Stephen Hunter: The Third Bullet

A description of Oswald was broadcast, and some miles away, in Dallas’s Oak Cliff section, an officer named J. D. Tippit spotted a man who matched that description. Tippit stopped and called him over. He got out of his car and was shot four times by the suspect and died on the spot.

The suspect walked away, but concerned citizens followed him; others noted his odd behavior and knew that suspicions were flying around Dallas about the Kennedy assassin. They noted that he sneaked into a movie theater, and the police were called. Thus was Lee Harvey Oswald arrested.

Meanwhile, at the Book Depository, officers found a “sniper’s nest” of book cartons arranged at the site of the sixth-floor (NE) corner window, three ejected 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano casings, and a hundred feet away, at the site of the sole stairway off the floor, a surplus Mannlicher-Carcano Model 38 carbine with a cheap and poorly attached Japanese-made scope. The rifle had been cocked and carried a live cartridge in its chamber.

It soon proved that Oswald’s fingerprints were on the rifle and on the boxes in the sniper’s nest, that he had carried a suspicious bag of “curtain rods” into the depository that morning, that he had ordered, under pseudonyms, both the Carcano rifle and the .38 Special S&W revolver used in the Tippit slaying. Moreover, he was a notorious malcontent with “revolutionary tendencies,” a self-proclaimed Communist, a former defector, a mediocre marine (accounting for his shooting skill), a wife beater, and an all-around creep.

He never stood trial because he was murdered by Jack Ruby on the morning of November 24, 1963, as he was being led to an armored car for transfer to a more secure holding area.

Those seemed to be the facts which, after much haggling, all had come to believe and accept. Swagger believed them and accepted them – that is, until his chat with Jean Marquez.

Her words touched one of his own memories, not a public memory at all but a private, long-buried one. He had been stalked once by a certain team of men in his long and turbulent past, and the smudge she had reported on the back of a coat had a meaning for him that it would have for no other man on earth. Amazing that it had, in some form and after all these years, reached him.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” said someone, and Swagger was pulled from his time travels to see a friend, younger, better dressed, a kind of Dallas up-and-coming executive type in a worsted Hickey Freeman suit, approaching on a beeline to sit next to him.

“We put the dumbest intern on the JFK squad,” the man said as he shook Swagger’s hand and dispensed with the how-are-you bullshit. “He fields the ten or twenty calls we get each day from people who’ve solved the case and now know for sure the Gypsies were involved with the Vatican and Japanese imperial intelligence.”

Nick Memphis was now the special agent in charge of the Dallas field office of the FBI. In most instances it would have been a plum assignment, but for him it was a last stop on the way out. His career had topped out when a new director took over the Bureau, heard he was intimately involved with the tragic incident at a huge mall in Minnesota, and wanted him far from headquarters. An assistant, some acid-blooded corpse named Mr. Renfro, had handled the delicate task of prying Nick from his deputy directorship and reassigning him to fieldwork in an office that was big and produced more than its share of cases closed but didn’t need radical shaking up or bold new leadership, just a dozing caretaker to sign the requisitions, approve the budget, and make sure the squads were adequately staffed until he retired.

Swagger didn’t say a thing. He knew he’d shaken up his pal with a strange request a few days ago and that Nick had to vent. He let the younger man flail away, unburden himself, get it all out.

It was typical Swagger, laconic and detached and seemingly camouflaged even if he wore a suit, an off-the-rack khaki rag that resembled a grocery bag on a scarecrow. He had one leg cranked awkwardly over the knee of the other, showing a beat-to-hell Nocona, and looked younger sitting than walking, because when he walked, the vibrations of several competing wound-deficient parts of him turned his progress into a slow and uncertain shuffle. You winced for the pain that hip had to cause him and wondered why the old coot was too stubborn to take painkillers. At least he wasn’t wearing that goddamn faded Razorbacks cap.

“I can’t believe I wasted a Justice Department witness protection identity on you,” Nick fumed. “Who do you think you are, Mark Lane? It’s over. Oswald did it. Nobody else. That’s what all the sensible research shows, that’s what the latest computer re-creations show, that’s what all the House panels concluded. Only fruitcakes and vegetarians believe in a conspiracy. Man, if it gets out that I bought in to this kind of scheme, Renfro will have my ass on a clothesline by Wednesday.”

“I appreciate your kindness,” Swagger finally said. “And no, I ain’t gone insane. I think my mind is working normally. Slow, as usual, but normal.”

Nick made a sound that expressed frustration. “Man,” he said, “I should never try to outguess you. JFK! Never in a million years would I guess you’d tumble into that slime pit.”

“If it helps, and you have to justify it” – the secret identity didn’t require formal computer paperwork and headquarters approval, which could be penetrated by hackers, only the okay of the senior bureau field officer, that is, Nick himself – “you can tell them you took a flier on a murder investigation. Fellow came to Dallas, your neck of the woods, went home to Baltimore, and got himself killed under circumstances that look very much like a professional hit.”

“Murder isn’t in our jurisdiction,” Nick said grumpily. “That’s a local issue.”

“True, but the wheelman traveled from somewhere to Baltimore to do the job. Maybe from Dallas. We know that because there can’t be but two or three professional car killers in the world at any one time, and they ain’t known to hang out in Baltimore.”

“You don’t even know it was a pro. It could have been a kid on meth.”

“I saw the Baltimore report. There was a witness, a girl walking a dog. She was observant. He accelerated clean through the hit and kept on a line afterward, without a waver or a wobble, then took a hard left at speed and was out of the neighborhood in about three seconds flat, without one squeal of brakes, one skid mark, one spinout or dent. That’s professional driving, even if nobody in Baltimore figured it out. If he went from anywhere to Baltimore, he’s your baby, and when you’re done with him on interstate violations, crossing state lines to commit a crime, five to eight, you hand him to the Baltimore prosecutor and he goes down for the long one and rots out in their pen.”

It was hardly enough, Nick knew. Murders were a dime a dozen. He tried to spin it enough to make friends with it. He came up with: contract killings were rare, and a good bust on some flashy mechanic from the Dark Side might be a good career feather, even if Mr. Renfro had knocked the cap off his head. Nice to go out taking down some pro kill jockey with a flashy resume. Maybe if the guy was hard-core enough and the evidence was strong enough – Swagger was good at digging up evidence – they might get an HRT team to go in hard and cap his ass and save everybody the hassle of a trial. The press loved it when HRT whacked genuine bad guys. It was so commando-chic.

“If you have any interaction with local or fed LE, don’t you mention the JFK angle. Not a word. It’s straight interstate to commit a crime. I didn’t want a local player, so I got an undercover who’d worked with the bureau before and that I knew and trusted. That’s the game. Who are you this time, by the way?”