Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

“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.