Point Of Impact

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?”

“Would you come in here, please?”

“Sure.”

Nick left the bull pen and headed into the little office out of which Howard was running the operation.

“Nick – ”

Howard did not ask him to sit down, not a good sign.

“Nick, just what is it you’ve been doing?”

“Ah, well, you know, mainly monitoring the reports on Bob’s movements as they’re routed here from Washington, and coordinating with the local officers and keeping contact with our surveillance teams sited in the area, and monitoring the readiness of our quick-react teams, you know, Howard, trying to stay alert and keep our readiness high and – ”

“I’ve just had a very irate call from Ben Prine in D.C. The head of Cointelpro.”

“Yes.”

“He says a request originated from this office concerning access to Bureau files on a private security firm called RamDyne over my authorization. I didn’t authorize anything. Do you know about this?”

Nick wasn’t an adept liar. A tide of phlegm rose in his throat and he was stunned at his own sudden loss of confidence and clarity of thought.

“It was only to save you time, Howard. I know you’ve got your big picture to worry about, so I just routed the request through your office with your name…uh, it’s just a kind of…”

He ran out of words.

Howard glowered at him.

“What do you think you’re doing, Nick? What game are you playing?”

Nick bumbled into a confused account of his investigation of the Eduardo Lanzman affair, the source who’d told him Lanzman was Salvadoran, his idea that a high-tech electronic eavesdropping van may have been used, his clumsy discovery of the mysterious RamDyne firm that seemed to have a line on such expensive equipment. He rambled on semicoherently about the coincidence of a Salvadoran agent maybe being killed by the Salvadoran secret police only weeks immediately before the suspiciously “accidental” murder of a Salvadoran archbishop despised by certain elements of his own regime. But he saw that he wasn’t making much progress with Howard.

“I tried all the usual channels and came up with nothing. Like, nothing. So I tried to show some initiative and…” He trailed off lamely.

“Nick,” said Howard, a deep sadness coming over his bland face, “I’m very disappointed in you. Why didn’t you come to me with all this?”

“Well, Howard, actually, um, I did and you said – ”

“Nick, we have an open-and-shut case on Bob Lee Swagger. We have means, motive and opportunity. We have some circumstantial ballistics evidence. We have witnesses, including, I might add, yourself. Nick, what on earth are you doing? Whose side are you on?”

“Howard, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you about the ballistics. I’m wondering if it’s technically