G-Man

1

Wasn’t much. Wasn’t a thing, really. Trees, an abundance of them, all green and dense, so thick you couldn’t see the forest for them. And closer in, the road. Gravel, not important enough to wear so important a name as Highway 154. That sounded like, well, civilization, and out here, in the boondocks of the boondocks, wasn’t civilization, just gravel and trees?

Charles anchored the line. Captain Frank put him there because he wanted boys he trusted at key spots. Frank wasn’t the sort to leave much to chance, which is why, fifty-one men later, he was still alive (though he’d been hit seventeen times). So that is why Charles sat in full man-hunting stillness in the bush, twenty feet from the gravel. Next to him, though invisible, was the Dallas policeman Ted Hinton with a big Browning gun, and then some of the Louisiana boys (Charles hadn’t caught their names), then Manny Gault, another trusted friend of the captain’s, another Louisiana fellow, and finally, anchoring the other end, the captain himself. They all sat or crouched, aspiring to different styles of stillness and silence, clearly men on the stalk, though some were born to it and others merely pretending they knew what they were up to. A cough, a slap at a mosquito, a hawked gob of phlegm, a scratched itch, a shuffle, all muted, kept in close, all of them with hats at ears and brims nearly to eyes, after what most guessed and some knew was the gunman’s style.

You’d have thought this posse was off on a raid in the Great War, so heavily armed it was, and Charles should know, having led many a raid in the Great War. Then, as now, he had a .45 Government Model in a shoulder holster, but not as then a Model 97 short-barreled Winchester riot gun leaning next to the tree and another of Mr. Browning’s fine creations, a semi-auto Model 8 in .35 caliber, in his hands. It held five big rounds and could be fired quick, as the trigger went back on it, a skill that took some practice, though with Charles’s gift for the firearm, not as much practice as with some others.

But Charles would have been fearsome without the hardware. He was a tall man, seemingly assembled from blades. He was forty-three, had a hard, long, angular blade of a body, a blade of a nose, two cheekbones that looked as if they could cut steel, and was long everywhere else, arms, fingers, legs, even toes. If you could meet his eyes — few could — they were black anthracite, and when they fixed and narrowed on something, that something was about to get a hole in it. Though it would be another hot, airless, dusty Louisiana day — a July day by Arkansas standards, an August day by Chicago or Washington standards — he wore a three-piece suit of thick gray wool herringbone, a black tie cinched tight, as it always was, a sheriff’s star on his lapel, and a pair of brown high-top boots. A brown felt fedora was pulled low on his face, as if to shield the world from the force of his eyes. He looked like a funeral director, which was close, as he was really a funeral provider.

“See anything there, Sheriff?” came a softly phrased question through the bush. Hinton, who couldn’t stay true to manhunt discipline and had squirmed and chattered the last few hours as if he were on the beach or at the bar.

“Not a goddamned thing,” said Charles.

Another of Charles’s freakish attributes was his vision, held by all to be unusually sharp. It was perhaps the key to his shooting, and it was another reason the captain wanted him farthest out. His job wasn’t merely to shoot well but to see well; the captain counted on him to catch a whisper of dust from a long distance to announce that a car was coming, about to crest a low hill, under the guidance of a fast and skillful driver, which would mean the commencement of the day’s work and the conclusion of a long and grueling ordeal.

Charles scanned for dust again, saw no disturbance in the atmosphere, and wondered if this one was going to go south like all the other ambushes. This pair of peckerwoods was hard to figure because they were such creatures of childish whimsy, going here and there as the mood took them. It was like hunting not sparrows but a particular pair of sparrows, trying to guess where they’d be when the sparrow brain was not advanced enough to encompass any notion of the future.

“Maybe we ought to pull tail. Could use me a nice iced tea. My mouth’s full of dust ’n’ grit.”

“You just hold still,” said Charles. “The captain gives the orders and we sit until he tells us we don’t sit no more.”

He scanned again. Trees, trees, trees. Across the gravel road, an old truck and an old man. But it was all ambush theater, a decoy to bring in the scrawny sparrows. The truck was on a jack and its tire lay in the middle of the gravel. The old man lounged on the running board. His name was Ivy and he was father to a boy who ran with the pip-squeaks. All this was happening by arrangement with and through him. In exchange for getting his boy Henry off on certain Texas charges, the old man had volunteered to keep the man hunters up on the ramblings of the outlaw pair and to act as tethered goat in the actual ambush if it came.

Charles was an Arkansawyer. He was hero of the Great War in two armies, one Canadian, one American. He was the winner of the famous First National of Blue Eye Gunfight in 1923, when he had killed three city boys with heavy guns who’d wanted to take a small-town bank for liquor money. He was the father of two boys, each one more of a mystery than the other. He was the sheriff of Polk County, Arkansas. He was here in secret at the captain’s request because the captain felt gun time was near and he wanted men with him who’d done the work before and none were better at it than Sheriff Charles F. Swagger.

It was about then, getting on to 9 a.m., he saw it. Just a trace of drift against a far-off green wall of trees, nothing really there, but to his sharp vision, it was bold as a dancing girl.

“Car bearing this way, coming down fast.”

“Yes sir,” said Ted, with a slight tweak to his voice indicating a spurt of emotion, and he heard Ted turn and say, “Coming in. Coming in. Get yourselves ready.”

For just a second it sounded like they were in a factory, not on the edge of the woods. That was because of clicks, clacks, whacks, cranks, and snaps — all gun business. Safeties came off, bolts were released, slides thrown, levers and pump actions jacked to lift .30-30s or twelve-gauge buck into chambers. There was probably also, if you listened close enough, the low hiss of breath, sucked hard into lungs for the enriching force of the oxygen, being now expelled as each man, seeing action on the come, tried to breathe his way toward control of the yips that coursed through hands and arms and the fear that suddenly lubricated each thought and breath. Lots of guns would be fired, lots of lead in the air, and no one could predict with any certainty what would happen yet.

“Ivy, get your goddamned old scrawny ass up and start dinking with the jack” came the captain’s order to his tethered old goat, and the old man stood, his face suddenly acquiring the gravity of its own fear, and then hustled over to the jack and pretended to be making adjustments.

“You boys, now, you wait to my command while I check to see when Ivy breaks free of our line of fire,” the captain explained casually, he and Charles the only two among them whose heartbeat hadn’t increased a thump. “And then again, maybe it ain’t them, only the Baptist minister up to say words over a dead Negro. We don’t need no Mexican hat dance like them federals at Little Bohemia.”

No one wanted that: the wrong people shot and killed or wounded, federal officers downed, and all gangsters gotten away into the cold Midwestern night. It was a famous fiasco, a warning for all who carried steel, lead, and a badge.

