there, tantalizing him until he remembered after a bit. Memphis was the joker in Tulsa who’d missed and hit some woman. His was the archetypal botched shot, the sniper who fouled up. And he, Bob, back in Maryland, had re-created the whole thing in front of the fancy boys while they were gulling him along with their “Accutech” stuff.

He wondered if this Memphis were a part of it. Then he remembered the stunned surprise of the man, the slack, dumb look on the wide face, his squirming, the
easy way the 10-mil came out of the holster when he reversed on him, and he doubted it. If he were one of what Bob thought now merely as “Them,” he guessed that this Nick Memphis would have been ready and waiting. Besides, he wouldn’t have left his car with the door open and the key in so helpfully there right outside on St. Ann Street.

There was a picture of the guy, a blurry thing snapped out front of the New Orleans FBI headquarters.

“Agent Memphis, who missed collar, hurries to car,” the caption said.

It was the same man, equally disturbed, this time with a grave and somewhat embarrassed look to his face.

You screwed up, and now these people are going to nail you for it. You screwed up almost as big as I did, he thought.

Bob read on, looking for answers.

But there were only more questions.

Here I am, Nick thought, in Arkansas!

He was sitting around the temporary bull pen in the Mena, Arkansas, Holiday Motel, wading through the oceans of paperwork that attended the task force’s relocation from New Orleans to Polk County, yet at the same time managing not to grieve too overwhelmingly for the passing of Leon Timmons, dropped by a mugger in a New Orleans alley two days or so ago. He wished it didn’t please him so and he wished the publicity—
HERO COP SLAIN IN FREAK CRIME
—would go away, because his own incompetence was a part of the story.

“You sure you didn’t smoke poor Leon there, Nick?” asked the ever mischievous Hap Fencl.
“You know, in blackface, with a little throw-down gun?”

The others had laughed; they couldn’t mourn the braying Timmons either, who’d made the Bureau look so bad.

But Nick just smiled grimly and stayed on station as the operation’s prime goat. Outside the window, the green and thunderous Ouachitas rippled away toward Oklahoma in the late afternoon sunlight. He returned to his document, a witness sighting report from the New Mexico State Police; a motorist claimed he’d seen Bob the Nailer, big as life, tooling down the highway in an ’86 Merc. That was the common element in the sightings: as if Bob would be so
bold
to bull on through in broad daylight, sure his courage and his determination would get him through. These people were imprinting their own sense of Bob on ambiguous events and coming up with the strangest stuff.

The phone rang across the room and somebody else got it.

“Hey, Nick, it’s for you.”

Nick turned to the phone.

“Nick Memphis.”

“Nick, it’s Wally Deaver.”

A little burst of excitement went off in Nick’s chest.

“Wally, Christ, how are you? You got the pictures?”

“Yeah,” said Wally and Nick didn’t like the tone in his voice.

“It’s not him?” he asked quickly. “That’s not the guy you talked to in Cartagena? That’s not Eduardo Lanzman of the Salvadoran National Police?”

“Shit, Nick. That’s the terrible thing of it. I wish I could say one way or the other. I wish I could just
tell
you. But … I don’t know. I was only with Eduardo during the meetings which lasted maybe a day or so. Two days max. And a bunch of us went out to dinner,
had a few drinks. I can’t say I
knew
him well. We exchanged cards, you know, the way cops do. Now these pictures—”

“Yeah.”

“Nick, death doesn’t do anybody any favors. Maybe this is the same guy. Maybe it isn’t. It
could
be. It
might
be. Maybe it is. But … 
maybe
it isn’t. You didn’t have the passport photo?”

“It didn’t look a goddamned thing like him.”

“What about any corroborating evidence?”

“Nothing. It all checked out, at least as near as we can tell. You know I can’t get budget to go down there. And the Salvadorans, they say they don’t know him at all, except that this is through our formal liaison with them which is run by the State Department, which means it’s got to go through so many layers—”

“Yeah, that’s why I bailed out, Nick. So many layers. Look, Nick, to be fair, it’s a pretty dead horse without corroborating evidence. I mean, in good conscience, I couldn’t go before a grand jury and—”

“Yeah, sure, I understand.”

“Great.”

“But tell me this. It
could
be. Just maybe, just somehow? At the outside.”

“Okay, Nick. Yeah, yeah. It
could
be.”

“Great, Wally.”

“But Nick. Don’t bet your career on it.”

“Sure,” said Nick. “I won’t.”

But he realized he already had.

She was rebandaging him.

“You must be a very tough guy, Sergeant Swagger. Looks to me like there isn’t a weapon made they haven’t tried out on your hide. You’re a one-man proving ground.”

“They had some fun with me, ma’am.”

“I count—what, four gunshot wounds?
Old
gunshot wounds, that is. As opposed to the two
new
gunshot wounds, which resulted in
three
holes. The hole total comes out to—five? Six? You’re a piece of Swiss cheese, Sergeant.”

“I was only hit three times. Twice the first tour, none the second, then the bad one, the bullet in the hip that ended the third tour. They had to glue and wire the whole gizmo back together again. Don’t know how they did such a thing. I thought I was set for the wheelchair my whole life. And that one old hole isn’t a bullet.”

“What is it?”

“You’re not going to believe this. It’s from a curtain rod.”