Through the windshield, the world tipped crazily, and turned to instant vegetation as branches and tufts of high grass whipped at the truck. It rocked savagely as it plummeted downward, now and then feeling about to launch itself in a gut-squeezing, heart-crushing thrust through the air. Then the wheels touched down again and the truck tore through the underbrush. Nick fought the wheel for some semblance of control; he saw trees again and heard himself screaming—and then he lost it. The whole thing flipped; the windshield stretched and shivered and seemed to liquefy as it turned to silver webbing in the instant before it shattered, pouring a torrent of glass atop him. He felt himself careening and the smell of dust and gas filled his ears, amid bolts of pain as he banged his head hard against the door pillar. And then they were still.
It took Nick a second or two to realize he was alive. He heard the ticking of the truck and shook his head, touching it, tasting salt as blood ran into his mouth. His eyes shot open. He lay half in, half out of the vehicle, which had come to a twisted rest in a tangle of trees at the end of the long plunge down the mountain. Up top, he could see the police cars halted and a couple of troopers, guns in hands, edging down the steep slope. A chopper hovered above and then another one swooped low overhead, its roar deafening. Nick turned and watched as a whole cavalry charge of police cars roared across the flatland at them, still a good three minutes distant.
Where was Bob?
He blinked, shook his head, pulled himself free. His hand shot down to his ankle and he unlimbered the .38 Agent. Where was he?
Then he heard a grunt and looked back through the cab to see Bob lifting the body bag with Mike’s corpse out of the truck bed. There was blood on his face too, and when he got the body to him, Nick saw him pause; there was a tenderness in him Nick would never have wired into his Bob Lee Swagger profile.
Then Bob spun and began to lurch away.
Nick had him.
“Stop!” He thrust out the .38, cupping it in two hands, as he thumbed back the hammer. He had its cylinder primed with Glaser safety slugs. At this range the bird-shot-loaded bluetips generated seventy-three percent one-shot stops.
“Goddammit, freeze!” Nick boomed again. He lurched forward, blinking blood from his eyes, and feeling himself begin to tremble like a child in the cold rain without a coat. He set himself against the canted hood of the truck, locking his elbows, sliding into a sight picture. It was a good hold; he had Bob, center mass, in the notch of the rear sight and the nub of the front.
Bob himself blinked away some blood as he studied on this new situation.
“Put the dog down and your hands behind your neck and get to your fucking knees, Swagger. You do some speed stuff on me and I swear to Christ I blow your spine out. These are Glasers.”
“Hell, Pork,” Bob said, “if you were going to shoot me, it’d be done by now.”
Then the sonovabitch winked at him! And he turned and began to amble off, dog under one arm, Winchester carbine under the other.
Shoot him! Nick ordered himself. The trigger was a curse against his finger; he yearned to expel it, to end all his failures.
But shooting a man takes one of two things: an overwhelming fear of one’s own death, which Nick did not have in the least; or conviction. It turned out he lacked this component as well.
He didn’t miss vertically; he missed horizontally, Nick found himself thinking as he stood there, watching Bob run away.
Bob got to the field and shot across the meadow a hundred yards or so to what Nick now saw was your picture-postcard country cemetery under a tall stand of ancient trees, hard by a doddering wooden church. He watched as Bob vaulted the stone wall, and there among the teetering, blackened gravestones set the dog down in what must have been a perfectly sized hole already cut from the earth, and snatehed up a shovel that must have been part of the master plan. With seven strong strokes, he heaped dirt upon it. In the next half-second, he’d scooped up the Winchester carbine and headed into the church.
Nick heard the cars closing in now, but they would not make it. Bob was inside the church and suddenly out the door skeedaddled a class of black children, running desperately, even as the first state cruiser arrived, and its occupants, Magnums and shotguns aimed and cocked, took cover behind it. Then came a second, a third and then ten more, then twenty; a whole caravan of lawmen was at the church in less than a minute, ready and waiting, when the last occupant emerged, a stooped black gentleman.