Sounds now of men squirming in the brush, acquiring a tension-engineered shooting position. Most chose to go to one knee, some tucking foot under ass. A slouchy feed bag like Frank probably didn’t think too much of such a thing and just made himself comfortable. Charles went into an athlete’s crouch, because he would be the only one breaking cover. His job, now that the early sighting was done, was to rotate around the vehicle to get shots in from the quarter angle, then close and finish the job with his Government Model if needed. If by some strange chance either bad one made it out of the car on this side, Charles would handle the last applications of rough justice, issuing quick dispatch. His long finger went to the safety lever of the Model 8, which was a gigantic thing (another reason your gun-savvy peace officers liked it, as it required no fumbling with a nubbin of a button when lead filled the air), and slid it smoothly down. He tucked the rifle under his shoulder and coiled the necessary muscles to break from cover, circle fast and low behind, and come up on the other side.

Now it was Ted Hinton’s show. He was a car expert and always up on the latest Detroit issue. As soon as details became clear, Ted would know if it was a 1934 Cordoba-gray V-8 Ford 730 DeLuxe. That seemed to be the car — these folks traded up whenever it was possible as the fellow was, like Ted, a fan of Detroit’s latest — which would be the final go-ahead. Then it fell to them to halt at Old Man Ivy’s flat tire to give assistance that would put them flat in the beaten zone that the captain had laid out.

Charles watched it come. The car pulled a screen of dust behind it, for the boy behind the wheel knew what he was doing and was good at it, loving the roar of the engine, the buzz of the vibrations, the smell of the gasoline. The car was gray, all right, and as sleek as Mr. Ford could turn out, a blur as it unzipped the dust off the still gravel bed, now and then dipping out of sight but never able to escape the marker of its roiling signature.

“That’s it, by god!” screamed Ted, way too loud, for a bubble of excitement in his lungs had pushed his voice up a register and he signified the end of his sentence with a loud, involuntary gulp as he swallowed excess spit and saliva.

“On my shot,” the captain reminded, and at that, the car — its occupants having now seen Old Man Ivy and his tire-distress diorama — had gone to gentle brake and begun its slowdown as it drew near. It was a hundred feet, fifty feet, twenty-five, and then, as close as the end of his nose, it scooted by Charles, slow enough for him to see the slouch of the boy driving it. Lord God, he was smallish. Looked like Our Gang, scrawny, cowlicks pointing this way and that, but, wanting to be grown-ups, all dressed out in grown-up clothes, even to his cinched-tight Sunday-school tie.

As the car eased to a halt, Charles stepped out, low, to get to his duty position, hearing the boy yell through the window in a surprisingly mellow voice, “Say there, Dad Ivy, what’s the problem?”

So Charles had his head cranked down the left side of the vehicle when all the shooting commenced. There was a first shot, but the second and third and fourth, out to the hundred fiftieth, came on so strong, like a blizzard wind, there was no sense of independence to the notes. Ted’s Browning gun was closest to Charles, thus loudest, manufacturing hell in the form of noise, flash, and lead. Ted just dumped the mag, loosing all twenty .30-06s in about a second, and possibly even hit the target a time or so. Meanwhile, wincing, Charles had a glimpse as the other five all opened up, and he could see the lead in the air, not palpably as singular objects but as a kind of wavering disturbance, as it sped through and pushed the atmosphere aside in its hunger to strike flesh. The wind of lead blew straight from the cemetery into the vehicle and through it, and where the bullets struck — seemed to be everywhere at once — they lit into the car hard, banging it, causing it to wobble, ripping and twisting the metal to slivers and craters, powdering the glass into diamond spray, all the damage heaped on in what seemed but a fraction of the first second.

Charles continued his scuttle, came up just at the right rear fender and got a good look into the cab at the two kids. They lounged behind a smear of fracture that occluded the windshield, smoke rising from themselves but also from it seemed a dozen punctures in the car’s dashboard, and they were festooned with metal shards torn from the Ford body, dusted with the atoms of glass where the windows were blown out and had the stillness of the death that already afflicted them. They had that rag-doll look that the dead find so comfortable, all akimbo and beyond caring, on the loll and only obedient to gravity.

But at that moment, by the rule of farce, a dead foot must have fallen from the brake pedal, and even as the men in the brush were slamming reloads into their now empty hot guns, the car began to creep ahead.

In a move that was pure gunman’s instinct, Charles threw the rifle to his shoulder to find the front sight just where it should be — that is, sharp and clear against the fuzzier outline of the boy’s head slumped back against the seat — and with an unconsciously perfect trigger pull, he fired a big .35 through the glass, hazing it to spiderweb for a dead-center hit, knocking bone fragments and brain spew everywhere; then, even coming off the stout recoil, he rotated and put a second one into the back of the seat on the other side, against which, dead or alive, the girl had to slump, and where it hit, it kicked up a big cloud of dust and debris, to add to the toxins afloat in the air.

By this time the deputies had gotten their pieces reloaded or picked up new ones, and as the car drifted slowly down the road, they came out of the brush, gun-crazed, and launched another but completely pointless fusillade, rocking and ripping the car still more. Only Captain Frank did not participate, for he knew the day’s business was finished.

The car came to a rest on the left side of the road, pitched toward but not quite in a ditch. It looked like a piece of metallic lace, a Ford doily, so penetrated and violated by the firepower spent against it. Smoke still rose from the engine and some whispered from the interior, where the corpses, still warm to the touch, lay. Meanwhile, a fog of burned powder and carbon residue crept heavily about everything, bringing tears to eye and bitterness to tongue and dust to lips.

The boys approached and peered in at their handiwork, though Charles had little curiosity, as he’d seen much of such human ruination in his life of duty. A man shot through the center of the forehead looks the same, whether in a trench in France or a Ford V-8 motorcar in Louisiana.

“They ain’t goin’ nowhere,” someone said.

“No siree. Them eggs is broke.”

“Don’t look so big now.”

“Ain’t nothing but kids. Little wet rats, or dogs. Chipmunks, maybe.”

“Looks like we done killed little Spanky,” said another. “Only thing left is the haircut.”

“The boy ain’t wearin’ no shoes.”

“Sure tore-up. Musta hit ’em a thousand times.”

Charles knew it to be so: it was death for Bonnie and Clyde.

A few minutes had passed, as the men eased themselves into coolness from the heat of the shooting and the frenzy. Lassitude now came over them, and nobody felt like doing much though there was much to be done. Someone had to head back to Gibsland and make the phone calls. And get the circus rolling. Someone had to pull all the guns from the shattered car, and from a quick look-see, it had been confirmed the two bandits traveled ready to take on an army. But all that was still in the future.

“Make sure you boys all get a good look,” said Captain Frank. “Go on, git close and memorize the details. See what we done here today. You don’t want to think back in twenty years and realize you never got a look. And if you have any doubts about shooting first, take a gander at the two shotguns Clyde had next to his legs and the .45 on Bonnie’s lap. Give ’em the chance and they’d have gone down hard and taken as many of us with ’em as they could point a muzzle at.”

Then he came over to Charles and drew him aside.

“Sure you don’t want to be part of this, Charles? It’s going to be a famous gunfight in its time, even if it was just like hosing out a steel drum. You have a chance here to step into legend. Can’t hurt none. The newspapers loved these two ever since they seen that picture of the gal with a cheroot.”

“Nah,” said Charles. “Thanks, Frank, but it ain’t to my taste. Besides, the Arkansas people want their sheriff at home, doing his job, locking up drunks, not out on ambuscade with Frank Hamer.”

