Red stared at him.
“Who was the kid?” he asked.
Bob said, “A Harvard kid. Raised in Washington, D.C. The son of a powerful politician. Himself loaded with ambitions.” Then he turned and pointed at the man on the bench.
“Him,” he said.
Red turned and faced his friend, the son of his father’s friend.
“Hollis?”
Hollis Etheridge stood.
“Hollis, you? You?”
“He’s lying,” said Hollis.
“He went home in a panic and told his father. His father being Congressman Harry Etheridge, Boss Harry Etheridge, and being the sort of man he was, he couldn’t see his boy’s life being ruined by a little mistake with a black gal. So he moved quickly through his sources and came up with Frenchy Short, who moved the girl’s body to get it away from Little Georgia and set up a frame on the lightest-skinned black boy he could find: a boy named Reggie Gerard Fuller, who was executed for the crime.
“The problem was the state trooper. They could get the ticket out of the court records but they couldn’t get it out of the trooper’s mind and they knew the trooper would put two and two together. They knew from the start they had to kill the trooper, but in some way that didn’t look suspicious and didn’t invite close examination of the trooper’s last days, and for which there was a ready explanation and a convenient killer.
“That’s how Jimmy Pye, the next Jimmy Dean, and Jack Preece, the sniper, come into it. All for him. For the next Vice President of the United States.”
“There’s no proof,” said Hollis. “It’s all lies. All political figures are used to rumors like this. You’d be laughed out of court. Red, it’s nonsense. It’s nothing. He doesn’t have a thing.”
“I have this,” said Bob.
He held up the old book of tickets.
“Your signature. The time, the date, the place. Any crime-lab can authenticate the age of the ticket and the age of the ink. It’s just as good now as it was then: it puts you at the site of the murder at the time of the murder. It’ll put you in the chair today just as it would have forty years ago. And this time, your goddamn father ain’t around to pull strings. And if my father’d had another day, he’d have seen the connection and put you on the row.”
He lifted the gun and pointed it at Hollis’s handsome head.
Hollis bowed.
“Please,” he said.
“You know how much evil came out of that night? You know the people who died? You know the train of destruction you set in motion? You know the lives ruined, the lives ended, the lives embittered because of that night? Why? Why? Did she laugh?”
“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “She started to scream. I had to stop her from screaming. I never meant to.”
Bob lowered the gun.
“My friend is a newspaper reporter,” he said. “We’ll go to the paper and publish this. We’ll get the case reopened. There’s been enough killing.”
He slipped the .45 back into its holster and turned to face Red Bama, who now held the loaded Krieghoff.
Through the lenses, Russ watched Red Bama pick up the shotgun from a hundred yards out. He watched the man raise the shotgun, watched its barrels pivot lazily.
Do something! he told himself.
Involuntarily his fingers closed on a trigger. But there was no trigger. He had no rifle.
Why didn’t you give me a rifle! he screamed to Bob Lee Swagger, his eyes glued in horror to the binoculars. I could have done it!
“Red, thank God,” said Hollis.
“Yes,” said Red, “thank God,” and he fired both barrels, one two, fast as they could be fired.
The No. 7½ shot hit its target; it didn’t have time to open or spread but delivered an impact similar to that of a nineteenth-century elephant gun, a tremendous package of weight and velocity and density; the first charge literally eviscerated the chest, the heart and lungs, the spinal column; the second hit just above the mouth and destroyed the skull, all the facial structures, the features, the hair. The body was punched backwards and came to sprawl in the bushes.
Gun smoke hung in the air.
Russ, watching from a hundred yards away, bent and puked.
“Nice shooting,” said Bob.
“It’ll cost me a million dollars,” Red said, “to straighten this out. And it’s the first fatal accident in the history of sporting clays.” He shook his head. “He would have been Vice President, you know. It was set. He might very well have been President.”
“Everybody has to pay. It was his turn,” Bob said.
“Yes,” said Red, “but do you know why I did it? To save me the trial? To save the humiliation? To save the legal fees? To avenge that poor girl, because he broke the rules and hurt a child? Maybe. But the real reason is that I now realize he not only killed your father, he killed mine. My father must have been the only man alive who wasn’t an Etheridge but who knew the secret. And when Boss Harry died, son Hollis got to worrying about that. So: there you have it. Did we pay our fathers back for what they did for us? Not really. But I’ll say this, Swagger: we sure as hell tried.”
“Damned right,” said Bob.
But Red had a last surprise for him.
He looked up, his eyes narrowed in sly concentration.
“And I know you think you’re much smarter than I am, because you figured all this out and I didn’t. So I give you that. But I have a surprise for you too.”
Bob looked at him.
“When you go home, I want you to say hello to Julie and YKN4 for me.”
There was a long moment.
“My family?” said Bob.
“The pay phone. We tracked your collect call. I had your wife and daughter, Swagger. I could have used them to get at you. You made a mistake.”
Bob saw how it could happen.
“But I don’t do families. That’s my policy. Now you have no more business around me and mine and I’ll have none around you and yours. You evened your scores, I evened mine. It’s over, it’s finished, it’s done. We are free men, right?”
“That sounds like a deal to me,” said Bob.
46
tate police investigators descended on the accident scene in their legions, along with hundreds of media types, and for a few days, the little sporting clays range in West Arkansas was the most famous site in America, leading all the network news shows. The newspapers were full of the Etheridge tragedy. A grand jury was swiftly empaneled by Sebastian County prosecutors.
But by the end of the week, no true bill of indictment was voted and prosecutors announced their acquiescence to the inevitable ruling of accidental death. There just wasn’t any evidence to the contrary: Red Bama clung to his story, and his two bodyguards and the trapper, all of whom had witnessed the event, confirmed his account. He’d just loaded the Krieghoff when his cellular rang, and he turned to step out of the constricting cage to get it off his belt, momentarily forgetting that he held the loaded shotgun, and he banged the stock against the cage and somehow the gun fired, although investigators could not get the gun to duplicate the accident in the ballistics lab. But that is the tragedy of the firearm: so enticing, so alluring, so beguiling, so damned much fun is the gun, and yet when a mistake is made with it, the consequences are beyond all scale to the act itself. A man grows confused with a gun in his hand, turns and bumps and boomboom! The end of a promising and already distinguished career.
Editorials appeared nationwide, lamenting the decease of Hollis Etheridge, former two-term senator, respected legislator, beloved husband, son of one of the most powerful politicians the state of Arkansas had generated, but a man who insisted on making it on his own, not riding his father’s coattails. He was the kind of American who had done so much to help so many. His party’s leaders issued proclamations; flattering posthumous profiles ran in all the big magazines and on TV shows; in the Arkansas State Legislature, a bill was introduced to rename the parkway now called solely after his father the “Hollis and Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway,” and it passed within a week, though no money could be found in the budget to remake the signs so that will have to wait until a better year.