Authors: Stephen Hunter
“It was only to save you time, Howard. I know you’ve got your big picture to worry about, so I just routed the request through your office with your name … uh, it’s just a kind of …”
He ran out of words.
Howard glowered at him.
“What do you think you’re doing, Nick? What game are you playing?”
Nick bumbled into a confused account of his investigation of the Eduardo Lanzman affair, the source who’d told him Lanzman was Salvadoran, his idea that a hightech electronic eavesdropping van may have been used, his clumsy discovery of the mysterious RamDyne firm that seemed to have a line on such expensive equipment. He rambled on semicoherently about the coincidence of a Salvadoran agent maybe being killed by the Salvadoran secret police only weeks immediately before the suspiciously “accidental” murder of a Salvadoran archbishop despised by certain elements of his own regime. But he saw that he wasn’t making much progress with Howard.
“I tried all the usual channels and came up with nothing. Like, nothing. So I tried to show some
initiative
and …” He trailed off lamely.
“Nick,” said Howard, a deep sadness coming over his
bland face, “I’m very disappointed in you. Why didn’t you come to me with all this?”
“Well, Howard, actually, um, I
did
and you said—”
“Nick, we have an open-and-shut case on Bob Lee Swagger. We have means, motive and opportunity. We have some circumstantial ballistics evidence. We have witnesses, including, I might add, yourself. Nick, what on earth are you doing? Whose side are you on?”
“Howard, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you about the ballistics. I’m wondering if it’s technically possible to—”
“All right, Nick, this is how things fall apart. Junior agents running around on their own, not reporting to authority. Unauthorized leaks to the press. It’s the beginning of the end of Bureau discipline, which is the beginning of the end of the Bureau.”
“Howard, I—”
“RamDyne, you’re right, is very connected. To our cousins in Langley, among half a dozen other secret agencies. They do a lot of things we can’t afford to do officially. Sometimes these things don’t look so good; sometimes they’re ambiguous; sometimes they do little bad things to prevent big bad things. Their secrets are very closely held. If you pick at them, or uncover something out of context, it can lead you exactly where you shouldn’t go, and cause all kinds of problems for all kinds of people. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nick, you’re not
supposed
to see the big picture. Other people do that. You’re supposed to do the jobs we give and do them well. Let us connect the dots. You catch the crooks.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nick, it pains me to do this. I’d thought perhaps after your screwups in the past, you’d turned over a new leaf, and I might have been tempted to forego your suspension.
But you haven’t. I’m removing you from this detail. You’re to fly back to New Orleans immediately and begin your suspension. Sorry, it has to be this way. Some years ago you messed up. I thought you’d worked hard and overcome that mistake. But you keep messing up, Nick. You’re a loose cannon. You’re not a team player. You want too much, you want it too fast.”
Nick realized he’d just gotten blindsided. It hit him with a force he hadn’t felt since Myra died.
“All the way through, Nick, you insist on doing things your way. If you’d bumped Swagger up to the Alpha category, if you’d taken him prisoner, if—oh, Nick, you’ve done so
poorly
. We’ve tried so desperately to help you. And now you pull
this
on us.”
“I’m sorry, Howard,” blurted Nick, stunned. “I didn’t know it was so serious. I was trying to do a thorough job and I—”
“Nick, that’s all I have for you. I want you—”
“Nick?”
It was Hap Fencl leaning in.
“Excuse me, Howard,” he said, “but I have a woman on the line who swears she knows where Bob Swagger is, and insists on talking to Nick.”
“For Christ’s sake, Fencl,” blurted Howard, “she’s probably just another—”
“She says he had an arm wound. We hadn’t released that information.”
There was a long pause.
Finally, disgustedly, Howard gestured to Nick to pick up the phone.
“It’s line fourteen,” said Hap.
“Nick Memphis, FBI, can I help you?”
“Mr. Memphis,” came the voice like a bad country-western song, though somehow theatrical and a bit phony, “Mr. Memphis, Bob Lee was with me and he was my man fer a time, but he’s gone now.”
“Who is this?” Nick said.
“This ain’t nobody,” she said. “But I seen your pitcher in the magazine and if you’re the johnny what’s got to catch Bob Lee, then git yourself ready, ’cause he’s a coming.”
“When?”
