Point of Impact (34 page)

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—

Then he saw something that made him sick.

He walked over to the graveyard.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Two black men were digging up the dog that Bob had buried, while two cameras blazed away and two TV reporters posed in front of them.

“I said, what the hell are you doing?”

The black men just looked at him foolishly.

“Do you have permission to dig here? This is state’s evidence.”

“Now, chief,” said one of the reporters, coming over to him. “Nothing to get excited about. We’re just doing our job. You’re FBI, huh? So, what does it feel like now that Public Enemy Number One has—”

The microphone was pushed at him, and Nick saw the camera coming onto him. He also saw Howard rushing over to take command, a stricken look on his face.

“Nick,” Howard was calling, “Nick, you aren’t authorized to do press at this point. Mr. Baker, I’ll have to ask you—”

Nick turned, the microphone was still there, big as a fist right at Nick’s nose, and the reporter, who Nick now saw was wearing considerable makeup and whose hair was lacquered into frozen perfection, was asking him quite earnestly how it
felt
when he watched the church burn—

“Nick, no—”

He heard Howard as his fist traveled a short distance, maybe ten inches, and caught the talker square in his pretty mouth. Nothing had felt quite so good in months. The clown bumbled fearfully backward, spitting teeth, leaking blood, and the whole contingent of press guys quivered back, making room for him.

Now gone to complete savagery, Nick turned onto the digging men and screamed at them to get the hell out of there, and they scrambled away. So there he stood for just a second, all his enemies vanquished. Look at me, Ma, top of the world. Top of the world.

Then Howard had him, and several others pulled him back and were on him, including one state policeman who was handling him more roughly than was necessary.

“Yeah, you’re tough with reporters,” the officer spat, “but yesterday when it counted, you were pussy.” And with that, he gave Nick an immensely powerful shove that sent him back a few feet, completely stripped of dignity.

It occurred to Nick for the first time how the cops must hate him. He hadn’t worked it out, having spent the night in the hospital after various stitchings and X rays. But yes, he’d had a shot at Bob, and couldn’t pull the trigger. Three minutes later it was state policemen who’d closed on Bob, fully armed and one of the most dangerous gunmen in the world. Had he wanted to, Bob could have filled Arkansas with state police widows even with that old-time cowboy carbine.

“Nick, goddamn, cool it, cool it,” Hap was whispering in his ear, as he held him in a tender but firm embrace. “Damn, what has gotten into you, Jesus, you punch a reporter, you could get busted for
assault
and these Arkansas State boys ain’t exactly your fan club, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Nick with phony surliness, as the cop slowly walked away, daring Nick to have a go at him. Meanwhile Howard had taken over with the reporters, trying to explain how Nick was “overextended.”

He just felt totally whacked. Even breathing seemed too hard. If he could only sleep for a couple of centuries
and then wake up and put the pieces together, it might make some sense.

Howard was back. Howard didn’t have a vocabulary for anger, being by nature a conniver and a facilitator rather than a brute. But he was
mad
. Nick could see it in the tightness of his eyes and the straight, flat, hard line of his little mouth.

“Howard, I’m sorry. I hadn’t really figured how stressed out I was. I really didn’t—”

“Memphis, that’s it. That’s the end. I am formally relieving you of duties as of this second. You are off this case and off this team. Get back to the hotel and pack and shower. I’ll have somebody drive you to the airport. You take a plane to God knows where—I don’t give a damn. I’ll have you formally notified when the review board will meet, but as of now you are officially suspended without pay pending the outcome of the board’s decision.”

“Howard, I want—”

“Memphis, shut up. Your involvement in the case has been a disaster. It’s my biggest mistake. Now just get the hell out of here. I want you out of here.”

“Sure, Howard. Sorry. I only wanted to be a good FBI agent. Sorry I blew it.”

Nick turned and went to his car. He was feeling woozy. He thought he might be sick. Hap was standing there, too.

“Nick, let me drive you. I don’t think you’re in any shape to drive. I think it’s a little postaction stress syndrome kicking in.”

“I just got fired, Hap.”

“I know, Nick. I’m real sorry.”

“Can you get me to the airport? After I shower, I mean?”

“Sure. Nothing going on here but fine-combing the ruins. And waiting for the coroner’s preliminary report.”

They didn’t talk much on the way back to the motel. Nick showered quickly, threw his clothes into a bag, and was ready to hit the drive to Little Rock in twenty minutes. He actually fell asleep on the way. As they were heading toward the airport entrance—there was a 5:45 to New Orleans—Hap awakened him.

He slept on the flight back too, and arrived around seven. The airport was almost deserted and there was no one, of course, to meet him. He walked down its empty corridors to the street and took a cab home. It cost him nineteen dollars.

There was nothing at home. He felt the emptiness without Myra keenly. He tried not to feel terribly sorry for himself, because he still had his youth, or at least a little of it, and he knew he was well liked and had it in him to be a good police officer, though possibly not at the federal level.

Just not cut out for the big leagues, he thought, morosely. He got himself a beer from the refrigerator and drank it while he watched CNN, but it didn’t taste like much.

On the TV, it was the same stuff, and they even had the dog’s body being removed from the grave by the two black men. There was a close-up of its body bag, half-deflated, that he had carried from the morgue to the truck that strange, mad day. Hard to believe it was only forty-eight hours ago. It seemed to belong to some other geological era.

“And now this,” said the CNN anchorman, a stern, commanding black man who would have looked comfortable on the bridge of a destroyer. “FBI forensic technicians have confirmed from dental records the identity of the body found in the ruins of Aurora Baptist, near Blue Eye, Arkansas, as that of Bob Lee Swagger, the Marine hero who allegedly shot at the president of the United States and killed the archbishop of El
Salvador and has been for five weeks the most wanted man in America. The cause of death was a self-administered gunshot wound through the roof of the mouth and into the brain as the flames closed in.”

