found himself becoming morose and mean-spirited. The vibrator on his beeper had not gone off.
What did it mean? What was going on? It was so goddamned
He pushed aside his fears and went to the car, but for the first time in years, his two obedient, discreet bodyguards irritated him, though they were so steely efficient there was no cause for the annoyance. They just bugged him tonight.
He said, “I’m going to the lounge, not home.”
“Yes sir,” came the reply, untainted by human emotion.
He climbed into the big S-class and turned right, down Cliff Drive and back toward the city, instead of left toward his big white house overlooking the airport. At the halfway point, he called the Runner-up.
“Hello?”
“Beth, honey, something has come up. I’ve got to nurse one through the night.”
“Sweetie, are you all right?”
“I am fine. And soon, I’ll be finer.”
“Are you sure?”
Dammit, even
“Yes, Red, honey.”
“Your brother. He can come too. That’s my babe.”
He hung up, crossing Rogers, turning in toward town, took his next right and followed the progressively seedier Midland Boulevard until at last he came to Nancy’s. His parking place was wide open, as usual, and he pulled into it. As he leaped out, his two bodyguards seemed to materialize from nowhere and took up position next to him.
He threw open the door and about six dreary drunks and four dreary pool players looked over at, his magnificence and withered in it; he blasted through, telling Fred the night barkeep just one word: “Coffee.”
In his lair, he felt a bit more relaxed. Here at last was a world small enough and known enough to be completely dominated. He sat at his father’s old desk. He felt comfortable. He set his folder on the green blotter before him and willed it to ring:
He tried to shut it out by concocting a plan to implement if he were to fail utterly.
Swagger lives. Swagger kills both men. No, worse, Swagger captures poor Duane, who spills the beans about the Bama connection. What would Swagger do next?
He’d come after me, he realized.
He leaned out and gestured to his bodyguards.
“It is very possible,” he said, “that a very tough man will be coming after me in the next few days. Not sure, but possible. Therefore y’all will need to be at your absolute tops. Understood?”
“Yes sir,” said the talkative one.
“We go into Condition One, all the way. We’ll need support teams, aerial surveillance, motion detectors, the works. I ain’t going to give it up without a fight.”
“We’ll get him, sir.”
Maybe, he thought, that would be better: face it, do it, get it over with. He and Swagger, man-on-man.
Then he laughed.
Swagger was too good. That would be suicide.
He looked at the phone.
Damn you. Ring!
But it wouldn’t.
The hours leaked by. He read the papers, tried to work on his books, had a lot of coffee, watched some TV on a ratty black-and-white. He may even have dozed for a time, for it seemed that there was a moment when it was dark followed by another moment when the dawn was suddenly breaking. He went out, looked down the broad boulevard that was still lifeless. Odd, even a slum like north Fort Smith could look pristine and wondrous in the first wash of moist, dewy light. But he knew his sentimentality was phony, more a function of stress and exhaustion than genuine feeling.
Now he began to feel sorry for himself. It went with the territory, the long night nursing through a crisis that he himself was incapable of influencing at this point, one which he must fight with surrogates.
He mourned his father, that great man. He wondered again at the great bitterness of his life: who had killed him? He missed his two wives and his five children. He missed the boys at Hardscrabble, the men he hunted, fished, flew to Super Bowls and occasionally caroused with. He mourned his life: was someone going to take it away from him now? At least his children would know who killed him, more than he knew of his own father’s death. He saw Swagger as a pale-eyed avenger, a figure of death, come to take it all away. Part of him yearned to fire both barrels of that expensive Krieghoff into Swagger and blow him to shreds. He calculated: two blasts of Remington 7? from five feet, that’s almost sixteen hundred pieces of bird shot delivered at over 1,200 feet per second, hitting him that close, before the shot column opened up into a pattern but instead traveled through space with the energy and density of a piston. Wow! Total destruction.
But in the end, he weakened. His warrior spirit was spent. His dick was soft and would never be hard. He needed sleep, he needed help.
He faced the phone. It was nearly seven.
I can take it no more.
I have to know.
He dialed Duane Peck’s number. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and Red feared that catastrophe had occurred. His heart bucked in terror.
But on the fourth ring Peck answered.
“Yeah?”
“What’s happening, Peck?”
There was a pause that seemed to last an epoch in geological time as ice ages rolled down from the north, then retreated, whole species were created and evaporated, civilizations rose and fell, and then Peck said, “It’s over. Got ’em both.”
“Ah—” began Duane.
“I told you to follow orders
“Yes sir,” said Peck. “Sorry, I—”
“Is the general all right?”
“Yep.”
His heart soared in gratitude and intense pleasure.
“Bury the bodies, get the general home and disappear for a week. Call me next week. I want a full report.”
“Yes sir,” said Peck.
Red snapped off to the dial tone, the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.
40
For even as the snake’s rattle registered in his brain, Bob had turned and driven savagely into him, knocking stars into his brain behind his eyes, taking his breath from him, forcing him in a wild plunge to the precipice of the creek bed where he panicked at the instant surrender to gravity. Yet through his fear as he fell, literally in Bob’s