“Okay, we’ll keep your name out of the papers. You’re steady through it all, Charles. As I said before, if there’s going to be lead thrown, I want Charles Swagger on my side.”

2

Lord God, how did I last this long?

He was old, so old. He was seventy-one. Better off than most, but not so lucky as others, he did feel diminished in small ways. The nightmares were worse, even if sleep harder to come by and, in the morning, harder to shake. Seemed always cold too, dammit, after a life spent in largely hot places. Each joint had its own separate melody of pains, aches, squeaks, cracks, and pops. He’d had a hip replacement recently for the third time and it had healed up just fine, and was his strongest, smoothest-operating pulley now. It was like an old enemy becoming a new friend. Stiffness came and went, and when it decided to visit, it was a plague, gnawing him everywhere, like a tribe of rats. It turned his first few steps, infirm and crazed in balance, into a comedy of lurching and grunting to stay upright. That wasn’t all: he dropped things too, all the time, but by the time he dropped them, he’d forgotten what he’d picked them up for in the first place. He fell, not a lot, but now and then. Hadn’t broke anything yet, but in downtown Boise last year he went down hard on his left arm, and if the doc said it wasn’t broken, it sure pretended to be for three months afterward.

The air still tasted good, though. He’d sometimes breathe in deep, suck as much down as possible, just glorying in the hard, cold rush against his lungs, feeling them inflate gloriously, and that was a pleasure and a half.

Other pleasure: old friends. A loyal wife who refused to take him too seriously or be shocked by what he said. Two kids flourishing as adults, and the youngest, his stepdaughter, off at some place in the East called Princeton. She was a smart one, that girl.

And the money. He’d gotten rich — rich, at least by non-oil standards — which meant warmth and provision against the cold and enough money left over for ammo. He had seven layup barns in four states, and affiliations with more than three dozen large-animal veterinarians across those states. Partly it was based on the rumor that he’d been a marine hero (true), but mainly it was because he never had any energy for chicanery, and told the truth in the simplest terms possible, and people out here seemed to like that. More, after resisting for years and years, he’d finally sold the hunk of land his people had lived on and off of in Arkansas for more than two centuries, since some fellow and his pregnant wife had come over the mountains at the tail end of the Revolutionary War. The land he’d acquired and added to over the years sure paid off for the seventh-removed grandson. Bob had never thought of it as an investment, just a hunk of his past of which he couldn’t quite let go. But an investment it sure turned out to be: the money it brought in was substantial — more than substantial. It meant he could afford all sorts of cool things now, the only problem being that he didn’t want them anymore.

So now there was only one question left and it was: what happens from now until?

So far, nothing.

Enough had happened, he supposed, and so nothing was just fine. Nothing meant a three-hour ride on land that was all his, another hour of horse care, then three or four hours in his shop working on this or that rifle project (this year: .375 CheyTac at over thirty-five hundred yards, and, damn, if he didn’t own over thirty-five hundred yards’ worth of Idaho on which to find out what it could do). Then on to the email thing, for conversations with old friends the world over, including reporters and retired sergeants, Russian gangsters, Japanese Self-Defense Forces NCOs, FBI agents, a thousand or so former marines, relatives of the too many dead he had loved and seen die, and such forth and so on. It was just fine. Except that it wasn’t.

“You need something,” his wife said. “You were never one for aimlessness. Give Swagger a mission and he’s the best there is. Let him drift and he’ll end up in the drunk tank.”

“I have a mission,” he said. “I mean to wear out the rockers on this damned chair.”

He might just make it too. Day in, day out, the magic hour, five to six, he sat and rocked on the porch, watched the changes come to the prairie, the seasons change, the mountains in the distance acquire and shed their snow, the leaves swirl and disappear and then magically regenerate six months later. Sometimes there was ice and wind, sometimes mellow breezes and the smell of summer flowers. The wind was persistent, the deer and the antelope played, and the skies were cloudy most days, but in the good way of showing off towers of fanciful architecture, full of turrets and bridges and secret passageways, all lit to glowing by the sun as it settled toward the horizon. It was all good. Really, it was.

I don’t need a thing, he told himself. My life is finished, my accomplishments accomplished, I am too old to do a damned thing but watch my children and my estate grow, even if none of the kids seemed yet to notice a considerable sum would come their way.

But she would not buy it.

“Not something dangerous, not with the guns or anything. You’ve been shot at a lot and mostly missed.”

When she said “mostly,” every one of the little squibs of scar tissue he wore like chain mail across his pelt perked up and issued a communiqué.

“But a goal, a thing to do, that would give you pleasure in the work and in the finishing, that would tie a bow on it, and so you could meet your father up there and him saying, ‘You did me honor.’”

“I am too old and too tired to start anything new.”

“You feel old and tired because you have nothing new to do, not in spite of it. Find the project and you will find the energy.”

“I’ve seen enough of the world. Besides, the airports these days are like refugee camps.”

“No travel. I think you should write a book.”

“Oh, that’s a good one. My grammar breaks down every ten minutes and I revert to mountain English and you want me to write a book?”

“Any man who can use ‘revert’ in a sentence can write a book.”

“Nobody’s interested in my stuff. If they’s interested, they wouldn’t believe it. If they believed it, they’d arrest me. I’m lucky as it is to be on this side of the iron bars with all my enemies dead and all my debts, money and justice, paid in full. It’s time to settle back and read some books, not write one.”

“I was thinking of what has given you the most pleasure over the past few years, apart from your children. And that is when you got back from Russia and you and Reilly had dug out the truth about that woman sniper and what a hero she was. That made you happy.”

“Still does,” he said, because it did. “She’s a real hero, not a lucky phony like me, she deserves the glory. Now she’s got her face on a Russian stamp, and she’s the subject of Reilly’s book. Yep, that one still feels good. But… You have to say, it was a stroke of luck Reilly finding her. Don’t think I’m going to run into that one again.”

“My idea: your father. He was a great man. You love him still. His story needs to be told. Sheriff’s son in dirt-poor Arkansas, goes on to be a five-invasion marine and receive the Medal of Honor at Iwo Jima, has some other adventures you’ve only heard about as legend, then dies tragically young in a cornfield, shot down by a punk in a T-shirt and Elvis sideburns.”

That wasn’t quite the truth, but it would do.

“I don’t think I could do that,” he said.

“You have marine connections still so you’d have no problem getting that information. You have an Arkansas lawyer from old gentry in Jake Vincent, and he is very well connected. He could open those few doors that the Swagger name alone wouldn’t. You could find old folks—”

“There are folks older than me?”

“—old folks, pick up rumors, memories, old photos. You could read. The libraries have dozens of historical manuscripts that no one has ever looked at. I think it would be fascinating. Plus, you’re good at that. Pattern recognition, smart deductions, re-creating imaginatively what did happen, as opposed to what everyone believes happened. When you’re done, or sort of done, maybe then Reilly would know an actual writer who’d put all the information into prose.”

“It don’t feel right, somehow. I mean, dammit, it doesn’t feel right.”