“He left here today. Should be there in three days of hard driving. He’s gone a little crazy, you know. I begged him not to go.”
“How do I—”
“Because he said his dog’s name was Mike, not Pat, like it said in the newspapers.”
Another trap to weed out loony callers.
Nick took a deep breath, made a signal to Hap to indicate it was time to get going on the trace.
“He says he’s coming home to bury his dog,” said the woman. “Gonna bury his dog, don’t care who he’s got to kill to do it.”
“I—”
“Don’t hurt him, Mr. Memphis. He ain’t hurt nobody.”
Then she hung up.
The secure phone rang.
Shreck looked up at the men in his office.
“Get out,” he said.
After they left, he picked it up.
“Shreck.”
“Hello, Raymond,” the old man’s voice sang. “How are you today?”
“Mr. Meachum, you don’t care how I am. What do you want?”
“I wanted you to be the first to hear the good news. I’ve heard from a friend that the Justice Department has just alerted the State Department to inform the Salvadorans that it has formally decided against reopening
its inquiry into the Panther Battalion atrocity. The archbishop is gone, and there’s nobody to pay any attention to it at all.”
This did cheer Shreck.
“Well, that’s something.”
“Yes, it is. Of course General de Rujijo and his colleagues and peers will be delighted. Certain people in certain agencies in this town will breathe a good deal more easily. The past will be allowed to die; we can go on from here. It’s the first day of the rest of our lives. You’re to be congratulated once again, Colonel. You made the impossible happen. Extraordinary.”
“Thank you, Mr. Meachum.”
“Only that one loose end, and it’s a very tiny one.”
“We’re on it, Mr. Meachum.”
“Excellent,” said the old man. “I knew I could count on you.”
“Okay,” said Howard, “now I want snipers on those two buildings, do you see. Put them on duty at four
A.M
. tonight. I want them there all day tomorrow, even if he’s not supposed to be in till the day after. You can never tell.”
“Yes, Howard,” said Hap Fencl. “We’ll put ’em up there, good boys. Nick? He’s the best shot.”
“No. Not Nick. Nick stays with me. Do you hear that, Nick?”
“Yes, I hear it,” said Nick, still clinging to membership on the task force by his fingernails, his exile to New Orleans forestalled by the prospect of action.
They were standing in front of the new red-brick Polk County Health Complex, which contained the county morgue. The body of Mike the dog had been removed there and now rested inside.
It was a bright afternoon, and the green Ouachitas glared down at them. They were about a mile out of
Blue Eye, just off of Route 270 where it neared 71 and turned into Mena. Traffic hummed down the road.
“And I want shotgun teams on standby. Say, four-man units, ready to go, secured in the installation.”
“Yes, Howard,” said Hap. “Uh, what load? Do you want them carrying double-ought buck or deer slugs?”
“Hmm,” said Howard.
“The boys like double-ought, because it doesn’t kick so much and you don’t have to make an exact shot placement. And, Howard, with those deer slugs, you got a .70 caliber chunk of lead moving at one thousand six hundred feet a second, and if you should happen to hit a civilian, Christ, the hoot from the newspapers.”
“He’s probably not going to be wearing body armor,” said Howard. “All right, go with the double-ought.”
“Howard, do you want to coordinate with the sheriff’s office?” Hap asked. “Old Tell’s getting pretty edgy as it is.”
“No, I don’t think so. This is our operation, this is a federal warrant, and we’ll serve it. We’ll alert the sheriff after we make the apprehension. Nick?”
“Yes, Howard,” said Nick, standing there disconsolately next to Howard in the small knot of agents just outside the lobby.
“Nick, I want you to stay at the command post to handle the communications. Or. do you want to ship out today?”
“No, Howard, I’ll hang around until—”
But Howard had already turned away from Nick.
“I also want us to have people in the morgue and people on the floor and in the office. I want an observation post up near the snipers, ID-ing everybody who pulls into the lot.”
“If we get a positive, will you green light?” asked Hap.
“Yes.”
There was a quiet moment. Green light. Pull the trigger. Shoot to kill without warning. It was a rare operational condition.
“I want to take him here in the lot, not inside. We could get ourselves in some hostage situation or God knows what if he gets inside,” said Howard. “This man is very dangerous. He could take down half a dozen men in the blink of an eye, and suddenly I’m looking at more dead than Miami.”
