They got him, Nick thought.
Someone was screaming in his ear.
“You didn’t shoot! You had him, goddammit,” the voice said. He turned. It was a tough-looking state police sergeant. Behind him his buddy radiated contempt at Nick.
I’ll have to pay for that one too.
“Goddamn,” said another state policeman, holding aloft Bob’s.45 as he found it in the cab. “It’s fucking empty!”
Nick heard a bullhorn demanding surrender. There was just one second of silence. Then the sound of shots rose against the sky, and Nick turned in horror. The lawmen were shooting gas grenades into the church. He watched as the heavy shells sailed through and the cottony white fog began to steam through the broken windows. A tendril of smoke leaped out, and a flame, and then another from another window, and the church began to burn.
Jack Payne stood outside the van with his binoculars. Overhead a TV news helicopter zipped by and shortly a TV news van came screeching down the road toward the mass of flashing lightbars and the howl of sirens. Jack could hear the troopers over the radio intercept from inside the van.
“Shit, it’s going up, that dry timber.”
“Is he coming out?”
“Don’t see a damned thing. I’m gonna – ”
“That’s a negative, Victor Michael Thirty-three, you stay put and keep those eyes open. Anybody seen the goddamned feds?”
“They’re coming, Charlie.”
At that moment four black cars raced by Jack, hell-bent for the church.
But it was too late. Jack watched the smoke, floating upward in a lazy column. Through the glass, he could see the flames.
“Wow.”
It was Eddie Nickles, beside him.
“Shit, they burned him up. Man, he’s all fucking toasty now.”
“Shut up,” said Jack. He didn’t know why, he felt like hitting the younger man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Shreck watched the church burn. When it was burned to the ground, he hit REWIND, and watched it burn again.
And each time, an earnest television correspondent repeated the news breathlessly.
“Behind me is the funeral pyre of the notorious attempted presidential assassin Bob Lee Swagger, whom Arkansas State Police officers and FBI agents pursued to this bucolic spot after his dramatic attempt to kidnap his dog’s body. Despite the lawmen’s requests that he come out, Swagger opened fire on the officers. A tear gas canister ignited the old structure into conflagration. The church has been burning for two hours now. In the morning, officials say, it will be cool enough to sift through the ashes for the body of Bob Lee Swagger.”
Shreck saw holocaust. The flames gobbled the structure from the roof downward. They danced madly through it, issuing a lazy, smeary column of smoke.
He hit REWIND again.
It was dark in the room. Three or four of the men from Jack Payne’s Operations unit were in the room, and Dobbler, making a rare appearance outside his cell-like little office, had slipped in, too.
“Play it again,” said Shreck.
The TV people, in Blue Eye on rumors of federal activity and monitoring the police channels on the radio, had gotten there efficiently; they had it from a variety of angles. From a helicopter it looked like a funeral pyre: Shreck could see the church standing in the devotional ring of police vehicles a little to one side of the copse of trees and the old graveyard. It throbbed with flames.
“Nobody could get out of that alive,” somebody said in the dark.
“Man, he’s fried.”
Then Shreck spoke.
“It’s nothing until they find the body and issue a forensic report. Until then, it’s nothing.”
But he watched it again. The flames billowed orangely as they ate through the old building standing in a meadow in the lee of mountains on a bright and beautiful Arkansas day.
“I think it’s over, sir,” somebody said. “I think we can chalk it off.”
“Then why would he do something so obviously stupid for a dog? This guy was a prick, but he wasn’t stupid.”
“But he was obsessional,” said Dobbler, in the dark. “The dog mattered to him. It wasn’t stupid to him. To us, yes. To Swagger, it mattered so much he was driven to come back.”
“I’ll buy it when they bring me his teeth,” said Shreck.
His eyes went back to the television. He hit REWIND.
Hap found him the next day.
“Here, here he is, goddammit,” he called after lifting the air filtration mask the men wore to protect their lungs from the clouds of ash. His words carried to the twenty agents and fifteen state policemen on hands and knees who sifted and pawed through the remains of Aurora Baptist, while a hundred yards away, like gawkers at a carnival midway, the reporters were kept in check by three more cops and a rope line.
The cops and agents gathered around. Nick pushed his way through the crowd. His head ached from the pounding he’d taken and he was afraid his stitches might not hold, but he had to see.
What was left of Bob Lee Swagger was not pretty. Bob’s face had burned away and the hideous fleshlessness exposed his teeth, which had been blackened with the rest of him in the blaze. His spine had curled; it looked like an Apache bow, drawn, perhaps shrunken a little, much notched. The rest was loose body parts, black as sin, disconnected from each other.
One of the agents went away to be sick.
Nick, standing amid clouds of ashen dust in the hulk of the old church, pushed his mask off and saw what had happened. In extremis, his last moments of life on earth, as the incredible heat consumed him, Bob crawled to the altar. The fire consumed him, and spat out his bones. He had done his duty; he got that damned dog buried. It was so important to him, it was important enough to die for. Was that nobility or sheer craziness? Hard to read; and that was somehow pure-D Bob Swagger. And that done, there was nothing left to do. What all his armed and dangerous enemies could not do, a single tear gas shell fired into the rafters of the church had done in seconds. Fitting? No. Too much pain. Death by fire wasn’t transformation, it was as agonizing as crucifixion, with nails driven through every square centimeter of your skin.
“Hell of a way to die,” someone said. “Creep or no creep, hell of a way to die.”
“Who’s going to body-bag him?”
“Not me,” said Nick first and loudest. He had wanted to see the whole thing played out to the end, knowing his own end – or the end of his career – was near. There was nothing of the reliquary here for him; the bones of saints, being really just bones, made him queasy.
He stepped out of the ruins of the church. Nice to be on solid ground again, instead of shuffling through ash and fire-rotted splinters of wood.
He stood off to one side while others came to see, and wondered if this was how it was in 1934 when they got Dillinger, and everyone had to come and look and dip a finger or a handkerchief in the great gangster’s blood.
The reporters sensed the discovery and became restive; Nick could see them surge forward and strain at the rope. It was Howard over there who quieted them with the news. Nick watched the network reporters cluster around him, then looked and saw that the photographers had finished, and now the guys from morgue had gotten what was left of Bob into a plastic sack. At least they had the decency to put him on a litter, rather than carrying him like a Halloween bag to the coroner’s van.
Feeling suddenly wiped out, Nick thought how nice it would finally be to be done with it all. He had zero money because it had taken every cent he had to keep Myra taken care of, and soon he would have no job, but hey, he was alive, he was -