Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

“I’m running late, Dobbler. I just got in.”

“My God, Colonel, are you all right?”

“Tired. Exhausted.”

“Jet lag? You really should take your shoes off, and walk barefoot on the carpet and – ”

“Doctor, I’d asked you to consider Swagger’s disappearance. Can you summarize your thoughts for me?”

“Of course, of course,” said Dobbler, nonplussed; Shreck had never crashed into his office before; almost always, he served at Shreck’s summons.

Dobbler began to babble through his discovery of the strange florist’s bill in Little Rock, his initial dead end when he learned that the florist kept no records, and his latest initiative, which was to ask one of the technonerds in Research to run a computer search through the memory of the FTD databank if he could get into the system, in hopes of locating that elusive destination to which Bob had dispatched his flowers. But halfway through he realized that Shreck wasn’t focusing.

“That’s very promising. But I want some feeling of what’s going on in his head. What’s he going to do?”

“Oh,” said Dobbler, somewhat taken aback at being denied the compliment he expected. “Well, Payne says the FBI has now moved its base of operations to Arkansas. His home area. They believe he’ll head there.”

“What do you think?”

“Oh, he will,” said Dobbler vaguely.

“Why do you believe that?”

“Because he has to do what we expect, and still beat us.” Dobbler smiled. “That’s really what’s going on now. Bob’s vanity. His desire not merely to survive but to triumph. To punish us for our delusion of superiority. He must now prove to us who is the alpha-male.”

Shreck nodded, intently.

“Suppose the FBI takes him alive. What will he be able to tell them?”

“Ah, I doubt he will be taken alive. He’s in a very volatile state. The pressures on him are incredible. He – ”

“But if he is?”

“If he is – it may make him insane. They won’t believe him, of course, the trap is too tight, too well constructed. It may actually destroy his mind. I don’t know if he can function under those circumstances.”

Shreck followed this carefully. Then he said, “All right, good. That’s very helpful.”

“Why, thank you, Colonel Shreck,” said Dobbler, pleased.

“It’s good to have a Harvard man on the staff, Dr. Dobbler. Because I can count on you for consistency. You are full of shit. Always. Completely. That’s a gift, Dobbler.”

Dobbler was stunned.

“I – ”

“You stupid asshole, don’t you know a thing about how men’s minds work? Or Swagger’s kind of man? Don’t you see the fucking joke in this? You see, we planned his death, but maybe we gave him his life. We have engaged him. He is back among the living, and he’s got himself a war to fight, and all his skills and talents may be fully deployed. That’s the terrible thing, the longer this goes on, the more he enjoys it, the stronger he gets. And he’ll love it. He should pay us for it. We’re giving him more fun than he’s had since the war.”

It was morning of the last day. She got up at four and made breakfast so that it was ready when he awoke at five. But he wanted to make love – so soon, after last night, and what she had thought would be the last time – so the breakfast waited. It tasted wonderful when they got to it.

Then he showered and she dressed his wounds.

“Jesus, but aren’t you a stud-puppy?” she said. “I’ve never seen multiple trauma gunshot recovery so fast.”

The arm wound was the ugliest, a raw welt at the outside of his left bicep about three inches above the elbow. But it was just bruised and burned meat that would eventually heal without complication.

The entrance and the exit wounds to the chest had resolved themselves into quarter-sized scabs that would ultimately pucker into scar tissue.

“It doesn’t hurt?”

“I can handle it.”

“I just bet you can.”

Bob had let his beard stay. He was a tall, sunburned man with a thick shock of blond-brown hair and a powerful chest. His eyes were hard and small; his mouth was a jot of concentration. He was a man in blue; she’d gone into a Gap store in a mall in Tucson and bought, with cash, three pairs of blue jeans and three pairs of black jeans, waist 34, length 33, and ten blue denim work shirts, and had washed them all. She’d also gotten a pair of brown Nocona boots, size 11, double A width, and two dozen pair of white socks at the Pick-and-Save. It was all loaded in a duffel bag in the back of his stolen car.

“Bob…”

Bob took a last swig of coffee.

“You know, you could just stay here. In time, we’d move. We could always be a jump ahead of them.”

A small smile came over his taut features.

“Sure. But I won’t. You know, if I could walk in right now and say to them, hey, you’ve got the wrong boy, and they take a look at some things they’ve missed, and say, ‘Damn, Swagger, you’re right,’ I still wouldn’t do it. Because that just means I’m off the hook and that’s not enough. I got some idea what it’s like to live with debts to pay and no way to pay them. Well, this time, I do mean to pay them, in full.”

He turned, looking at her obliquely, and she saw an odd and powerful light in his eyes. She saw, too, that he was no longer the man he’d been a month ago, that desperate, bloody, half-crazy fugitive who’d arrived on her doorstep.

She didn’t know this man. This was the Bob that Donny had loved, so focused you felt his power even now, sitting in the bedroom as he buttoned up his shirt. Now he scared her a little.

“Julie, you listen here. When I’m gone, I want you to scrub down every surface in this house with ammonia, because it’s the only thing that will take off fingerprint oils. Throw out all your dishes and glasses and silverware. Now, you know what you have to do?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Run through it again. Tell me.”

“In five days, I drive four hours in any direction to any pay phone I can find. Then I call long distance to – uh, the number is three-three-one, four-five-two, six-seven-eight-three and I do my Lurleen accent – low, trashy, the kind of girl Elvis used to pick up in Tupelo bars before the Ed Sullivan show – ”

He smiled.

“Then I ask for Memphis. Agent Memphis.”

“Yes.”

“They’ll test you. They’ll ask you what the dog’s name was, and it wasn’t Pat like they put in the papers, it was Mike. I wasn’t hit once, like they said, but twice. You’ll have to tell them that.”

“I know all that. Then I tell him what you told me.”

“Yes.”

“Then I hang up and drive away.”

“How long on the phone?”

“No more than two minutes.”

“Don’t forget to stop and have lots of change for the phone. You should have at least ten dollars in quarters.”

“All right.”

“Then you drive back here. I can’t begin to think there’s a chance in hell they’d ever track you. You don’t know about me, you never heard about me, I don’t exist. Nobody will know.”

“And then the fun part,” she said bitterly, “you get killed. The FBI kills you in some little Arkansas roadhouse.”

“Maybe. But I have a few cards up my sleeve.”

“Oh, Bob.”

The sun was coming over the eastern rim of the desert now, and it bled through the sky. For just a moment the room itself seemed soaked in blood – blood everywhere, red and glinting and wet and black. But blood most of all in the narrow eyes of Bob Lee Swagger.

She shuddered, and tried to think of other things.

“Nick!”

It was Howard, and he didn’t sound pleased.

“Uh, yes, Howard?”