Bob wanted the liver, which he found, a treasure amid the gore, and ripped it out, feeling it hot because it was so soaked in oxygenated blood.
The liver was richest in nutrition and tastiest this side of a fire. Bob tore off a bite, stunned at the intensity of the flavor and the sense of richness; it made him dizzy it was so powerful. He ate some more, chewing ravenously, amazed at how hungry he was; how desperately he needed it. He ate and ate until the liver was gone.
I am alive, he thought.
Then he heard the roar of a chopper, and dropped. A Huey sped low above the riverbank, blowing the trees left and right as it hurtled along.
They’re looking for me, he thought, with a wave of regret at the complications of his life. Then he picked up the carcass, slung it over his back and headed deeper into the swamp.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dobbler always found Shreck’s occasional absences frightening. The customers here at RamDyne were tough guys, like cops or soldiers, or if not tough, they were distant, techno-nerd types, and both groups looked upon the large, soft psychiatrist with an attitude characteristic of their professions: either contempt or indifference, depending. So the doctor tended to sit in his grubby little office when Shreck wasn’t around to act as his sponsor in this strange world.
The RamDyne offices – offices wasn’t exactly the right word – were located amid the cargo terminals and warehouses of Dulles International Airport, just south of Washington, D.C. They were a shabby warren of jerry-built light-industrial units sequestered behind double Cyclones that wore double spirals of razor wire, guarded viciously by armed men. The sign next to the guardhouse at the sole entrance said only BROWN EXPORTS, without corporate logo or escutcheon. It had a prosaic, unexceptional quality to it, and the guard who always looked fiercely at Dobbler, as if he never recognized him after a full year on the payroll, went with the outfit’s bunker mentality.
Dobbler’s office was a dingy closet unbecoming an assistant professor at a junior college in Idaho; with concrete floors and surplus wardroom furniture, it looked like the office of a doomed teacher who never would get tenure and would live forever on the hook of his department chairman’s whim. Everything in it was junk, from the sagging bookcase to the desk scratched with strange initials to the ancient safe for confidential documents. It even had bars at the window, an irony not lost on Dobbler. The fluorescent light was imperfectly calibrated, and threw shadows no matter how you sited yourself in it, that is, when it wasn’t flickering wanly.
But it wasn’t as if Dr. Dobbler had the worst office; Colonel Shreck’s, in another building, was equally crummy; it was just a bit bigger, with a moth-eaten sofa near a window that yielded a vista of cargo planes taking off or landing. It didn’t even have a bigger safe, but exactly the same beat-up model as Dobbler’s. The doctor often wondered if it had the same combination!
Dobbler now sat in his office, trying to focus on the problem before him. He found the silence ominous, as if a spell had been cast by the freakish escape of Bob Lee Swagger. And that, in fact, was the problem Dobbler now faced.
The last words from Shreck had been simple.
“Doctor, go back over the documents. Tell me where this asshole went.”
Dobbler answered tentatively, as he always did.
“Y-you don’t think he’s dead?”
“Of course not. Now, I’ve got to go out of town for a few days,” said Shreck. “Try and let me have a report when I get back. I have the utmost confidence in you.”
Before Dobbler the material fluttered in and out of focus.
Concentrate, he instructed himself. Man on the run. No friends. Where does he go? Where can he go? Who would have him?
He had the files of data assembled by Research in its first evaluation of the subject and his own psychological reports.
Breathing heavily, he began to shuffle through them. Bob’s life in the years before his recruitment seemed comprised of two things: his guns and his long walks through the Ouachitas. He was hiding from the world, Dobbler thought, feeling himself unworthy of it.
The detritus of Bob’s life spoke of no warm personal relationships, at least not outside of Polk County. His only friend was that crotchety old Sam Vincent, who’d helped him sue the magazine. If he were alive, he might eventually try to return to Polk County, and maybe to Sam. But now, on the run, where would he head? There was no indication – no sisters, no brothers, no old Marine buddies, no women, not a thing. The man was too much like some kind of exiled warrior – Achilles sulking in his tent came to mind – to need companionship of any kind.
Even the financial records, uncovered by a credit agency, confirmed this pattern. Clearly, Bob kept his finances in control by iron discipline – he could live off his fourteen-thousand-dollar government pension because his expenses were low and he had no creature comforts, no interest in clothes beyond their function, no travel or diversion. There was no record of what he’d done with the thirty thousand dollars he’d received from the magazine in his out-of-court settlement. He had a credit card – a Visa, from the First National Bank of Little Rock – but the reason seemed to be convenience; he could make telephone purchases of reloading components and shooting supplies, thus saving himself time and trouble writing up orders. He bought his clothes from Gander Mountain, Wisconsin, his powder from Mid-South Shooter’s Supply and a couple of other places. He lived to shoot, that’s all; and, Dobbler supposed, he shot to live.
Would he run to shooters?
This was an alien world to Dobbler, so he tried to imagine it. Then he realized that from what little he knew of shooting culture, there’d be no place in it for Bob. Those folks tended to be conservative rural Americans; they’d have no sympathy for a man whom they thought had winged a shot at the president of the United States. Which left him with…
In several hours of close scrutiny, he came up with nothing. He looked around; it was late in the afternoon. The place was quiet. There were no answers anywhere. He was ready to give it up. Maybe tomorrow he’d notice -
And then he saw it.
He looked, blinked, squinted, looked again. It was so little. It was so much nothing. It couldn’t be.
It was a telephone billing on Bob’s December 1990 Visa bill.
A place called Wilheit’s, in Little Rock. The phone number was given.
It seemed… familiar.
He rifled through the credit report, looking for the other Visa bills, and found nothing until…December 1989. Wilheit’s.
Quickly he found December 1988… Wilheit’s.
The bill was roughly the same, seventy-five dollars.
What was Wilheit’s?
He called the number, and waited while AT &T shunted the connection through dialing stations and off satellites, and the phone rang, sounding far away, and then was answered.
“Hello, Wilheit’s, c’n ah hep you?” was how Dobbler heard the Little Rock accent.
“Er, yes. Um. What do you sell, please?”
“Whut do we sell?” said the voice.
“Yes. What sort of establishment are you?”
“We’re a florist, son. We sell flowers.”
“Ah,” said Dobbler, hanging up.
Now who on earth would Bob Lee Swagger be sending flowers to every December? A Christmas thing? But Bob wasn’t a Christmas sort of guy.
Jack Payne was not a happy camper.
Like the other two men who had been in the room at the time, he was haunted by the resurrection of Bob Lee Swagger.
Since then, Jack had stayed clear of the colonel, knowing he’d probably have to answer for the blown shot.
But how could it have been blown?