They got him, Nick thought.
Someone was screaming in his ear.
“You didn’t shoot! You had him, goddammit,” the voice said. He turned. It was a tough-looking state police sergeant. Behind him his buddy radiated contempt at Nick.
I’ll have to pay for that one too.
“Goddamn,” said another state policeman, holding aloft Bob’s .45 as he found it in the cab. “It’s fucking empty!”
Nick heard a bullhorn demanding surrender. There was just one second of silence. Then the sound of shots rose against the sky, and Nick turned in horror. The lawmen were shooting gas grenades into the church. He watched as the heavy shells sailed through and the cottony white fog began to steam through the broken windows. A tendril of smoke leaped out, and a flame, and then another from another window, and the church began to burn.
Jack Payne stood outside the van with his binoculars. Overhead a TV news helicopter zipped by and shortly a TV news van came screeching down the road toward the mass of flashing lightbars and the howl of sirens. Jack could hear the troopers over the radio intercept from inside the van.
“Shit, it’s going up, that dry timber.”
“Is he coming out?”
“Don’t see a damned thing. I’m gonna—”
“That’s a negative, Victor Michael Thirty-three, you stay put and keep those eyes open. Anybody seen the goddamned feds?”
“They’re coming, Charlie.”
At that moment four black cars raced by Jack, hellbent for the church.
But it was too late. Jack watched the smoke, floating upward in a lazy column. Through the glass, he could see the flames.
“Wow.”
It was Eddie Nickles, beside him.
“Shit, they burned him up. Man, he’s all fucking toasty now.”
“Shut up,” said Jack. He didn’t know why, he felt like hitting the younger man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Shreck watched the church burn. When it was burned to the ground, he hit REWIND, and watched it burn again.
And each time, an earnest television correspondent repeated the news breathlessly.
“Behind me is the funeral pyre of the notorious attempted presidential assassin Bob Lee Swagger, whom Arkansas State Police officers and FBI agents pursued to this bucolic spot after his dramatic attempt to kidnap his dog’s body. Despite the lawmen’s requests that he come out, Swagger opened fire on the officers. A tear gas canister ignited the old structure into conflagration. The church has been burning for two hours now. In the morning, officials say, it will be cool enough to sift through the ashes for the body of Bob Lee Swagger.”
Shreck saw holocaust. The flames gobbled the structure from the roof downward. They danced madly through it, issuing a lazy, smeary column of smoke.
He hit REWIND again.
It was dark in the room. Three or four of the men from Jack Payne’s Operations unit were in the room, and Dobbler, making a rare appearance outside his celllike little office, had slipped in, too.
“Play it again,” said Shreck.
The TV people, in Blue Eye on rumors of federal activity and monitoring the police channels on the radio, had gotten there efficiently; they had it from a variety of angles. From a helicopter it looked like a funeral pyre: Shreck could see the church standing in the devotional ring of police vehicles a little to one side of the copse of trees and the old graveyard. It throbbed with flames.
“Nobody could get out of that alive,” somebody said in the dark.
“Man, he’s fried.”
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Then Shreck spoke.
“It’s nothing until they find the body and issue a forensic report. Until then, it’s nothing.”
But he watched it again. The flames billowed orangely as they ate through the old building standing in a meadow in the lee of mountains on a bright and beautiful Arkansas day.
“I think it’s over, sir,” somebody said. “I think we can chalk it off.”
“Then why would he do something so obviously stupid for a dog? This guy was a prick, but he wasn’t stupid.”
“But he was obsessional,” said Dobbler, in the dark. “The dog mattered to him. It wasn’t stupid to him. To us, yes. To Swagger, it mattered so much he was driven to come back.”
“I’ll buy it when they bring me his teeth,” said Shreck.
His eyes went back to the television. He hit REWIND.
Hap found him the next day.