“You’re scared. Swagger — scared of no man and no force on earth. But scared of this.”

“That’s right. Nothing back there but bad news. But it’s not just my father, Earl. It’s his father, Charles, the sheriff. He’s the mystery. Another gunman. He’s the scary one.”

It was so true. The Swaggers, on back over the years, men with guns. And the men of the last three generations, Charles, his son Earl and his son Bob, they had it in spades and were, each of them, defined by war. Throw in Bob’s son, Ray, now at the FBI, defined by the War on Terror in the world’s brutal sandboxes. That made four straight. They all had it, that Swagger singularity that set them apart, curse or blessing, as circumstances dictated. Who knew where it came from, that odd gift to take a firearm, understand it, and make the first shot count — always.

But it was Charles, the grandfather of Bob, the father of Earl, who was the strangest of them all. He was a hero in the Great War, and came back to Polk and put his skill to work as a deputy and then became the sheriff of the county. But it seemed the man didn’t want anyone knowing his business, anyone poking about. He was solitary, a figure of rectitude and distance, blazing good with the gun but otherwise not a chum, a pal, a buddy, a laugher, a storyteller. He just stood for pure force, and his reputation alone, especially after a 1923 shoot-out with three Little Rock hotshots called the Warrens (final score: the sheriff, 3; the Warren brothers, 0), kept most bad boys out of Polk. Death was too sure a thing at the speedy hand of the sheriff.

But — the stories were unclear, always blurry, ever-shifting — something persisted that carried the information that Charles had turned not just drunk and mean and surly but against the law he enforced. In 1940, there’d been a train robbery in Hot Springs, some real Mob professionals, and they’d simply vanished. Someone who knew the forests — Charles had hunted them his whole life — had to have gotten them out. Did someone have something on him? Was he compromised by criminal interests? It was like an inkblot, a smear, that warned all to stay away.

But if there were civic mysteries encapsulated by his public career, there were even more abiding ones on the family circuit. Why did Bob’s father, Earl, never speak of the old man? Hate, fear, anger, unforgiveness? — it could be anything except indifference. Why’d Earl leave home at sixteen for the Corps? Then there was Bobbie Lee, Bob’s own namesake. Earl’s brother, Charles’s second son, evidently some sort of damaged goods. He hung himself in 1940—almost simultaneously with the train robbery. Why? Was Charles abusing him or was he just so beyond the bend there was no helping him and he himself saw no further point. Why was all this shrouded in mystery? Any small town is a nest of scandal and shame, and this was one of Blue Eye’s juiciest, and yet so powerful, it kept people away seventy-five years later. Was there a truth too terrible to bear?

Swagger decided to put it from his mind. But the past was like a big cat, a black panther, that, having slipped the cage, would not go away. Instead, it haunted the fringes of the property, leaving sign, howling in the night, possibly seen as a dark blur for a second or so when least expected, somehow ominous and waiting at the same time. Invisibly, it prowled, scuffled, left bloodied carcasses about. Bob knew it would come.

It attacked when Bob was riding the rim one morning. A bitter memory leapt from a tree and took him down hard and clawed the wound that never healed, the death of Earl Swagger in 1955. The wound opened, bled, puckered, and hurt like hell. It put in Bob’s head the thing he hated the most: the memory of his father on that last day, pulling out of the farm in his black-and-white, waving at his only son.

How does such a man happen? How can a man contribute so much and demand so little? Where does pure moral strength come from? It doesn’t come from nowhere. As Bob’s character was formed in obedience to his ideal of his father, Bob now saw that Earl’s was formed in a different smithy; he was formed to be the anti-father, the anti-Charles. He ran his life in such a way as he would never end up as that dark figure who haunted it, his father. So, yes, inescapably, everything his father became had to do with the man the sheriff already was.

It all had to do with the sheriff. Who was he? Why was he? He scared Bob.

Then that same afternoon — it had to be coincidence because he was too sane and too old to believe in any system running the universe but brute whimsy — Bob looked in his email and saw something unexpected. From: jvincent@smathersvincentnichols.com.

That was Jake Vincent, his Arkansas lawyer, one of Sam Vincent’s boys, all grown up and made good and partnered up in a fancy law firm in Little Rock.

Jake had represented him on the sale of the land to a big corporation for residential development and he was a fine one for dotting all t’s and crossing all i’s. A small fortune had been spent on stamps to get the deal finally done and the money transferred into the Swagger accounts. Jake had done it all, as Bob had no other reason to conclude, superbly.

“Bob,” the email read, “something small and odd has come up involving the property. I don’t feel comfortable discussing it by email or even letter. Can you call me on my private cell tonight?” and he gave the number.

That night, Bob called.

“Jake, it’s me.”

“Ah, right on time. Thanks so much.”

They palavered a bit about recent fortunes, the state of the estate, Arkansas politics, the Razorbacks’ chances in football and basketball, the destinies of their children.

“So anyway, Bob, this odd thing has happened.”

“Go ahead.”

“As your lawyer, let me formally inform you — this is for your protection as well as mine — that some of the information I’m about to give you suggests commission of a federal crime, and if you don’t report it, you could be subject to indictment yourself. It’s probably a long shot, but I’m not earning my money if I’m not telling you that.”

“What kind of law?”

“I’d guess receivership of stolen property.”

God, had Earl been on the take and stowed away a quarter million that had just come to light? Bob wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Lord,” he said.

“The objects in question are two. One is a government-property Colt .45 ACP automatic, serial number 157345C. We tracked the number via the Colt Company and it was from a lot that was sold to the Department of the Post Office in 1928, the year of its manufacture. It wasn’t an army gun but a commercial variant, purchased for use in certain law enforcement situations. Now — I don’t know, but somehow it ended up in a tin strongbox that was hidden under the foundation of your old farmhouse. The clear implication is that it was illegally appropriated. It had been very carefully secreted away, God knows when, and after the house came down, the excavator was tearing out the foundation and the bucket caught on the corner of the box and pulled it out of the ground.”

“I sure don’t know nothing about that,” said Bob. “I know my father brought a Thompson back from the war, but after he died, my mother turned it over to the State Police out of fear of legal entanglement. But if it’d been a gun my dad cropped from the Corps — it must have happened to a million .45s in the war—”

“At least. I think my dad had one too.”

“—it would have had a government serial number and said ‘Property of U.S. Government’ on it, so it doesn’t sound like a Marine Corps pistol. You say there was something else that could have been stolen?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t wait.”

“A thousand dollars in cash.”

“A thousand!”

“A fair amount of money now, a lot more then.”

“Maybe my father confiscated it from some bust, maybe he— Well, he was no angel, hero or not, and that much money in 1955, unaccounted for, you know, maybe he just figured…” He let the words trail out.

“I don’t think so. First off, it’s only one bill. A thousand-dollar bill. On top of that, it appears new and uncirculated, which could mean many things. By serial number, it’s a 1934-A type bill. We’re consulting a numismatist to learn more, and possibly we’ll try to trace it through the Treasury Department, but that takes time. Maybe months.”

