“No, this one’s secure at each end, can’t be intercepted without a preset descrambler. What they can do is subpoena the records so they can find out who was talking to who. But I don’t think the cellular company would cooperate with them, at least for years and years.”
“Why?” asked Duane.
“Because I own it,” said Red. “Now, Duane, be delicate. No bullyboy stuff. You have some charm, I’m told. You can be a backslapper, a laugher, a regular guy? Those are the colors I want you showing in this first phase.”
“Yes sir.”
“Now you must go. I’m behind schedule,” said Red Bama, looking at his Rolex, “and I want to get to my son’s soccer game.”
11
n the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for armed men to ride into Fort Smith, Arkansas, the bawdy, bustling city nestled on the confluence of the Arkansas and Poteau rivers. Founded in 1817, it boasted a population of thirty thousand by 1875, perched as it was at the head of the long valley between Ozark and the Ouachita Mountains, and perched again on the border between Arkansas and what in those days was called Indian Territory and is now known as Oklahoma.
In those days, the city was nicknamed Hell on the Border. Fort Smith was the gateway to the savage and untamed West. In those days, civilization tried mightily to enforce its will upon the lawless, and the enforcers were federal deputies to the hanging judge, Isaiah J. Parker. Between 1875 and 1896, the judge sent his men into Indian Territory to carry out the law. They were of a type: lean, slit-eyed, exquisitely practical, without much in the way of larger views. All could shoot; all would shoot. For two decades Fort Smith was the gunfight capital of the world, sending its men out to bring back the desperados and outlaws who roamed Indian Territory. Of the marshals, 65 were slain in the line of duty; of the 172 men they brought back alive, 88 were hanged by the judge; no one knows how many outlaws perished in the territory at the hands of the deputies. In those days, such facts weren’t worth recording.
Now, of course, all that has changed: there are no gunslingers, no bawdy houses, no rigid judges. Instead, Arkansas’s second largest city is a bit shopworn, its downtown, once the most sophisticated urban thoroughfare west of the Mississippi and east of Denver, fallen on hard and empty times, with the action having moved out to the suburbs where the Central Mall and the Wal-Marts are. Its skyline is dominated by two large grain elevators. City fathers have tried gamely to reclaim or re-evoke the glories of the past, and the old fort, Parker’s courthouse, a brothel called Miss Laura’s and many fine homes in the stately Belle Grove District of Victorian Houses have been restored, but they do little to disguise the fact that history has moved elsewhere. Now its parade-widened Garrison Street, a reminder of the days when it was an army post sited to keep the Cherokee and the Osage from tribal war, has the look of a beautiful mouth that has lost too many teeth to gingivitis. The most prominent downtown landmark is, in fact, the Holiday Inn on Rogers Avenue, a mock Hyatt with a nine-story atrium and a disco that blows loud, bad rock into the night. It is partially owned by the Bama group.
So the men who come to Fort Smith from Indian Territory these days are unlikely to be federal marshals or gun-fighters. But still, some come on missions, and some are slit-eyed, hard and practical. One was Bob Lee Swagger, accompanied by his new young partner, Russ Pewtie, driving east on U.S. 40 in Bob’s green pickup truck. They reached the city near twilight. The lights were coming on as they approached it through the rolling land of Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, though they couldn’t see the Arkansas River off to their right, broad and flat but invisible behind a train of trees.
“See,” Russ was saying, the folder of old articles from 1955 on his lap, “it just shows how crappy the newspapers were back then. We’re much better now,” he insisted, though Bob only grunted noncommittally.
“These stories,” he argued, “they just don’t tell you enough. No reporter ever went to the sites, they just took the police handout and reprinted it. Jesus, I can think of a hundred questions I’m going to have to figure out how to answer. How do Jimmy and Bub get all the way from Fort Smith down to Blue Eye through the largest manhunt in Arkansas history? How do they just run into your father? Is it coincidence? Yet there’s no speculation here on these issues at all. Also, the bigger question: why? Why did Jimmy Pye on his first morning out after ninety days in jail go off on this thing, and why did poor Bub, who had no criminal record, why did he go along with him? And this bit here, stopping at a drive-in and eating a burger and flirting with the waitress? What was that all about? It sounds like someone who wants the world to think he’s cool. Also, why—”
“Say, you do talk a mite, don’t you?” said Bob.
“Well—”
“It ain’t like I haven’t thought about this, you know.”
“All right,” said Russ. “One of my least lovely characteristics. I am a talker. I can’t shut up. I don’t feel things, I yap about them. And you’re the original Wyatt Earp and you’re stuck with me.”
“Son, I ain’t no Wyatt Earp. I’m just a beat-up old marine trying to stay on the goddamn wagon.”
Russ said nothing. In the fading light, Swagger’s face looked as if it were carved out of flint; his eyes hardly showed a thing. He hadn’t said a word in hours, and yet he drove with the perfect adroit grace of a race driver. He just swung the truck in and out of traffic, smooth and light as could be, hardly moving himself. He was the stillest man Russ had ever seen; no man seemed to care less what the world thought of him.
“I’ve worked out a plan,” said Russ. “I want to approach this coherently and methodically. I know where we’ll begin and—”
“The plan,” said Bob, “is that we go grocery shopping.”
It was full night when they got there, but the store was still open. If once it had been the flagship of a national chain, that identity was long since faded, though if you looked, in the neon you could make out the silhouettes of the letters when they removed the “IGA” from the big sign. It just said “Smitty’s,” hand-painted on plywood, nailed halfway up the big struts of the old sign. But it was still at 222 Midland Boulevard.
Brown light sustaining a cloud of insects beamed down from the pylons installed as a crime deterrent. The store looked ratty, even threadbare, and through the broad windows, Russ could see a few shoppers rushing among junky, sparse shelves. It occurred to him that the neighborhood had changed in forty years: everybody he saw in the store, everybody going in and out, was black or Asian or Hispanic.
“So,” Bob said, “you’re a writer. You figure things out. You tell me: why here?”
“Huh?” said Russ.
“Begin with a beginning. That day, it starts here at this grocery store at about eleven in the morning. Now: you tell me why.”
“Me?”
“Yep, you.”
“Ah, maybe they just fell into it. They were—”
“Russ, they’d stolen a car and somehow come up with two guns and ammunition. They were fixing to rob something. Now, if they went to all that trouble, you think they’d just walk into it? First place they saw? The jail is downtown. Blue Eye’s the other way, south, out of town. Why’d they come north to this place?”
“Ahh—” Russ had no answer. It shocked him, though. Clearly, Bob had mastered the material at a much deeper level than he’d expected, surprising from a man who seemed as far from formal intellectuality as he could imagine.