“There’s a fifty in it for you.”
“Okay, but if a cop comes – ”
“I am a cop,” said Nick, reflexively, then wished it were still true.
The driver backed up the ramp, executed a Kamikaze-like 240 and managed to get them, after some honking and screeching, headed down Veterans. The Palm Court was the third motel past the turnoff.
“Pull in here,” said Nick.
The driver obeyed.
“You want me to – ”
“Just wait a minute.”
Nick sat, thinking.
Dump it. Go into the motel before they spot him. Get a room near the Coke machines in case they’ve got electronic penetration capacity, call Nick Memphis, and then wait.
He doesn’t know they’ve got an Electrotek 5400. He doesn’t know they’ll hear his call. He doesn’t know that when the knock on the door comes, and he says who’s there, and the answer comes “Nick Memphis,” he’s letting his own death squad in.
No matter, Nick thought.
The key thing is, he’s got to hide his package.
Something else came to Nick.
Eduardo, you’ve been hit now, you’ve been whacked by guys with axes, they’ve cut your fucking heart out. But somehow – Jesus, man, you had a set of balls on you – somehow you crawl into the bathroom and on the linoleum you write a message in your own blood. No, not the name of your killers, but something else.
You write – ROM DO.
What’s it mean? What’s the message?
ROM DO.
“I want you to go back to the airport where you picked me up, and then repeat this journey.”
“You kidding?”
“I am not.”
“Okay, pal. Hope you got a big expense account.”
The cabby swirled the vehicle around and returned to the terminal.
“Don’t stop. Just follow the same route.”
Nick watched the scenery roll by.
Along here you were made, he thought. You looked up, you saw a car following you that wasn’t a taxi, you hit the panic button. You saw them, maybe reading their profiles through the windshield or maybe recognizing the vehicle. But it had to be here, along this dull, limited access road, with no escape, no place to hide, not even a place to stop.
They reached the parking lot of the motel again.
“Okay, pal?”
“Shut up,” said Nick.
He sat there, trying to think.
ROM DO.
ROM DO.
He looked around for ROM DO. But the only words he could see from the parking lot were inside the cab. JERRY NILES, it read, in caps, up there on the sun visor.
Dobbler felt absurd. Here he was among country types in the very small and rude town of Blue Eye, Arkansas, a few hours west of Hot Springs. There was nothing friendly about the place. What had happened to the famous American small-town hospitality? People looked at him sullenly. It was one of those one-horse places, a scabby, peeling town square around a Confederate monument. A banner floated above the main street, proclaiming to all the world THE BUCKS ARE STOPPED HERE. Hunting. Dobbler shivered. He felt trapped in this godforsaken nightmare, sealed in by the mountains everywhere he looked, towering claustrophobically over the town.
The mountains scared him. Heavily encrusted with pines and on this rainy morning shrouded in mist, they looked as if they could kill you. He didn’t want to go up there but he had to. That’s where Bob would be.
Dobbler really had no idea what to do. With the cassette in his briefcase, he knew the only safety lay here. That is, if he could find Bob Lee Swagger. No one else could stop them. That was the irony. In America, with its FBI and its hundreds of police forces, no one could stop them except Bob Lee Swagger, the man with the rifle.
If these people knew anything they weren’t talking, especially to an outsider like him, in his lumpy suit, with his eastern beard. They probably thought he was gay. He’d better watch himself. High school boys might beat him to death with shovels or festoon him in a dress and drag him behind a pickup truck through town to the boundary of Polk County. But he had to have a plan. There had to be a plan.
He had thought he might go back to the now-notorious Bob sites, the burned church, Bob’s own still-sealed-off trailer eight miles out of town or the Polk County Health Complex, where Bob had so flummoxed the FBI – and RamDyne. But when he’d visited all these places that morning, he’d found them returned to banality, their brush with glory and the national media completely over.
Maybe guns were the hook. He had gone to a gun store on the edge of town and tried to start up a conversation. This was a big mistake. The owner looked at him as if he were from Mars, and asked him rudely if he wanted to see something or what.
“That one,” he said nervously.
The man took a large rifle off the rack, opened the bolt, and handed it over.
It was very heavy.
“Is this like the one Bob Lee Swagger used?” Dobbler asked.
The old man’s eyes narrowed. Then he allowed, “Sir, in these parts some folks don’t think Bob done what they all say he done. They say if Bob had taken a shot at the president, we’d be havin’ ourselves a new president. Now that rifle’s a Savage 110 in thirty-ought-six. Are you serious about buying or do you just want to cuddle on up to it and pretend you’re Bob Lee Swagger?”
This hostility had frightened Dobbler; he handed the rifle back and fumbled his way out of the shop. Now it was three hours later and all he’d done since was to wander around foolishly, wishing to hell he knew what to do.
Dobbler looked up into the mountains. They all looked the same to him, menacing. It reminded him of his first glance into the yard at Norfolk State, the terror and vulnerability he felt. He resolved to develop some steel. He resolved to be courageous. He determined to go up to the mountains, yes, to go up there and somehow face the man he had to face. Tomorrow.
Dobbler got into his rented car and drove back to the motel, feeling utterly beaten. He went to his room, realizing he’d wasted his first day entirely and that it wouldn’t take Shreck and his goons long to figure out where he’d run to. He had no place else to go.
He got out of the car and walked to his room. He fumbled with the lock and stepped into darkness. He wished he had stopped to buy something to eat, feeling suddenly feeble.
He turned on the light.
“Hello, little buddy,” said Bob the Nailer. “Believe you and I have some talking to do.”
He was afraid she’d have a date or a car pool arrangement, or something. But Nick was lucky as he sat parked just across the street from the Federal Building on Loyola at 5:35 P.M. Sally came out of the building alone, crossed the street, went into the Payless Parking Garage, and emerged three minutes later in a gold Honda Civic.