“So the 1934 serial number and the fact that it’s uncirculated shows it can’t have nothing to do with Earl Swagger. He was in the Marine Corps in China or Nicaragua then, didn’t get back for two more years, no way he could have laid a finger on it. That’s a relief. Anyhow, that money should be returned with the gun as soon as possible and this thing put right.”

“Then another gun exhibit. Or we think it’s related to a gun. It’s a kind of machined cylinder — very high-quality metalwork — but weirdly gigantic, too big for any rifle or shotgun of the time. Maybe it’s a machine-gun muzzle. Has slots milled into it. Heavy piece of work.”

“I don’t have no idea at all.”

“There’s a couple more oddities. The first is a map of some sort. Very crude, just the diagram of what I take to be an oddly laid-out wall with ten steps marked off to what could be a tree trunk, then another few steps to an X that marks the spot.”

“Hmm.”

“Bob, maybe that crisp bill was stolen from a bank or something. Maybe other money, more money, is under the X. But of course without knowing where or what the building was, the map is useless.”

“Yeah, I see,” he said, trying to mull it over in his mind.

“And there’s one other thing. Was any of your family ever an FBI agent? I mean other than Ray of course.”

“What?”

“Any FBI agents in the family tree? I think I would know, but I’m getting nothing.”

“Well, Ray’s the only one—” His son Ray was second in command at the FBI sniper school at Quantico.

“No, no, I don’t mean that. I mean in the thirties.”

Bob had nothing to say. But he realized his grandfather, Charles Fitzgerald Swagger, who had lately occupied his thoughts, the sheriff of Polk County and victor of the famous Blue Eye gunfight in 1923, war hero and mystery, would have been, what, forty-three in that year. Just the right age, and just the right profile, salty yet still spry, a gunfighter with much killing behind him and no fear in front of him.

“Because we found an FBI Special Agent’s badge in the box too.”

“You’re kidding,” said Bob.

“Not a bit. And there’s more. It actually was a badge for the Justice Department’s Division of Investigation, which they called the FBI for a single year.”

“Oh?”

“That year was 1934. The year of all the gunfights.”

3

It was a typical day for the sheriff of Polk County.

He made sure his .45 Government was cocked and locked and slid it into the floral-engraved shoulder rig, made custom by a fellow in San Antonio, one of the few “nice” things he allowed himself, and the gun felt especially heavy. Then he pulled his fedora low over his sharp eyes and set out. He pulled out the long driveway, turned left, and headed into Blue Eye, the county seat, with its seven church spires, water tank, and two-funnel power company twelve miles to the west.

He had rounds: first to check with his one deputy in Niggertown, where he only wanted a general report, as it didn’t do to look too carefully at how Jackson Johnson, his Negro deputy, ran the law-and-order business down here. Jackson kept the crime down, and made sure no one ever acted disrespectfully toward a white person, and so was otherwise left alone.

Then Charles checked on his two snitches among the subversives. There were basically two subversive groups in Blue Eye — Communists and Republicans — and Charles confirmed quickly enough that neither group had any revolutions planned. Then he dropped in at Tom Bode’s to tell Tom that the bank was complaining to the judge about Tom’s delinquency on his mortgage and he didn’t want to have to do any foreclosing, as that was nasty business for everyone. Tom said he’d let a man go and they’d work triple overtime to get the okra in.

He rolled into the actual sheriff’s office about 11. He usually found his clerk, Millie, and one of the three deputies on the day shift, the other two being out on patrol, driving slow, careful patterns around the county, ready for anything and reachable instantly by a primitive radio. At the transmitter, he ran a check on both, and all seemed okay, quiet and pleasant, meaning no labor agitators and no one using too much sugar at the doughnut shop. He went to his desk in his office off the squad room and went through his in-box, which contained the night’s tickets and reports, expecting nothing, finding nothing. No real crime seemed to exist in Polk County, assuming you didn’t count when a Willie thumped a Willie or some trashy transient farmworker broke a bottle over another’s skull or the even rarer domestic disturbance among the town’s quality, usually involving liquor, untoward accusations, and a fist or slap in anger that announced itself by loud crying and a call to the sheriff. It happened. People were people and it happened, all of it of no real significance. It just rolled on, well-oiled, self-sustaining, unseen, but trusted by nearly all.

But this day there was something unexpected.

“Sheriff, a Captain Hamer from Texas called you. Wants you to call him back. Shall I call him?”

“Yes, can you, Millie?”

It took a few seconds for Millie to put the call through, operator by operator, so that finally Blue Eye and Dallas were connected, by which time Charles had gotten into his office and closed the door.

“Hamer. That you, Charles?”

“It is, Captain.” Frank Hamer was one of the few people in the world that Charles felt at home around.

“How’re you feeling? See all the ink we got for steppin’ on them two pip-squeaks?”

“Yes sir. You’re a hero, Frank, but you always were a hero.”

“You’re just pulling an old man’s leg, Charles. As I said, plenty of glory to go ’round. It ain’t too late. You can magically appear in the accounts just like you magically disappeared.”

“Not sure how the damned judge would take it, Frank. The job was its own reward. An out-of-season hunt, what could be better reward than that?”

“Well, I do agree. Clears the sinuses better than a shot of fine whiskey. Now, I have something for you, Charles, thought I’d best mention it.”

“I’m all ears,” said Charles.

“Seems the federals are recruiting gunfighters. That cucaracha dance in Little Bohemia, where all the gun boys just went through their ranks like shit through a goose? And the federals only bagged a few innocent townsmen? Mighty embarrassing. That’s because they got no old salts, just wet-eared college boys. Fools and poofs, nobody righteous who’d stand and shoot it out.”

“I see,” said Charles.

“So a fellow comes to me yesterday, an Inspector Cowley out of Chicago. My reputation being so sterling and all, would the captain be interested in going up north, appointed a Special Agent in what they call the Division of Investigation, to be part of a unit that’s going after all them famous bad boys — mainly, Mr. Johnny H. Dillinger — but the other big ones, the one they call Baby Face, the one they call Pretty Boy, then there’s a Wilber, a Harry, an Alvin, even a old lady called Ma. The Division needs shooters, Charles, men who can shoot and take fire without panic. And this inspector wanted me to head it all up.”

“Sounds like a fine opportunity, Frank,” said Charles.

“Maybe for a younger man. But, Charles, the six weeks after Bonnie and Clyde done flattened me out. I mean to sleep and drink and hibernate until the fall at least. At my age, a fellow can’t be running around and sleeping in cars no more.”

“I feel the stiffness myself.”

“You are ten years younger, Charles, and tough as a buzzard that feeds on coyote.”

“Well, sir,” said Charles, “I might have some tough left in me.”

“I gave him your name, Charles. Told him about the war, about 1923, about all the frays since then, told him special how it was for duty, not glory, you put your grit to the use of the law. He liked that. He liked that part a lot.”

“Thanks for the advertisement, Frank.”

“So any day now he may show up. He may invite you to join the federals and their hat dance. Be a fine move, Charles. More money, a dose of fame, freedom from that damned judge, better opportunities in Chicago for your sick boy.”