“Howard,” said Nick, knowing it was futile, “he had me dead to rights in New Orleans with my own pistol when the smart thing was to drill me, and he passed on it. He hasn’t been found guilty of—”
“Nick, you are really disappointing me.”
“Yeah, Nick,” said Hap. “Howard’s right. Gotta tag the guy if a clean chance shows.”
Nick nodded bitterly. But what if he’s innocent? Then he realized it didn’t really matter anymore.
“All right, Hap, you get the men out and sited, very quietly. I don’t want a lot of action on this. It’s possible Bob has sympathizers in the community, and he’ll be getting advance reports.”
“Howard, he’ll also scope out this place before he moves in,” said Nick. “That’s how he works. He’s very careful. You’ll want to be real careful how you hide these people. This guy can smell a trap a mile away.”
“Nicky, we’re pros too, remember,” said Hap. “Hey, we’ll do a real nice job. He won’t know what hit him, Nicky. If he shows.”
“Nick, you come with me,” said Howdy Duty. “I want to see the administrator here and get all this cleared before we move in. I may need your diplomatic skills.”
Nick and Howard went into the lobby waiting room, a bland, government-grim office that smelled of newness and plastic—the place was only a year or so old—
where beige furniture stood against beige walls and one bearded geezer was up at the desk, jawing in deep Arkansese with the girl there.
Howard led Nick to the counter and they waited politely in the otherwise empty office as the hillbilly or mountain man or whatever he was carried on ’bout the damned government or some such, and the girl listened with half an ear and half a brain, and kept saying, “But the papers aren’t
ready
yet.”
She was just letting him blow some steam and after a while he seemed to settle down and stepped aside, and Howard pushed his way to the counter, pulling his identification and announcing himself as Deputy Director Utey, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It was only then that Nick looked up into the face of the man they’d rammed aside, and behind the blond beard and under the deep tan, realized he was looking into the gray eyes of Bob the Nailer.
Nick was fast; Bob was faster.
“Don’t you do it, son,” he said, the .45 Colt automatic a blue blur as it rose from nowhere and locked onto Nick’s chest. Bob’s voice was dead calm, dead serious.
Nick’s hand had flashed to his own Smith, his fingers were wrapped around the shaft of the piece—a very good speed draw, in fact, by Bureau standards—but he was dead by a clean three-tenths of a second if Bob so chose.
Nick put his hands up.
“Hey, what—” Howard said.
“You boys just relax. Young lady, you relax too. I came only to get my old hound Mike, and no man
should have to die for so silly a thing as a dog that’s been dead a month or so, right, Memphis?”
There was a weirdly cheerful crackle in his voice.
The girl behind the counter sat back and her eyes got big as eggs. Howard, meanwhile, was still not quite with it.
“Who—”
“Howard, it’s him, it’s Swagger. He beat us here—no, he set us
up
. Isn’t that right?”
“You, older guy, don’t you do anything stupid, even if you do look stupid. Gun out, left hand reaching around, set it on the counter, just like the kid here.”
“Mr. Swagger, there are federal agents all arou—”
“Just do it, old man, there’s a good boy.”
It stunned Nick how calm Bob was.
Howard’s big Model 19 came out, went onto the countertop delicately.
“Young lady, pick each one up by the barrel and put ’em in that wastebasket over there.”
She did as she was told, shaking all the way.
“Now, young lady, I want you to lie down on the floor over there by the wall and curl up, with your hands over your ears. You just stay there. If you hear shooting, you just stay there. You’ll be fine if you just stay there.”
The girl, a blonde with a murky face, did just that, sinking to the floor.
“Swagger,” said Howard, “give it up. You won’t make it out. If we don’t get you today, we’ll get you tomorrow. We have a thousand men on this.”
“You just shut your mouth, sir,” said Bob. “Now y’all come with me, smiling like we’re old pals, you being just a touch ahead. Remember I can put the third of three bullets into each of you before you feel the first two. Now let’s go. We’re headed back past three halls, then turning to the right. Then you, Memphis, you’re going to tell the man there, a Dr. Nivens I believe, how
it’s time to give up on the dog’s body and send it on to Washington for further tests. You pick it up. Then we’re going to walk out to my truck, and I’m going to drive off. And nobody has to get hurt over a damn dog. Fair enough?”