The van suddenly accelerated and began to pull even.
“Don’t look” said Bob, “and if I say go, you hit the brake hard, you understand?”
Russ swallowed, tasting pennies. They were back.
But the van kept passing them and Russ could no longer obey; his head sneaked sideways, where he saw, in the backseat, a very pretty little girl who stared intently at him. She stuck out her tongue.
“Shit,” said Russ. “You had me scared.”
“Maybe I am losing it,” said Bob, sliding the pistol back behind his jacket. “I didn’t see that boy pull up; he was in the slot. I got to be paying more goddamned attention.”
“So what do we do next?” asked Russ.
“You’re the Princeton boy. You tell me.”
“Well,” said Russ, and then he realized … he didn’t know either.
The complexity that had been Sam Vincent was on full display in the odd mob that congregated at his house to mourn his passing, or possibly to celebrate it, or at least to get drunk at his expense. African Americans from the west side of the tracks, aristocrats from Little Rock, cronies from the thousands of hunting trips he’d taken, old boys who’d guided him, farmers who’d traded with him, politicians, police officers, children, bitter secretaries, opposing lawyers, corrections officers, even a few men that Sam had sent away. Each had a Sam story to tell, but the one that was making the rounds when Bob and Russ finally arrived and found parking—the street was thronged with cars, everything from Mercedes to forty-year-old pickups—had to do with the ultimate disposition of Sam’s estate, itself quite large from a lifetime of extremely shrewd investing and trading. He’d been wisely sidestepping the estate tax by dispensing his wealth in $10,000-per-year chunks for a number of years to his children and even to his sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, divorced or not, second marriage or not, no questions asked, on the principle that anyone who’d had to put up with him in the family deserved a nice little present. He’d also already established trust funds for each grandchild worth $200,000 but only payable to educational institutions in the form of checks for tuition, food or housing. He left each of his fired or resigned secretaries $10,000 except for the one who’d become a drunk: she got $15,000. That left an untidy sum in the estate of $19,450.
“God, Dad,” said Dr. John Vincent, Scotch on his breath (the bar was well stocked) and amazement in his voice, “he left $9,725 to the NRA’s ILA fund and $9,725 to Handgun Control, Inc. I can see him cackling when he thought that one up!”
“He was a good man,” said Bob, who seemed in the crowd of revelers the only one who was morose and still grieving.
“Oh, he was a mean old bastard,” said the doctor, the eldest son, the one who’d borne the brunt of his father’s rages and praises. “Smart as a whip, mean as a rooster. He whaled the tar out of us when we were growing up. But by God each of us turned out. Two doctors, a lawyer, a travel agent, an investment counselor and an impressionist painter.”
“Who’s the painter?” Bob asked.
“Jamie.”
“I thought he was a lawyer.”
“He was, for ten years. Then he finally screwed up his courage and did what he wanted, not Dad. I think Dad respected him for it.”
“He was a stubborn bastard,” Bob said.
“Jesus. And tough. You know in twenty-two years at home, I only saw him cry once. He didn’t even cry when Mom died. He only cried when your father was killed. I remember he sat downstairs all by himself when he got back. Must have been well toward dawn. He sat down there and had a drink. I was awakened by a sound I’d never heard. I snuck downstairs. He was sitting in that old rocker there”—John pointed through the crowd to a threadbare old chair that had stood in the same spot for fifty years—“and rocked back and forth and sobbed like a baby. He loved your father. He thought Earl Swagger was the most perfect man ever put on earth: hero, father, police officer, incorruptible symbol of everything that was right and strong about America.”
“I keep telling people: my father was only a man.”
“Well, my dad didn’t think so. Bob, I have to ask: what’s going on? I keep hearing things.”
“About old crazy Bob Lee digging up some Confederate?”
“Yes. That. And suddenly you’re here and there’s a terrible gunfight over in Oklahoma and ten men are killed. Never happened before you came back. Nothing connects you to it, but people still remember you went hunting a few years back, and two boys came out of the woods in body bags. Old Dad saved your butt in a federal court.”
“Nobody went into a body bag around me that didn’t deserve to. It’s just some old business. About my father.”
“Did it involve mine?”
“I asked him to do some legal work for me. That’s all.”
“That’s it?”
“My young friend over there. He come to me because he wanted to write a book about my daddy. No one remembers Earl Swagger, except maybe your father and old Miss Connie. He’s dead, she will be soon. It seemed to me to be worthwhile. Better’n writing a book about me.”
“Okay. You should know, people are asking. You walk alone, but you cast a long shadow, my friend. Now come with me, I have something for you.”
They walked through the crowd, which in effect was a walk through the fragments of Bob’s past. He saw Sara Vincent, Sam’s eldest daughter, who had married twice and divorced twice; she was now the town’s travel agent, prosperous and lonely. She alone of the Vincent kids did not have Sam’s magnetism, though she’d once conceived an awful crush on Bob, and even now threw an awkward, hot-eyed glance at him. But she alone made eye contact; for the others, he knew, he was an embarrassment.
I killed men. I am the sniper. I am apart.
It was the crushing sense of exile that the killer feels, which sometimes makes him more of a killer. Everyone knew from the publicity three years back: Bob Lee Swagger, not just a drunken marine vet alone on his mountain, but a sniper, an executioner, a man-hunter, the man who reached out and touched eighty-seven somebodies. In Arizona, nobody really cared because that’s who he was from the start, but here it had the effect of a scandal. They connected him with a past and wondered: Why him? What sets him apart? What does the sniper know that other men don’t? What’s it like to send a piece of lead and copper through somebody’s head and blow his brains out? The pink mist effect: turn a man to colored rain. What’s it feel like?
There was a girl once named Barb Sempler: he’d been on a date with her in high school but she thought he was too wild, a country boy. Wasn’t her father a lawyer or something? Now she was oddly inflated, having picked up the forty pounds, her once beautiful features spread across the wide face. A boy over there, now fat and bald and well dressed, had once blocked him blindside on a football field and laughed about it until Bob had jumped him and the coach had pulled him off. He’d grown up to sell insurance, Bob to kill men. Strange. That woman. He thought her name was Cindy—ah, what, Tilford, that was it—and he’d gotten backseat tit off her one night in 1961. So long ago. Tit seemed like paradise. She was now slim and hard, where she’d been fat and dumpy. A divorcee, therapy, lots of aerobics. She smiled, scaring him. He yearned for his wife. He yearned to feel whole and connected again: father, family man, lay-up barn owner. Julie, YKN4, horses: he missed them, but also what they represented, which was the normal way, not the sniper’s way. But they parted, to let him pass, to let him stand alone.
I am the sniper. I stand alone.
They reached the stairs, again the crowd parted magically, and they went down into the basement where Sam had had his office. John walked to the closet, opened it, took something off the shelf.