“Mr. Scott, I can’t have it,” Shreck said. “We have extremely competent people for this sort of thing. It’s not for you. It’s far too dangerous.”
“It’s my house. I’m the bait,” he said. “So I’ll be the one.”
“The second he sees you in that wheelchair, he’ll know who you are.”
“Fine. It makes no difference.”
“Suppose he shoots you?”
“Then I’ve had a full life. Considering my limitations, I’ve had a wonderful life. If it happens, it’ll happen. But it won’t happen.”
“Why not?”
“This Marine. He’s not like that. He couldn’t pull his pistol and execute a man in a wheelchair no matter what crimes the man in the wheelchair has committed and no matter that he himself, when he hears the helicopters landing, will understand that he’s a dead man. He still won’t do it. I know him. I knew his type among the Southern shooters before I lost my legs. My father was a lot like him. No, he won’t do it. He’s sick with honor.”
Shreck had to concede that Scott was probably right. No less a Bob Lee Swagger expert than Dobbler had given his acquiescence to Scott’s decision.
But Shreck himself was curious about it.
He looked at the misshapen man, whose handsome skull now lolled idiotically to the left, as its owner had momentarily lost control of it.
“Why? What do you gain from it?”
Lon smiled from his wheelchair and Shreck shuddered. Lon’s even, distant, icy gaze bore into him. Outside he could hear the hammers and crowbars pounding and ripping as a work detail from Tiger Battalion tore down the wheelchair ramp into the house.
Finally, Lon Scott answered.
“I want the chance to look him in the eye. I want to share the moment with him. I want him to see me and know who I am and what I’ve done with what I was handed. I want some eye contact with him and see what electricity transfers between us in those last seconds when he knows he’s doomed. The great Bob Lee Swagger, who’s killed so many times. We should have this moment together, Bob and I. We are at the top of our profession.”
Shreck thought it would be quite a meeting; a summit of professional world-class killers, each strangely courageous.
“All right, Mr. Scott, but don’t do anything foolish. Don’t get cute with him. You let him come in, you remove your hand from the light cell, and you hide. Panther Battalion will be here in seconds; and we waste his ass. That’s all it’s about: killing him, before he kills us.”
“Fine.”
The surveillance was extremely soft, men without radios who had been instructed to stare at nothing, to make no eye contact, but just to hope that what they’d been sent to see would arrive. They were established at various roads into the area, at coffee shops, across from shopping malls, at restaurants.
And it did happen, late that night. A rented red Chevy pulled into the parking area outside the Danville Sheraton, and from the darkness on the roof of the Big Boy across the street a RamDyne spotter watched as a tall lanky man got out, stretched in the bright pool of the fluorescent light, then went into the motel office. He came out in a bit and moved the car. Then he and another man, husky and blond, walked up the outside stairs leading to the second-floor balcony that ran the full length of the building and into two adjacent rooms. The spotter watched as they came back out to the car, and was able to follow its passage a quarter of a mile to the Pizza Hut; then he called headquarters.
Within ten minutes, the Electrotek 5400 surveillance van pulled up discreetly across the street.
“You want me to try and get a tap into their rooms?” asked Eddie Nickles.
“Nah,” said Payne, not quite believing it was happening. “Nah, we don’t even know if it’s them.”
But it was. The Chevy pulled up and parked, and Payne watched as Bob Lee Swagger, big as life, got out of the car two hundred yards away. He’d recognize that lanky walk anywhere, with its faint hitch in one leg from the wound so long ago; he’d studied it for weeks, and dreamed about it for months.
Jesus, if he had a rifle with a good night scope. With infrared, he could do Bob right here as he ambled with his buddy toward the stairway up to the second-floor balcony, place the dot in the center of the back and squeeze. Blow his spine out. It would be over in the space of time it took the bullet to eat up the yardage.
But the only thing he had was his Remington sawed-off in the custom rig running down his left side, under his fatigue jacket.
“It’s him?” asked Eddie Nicoletta.
“Yes, goddammit,” Payne said sharply.
“Shit, man, they look like they don’t suspect a thing. Man, we could do it, Payne-O, you, me, the guys. Hit him hard and fast. Kick in the fuckin’ door, you let fly with your double-ought, I empty a clip, then it’s over, man. We’re fuckin’ home free, plus we’re heroes.”
“You think he don’t sleep with a piece cocked and locked? One tenth of a second after you’re through that door, you’re dead. The guy’s a fuckin’ champ, and you know it. Now shut up and let me think.”
He turned to the Electrotek technician.
“Can you put the directional microphone beam on their room?”
“No problem,” said the man. “If there’s not a lot of white noise in the air, we’ll get ’em big as day.”
Suddenly, the door to the young one’s room opened and he went running down the balcony and began banging excitedly on Swagger’s door.
“Fuckin’ guy’s excited, Payne-O.”
“Hurry up,” Payne said to the technician.
Swinging the long foam-covered boom, the technician sighted in, twisted knobs.
“Bring it up,” said Payne. “And get the tapes going.”
Two voices began to crystallize over the babble as the man worked his digitized control panel.
“ – more promising, really. I’m telling you.”
Yes, it was Memphis, emerging out of the background noise.
“I don’t know.”
Swagger now. The voice was bell-clear, its drawly Arkansas rhythms stretching it out.
“Look, listen to me on this just once, okay?”
Bob was silent.
“She said she’d brief me on the organization of the computerized files and the code word structure. That’s a start, at least. It’s better than chasing this wild-goose hope that there’s some information buried in diaries thirty years old.”
“Memphis, I don’t like going in without a backup gun around.”
“Listen to me, Bob, please, just this once. If we can get Annex B it gives us names. Not names like ‘Payne’ and ‘Shreck.’ Those are the up-front guys. Annex B gives us the real powers – the people who don’t carry the guns but figure it all out and give the orders.
There was something that sounded like a transmission breakup but then it came to Payne that Swagger was sighing.
“I hate going into any place blind,” he finally said.
“It’s an old man who wrote a book about a shooter who died in the fifties. You don’t need backup. What you need is a little patience. You’re going to have to sit there all afternoon and read those diaries. Maybe you’ll come up with something, maybe you won’t. But that was your idea, not mine. Meanwhile, I’ll get down to New Orleans, and meet with her and we’ll have some idea of what we’re up against. Then…then we can go to the Bureau. With the evidence, we can get indictments. We can bring them down, we can save our own lives. We can bring it off.”
But Bob just repeated, “Hate to go into any place blind, no backup.”
“He’s a cautious bastard, isn’t he,” said Nickles. “Scary son of a bitch.”
“That’s why he don’t make mistakes,” said Payne.
“I called,” Nick was saying. “I can get a cab to drive me to the Richmond airport. I can get an eight A.M. flight