“Here, here he is, goddammit,” he called after lifting the air filtration mask the men wore to protect their lungs from the clouds of ash. His words carried to the twenty agents and fifteen state policemen on hands and knees who sifted and pawed through the remains of Aurora Baptist, while a hundred yards away, like gawkers at a carnival midway, the reporters were kept in check by three more cops and a rope line.
The cops and agents gathered around. Nick pushed his way through the crowd. His head ached from the pounding he’d taken and he was afraid his stitches might not hold, but he had to see.
What was left of Bob Lee Swagger was not pretty. Bob’s face had burned away and the hideous fleshlessness exposed his teeth, which had been blackened with the rest of him in the blaze. His spine had curled; it looked like an Apache bow, drawn, perhaps shrunken a little, much notched. The rest was loose body parts, black as sin, disconnected from each other.
One of the agents went away to be sick.
Nick, standing amid clouds of ashen dust in the hulk of the old church, pushed his mask off and saw what had happened. In extremis, his last moments of life on earth, as the incredible heat consumed him, Bob crawled to the altar. The fire consumed him, and spat out his bones. He had done his duty; he got that damned dog buried. It was so important to him, it was important enough to die for. Was that nobility or sheer craziness? Hard to read; and that was somehow pure-D Bob Swagger. And that done, there was nothing left to do. What all his armed and dangerous enemies could not do, a single tear gas shell fired into the rafters of the church had done in seconds. Fitting? No. Too much pain. Death by fire wasn’t transformation, it was as agonizing as crucifixion, with nails driven through every square centimeter of your skin.
“Hell of a way to die,” someone said. “Creep or no creep, hell of a way to die.”
“Who’s going to body-bag him?”
“Not me,” said Nick first and loudest. He had wanted to see the whole thing played out to the end, knowing his own end—or the end of his career—was near. There was nothing of the reliquary here for him; the bones of saints, being really just bones, made him queasy.
He stepped out of the ruins of the church. Nice to be on solid ground again, instead of shuffling through ash and fire-rotted splinters of wood.
He stood off to one side while others came to see, and wondered if this was how it was in 1934 when they got Dillinger, and everyone had to come and look and dip a finger or a handkerchief in the great gangster’s blood.
The reporters sensed the discovery and became restive; Nick could see them surge forward and strain at the rope. It was Howard over there who quieted them with the news. Nick watched the network reporters cluster around him, then looked and saw that the photographers had finished, and now the guys from morgue had gotten what was left of Bob into a plastic sack. At least they had the decency to put him on a litter, rather than carrying him like a Halloween bag to the coroner’s van.
Feeling suddenly wiped out, Nick thought how nice it would finally be to be done with it all. He had zero money because it had taken every cent he had to keep Myra taken care of, and soon he would have no job, but hey, he was alive, he was—
Then he saw something that made him sick.
He walked over to the graveyard.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Two black men were digging up the dog that Bob had buried, while two cameras blazed away and two TV reporters posed in front of them.
“I said, what the hell are you doing?”
The black men just looked at him foolishly.
“Do you have permission to dig here? This is state’s evidence.”
“Now, chief,” said one of the reporters, coming over to him. “Nothing to get excited about. We’re just doing our job. You’re FBI, huh? So, what does it feel like now that Public Enemy Number One has—”
The microphone was pushed at him, and Nick saw the camera coming onto him. He also saw Howard rushing over to take command, a stricken look on his face.
“Nick,” Howard was calling, “Nick, you aren’t authorized to do press at this point. Mr. Baker, I’ll have to ask you—”
Nick turned, the microphone was still there, big as a fist right at Nick’s nose, and the reporter, who Nick now saw was wearing considerable makeup and whose hair was lacquered into frozen perfection, was asking him quite earnestly how it felt when he watched the church burn—
“Nick, no—”
He heard Howard as his fist traveled a short distance, maybe ten inches, and caught the talker square in his pretty mouth. Nothing had felt quite so good in months. The clown bumbled fearfully backward, spitting teeth, leaking blood, and the whole contingent of press guys quivered back, making room for him.
