Стивен Хантер - G-Man

OUTSIDE CASCADE, IDAHO

The present

Lord God, how did I last this long?

He was old, so old. He was seventy-one. Better off than most, but not so lucky as others, he did feel diminished in small ways. The nightmares were worse, even if sleep harder to come by and, in the morning, harder to shake. Seemed always cold too, dammit, after a life spent in largely hot places. Each joint had its own separate melody of pains, aches, squeaks, cracks, and pops. He’d had a hip replacement recently for the third time and it had healed up just fine, and was his strongest, smoothest-operating pulley now. It was like an old enemy becoming a new friend. Stiffness came and went, and when it decided to visit, it was a plague, gnawing him everywhere, like a tribe of rats. It turned his first few steps, infirm and crazed in balance, into a comedy of lurching and grunting to stay upright. That wasn’t all: he dropped things too, all the time, but by the time he dropped them, he’d forgotten what he’d picked them up for in the first place. He fell, not a lot, but now and then. Hadn’t broke anything yet, but in downtown Boise last year he went down hard on his left arm, and if the doc said it wasn’t broken, it sure pretended to be for three months afterward.

The air still tasted good, though. He’d sometimes breathe in deep, suck as much down as possible, just glorying in the hard, cold rush against his lungs, feeling them inflate gloriously, and that was a pleasure and a half.

Other pleasure: old friends. A loyal wife who refused to take him too seriously or be shocked by what he said. Two kids flourishing as adults, and the youngest, his stepdaughter, off at some place in the East called Princeton. She was a smart one, that girl.

And the money. He’d gotten rich — rich, at least by non-oil standards — which meant warmth and provision against the cold and enough money left over for ammo. He had seven layup barns in four states, and affiliations with more than three dozen large-animal veterinarians across those states. Partly it was based on the rumor that he’d been a marine hero (true), but mainly it was because he never had any energy for chicanery, and told the truth in the simplest terms possible, and people out here seemed to like that. More, after resisting for years and years, he’d finally sold the hunk of land his people had lived on and off of in Arkansas for more than two centuries, since some fellow and his pregnant wife had come over the mountains at the tail end of the Revolutionary War. The land he’d acquired and added to over the years sure paid off for the seventh-removed grandson. Bob had never thought of it as an investment, just a hunk of his past of which he couldn’t quite let go. But an investment it sure turned out to be: the money it brought in was substantial — more than substantial. It meant he could afford all sorts of cool things now, the only problem being that he didn’t want them anymore.

So now there was only one question left and it was: what happens from now until?

So far, nothing.

Enough had happened, he supposed, and so nothing was just fine. Nothing meant a three-hour ride on land that was all his, another hour of horse care, then three or four hours in his shop working on this or that rifle project (this year: .375 CheyTac at over thirty-five hundred yards, and, damn, if he didn’t own over thirty-five hundred yards’ worth of Idaho on which to find out what it could do). Then on to the email thing, for conversations with old friends the world over, including reporters and retired sergeants, Russian gangsters, Japanese Self-Defense Forces NCOs, FBI agents, a thousand or so former marines, relatives of the too many dead he had loved and seen die, and such forth and so on. It was just fine. Except that it wasn’t.

“You need something,” his wife said. “You were never one for aimlessness. Give Swagger a mission and he’s the best there is. Let him drift and he’ll end up in the drunk tank.”

“I have a mission,” he said. “I mean to wear out the rockers on this damned chair.”

He might just make it too. Day in, day out, the magic hour, five to six, he sat and rocked on the porch, watched the changes come to the prairie, the seasons change, the mountains in the distance acquire and shed their snow, the leaves swirl and disappear and then magically regenerate six months later. Sometimes there was ice and wind, sometimes mellow breezes and the smell of summer flowers. The wind was persistent, the deer and the antelope played, and the skies were cloudy most days, but in the good way of showing off towers of fanciful architecture, full of turrets and bridges and secret passageways, all lit to glowing by the sun as it settled toward the horizon. It was all good. Really, it was.

I don’t need a thing, he told himself. My life is finished, my accomplishments accomplished, I am too old to do a damned thing but watch my children and my estate grow, even if none of the kids seemed yet to notice a considerable sum would come their way.

But she would not buy it.

“Not something dangerous, not with the guns or anything. You’ve been shot at a lot and mostly missed.”

When she said “mostly,” every one of the little squibs of scar tissue he wore like chain mail across his pelt perked up and issued a communiqué.

“But a goal, a thing to do, that would give you pleasure in the work and in the finishing, that would tie a bow on it, and so you could meet your father up there and him saying, ‘You did me honor.’”

“I am too old and too tired to start anything new.”

“You feel old and tired because you have nothing new to do, not in spite of it. Find the project and you will find the energy.”

“I’ve seen enough of the world. Besides, the airports these days are like refugee camps.”

“No travel. I think you should write a book.”

“Oh, that’s a good one. My grammar breaks down every ten minutes and I revert to mountain English and you want me to write a book?”

“Any man who can use ‘revert’ in a sentence can write a book.”

“Nobody’s interested in my stuff. If they’s interested, they wouldn’t believe it. If they believed it, they’d arrest me. I’m lucky as it is to be on this side of the iron bars with all my enemies dead and all my debts, money and justice, paid in full. It’s time to settle back and read some books, not write one.”

“I was thinking of what has given you the most pleasure over the past few years, apart from your children. And that is when you got back from Russia and you and Reilly had dug out the truth about that woman sniper and what a hero she was. That made you happy.”

“Still does,” he said, because it did. “She’s a real hero, not a lucky phony like me, she deserves the glory. Now she’s got her face on a Russian stamp, and she’s the subject of Reilly’s book. Yep, that one still feels good. But… You have to say, it was a stroke of luck Reilly finding her. Don’t think I’m going to run into that one again.”

“My idea: your father. He was a great man. You love him still. His story needs to be told. Sheriff’s son in dirt-poor Arkansas, goes on to be a five-invasion marine and receive the Medal of Honor at Iwo Jima, has some other adventures you’ve only heard about as legend, then dies tragically young in a cornfield, shot down by a punk in a T-shirt and Elvis sideburns.”

That wasn’t quite the truth, but it would do.

“I don’t think I could do that,” he said.

“You have marine connections still so you’d have no problem getting that information. You have an Arkansas lawyer from old gentry in Jake Vincent, and he is very well connected. He could open those few doors that the Swagger name alone wouldn’t. You could find old folks—”