“Come on, Mr. Meachum, that’s not what worries you. What worries you is that the lefties might win here, even as communism is crumbling or has crumbled all over the world, and we’ve kicked ass bigtime in the Persian Gulf. That’s what sticks in your craw.”
The old man smiled one of his mischievous Meachum smiles, then faded behind a mask of remoteness.
“Well, Raymond, believe what you will and for whatever reason you wish. But agree with me on this one sound operating principle. That this man Swagger must be found and destroyed.”
“We’ll get him.”
“Speaking of which, I had an idea. The Electrotek 5400. State of the art, is it not?”
“You know it is.”
“It seems a shame to let it sit up in New Orleans until the general figures out how to get it back through customs. It occurs to me how very useful it might be to you in your quest.”
“Jesus,” said the colonel.
“Yes, I thought you’d be pleased. You see, Raymond, even though you don’t think so, we do take care of our own. We always have. We always will. And I’d destroy that tape if I were you.”
“I will,” said Shreck, looking at the goddamned thing in his hand.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He drove through brightness. There was brightness everywhere. The sun was a blaze, a flare; the white sand picked it up and threw it back. He drove squint-eyed because he had no sunglasses. He drove straight on because he did not want to stop to rent a room, knowing his face was the most famous in America. He lived on candy bars and Twinkies and Cokes from desolate gas station vending machines and thanked God he had had a couple of hundred bucks in his wallet. He drove through the pain and the anger; he just committed himself to driving and he drove.
Now it was hot. He was in desert. The spindly cacti that played across the low rills looked as if they could kill him; in some religious part of his brain they looked like crucifixes, though of course he was not a Catholic but some sort of Baptist back when his daddy had been alive. Ahead, the road was a straight, shimmering band in the heat; mirage rose off it in the light and dust devils swirled across it. Onward he drove.
He held right at seventy, just five miles over the speed limit. He was in his third stolen car, a 1986 Mercury Bobcat, but always before he stole a car he switched its plates with another vehicle’s. That was an old trick he’d heard about on Parris Island, from some tough young black kid, probably now long dead in Vietnam.
It was strange: from the long, wet haul across the swamp, hoarding cartridges, hunting to live, taking only the surest of shots; then, when he was down to his last, he came across something like civilization. He threw the gun away and nabbed a car; and then a long eighteen-hour driving stretch that brought him to desert. Ten hours in Texas. New Mexico was shorter. He was now in Arizona. Texas was long past, though it had been a long, long stretch in Texas. He knew he was almost there. And what was there? Maybe nothing. Maybe this was it. But there was no other choice. He’d thought it out. No, no other place to go that would not get him caught because they’d be looking for him everywhere. But here there was a chance.
He came over a rise. A little town in the desert, a spread of buildings, with bright tin roofs glowing in the sun, lay just ahead. There’d be some kind of law here too, but he didn’t care. Far off, he could see the purple crests of mountains, but for now just this spread of buildings in the desert. He slowed.
The town came up fast.
AJO, ARIZ., the sign said, POP. 7,567.
He drove through, shielding his eyes against the dazzle. Bank, strip mall, convenience store, two gas stations, one main drag, what looked to be some tract houses where a lot of water had produced what passed for green, a McDonald’s, a Burger King, another gas station, Ajo Elementary School, and then, yes, finally, Sunbelt Trailer Park.
Bob pulled in. Drove all this way for such a scruffy little place, huh? Maybe a hundred trailers, maybe a hundred palm trees, it all looked the same to him.
He almost lost it right here at the end. Some pain fired up behind his eyes and his whole body felt itchy or patchy, as if he’d come down with a terrible skin disease. The entry wound hurt something terrible; a low throbbing against his nipple where the bullet had driven through him.
Am I going to make it? he wondered.
He drove up and down the little streets of trailers and saw people out of cartoons, fat Americans in shorts, women with their hair in curlers, lots of sullen, rude little children.
I must look a sight, he thought.
But nobody noticed; they were all sunk into their own dramas.
Then he saw her name on the mailbox, followed by R.N., her profession.
He knew the address from memory. All the letters had been returned unopened, placed in a slightly larger envelope. The flowers, every December, around the fourteenth. She probably just threw them out; she never sent a note of thanks. Yet she had never moved. She had not changed her name or made any attempt to become who she wasn’t. She just wouldn’t let him in. He was the rotten past and it carried too much hurt.
Bob looked at her place: the trailer was shabby but well tended, with trim little window boxes, with flowers in them. That was a woman’s gentle way. The trailer was brown, edged in white trim, plastic. Neat, very neat.
And suppose she was not home? But the car was there, what had to be her car. And the name was hers, just as he knew it would be. Suppose there was a man there? Why not? She was a woman, didn’t there have to be a man?
But he didn’t think there would be.
He turned off the engine, and managed to lurch to the door. He knocked.
He’d never seen the woman before, only her picture. But when she opened the door he recognized her instantly. He’d always wondered what she looked like in the flesh, all those times off in Indian Country, looking at that picture. She had been a young beauty then and now she was a not-so-young beauty, but she was a beauty.
The face was a little too tough, some wrinkles, but not too many; the eyes, behind reading glasses, were gray, and miles beyond any kind of surprise. The hair was blond, but just blond. The lanky tall woman before him looked at him with eyes that stayed flat as the desert horizon.
She wore jeans and some kind of a pullover shirt and no makeup and had her hair pulled back in a short ponytail. She held a book in her hand with a bright cover, some kind of novel.
“Yes?” she said, and he saw a little shock cross her face.
He had no idea what to say. Hadn’t talked to women for years.
“Sorry,” he said, “sorry to bother you, ma’am, and sorry to look so bad. My name’s Swagger. Bob Lee. I knew your husband in the Marines. A finer young man there never was.”
“You,” she said. And then again, “You.” A sudden grimace as she bit off the word. He saw her tracking the details; his scrubby face, matted with dirt; his filthy shirt with the blood stain now faded almost rose-colored; the eyes bloodshot, the rank smell of a man beyond hygiene. She probably saw his absolute defenselessness, too. He knew he was simply throwing himself at her. He felt himself begin to wobble.
“My God, you look awful.”
“Well, I got the whole damn government after me for something I never did. I’ve been driving for twenty-four straight hours. I came to you because – ”
She looked at him some more, as if to say, Boy, this had better be good.
“…because he said that he told you all about me in those letters. Well, that was the best I ever was, and if you believed what your husband said to you when he was in the middle of a war, maybe you’ll believe me now, when I tell you that what they’re saying about me isn’t the truth, and that I need help in the worst possible way. Now that’s my piece. You can let me in or you can call the police. One way or the other, at this point I’m not sure I could tell the difference.”