Point Of Impact

against the door pillar. And then they were still.

It took Nick a second or two to realize he was alive. He heard the ticking of the truck and shook his head, touching it, tasting salt as blood ran into his mouth. His eyes shot open. He lay half in, half out of the vehicle, which had come to a twisted rest in a tangle of trees at the end of the long plunge down the mountain. Up top, he could see the police cars halted and a couple of troopers, guns in hands, edging down the steep slope. A chopper hovered above and then another one swooped low overhead, its roar deafening. Nick turned and watched as a whole cavalry charge of police cars roared across the flatland at them, still a good three minutes distant.

Where was Bob?

He blinked, shook his head, pulled himself free. His hand shot down to his ankle and he unlimbered the.38 Agent. Where was he?

Then he heard a grunt and looked back through the cab to see Bob lifting the body bag with Mike’s corpse out of the truck bed. There was blood on his face too, and when he got the body to him, Nick saw him pause; there was a tenderness in him Nick would never have wired into his Bob Lee Swagger profile.

Then Bob spun and began to lurch away.

Nick had him.

“Stop!” He thrust out the.38, cupping it in two hands, as he thumbed back the hammer. He had its cylinder primed with Glaser safety slugs. At this range the bird-shot-loaded bluetips generated seventy-three percent one- shot stops.

“Goddammit, freeze!” Nick boomed again. He lurched forward, blinking blood from his eyes, and feeling himself begin to tremble like a child in the cold rain without a coat. He set himself against the canted hood of the truck, locking his elbows, sliding into a sight picture. It was a good hold; he had Bob, center mass, in the notch of the rear sight and the nub of the front.

Bob himself blinked away some blood as he studied on this new situation.

“Put the dog down and your hands behind your neck and get to your fucking knees, Swagger. You do some speed stuff on me and I swear to Christ I blow your spine out. These are Glasers.”

“Hell, Pork,” Bob said, “if you were going to shoot me, it’d be done by now.”

Then the sonovabitch winked at him! And he turned and began to amble off, dog under one arm, Winchester carbine under the other.

Shoot him! Nick ordered himself. The trigger was a curse against his finger; he yearned to expel it, to end all his failures.

But shooting a man takes one of two things: an overwhelming fear of one’s own death, which Nick did not have in the least; or conviction. It turned out he lacked this component as well.

He didn’t miss vertically; he missed horizontally, Nick found himself thinking as he stood there, watching Bob run away.

Bob got to the field and shot across the meadow a hundred yards or so to what Nick now saw was your picture-postcard country cemetery under a tall stand of ancient trees, hard by a doddering wooden church. He watched as Bob vaulted the stone wall, and there among the teetering, blackened gravestones set the dog down in what must have been a perfectly sized hole already cut from the earth, and snatched up a shovel that must have been part of the master plan. With seven strong strokes, he heaped dirt upon it. In the next half-second, he’d scooped up the Winchester carbine and headed into the church.

Nick heard the cars closing in now, but they would not make it. Bob was inside the church and suddenly out the door skeedaddled a class of black children, running desperately, even as the first state cruiser arrived, and its occupants, Magnums and shotguns aimed and cocked, took cover behind it. Then came a second, a third and then ten more, then twenty; a whole caravan of lawmen was at the church in less than a minute, ready and waiting, when the last occupant emerged, a stooped black gentleman.

They got him, Nick thought.

Someone was screaming in his ear.

“You didn’t shoot! You had him, goddammit,” the voice said. He turned. It was a tough-looking state police sergeant. Behind him his buddy radiated contempt at Nick.

I’ll have to pay for that one too.

“Goddamn,” said another state policeman, holding aloft Bob’s.45 as he found it in the cab. “It’s fucking empty!”

Nick heard a bullhorn demanding surrender. There was just one second of silence. Then the sound of shots rose against the sky, and Nick turned in horror. The lawmen were shooting gas grenades into the church. He watched as the heavy shells sailed through and the cottony white fog began to steam through the broken windows. A tendril of smoke leaped out, and a flame, and then another from another window, and the church began to burn.

Jack Payne stood outside the van with his binoculars. Overhead a TV news helicopter zipped by and shortly a TV news van came screeching down the road toward the mass of flashing lightbars and the howl of sirens. Jack could hear the troopers over the radio intercept from inside the van.

“Shit, it’s going up, that dry timber.”

“Is he coming out?”

“Don’t see a damned thing. I’m gonna – ”

“That’s a negative, Victor Michael Thirty-three, you stay put and keep those eyes open. Anybody seen the goddamned feds?”

“They’re coming, Charlie.”

At that moment four black cars raced by Jack, hell-bent for the church.

But it was too late. Jack watched the smoke, floating upward in a lazy column. Through the glass, he could see the flames.

“Wow.”

It was Eddie Nickles, beside him.

“Shit, they burned him up. Man, he’s all fucking toasty now.”

“Shut up,” said Jack. He didn’t know why, he felt like hitting the younger man.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Shreck watched the church burn. When it was burned to the ground, he hit REWIND, and watched it burn again.

And each time, an earnest television correspondent repeated the news breathlessly.

“Behind me is the funeral pyre of the notorious attempted presidential assassin Bob Lee Swagger, whom Arkansas State Police officers and FBI agents pursued to this bucolic spot after his dramatic attempt to kidnap his dog’s body. Despite the lawmen’s requests that he come out, Swagger opened fire on the officers. A tear gas canister ignited the old structure into conflagration. The church has been burning for two hours now. In the morning, officials say, it will be cool enough to sift through the ashes for the body of Bob Lee Swagger.”

Shreck saw holocaust. The flames gobbled the structure from the roof downward. They danced madly through it, issuing a lazy, smeary column of smoke.

He hit REWIND again.

It was dark in the room. Three or four of the men from Jack Payne’s Operations unit were in the room, and Dobbler, making a rare appearance outside his cell-like little office, had slipped in, too.

“Play it again,” said Shreck.

The TV people, in Blue Eye on rumors of federal activity and monitoring the police channels on the radio, had gotten there efficiently; they had it from a variety of angles. From a helicopter it looked like a funeral pyre: Shreck could see the church standing in the devotional ring of police vehicles a little to one side of the copse of trees and the old graveyard. It throbbed with flames.

“Nobody could get out of that alive,” somebody said in the dark.

“Man, he’s fried.”

Then Shreck spoke.