It had its appeal, no doubt about it. It’s what Charles was born to do. It would fill his mind too, keep it from going other places, places it shouldn’t want to go but, goddammit, did anyhow.

“I’m thanking you for the tip, Frank. I’ll give it hard thought, and if the inspector shows, I’ll be ready for him.”

Inspector Cowley showed up two days later. He was a well-dressed, handsome thirty-five-year-old, who seemed much older and graver than his years, more Grandpop type than Pop type, and seemed immediately to Charles somewhat soft for the job he had. To face men with guns with your own guns took a certain steel. Men could master it under severe military discipline for a year or so — Charles had seen it in the war — but to make it a career took a certain harshness of spirit, a lack of care for the pain dealt to other men, an obsessional quality, a certain gimlet-eyed view of reality, quick reflexes, the talent to shoot well and fast, to say nothing of first, and finally a grit that would drive you forward even with — especially with — the possibility of your own death. That’s what Frank Hamer had, which is why he became a legendary Texas Ranger, and Charles knew he himself had it, along with the cold heart, which was he had no trouble pulling the trigger on a fellow human being, making him go still forever. Some men deserved killing, you had to believe that.

But clearly such was not the case with Inspector Cowley, who admirably made no pretense that it was. He seemed instead like a sort of pastor. His was the kind of talent for quiet leadership and organization and inspiration, but he’d never be a barker, a shouter, a discipline monster, a man killer.

“Thank you for seeing me, Sheriff.”

“We are in the same business, sir. I owe you courtesy and attention, and that’s what you’ll get from me completely.”

“How wonderful. In some places, federals are not beloved at all, and on my trip I’ve run into a fair amount of acrimony.”

“Not in the judge’s Polk County, sir.”

“I’ll come to the point, Sheriff. You’re too busy and important to waste time. You have of course heard of our unfortunate arrest attempt in Wisconsin in April? Little Bohemia?”

“I believe I have, sir. Not a happy day for police officers countrywide.”

“No, a disgrace, to be sure. We lost a very fine young agent, we shot two innocent men, killing one, and our quarry, so neatly gathered in one spot as never before, scattered to the four winds.”

“I have seen all the bulletins. You were up against some very nasty folks. Shooters all, and I have learned that too many in our business get squeamish when it comes to the gun.”

“Our Director had a vision, Sheriff Swagger. He envisioned a scientific national police force, incorruptible, untainted by ego, vanity, and politics. Alas, as we have learned, that also meant untainted by experience, toughness, cunning, and marksmanship. Lawyers make poor gunfighters.”

“Fighting’s a technique, like anything. It’s a skill to be learned, that’s all.”

“So our Director, and I agree with him of course, now sees the need for your kind of law enforcement. That is, heroes. Men of the gun. Our criminal class is too violent and too skilled to be arrested by lawyers. We need the likes of you, of Frank Hamer, of D. A. Parker, of Bill Tilghman, of Jelly Bryce, of men who’ve been hardened by battle, in war or arrest situations. Do you see what I am driving at?”

“I believe I do, sir.”

But Charles saw something else. He saw his family up north, he saw his damaged boy in some sort of caring facility, where the other children wouldn’t tease him and throw rocks at him, where his wife wasn’t beaten to a frazzle by the ordeal of caring for such a boy, where he himself could look at the boy, whom he knew had been delivered to him by a stern God as punishment, and not feel a racing current of self-hatred.

And he saw one other thing. Certain developments were weakening Charles. Certain opportunities were available as never before. He felt the yearning, the needing, the hunger, but he could not give in. The punishment was eternity in hell. Thus, Chicago was escape. It solved an immediate problem. It saved Charles from his worst enemy, who was Charles. It was his getaway.

He knew in that second he would take the job.

“I was also impressed by your modesty. I have it on authority that you were part of the team that ended the careers of two famous bank robbers. Yet you chose to leave the scene early, you had no hunger for special attention, the adulation of the press, the advancement of your reputation. Most man killers are like baseball stars and they love to be at the center of things.”

“I am a private man,” said Charles.

“That is very impressive and entirely in accordance with the wishes of the Director, who believes it is the organization, not the man, who should get the credit. That ensures the survival of the organization, and believe me, Sheriff, as America fills and gets yet more and more sophisticated, so will its criminals, whether gangsters or Reds, and we will need the most sophisticated, most modern law enforcement organization in the world, if we are to keep up with them.”

“I can’t help you on modernization, sir. I can win fights for you and help your boys win fights, that’s the extent of my talent.”

“And that is what we need right now. Yes, I’m here to offer you a job. You would be appointed Special Agent, a rare privilege, as most men have to go through six months’ training. You will work under me out of Chicago, and the pay is about twice what you are now making, eight thousand dollars a year. Needless to say, it will be a much better life for your wife and boy.”

“I believe I would leave them here for now, sir. My wife has family here, my boy is set in school, and I don’t want her obsessing about the danger.”

“Certainly. You would know best. To continue, you would be in charge of firearms training, to try and get the fellows to shoot a little better and not lose their heads when they are being shot at. If we’re thin, you’d have stakeout duties, which nobody enjoys, but it’s part of the job. Even I do it. You might be asked to run security on crime scenes where our technicians have to work undisturbed. Interrogation is a special art, and possibly you have an old lawman’s gift for it, but, if not, no problem. Interrogators are easier to find than gunfighters. You’re familiar with the Thompson gun, the twelve-gauge riot gun, the Browning rifle, the Remington Model 8, and the Colt .45 automatic? It’s said you’re a superb shot.”

“I have fired them all courtesy of our State Police, some more than others. We could have used that Thompson in France, let me tell you.”

“A bit heavy for a lawyer like me, I have to say. Is there anything else?”

“Sir, I’m wondering if we could do this on the sly. No publicity, no newspapers, some way I don’t have to resign this here job. I’m sure the judge will let me go, perhaps even encourage me, as he’s a big Democrat and a true Roosevelt man, but here are my roots and I’d like to have something to come back to.”

“It’s an excellent idea,” said Inspector Cowley. “I wish more of our men felt that commitment to the team.”

“Then I think you’ve got yourself a man.”

“I am gratified and will notify the Director immediately.”

“If I get Johnny Dillinger in my sights, I will bag him for you or die trying.”

“I know you will. But the newspapers have perhaps made too much of Dillinger. He’s got a gift for publicity over and above his talents for larceny, and it seems he’s not a key larcenist as we’ve been led to believe. In any event, it’s not Public Enemy Number One I fear. It’s a man called Lester. Now, that’s a scary proposition. Only a Charles Swagger has the nerve to face Lester J. Gillis.”

“Lester?” said Charles. “Never heard of him.”

4

Bob, in a suit that his formality demanded, sat in the law offices of Smathers, Vincent and Nichols in a skyscraper in Little Rock and looked at the odd collection that Jake Vincent’s assistant had gently removed from a much-battered and dirtied old box.

The pistol was at least knowable. It was a well-preserved Colt Government Model, greasy from the oil-soaked cloth that had been its shroud for eighty or so years underground. The firm thoughtfully provided Bob with rubber gloves, so he could pick it up.

