sporting crowd’s fever in the air. All agreed that, what with a moist and succulent summer, the Arkansas whitetails were everywhere. It would be, everybody said, a great year for a venison harvest.
But Nick, melancholy as always with the approach of action, ignored all this, went to the square, and sat himself down on a bench near a statue of some ancient Confederate hee-row in pigeon-shit-green copper. There he slumped, a glowering figure in jeans and a rough workman’s coat, his Beretta in a speed holster upside down under his left arm, not three inches from where his right hand just happened to fall.
He sat and he sat, and in time – he had no sense of it at all – a man came and sat with him. It was very smoothly done, but then everything these birds did they did smoothly. They were professionals.
“Memphis?”
“Yes.”
“Good. There,” said the man. “Can you see her?”
“No,” said Nick.
“See, the Plymouth Voyager van. The back door is open. She’s sitting there. Can you see her?”
He could. She was a lean middle-aged woman, handsome and composed, dressed in a sweater and jeans, and with a grave look on her face. There was something stiff in the way she sat.
Sitting next to her was Payne. He remembered Payne from the swamp, and the jaunty, relishing way he had interrogated Nick and got him ready to die. And he remembered Payne from Annex B: Payne, of the Sampul River.
“Yeah, I see them.”
“Do you want to talk to her?”
“No.”
“You have the cassette?”
“The cassette, you bet. But we’ve got more than that. I also managed to dig Annex B up.”
“Oh,” said Shreck.
“There’s enough to send you and Payne to the electric chair three times. Man, they’ll deep-fat fry you to a crisp.”
Shreck laughed.
“Not this time, sonny. Now you know how this has to happen. We need that cassette. Swagger thinks the woman is important. And we both know Bob has a stubborn, romantic streak, don’t we?”
Nick turned. He looked at Raymond F. Shreck for the first time. He wasn’t disappointed. He thought of the word
“You know if it were up to me, and I was still with the Bureau, I’d bust your ass so fast you’d leave your teeth in the street.”
Shreck smiled.
“Sonny, people have been trying to kill me for nearly forty years. They’re all dead and buried and I’m still here. So don’t try to scare me. It’s a little late in the day for that.”
He was wearing a Trebark camouflage suit and a blaze-orange baseball cap that said in gold sans serif across the front, AMERICAN HUNTER AND DAMN PROUD OF IT. His eyes met and held Nick’s as forcefully as an assault, and it was Nick who finally looked away.
“Tell Swagger if he crosses me, I kill the woman. Kill her dead. Cut her throat, watch her die, walk away. I’ve got tons of money and a thousand new identities I can slip into. I’m home free at any second if I want to be.”
“But you want that cassette. And those documents.”
“Frankly, I don’t really give a shit about the documents. But the cassette does have my face on it; it’s the only absolute record of my appearance. Life could be difficult if it got out. But the people I work for will be excited about the documents. So bring them too, or I kill the woman. Now this is how we play it.”
Nick listened intently as the colonel laid out the plan.
At the conclusion, Shreck handed over a map, a geodesic survey of the high Ouachitas, with the start point laid out, and a 40mm brass flare pistol.
“We don’t want the Nailer nailing us. We have to see him moving so we know he isn’t setting up somewhere above us to take us down from eight hundred yards.”
“Maybe you’ll have a guy to nail him,” Nick said.
“No way. We can’t nail him because he may not have the cassette and Annex B with him. He’s got insurance, I’ve got insurance. Mutual deterrence. It kept the world alive for fifty years. I’ll set it up so the final exchange is in the wide-open spaces, way beyond any rifle range.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And when the exchange is made, we walk away. It’s over. We’re out of business, but so is he. He has his woman and his freedom. The Feds think he’s dead. He can have his whole life back if he lets it lie. He’s had a hell of a war, but the war is over now. It’s time for him to go someplace in Montana, where beaucoup deer and antelope roam, and just shoot and fuck all day long.”
Toward late afternoon of that same day, a banal van left a motel and drove to a civilian hangar at a small airport twenty miles south of Little Rock. It contained three men: one of them was Eddie Nickles and another was a dour figure with the head and shoulders of a Greek god and a broken body, who sat alone with his rifle in a wheelchair in the back. He spoke to no one. It made Eddie Nickles nervous.
If Bob scared him, this guy scared him too, especially in that he wasn’t even whole. He had the aura of death to him, that was for sure; he was like a butcher or an embalmer.
“Guy fuckin’ scares the shit out of me,” Nickles said to his companion, one of the morose survivors of Panther Battalion’s assault on Bone Hill, another lad who’d lost his sand.
At the hangar, they pulled up next to a DC-3, glistening silver. ARKANSAS CENTRAL AIRLINES it said in green art deco print under the windows. A double cargo door had been opened two thirds down the fuselage toward the tail.
Nickles got out, went over and conferred briefly with the pilot. Then he leaned into the open cargo bay and saw the ATV, a three-wheeled Honda with soft fat studded tires for gobbling up the rough land and steep inclines of the wilderness; it had been staked to a board with heavy yellow rope; a bulky pack that he knew was a cargo parachute was lashed to it.
“Everything okay, chief?” he called to the cargo master still checking the rigging.
“Thumbs up, Bud,” said the man.
Nickles went back to the van.
“Sir, I’m going to load you now,” he said.
“Don’t touch me. Get the ramp down and stand aside.”
“Yes, sir.”
Nickles pulled the ramp out of the van. He stepped back and watched as the man leaned over and took the blocks out from under his wheelchair tires. Then he forcefully rocketed himself to the edge, shot down the ramp and headed to the plane.
The man wore a black baseball cap and had smeared his face with black and green paint. He wore black boots and a black and green camouflage tunic. The rifle, encased in a plastic sheath against the damp weather, lay in his lap; he had a Browning Hi-Power pistol in a black shoulder holster.
“Okay,” Nickles yelled up to the cargo master. “We need the winch now.”
The crewman swung out the device and with an electric purr, the wire descended from its pulley, bearing a hook.
“I have this harness for you, sir,” said Nickles.
The man looked at him and Nickles recognized with a stab the fury and humiliation in him; to be that helpless among all these robust men! But, uncomplainingly, the man slipped it on and cinched it tight. His jaw trim, his eyes set, he adjusted himself to the indignity of being loaded aboard the plane like a haunch of beef.
Lon was free. He fell in darkness feeling the wind pounding at him. For just a second he was a boy again, stalking the hills of Connecticut twenty miles west of New Haven with his father. The sun was a bronze smear; the