Now gone to complete savagery, Nick turned onto the digging men and screamed at them to get the hell out of there, and they scrambled away. So there he stood for just a second, all his enemies vanquished. Look at me, Ma, top of the world. Top of the world.
Then Howard had him, and several others pulled him back and were on him, including one state policeman who was handling him more roughly than was necessary.
“Yeah, you’re tough with reporters,” the officer spat, “but yesterday when it counted, you were pussy.” And with that, he gave Nick an immensely powerful shove that sent him back a few feet, completely stripped of dignity.
It occurred to Nick for the first time how the cops must hate him. He hadn’t worked it out, having spent the night in the hospital after various stitchings and X rays. But yes, he’d had a shot at Bob, and couldn’t pull the trigger. Three minutes later it was state policemen who’d closed on Bob, fully armed and one of the most dangerous gunmen in the world. Had he wanted to, Bob could have filled Arkansas with state police widows even with that old-time cowboy carbine.
“Nick, goddamn, cool it, cool it,” Hap was whispering in his ear, as he held him in a tender but firm embrace. “Damn, what has gotten into you, Jesus, you punch a reporter, you could get busted for assault and these Arkansas State boys ain’t exactly your fan club, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Nick with phony surliness, as the cop slowly walked away, daring Nick to have a go at him. Meanwhile Howard had taken over with the reporters, trying to explain how Nick was “overextended.”
He just felt totally whacked. Even breathing seemed too hard. If he could only sleep for a couple of centuries and then wake up and put the pieces together, it might make some sense.
Howard was back. Howard didn’t have a vocabulary for anger, being by nature a conniver and a facilitator rather than a brute. But he was mad. Nick could see it in the tightness of his eyes and the straight, flat, hard line of his little mouth.
“Howard, I’m sorry. I hadn’t really figured how stressed out I was. I really didn’t—”
“Memphis, that’s it. That’s the end. I am formally relieving you of duties as of this second. You are off this case and off this team. Get back to the hotel and pack and shower. I’ll have somebody drive you to the airport. You take a plane to God knows where—I don’t give a damn. I’ll have you formally notified whe
n the review board will meet, but as of now you are officially suspended without pay pending the outcome of the board’s decision.”
“Howard, I want—”
“Memphis, shut up. Your involvement in the case has been a disaster. It’s my biggest mistake. Now just get the hell out of here. I want you out of here.”
“Sure, Howard. Sorry. I only wanted to be a good FBI agent. Sorry I blew it.”
Nick turned and went to his car. He was feeling woozy. He thought he might be sick. Hap was standing there, too.
“Nick, let me drive you. I don’t think you’re in any shape to drive. I think it’s a little postaction stress syndrome kicking in.”
“I just got fired, Hap.”
“I know, Nick. I’m real sorry.”
“Can you get me to the airport? After I shower, I mean?”
“Sure. Nothing going on here but fine-combing the ruins. And waiting for the coroner’s preliminary report.”
They didn’t talk much on the way back to the motel. Nick showered quickly, threw his clothes into a bag, and was ready to hit the drive to Little Rock in twenty minutes. He actually fell asleep on the way. As they were heading toward the airport entrance—there was a 5:45 to New Orleans—Hap awakened him.
He slept on the flight back too, and arrived around seven. The airport was almost deserted and there was no one, of course, to meet him. He walked down its empty corridors to the street and took a cab home. It cost him nineteen dollars.
There was nothing at home. He felt the emptiness without Myra keenly. He tried not to feel terribly sorry for himself, because he still had his youth, or at least a little of it, and he knew he was well liked and had it in him to be a good police officer, though possibly not at the federal level.
Just not cut out for the big leagues, he thought, morosely. He got himself a beer from the refrigerator and drank it while he watched CNN, but it didn’t taste like much.