His fingers knew it immediately. As a design, the thing was one of many masterpieces that had tumbled from the brain of John M. Browning before World War I, so perfect in conception and execution, such a chord of power and grace and genius of operation that even now, more than a century after its year of adaptation in 1911, it was the standard sidearm of many of the world’s elite units. Nothing plastic, nothing sleek and streamlined, with a huge magazine of smaller cartridges, could really replace it for the trained man.

This one bore no rust, testament to the care with which it had been packed and the airtightness of the tin box, which, upon reflection, could not have been tin, as all had assumed, but welded steel. Again, that expressed care and savvy.

Bob eased back the slide, finding it smooth, until it locked, exposing through the ejection port the pistol’s cockpit. He looked in, and though slick with oil, the pistol showed its perfection in the harmony between barrel and magazine follower and the firing-pin hole in the bolt face, with two other nubbins projecting slightly, the extractor and the ejector. Amazing that an eighty-year-old spring held so tight and true, locking the whole gun in powerful tension. He held it close to his eye to behold the workmanship of the old Colt Hartford plant in those days, the precision of the Colt lettering — COLTS PTS FA MFG CO/HARTFORD CT U.S.A. — along with the patent line, and, on the other side, COLT AUTOMATIC/CALIBRE .45, complete down to old-school spelling. The serial number was 157345C, meaning it left Hartford in 1928, and the Colt Company had cooperated swiftly, locating the bill of lading, which had sent a batch of fifteen pistols to the U.S. Postal Department. Evidently the Postals didn’t like the heaviness and big, smacking kick of the big-bore, and the guns must have been shipped to the FBI in ’34, where the high impact of the fat bullet was more meaningful to the operators than the size and weight of the piece. To an experienced man killer like Charles, the .45 would have been far preferable to the mousy .38 Special that most of the other agents carried, though some of them might have upgunned to a higher-powered .38 on a .44 frame. The .357 Magnum, which became synonymous with the Bureau, didn’t arrive until ’35.

He drew it closer to his eye. The fit of metal to metal was flawless, all the pieces locked in and held by precision machining, not pins or screws. In fact, the whole mechanism was united in solidity by a single pin that ran from the slide release through the body of the gun, and only by popping it out — it took a touch — could the gun be disassembled. The checkering on the hammer spur was a constellation of perfectly aligned pinpricks, the parallelism of the slide serrations was masterful. They knew how to build them in those days, when it was the machinist’s skill and intuition that made it happen, not some computer algorithm. He popped the slide release and let that heavy part ease forward in capture, encompassing the barrel again, let the gun settle into his hand, and peered through the tiny sights that took someone with talent to get the most of.

No holster, as whoever squirreled it away knew that the leather, being organic, would disintegrate, moisture or not. He put it down and moved next to another relic of the firearms world of 1934. Unwrapped from a coil of oiled cloth, it revealed itself to be some kind of cylinder, obviously created at the lathe by a skilled machinist. It was a fine piece of work, a heavy chunk of sculpture cut from a single block of high-strength steel. It looked a little like a Japanese grenade or something, but it was hollow, and perforated at each end lengthwise by a hole that appeared to be roughly three-tenths of an inch wide. At one end, the width compressed into a cone that encircled what had to be the muzzle; at the other, the interior of the opening had been machined expertly with precise screw grooves, so it could be twirled on and tightened against the barrel of whatever weapon it assisted. It was cut by twelve grooves, each exactly parallel to the others, all angles squared perfectly to ninety degrees.

“Ever see such a thing?”

“Not exactly. Looks like some sort of automatic weapon accessory, a muzzle brake or something. The slots let hot gases escape upward, and their jet action keeps the muzzle down. Most automatic weapons have ’em. But this is so big and strange. Maybe from a Japanese or a French gun, a Belgian or Czech, something he brought back from the war, I’m thinking.”

“What would it be doing here?”

“Hell if I know,” said Bob.

Putting the cylinder down, he next considered the bill. It bore the picture of the stentorian Grover Cleveland, and its green was a lighter green. All the zeros after the 1 looked kind of goofy, particularly up at the corners, where they had to be curled around to fit. Some associate had wisely sealed it in a baggie so nothing of this century could tarnish it. Passed from teller to robber at gunpoint. What else could it be? Then, tossed somewhere, maybe as getaway money, in case someone had to move fast and didn’t have time to pack. Or maybe it was swag that old Charles had picked up, a bill from a big gambler in Hot Springs he’d shaken down or found dead or money otherwise unaccounted for in the aftermath of a robbery that he presumed nobody would notice if missing. He put it away for the rainy day sure to come, knowing nobody would ever look for it. But its denomination had to make it something of a singularity that would make it easy to identify, easy to trace, less valuable than its face value, since it would have to be stepped on several times by brokers before a third of it returned as usable, untraceable cash. Unlikely that Charles would not know that. Unlikely also that he’d have the connections to get the job done and the time to wait for it to happen. And, finally, unlikely that it would be worth the effort, in 1934 terms, for a payoff coming in at two-thirds less than a grand.

So the getaway stash made the most sense. A bad guy on the run would need to finance his travel. The folks he dealt with would be far from law enforcement, would take the dough without question in small increments as he voyaged, and it would be months before any of it came to Treasury’s attention and tracking efforts were started.

“A thousand?” said Bob to Jake, who sat across the conference room table from him. “How much is that worth in today’s money?”

“A thousand in 1934 buys about three hundred dollars’ worth of goods today,” said Jake.

“Ain’t getting rich on that,” said Bob.

“Don’t be so sure. It’s not the value, it’s the bill’s rarity. That makes it worth something, perhaps a lot more worth than a thousand. The numismatist told us it was quite rare, an AC-1934-A out of San Francisco. He said it was Friedberg-2212-G, rated as 66EPQ, which is called Gem Uncirculated. It’s pretty close to perfect. Worth about six or seven grand today, depending.”

“But that’s now. Then it was just flat 1934 one-grand value. After being walked through the cleaning process, it would go down to three hundred.”

“That’s right.”

“So it hardly seemed like killing money, like a big chunk of swag that enters legend, and if located, would confer a life of luxury on its locator.”

He put it down, picked up the map, or whatever it was. Well, map was too grand a word. It simply traced what appeared to be one wall of an irregular dwelling, with juts to sustain windows, and a diagonal of ten dashes leading off to the northeast quadrant, if the map was oriented with the north at the top, of which there was no indication. At the tenth step, in the same steady fountain-pen hand, a circle denoted what was certainly the trunk of a tree, and on the back side of the tree, from the wall of the house, if it was a house, was an X marking a spot.

“All of this stuff makes some sense if the year was 1940, the year of the big train robbery in Hot Springs, which rumor tied to Charles. But this was six full years earlier, and nothing happened down there in 1934. So we can discount the train business.”

“Got it,” said Jake.

“Why would he bury a treasure map under a house? He buries the map to buried treasure? Odd. Why wouldn’t he just bury the treasure under the house?” Bob asked.

