Swagger lives. Swagger kills both men. No, worse, Swagger captures poor Duane, who spills the beans about the Bama connection. What would Swagger do next?
He’d come after me, he realized.
He leaned out and gestured to his bodyguards.
“It is very possible,” he said, “that a very tough man will be coming after me in the next few days. Not sure, but possible. Therefore y’all will need to be at your absolute tops. Understood?”
“Yes sir,” said the talkative one.
“We go into Condition One, all the way. We’ll need support teams, aerial surveillance, motion detectors, the works. I ain’t going to give it up without a fight.”
“We’ll get him, sir.”
Maybe, he thought, that would be better: face it, do it, get it over with. He and Swagger, man-on-man.
Then he laughed.
Swagger was too good. That would be suicide.
He looked at the phone.
Damn you. Ring!
But it wouldn’t.
The hours leaked by. He read the papers, tried to work on his books, had a lot of coffee, watched some TV on a ratty black-and-white. He may even have dozed for a time, for it seemed that there was a moment when it was dark followed by another moment when the dawn was suddenly breaking. He went out, looked down the broad boulevard that was still lifeless. Odd, even a slum like north Fort Smith could look pristine and wondrous in the first wash of moist, dewy light. But he knew his sentimentality was phony, more a function of stress and exhaustion than genuine feeling.
Now he began to feel sorry for himself. It went with the territory, the long night nursing through a crisis that he himself was incapable of influencing at this point, one which he must fight with surrogates.
He mourned his father, that great man. He wondered again at the great bitterness of his life: who had killed him? He missed his two wives and his five children. He missed the boys at Hardscrabble, the men he hunted, fished, flew to Super Bowls and occasionally caroused with. He mourned his life: was someone going to take it away from him now? At least his children would know who killed him, more than he knew of his own father’s death. He saw Swagger as a pale-eyed avenger, a figure of death, come to take it all away. Part of him yearned to fire both barrels of that expensive Krieghoff into Swagger and blow him to shreds. He calculated: two blasts of Remington 7½ from five feet, that’s almost sixteen hundred pieces of bird shot delivered at over 1,200 feet per second, hitting him that close, before the shot column opened up into a pattern but instead traveled through space with the energy and density of a piston. Wow! Total destruction.
But in the end, he weakened. His warrior spirit was spent. His dick was soft and would never be hard. He needed sleep, he needed help.
He faced the phone. It was nearly seven.
I can take it no more.
I have to know.
He dialed Duane Peck’s number. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and Red feared that catastrophe had occurred. His heart bucked in terror.
But on the fourth ring Peck answered.
“Yeah?”
“What’s happening, Peck?”
There was a pause that seemed to last an epoch in geological time as ice ages rolled down from the north, then retreated, whole species were created and evaporated, civilizations rose and fell, and then Peck said, “It’s over. Got ’em both.”
“Goddammit! Why didn’t you call me?”
“Ah—” began Duane.
“I told you to follow orders exactly. Don’t you get that?”
“Yes sir,” said Peck. “Sorry, I—”
“Is the general all right?”
“Yep.”
His heart soared in gratitude and intense pleasure.
“Bury the bodies, get the general home and disappear for a week. Call me next week. I want a full report.”
“Yes sir,” said Peck.
Red snapped off to the dial tone, the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.
40
uss had an instant of clarity: he thought, I’ve finally done it. I’ve pissed him off so bad he’s going to beat the shit out of me.
For even as the snake’s rattle registered in his brain, Bob had turned and driven savagely into him, knocking stars into his brain behind his eyes, taking his breath from him, forcing him in a wild plunge to the precipice of the creek bed where he panicked at the instant surrender to gravity. Yet through his fear as he fell, literally in Bob’s arms, toward the black cold water, he heard one other thing.
This was the sound of a whip crack next to his car, for the air was full of buzz and fury, a sense of presence that Russ couldn’t identify, for it had no real antecedent in his life. And as he fell toward the water he also noted the appearance of explosions of some sort, on the far bank, geysers of earth spouted upward, filling the air with grit and dirt, but fastfastfastfast, so fast he couldn’t believe it and—
The water was cold. It knifed through him. He shivered like a dog, breathed some in (it tasted like cold nickels in his throat), and he fancied he saw black bubbles climbing until he broke free of Bob and started to rise, but Bob had him again and smashed him forward into the bank as three more silent blasts erupted into the dirt above and seemed to turn the darkness gray with haze and dust to the tune of three more whip cracks.
Russ had come to rest in the lee of the shallow bank. It was about a foot deep, a narrow gulch. The water cascaded over him, swift and numbing. He gasped for air and understanding.
“Sniper,” hissed Bob. “He’s up there on the elevation above the path. Infrared. The snake, Russ. I heard the snake.”
All was silent except for the rush of the cold, cold water over their limbs.
“Fuck,” said Bob. “Ain’t he a smart one, though.”
“Can you see him?”
“Russ, he’s got infrared. He can see us. We can’t see him.”
Russ rose as if to peer over the lip of the bank, but Bob pulled him back.
“He can shoot your eyes out. He can see you. You can’t see him.”
“It was so close.”
“What you heard was sonic boom. He has a silencer. You can’t hear his muzzle blast.”
It dawned on Russ where they were: no longer in the precincts of paranoia, where every living thing seemed a threat, but in the actual universe of hurt, where every living thing is a threat. This was it, then: the ultimate existential horror of the sniper’s world—to be hunted in a dark forest by an invisible antagonist who could see you when you couldn’t see him, who could fire without giving his position away and to be, yourself, unarmed.
Not unarmed: Bob had his .45 out.
“Can you get him?”
“Not likely. He don’t have to close. Fuck! Smart motherfucker.”
“Who is it?”
“What the fuck difference does it make?”
But then he knew.
“Preece. It’s his specialty. Goddamn. So smart.”
“Preece! How—”
“Don’t think about that now. Think about where we are, what we got.”
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Welcome to the club, sonny.”
In the dark, Bob’s features screwed tight in concentration. He looked both ways up the creek bed, threw himself into the problem, searching his mind to recall the terrain that lay between himself and the car, where he had a rifle.
“All right,” he said. “Here’s the deal. You work your way up the creek bed, about a hundred feet. You stay low, you stay in the water. He’s scanning right now. I’m going to work my way in the other direction. In four minutes, when you’re set, I’ll make my move and try and draw him away. When I go, loudly, you go softly, back—”