Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

But the pain of it amazed him. He realized in a tiny part of his mind he’d been harboring some kind of illusion until now; he saw himself back at the place, and old Mike come up to nuzzle him, to press his sloppy jowl against him and gaze up with those dumb, adoring eyes.

All right , he thought, you killed my dog. Now I got some work to do, so that I can settle up .

He read slowly, without hurry, each article, from the earliest Julie had been able to find – which meant the most inaccurate – to the very latest. Nothing showed on his face. He sat on his bed and read it all, straight through. Then he read it again.

He saw himself laid bare, penetrated, turned inside out. He was fair game for them all; everybody had a theory, an idea, a notion. He realized he was no longer his own property; his private self had been taken from him forever.

They had it right – but wrong, too, terribly wrong. They were looking at him from such a twisted angle.

“Swagger’s Navy Cross bespeaks his aggressive nature and his reckless will to kill and precurses the tragic events of March 1,” Time said.

It was the second highest award his country could give him; and he’d saved a hundred lives those two days in the An Loc Valley. They made it seem like a crime.

“Violence is inbred in the Swagger clan. His father, Earl Swagger, destroyed three machine gun nests one morning on Iwo Jima and returned to violent encounters in law enforcement, climaxing in a bloody shootout where he killed two men but died himself off Highway 67 near Fort Smith.”

They turned his old daddy, who only did his duty to country and state, into some kind of mentor in murder. Nothing about the lives his dad had saved in giving up his own against Jimmy and Bub Pye that terrible evening.

There was a paragraph recounting his lawsuit against Mercenary magazine, which had put a picture of him on the cover and called him the most dangerous man in America. It told how sly old Sam Vincent had shaken thirty thousand dollars out of their pockets and warned all those gung-ho books to stay the hell away. But then Time dryly remarked, “It is doubtful that Swagger could win his case today.”

He shook his head at all this, wondering what could twist people so. Where do these people come from? How do they learn things like this? Is there a school that teaches them? What gives them the damned right to just take over your life and bend it any which way they please?

They hadn’t missed a damn thing. They’d pried everywhere. The inside of his trailer was photographed. His books were listed: the writers found it amusing that among the loading manuals and the classic works on rifles and shooting, such a violent man had poetry by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, though it was noted that the works were “only bitter war poetry.” There was his gun rack in loving detail, the weapons cataloged and judged by reporters who seemed disappointed to discover that he had no “assault rifles,” as they called them. His rifle range was diagrammed. His two victories in the Arkansas State IPSC championships were probed. And he saw schematics of the shot he had supposedly taken in New Orleans from 415 St. Ann into Louis Armstrong Park. The madness of that second was broken down and analyzed, its physics and ballistics choreographed in infinite detail, its trajectories laid out in dotted lines to little X’s that marked the strike of the bullet, all of it convincing, all of it wrong. He saw stills drawn from the videotape of what went on at the podium, the fall and twist of the man he’d supposedly “hit,” the archbishop of whom he’d never even heard.

The completeness of it blew him away. They’d been so careful, they’d set it up so perfectly, and, worst of all, they’d known him so well.

Not these damn reporters who didn’t know a thing, but them, the Agency boys, whoever they were. They’d known him perfectly. It was as if they’d lived his life or gotten in his brain.

“You look so hurt,” she said.

“These people, they knew so much about me,” he said. “It’s scary how careful they were. Not that they took the time, but that they knew so much, they knew how my mind would work.”

He thought back to the moment when he’d been truly hooked: when they came up with a trophy he couldn’t say no to, the Russian sniper Solaratov, who he now realized probably didn’t exist. It was so perfect. They knew how desperate he’d be.

Then he discovered, from Newsweek , that the guy he’d jumped coming out of the house on St. Ann Street was named Nick Memphis and he was from the FBI!

Now here was something that twisted in his imagination. Memphis, Memphis, where’d he heard that damn name before? It hung there, tantalizing him until he remembered after a bit. Memphis was the joker in Tulsa who’d missed and hit some woman. His was the archetypal botched shot, the sniper who fouled up. And he, Bob, back in Maryland, had re-created the whole thing in front of the fancy boys while they were gulling him along with their “Accutech” stuff.

He wondered if this Memphis were a part of it. Then he remembered the stunned surprise of the man, the slack, dumb look on the wide face, his squirming, the easy way the 10-mil came out of the holster when he reversed on him, and he doubted it. If he were one of what Bob thought now merely as “Them,” he guessed that this Nick Memphis would have been ready and waiting. Besides, he wouldn’t have left his car with the door open and the key in so helpfully there right outside on St. Ann Street.

There was a picture of the guy, a blurry thing snapped out front of the New Orleans FBI headquarters.

“Agent Memphis, who missed collar, hurries to car,” the caption said.

It was the same man, equally disturbed, this time with a grave and somewhat embarrassed look to his face.

You screwed up, and now these people are going to nail you for it. You screwed up almost as big as I did, he thought.

Bob read on, looking for answers.

But there were only more questions.

Here I am, Nick thought, in Arkansas!

He was sitting around the temporary bull pen in the Mena, Arkansas, Holiday Motel, wading through the oceans of paperwork that attended the task force’s relocation from New Orleans to Polk County, yet at the same time managing not to grieve too overwhelmingly for the passing of Leon Timmons, dropped by a mugger in a New Orleans alley two days or so ago. He wished it didn’t please him so and he wished the publicity – HERO COP SLAIN IN FREAK CRIME – would go away, because his own incompetence was a part of the story.

“You sure you didn’t smoke poor Leon there, Nick?” asked the ever mischievous Hap Fencl. “You know, in blackface, with a little throw-down gun?”

The others had laughed; they couldn’t mourn the braying Timmons either, who’d made the Bureau look so bad.

But Nick just smiled grimly and stayed on station as the operation’s prime goat. Outside the window, the green and thunderous Ouachitas rippled away toward Oklahoma in the late afternoon sunlight. He returned to his document, a witness sighting report from the New Mexico State Police; a motorist claimed he’d seen Bob the Nailer, big as life, tooling down the highway in an ’86 Merc. That was the common element in the sightings: as if Bob would be so bold to bull on through in broad daylight, sure his courage and his determination would get him through. These people were imprinting their own sense of Bob on ambiguous events and coming up with the strangest stuff.

The phone rang across the room and somebody else got it.

“Hey, Nick, it’s for you.”

Nick turned to the phone.