Point Of Impact

Nick had only tried once and failed spectacularly. His bullet had gone exactly where he had not wanted it to.

So it was with a sense of facing his old self and his old beliefs and the mistakes of his own youth that he set about to track down Bob the Nailer. And like many memories, this one proved easy enough to unearth. Bob was not hard to find, that is, the traces of Bob. He’d checked into the Robert Oliver Hotel in the French Quarter on February 3 and checked out on February 4. Two days. Nobody much remembered him; the only vague reports Nick could scare up told of a tall western-styled man, very leathery, who said nothing, kept to himself, was gone all day, and left without fuss. Had a funny camera with him, some expensive Jap thing probably.

Business of some sort, Nick thought. He’d heard that Swagger hadn’t been able to stay in the Marines because of his injuries. Probably today he was some kind of traveling salesman or something, or an Arkansas farmer into the big city for the hell of it, a wild few days or something, take some pictures like any tourist, and go on back to the South Forty.

But it occurred to Nick to ask a more fundamental question. Why was the guy on the Suspects List at all? Who put him there? What gets you there?

He ran Swagger through the FBI computer and learned he had no record, at least no felonies listed anywhere. He checked him against the National Crime Index and again came up with nothing. Calling the Department of the Navy, he learned that Bob had retired at the rank of gunnery sergeant with physical disability pay after twelve years active service and close to three years in the hospital undergoing joint reconstruction and extensive physical therapy and had no blemishes on his record. He checked with the Veterans Administration and found out that Bob had never sought or received any kind of psychological testing, or counseling or anything like that. There seemed to be nothing on him at all. Now why the hell had he ended up on this list? And who was tracking him enough to note that he was here in New Orleans?

He called Herm Sloane.

“Hey, Herm – ”

“Nick, we’re really pressed for time up here? What is it?”

“I just have one question. These Charlies, where do you get them? How does a guy get on the Charlie list?”

“Well, the Alphas are usually developed from intelligence, usually from the Bureau investigations of dangerous groups, from other Justice Department or DEA sources and our own intelligence unit; um, the Betas are usually guys with minor criminal records, guys who’ve made lots of public threats, who have an authority complex and tend to attract attention; and your Charlies are letter writers. We keep all the threatening letters the president gets, or threatening-seeming letters. Why?”

“Oh, there’s a Charlie here that surprised me.”

“Listen, call Tom Marbella at Treasury in DC. He collates the letter files; he’ll let you know what’s what.”

Some minutes later, Nick managed to track down Marbella and Marbella said he’d check it out, let him know, and some time after that – it was the next day, actually – Marbella called back.

“Okay, I’ve got the file up on my computer terminal now. Your boy seems to think he should have won the Congressional Medal of Honor,” said Marbella.

“Hmm,” said Nick, a noise he made when he wanted to indicate he was on the phone still, but that he had no attitude or information to convey.

“Three weeks ago, he writes a letter to the president, explaining that the Marine Corps screwed him out of the Congressional Medal of Honor that was his by rights, just like his dad’s, and that he now wanted his medal, and would the president please send it on?”

“And that gets him on a Secret Service list?”

“Hey, after sixty-three, anything gets you on a Secret Service list, friend. We take no chances. We win no friends, but we take no chances.”

“Is there anything threatening in the letter?”

“Uh, well, our staff psychiatrist says so. It’s not an explicit threat so much as a tone. Listen to this. ‘Sir, I only request that the nation give me that which is my due, as I served my country well in the jungles. It’s quite important to me that I get this medal [exclamation point]. It is mine [exclamation point]. I earned it [exclamation point]. There’s no two ways about it, sir, that medal is mine [exclamation point].’ ”

Nick shook his head. Like so many others, the great Bob the Nailer, the warrior champion of Vietnam, the master sniper, had yielded to vanity too. It was no longer enough merely to have done the impossible on a routine basis and to know that you and you alone were of the elect. No, in his surrender, Bob, like so many others, wanted celebrity, attention, validation. More. More for me. I want more and I want it now. It’s my turn.

That’s what Nick ran into all the time on the streets. Somehow in America it had stopped being about us or we or the team or the family; it was this me-thing that turned people crazy. They expected so much. They thought they were so important. Everybody was an only child.

But it seemed so un-Bob-like somehow.

“It sounds pretty harmless to me,” Nick said.

“It’s the exclamation points. Four of ’em. Our reading is that exclamation points indicate a tendency toward violence. Not an inclination, but a tendency, a capacity to let go. That’s the theory at any rate, though the truth is, we’ve found that letter writers almost never go to guns. They just don’t. For most of them, writing the letter is the thing that satisfies them, they sit back and everything is nice. Still, this guy is supposedly a hell of a shot, or was at one time. He used four exclamation points. And we do have it on record that he did go to New Orleans – ”

“Yeah, I’ve confirmed that – ”

“And so we put him on the Charlie list. Check him out, see if he deserves an upgrade to Beta – ”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“I know the Charlie list is shit, Memphis. Nobody likes to do the Charlie list. Usually the guys just out of training end up doing Charlies. You sound, um, a little old for Charlies.”

“Look, I do what my boss says, that’s all.”

“We appreciate it. Glad to have the Bureau’s help.”

“How did you know he was in New Orleans?”

“Huh?”

“You said, ‘And he was in New Orleans.’ How did you know that?”

“Uh,” said Marbella, “it says so. Right here in his file.”

“But where did that information come from? I mean, a snitch, another agency, a cop shop, the Pentagon, the VA?”

“Hey, it doesn’t say. You know, this stuff comes in from all over, some of it pretty raw. 0What’s the big deal?”

“Is somebody watching Swagger?”

“Shit, man. I’m the last guy to know. And it doesn’t say a thing here. It’s just raw data, Memphis. Some of it’s accurate, some of it isn’t. It’s up to you to check it out, okay, bud?”

“Yeah, sure. Hey, thanks a lot,” Nick said. He hung up.

What should I do? I should do something.

He called Directory Information for the state of Arkansas, learned quickly that Bob Lee Swagger had no listed or unlisted phone number. He called the Arkansas State Police, and found that Bob Lee Swagger was not under investigation or indictment of any sort, but from that he learned Bob’s address, which was simply Rural Route 270, Blue Eye. Finally, he called Vernon Tell, who was the sheriff of Polk County, Arkansas, and after giving the FBI identification code, quickly got to the sheriff himself.

“Bob Lee? Bob Lee just lives up the mountain by himself. That’s all.”

“Any problems with him?”

“No, sir. Not the most sociable fellow in the world, no, sir. Bob Lee keeps to himself and don’t like people picking at him. But he’s a good man. He done his country proud in the war, and his daddy done his country proud and Earl’s daddy Lucas was actually the sheriff back in the twenties. They’re all old Polk County folks, and wouldn’t hurt nobody didn’t hurt them first.”

But it bothered Nick that Bob lived alone, away from society, with a lot of guns. The profile of the loner gunman had proved out too many times to be coincidental.

“Any drinking or substance abuse problems?”