Sally, who had just graduated from law school, was the wife of one of Bob’s few friends, a special agent in the FBI named Nick Memphis who now ran the Bureau’s New Orleans office. She was about thirty-five and had acquired, over the years, a puritan aspect to her, unforgiving and unshaded. She was going to start as an assistant prosecutor in the New Orleans district attorney’s office that fall; but she’d come here out of her and her husband’s love of Bob.
“I had a bad night.”
“I’ll say.”
“It ain’t what it appears,” he said feebly.
“You fell off the wagon but good, that’s what it appears.”
“I had to do some work last night. I needed the booze to get where I had to go.”
“You are a stubborn man, Bob Swagger. I pity your beautiful wife, who has to live with your flintiness. That woman is a saint. You never are wrong, are you?”
“I am wrong all the time, as a matter of fact. Just don’t happen to be wrong on this one. Here, lookey here.”
He picked up the uncapped bottle of Jim Beam, three-quarters gone, and walked out on the front porch. His hip ached a little. Sally followed. He poured the stuff into the ground.
“There,” he said. “No drunk could do that. It’s gone, it’s finished, it won’t never touch these lips again.”
“So why did you get so drunk? Do you know I called you? You were hopeless on the phone.”
“Nope. Sorry, don’t remember that.”
“Why the booze?”
“I had to remember something that happened to me long ago. I drunk for years to forget it. Then when I got sober finally, I found I disremembered it. So I had to hunt it out again.”
“So what did you learn on your magical mystery tour?”
“I didn’t learn nothing yet.”
“But you will,” she said.
“I know where to look for an answer,” he finally said.
“And where would that be?”
“There’s only one place.”
She paused.
“Oh, I’ll bet this one is rich,” she said. “It just gets better and better.”
“Yep,” he said. “I don’t never want to disappoint you, Sally. This one is really rich.”
“Where is it?”
“Where a Russian put it. Where he hid it twenty-five years ago. But it’s there, and by God, I’ll dig it out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s in my hip. The bullet that crippled me. It’s still there. I’m going to have it cut out.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
It was dark and the doctor was still working. Bob found him out back of the Jennings place, down the road from the Holloways, where he’d had to help a cow through a difficult birth. Now he was with a horse called Rufus whom the Jennings girl, Amy, loved, although Rufus was getting on in years. But the doctor assured her that Rufus was fine; he would just be getting up slower these days. He was an old man, and should be treated with the respect of the elderly. Like that old man over there, the doctor said, pointing to Bob.
“Mr. Swagger,” said Amy. “I’d heard you’d left these parts.”
“I did,” he said. “But I came back to see my good friend Dr. Lopez.”
“Amy, honey, I’ll send over a vitamin supplement I want you to add to Rufus’s oats every morning. I bet that’ll help him.”
“Thank you, Dr. Lopez.”
“It’s all right, honey. You run up to the house now. I think Mr. Swagger wants a private chat.”
“ ’Bye, Mr. Swagger.”
“Good-bye, sweetie,” said Bob, as the girl skipped back to the house.
“Thought those reporters chased you out of this place for good,” the doctor said.
“Well, I did too. The bastards are still looking for me.”
“Where’d you go to cover?”
“A ranch up in Idaho, twenty-five miles out of Boise. Just temporarily, waiting for all this to blow over.”
“I knew you were something big in the war. I never knew you were a hero.”
“My father was a hero. I was just a sergeant. I did a job, that’s all.”
“Well, you ran a great lay-up barn. I wish you’d come back into the area, Bob. There’s no first-class outfit this side of Tucson.”
“Maybe I will.”
“But you didn’t come all this way to talk about horses,” said Dr. Lopez.
“No, Doc, I didn’t. In fact, I flew down this afternoon. Took the two-ten American from Boise to Tucson, rented a car, and here I am.”
Bob explained what he wanted. The doctor was incredulous.
“I can’t just do that. Give me a reason.”
“I am plumb tired of setting off airport alarms. I want to get on an airplane without a scene.”
“That’s not good enough. I have an oath, as well as a complex set of legal regulations, Bob. And let me point out one other thing. You are not an animal.”
“Well,” said Bob, “actually I am. I am a Homo sapien. But I know you are the best vet in these parts and you have operated on many animals, and most of ’em are still with us today. I remember you nursed Billy Hancock’s paint through two knee operations, and that old boy’s still roaming the range.”
“That was a good horse. It was a pleasure to save that animal.”
“You never even charged him.”
“I charged him plenty. I just never collected. Every few months, Billy sends me ten or fifteen dollars. It should be paid up by the next century.”
“Well, I am a good horse, too. And I have this here problem and that’s why I come to you. If I go to VA, it could take months for the paperwork to clear. If I go to a private MD, I got a passel of questions I have to answer and a big operating room to tie up and weeks to recover, whether I need it or not. I need this thing now. Tonight.”
“Tonight!”
“I need you to go in on local, dig it out, and sew me up.”
“Bob, we are talking about serious, invasive work. It would take any normal man a month to recover, under intensive medical care. You won’t be whole again for a long time.”
“Doc, I been hit before. You know that. I still come back fast. It’s a matter of time. I can’t tell you why, but I’m under the gun on time. I have to find something out so I can go to the FBI. I need a piece of evidence. I need your help.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“I know you did a tour over there. It’s a thing guys like us have in common. We ought to help each other when we can.”
“No one else will, that’s for sure,” said Dr. Lopez.
“You was a combat medic and you probably saw more gunshot wounds and worked on more than any ten MDs. You know what you’re doing.”
“I saw enough of it over there.”
“It’s a nasty thing to fire a bullet into a man,” said Bob. “I was never the same, and now that I am getting old, I feel my back firing up because of the damage it did to my structure. And the VA don’t recognize pain. They just tell you to live with it, and cut your disability ten percent every year. So on I go, and on all of us go with junk in us or limbs missing or whatever.”
“That war was a very bad idea. Nothing good ever came out of it.”
“I copy you there. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have no other choice. I need that bullet.”
“You are a fool if you think what I can offer you is as safe as modern hospital medicine.”
“You dig the bullet out and put in the stitches. If you don’t do it, I’ll have to do it myself and that won’t be pretty.”
“I believe you would, Bob. Well, they say you are one tough son of a bitch. You better be, because you’re going to need every bit of tough to get through the next few days.”
Bob lay on his back, looking at the large mirror above him. The ugliness of the entrance wound was visible; he hated to look at it. The bullet had hit him almost dead on at a slight downward angle, plowed through skin and the tissue of his sheathing gluteus medius muscle, then shattered the platelike flange of the hip bone, deflecting off to plunge down the inside of his leg, ripping out muscle as it went. The bullet hole was unfilled: it was that alone and nothing else — a channel, a void, an emptiness in his hip that plunged inward, surrounded by an ugly pucker of ruined flesh.