So, Nick thought, you put the gun muzzle in your mouth and pulled the trigger.

It was fitting that no man had brought Bob the Nailer down but himself, by his own hand, sealing his secrets off forever.

“Well,” Nick said to nobody in the empty room except the clock, the anchorman, and the can of beer, “we put him away. Hooray for us.”

Julie Fenn held herself tight and somehow got through the day. There was still a wisp of a hope or a prayer or
something
, some little thing. She drove home through the fiery radiance of the Arizona twilight clinging to it. But that night came the evidence of the dental report, and that was the end. That was that.

And somehow she got through the next day, too. It wasn’t easy but she was a strong woman and she had plenty of years of practice holding things in. But enough was enough. She called in the next day and said she was having family difficulties and would have to have a day or so off. Dr. Martin said that was fine, he understood, though under his voice there was a layer that said he didn’t. She couldn’t care. Dr. Martin was twenty-six; he needed Julie a lot more than Julie needed him. Who would run the clinic if she didn’t?

So she sat in her trailer and tried to cry. She found she could not cry. In some way or other, she had moved beyond crying. She could not weep and she could not feel relief. It had always been possible, from that first second the knock on the door had come and she’d pulled it open to see a man who’d haunted her dreams, whom she’d loved and hated through twenty long years
of nights, that her whole life could be pulled apart. She could have been arrested for being an accessory after the fact or something like that; at the very least there’d be that horrible kind of modern fame where every creep in the world thinks he owns you and has a right to your inner life, and you see the same bad picture of yourself in a thousand newspapers, and none of the people trying to talk to you or take your picture give a real damn about you. You’re just that week’s meat.

But to know that wouldn’t happen now, that dead men tell nothing and indict no witnesses, offered no solace at all. She just wanted Bob, her Henry Thoreau with a rifle, the funny way he had said, “He went and lived by himself too.” It had cracked her up, that little proud squeak of knowledge about a New England transcendentalist from the world’s best manhunter.

So nice to have a man around the house.

She turned on the television, because the news was on. NBC. Tom Brokaw looked earnest and troubled tonight. He was telling Bob’s story for the umpteenth time, the tragic story of the Marine hero who was the son of a Marine hero and had gone tragically astray in his bitterness, and yet who had died with such quixotic grandeur that a little part of everybody had to admire him. It was the dog angle that would propel Bob to incredible national celebrity, if he could be, in his current state as America’s most wanted man, even more celebrated.

“And so,” Brokaw concluded, the TV cheap irony tone coming into his syrupy voice, “a man of violence who allegedly killed a bishop has died to commit an innocent animal to a final act of dignity.”

Other stories came on; dog lovers had gathered a petition to make certain the dog was buried where Bob had meant to bury it. There was an interview with some general in the Salvadoran army, taking pleasure that the
archbishop’s murderer had paid the ultimate price but somewhat upset that he was acquiring such a patina of sainthood for his kindness to a dead animal when he’d actually killed the animal himself and then the archbishop. He was asked about the Panther Battalion massacre and he said they were making good progress on that investigation.

Next, NBC flashed to Blue Eye and showed an interview with Sam Vincent, a lawyer, and he wondered why the FBI and the state police had to go and kill Bob, since no one had proved in a court of law that Bob was guilty. But the reporter kept wanting to get back to the dog, the dog, the dog, how much Bob had loved the dog.

“Oh,” said Sam, finally, “yep, I s’pose he did, but Bob had a damn practical streak and if the dog were dead, I can’t for the life of me figger out why he went and did such a fool thing.”

The old man blinked into the camera.

“He weren’t no fool,” said Sam Vincent, “and you can put that in the damn bank.” Then he spat into the dirt and walked away.

It puzzled her too, and she turned it over in her head that night, trying to make sense of it. It was a sleepless night. Once, she drifted off, and came awake an hour later in the dark with her head racing with memories.

“Bob? Bob Lee?” she called into the darkness. There was no response. She heard the ticking, the random noise, the sound of a car on the road, and far off in the desert, the cry of a coyote. But there was nothing else. Or was there? She felt something, a presence, or maybe just a sense of being watched. She shivered, and reached under the bed to the Smith & Wesson .32 camp gun, but nothing came of the feeling that night.

Nick sat in front of the tube the whole damned evening, drinking more and seeing nothing. Around eleven, not drunk but slightly blurry, he ambled to bed. That night he had a dream, involving Bob Lee Swagger and Myra and somehow also that terrifying crash down the mountainside, with the green branches beating at the windshield until the windshield went. Then he saw the door post as it came forward and hit him in the skull.

Myra! he screamed in his dream, Myra, I didn’t mean it.

When he got out of the cab and reached for his little .38, he saw Bob Lee Swagger and Myra dancing on the green grass. Myra was barefoot and lively as a country tune. Her whole face radiated pleasure.

Stop or I’ll shoot, he screamed, the little pistol tight in his big hand. Then he fired. In the dream he fired just as surely as in real life he had not, and Myra’s back spurted black blood and she went down, crying, Nick, you killed my spine, you killed my spine. And Howdy Duty was there telling him what a terrible job he’d done, how he’d wrecked his career. And Bob was dancing away into the flames.

Nick sat up, blinking. He was covered with sweat. Someone was screaming. It was himself.

After that, he had trouble getting back to sleep, though he may have dozed some around dawn. He finally awakened for good about eight-thirty in the morning, dissociated and hung over. His head ached; he needed a shave. This was life after the Bureau. Another pointless day stretched before him. He had no will to go on, but he decided out of habit to shower and have a cup of coffee. Then he put on a summer-weight suit and a white shirt, just as if he were going to the office.