“Maybe the ‘treasure’ was too big. Maybe it was some sort of contraband, and if he was caught with it, it meant jail. So he wanted it off the property. Did he ever say anything?”

“He died four years before I was born. I don’t know a thing about him.”

“Did your dad say anything?”

“Not a thing. But my grandmother told my mother, who told me that he had the bottle disease. His pleasure was rye, lots of it, lots and lots toward the end. He started going to the Caddo Gap Baptist Prayer Camp for help with it, but the bottle beat down the Lord, because he drank hard till the day he died.”

The real mystery was what happened in 1934 that prompted the gun to be hidden as well as the money, some kind of treasure buried in some unknowable place? And maybe sent him staggering down the Rye Highway toward a dissolution so deep, even the Baptists couldn’t help.

And all of it had to revolve around the last of the objects in the reliquary. The badge. Both his forefathers had worn badges, had been lawmen, and so as a totem the attraction to such emblems of state power must run strong in the Swagger blood. And his own son now wore a badge. Yet Swagger himself was an outlier from his own DNA, in that it had never drawn him in. He had no police impulses. The Corps, with its top-down, to-the-death mandates of discipline, had been enough, and when it was over, it was also not a bad thing to be done with certain ceremonial requirements that a police career would have maintained. And like his grandfather ruined by the song of hooch, he had that same weakness. So he’d been too drunk after invaliding out to go into the State Police, and had never felt the call that his father and his grandfather, and who knows what Swagger before then, had felt? The bottle was far more interesting than the badge, and though he hadn’t touched a bottle in years, it remained so.

When he picked it up, it meant nothing, delivered no charge. It was just a piece of — what? — an alloy of some sort, bronze, iron, maybe a salting of steel, crushed into a symbol of not merely justice but also authority and its facilitator, force. Had his grandfather worn this one? He looked carefully, and having no meaningful acquaintanceship with badges, only saw the random set of power emblems, as basically invented by the Roman Empire — that is, scrolls, raised lettering—embossed, that was the word — the whole thing a kind of mini shield that suggested a legionary’s strength and probity, though some Knights of the Round Table shaping had crept in, as it was more elegantly designed than the legionaries’ minimalist rectangle. It was heavy too, like a gun, much heavier and more substantial than it looked like from afar. In the dull but shadowless illumination of the overhead fluorescents of the law firm, it threw off glints of sparkle as you turned it, and the light caught or missed various heights and depths it wore on its uneven surface.

It didn’t say FBI. It said, in an arch across the top, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, and in a straight line under some kind of bas-relief of blindfolded Greek Lady Justice, DIVISION OF INVESTIGATION.

“They didn’t become FBI officially till 1935,” said Jake. “I’m an expert, I looked it up on Wikipedia.”

“I should have done the same,” said Bob, still rapt in the presence of the badge.

“It was only a division for that year. That’s what they called it, the Division. Sounds kind of 1984. The newspapers simply called it the Justice Department, or Justice. They liked the pun, as in ‘Justice fells Dillinger,’ that sort of thing.”

“I see,” said Bob.

“So, what do you want to do with this stuff, Bob? Take it? Leave it? Report it?”

“Well, I guess the money should be turned in to Treasury. It’s clearly a bank’s, not mine, so let’s get that one over with fast. Can you take care of it?”

“No problem.”

“Then, I’d like to xerox the map, just in case, just in case of I don’t know what. Maybe something will occur to me.”

“Makes sense.”

“As for the pistol, I think I’ll take that, at least for a little while. I want to shoot it, see what I can learn from it. If it was his pistol, maybe it’ll tell me something. Maybe we can communicate through the gun, since we both loved guns so much.”

“I don’t see any problems. Just don’t sell it. You can destroy it or keep it, but if you destroy it, it might open you up to destroying government property. I have to look into the law here.”

“Got it,” said Bob.

“There must be an old briefcase around here. We’ll put it in that.”

“Great.”

“And the ‘cylinder’?”

“You keep it for now. I’ll look in various books I’ve got, maybe I can come up with something.”

“And the badge?”

“Can you keep it too? I won’t know what to do with it until I figure out who and what he was. Let’s keep it here for a bit. In the meantime, I have to look into my grandfather’s life. I have a very good friend, Nick, recently retired from the Bureau, and maybe he can help me dig out old files. I can see if there was ever a Charles Fitzgerald Swagger on the payroll for a few months in 1934. Maybe that gun has some historical provenance and it should be returned to the Bureau, though they don’t have no museum. Maybe my grandfather’s career has been expunged; he got drunk one night and shot up a whorehouse, something like that.”

“You sure you want to dig into family secrets? Some things are best left underground. I could tell you a thing or two about Sam Vincent that would surprise you and that, even now that I have made peace with them, I wish I hadn’t learned.”

“I have had the same thoughts myself and it does scare me. But now I’m hooked. Charles invented Earl, Earl invented Bob. To understand Earl, I’ve got to work that line backwards in time. I have to answer the one question Charles didn’t want asked: who was Charles F. Swagger?”

5

Les ran through the woods blindly. He was not one to panic, but hearing what sounded like gunfire, he’d looked out the window of the cabin and suddenly the tree line had erupted in machine-gun fire, and even if he wasn’t in its direct line, from the number of guns he knew the federals were here in force.

His first thought, Where was Helen? while the gunfire rose and rose, as if a whole battalion was on the attack. Then he realized she was in the main lodge with Tommy and Johnny and Homer and the boys, and there was nothing he could do except escape and survive and pray for the same outcome for her.

He had his .45 tucked in his shoulder holster, because he always did; he lived with that gun, trusted it, and kept it close for just this occasion. But from the sounds outside, he knew he needed more, and he opened the closet and there his Thompson gun leaned against the wall, as casually as if it were a golf club or something, with its bulbous and awkward drum of fifty rounds giving it weight and clumsiness. His enthusiasm for firearms filled him with energy, and the prospect of using one against human targets always made him happy — that is, if he weren’t boiling with rage, which was his other mode of being. He was a contradiction, and no one could explain him, a handsome, dapper fellow, capable, a family man, the proud father of Ronald and Darlene, the loyal husband to one wife (he never messed around, and he never left Helen for long periods of time), and, to see him, you’d think he was one of life’s little mechanics, solid, a churchgoer. But he did like to shoot things up, he liked adventure, he had an abnormal absence of fear, and killing wasn’t a thing that lingered in his mind for long.

He grabbed the weapon, feeling its heaviness, which, far from being an irritation, was an attribute that helped keep it steady when fired at the quick march. He called it a machino, and it was one of the reasons he had entered this line of work, for the thrill it gave him when unleashed righteously against those who would do him harm was beyond ecstasy. And such a moment was now upon him, happily, like the reward of a drug rush to addict. Machino held all the answers, was a god that paid for fealty with victory. It pushed out all doubts and fears. He was happy, happy, happy.

He stepped out the front door of the cabin and found himself at an angle to the tree line, whose concealed gunners continued to lay their fusillade against the large log structure fifty yards immediately to their front, which itself was now adrift in smoke and vapor from all the bullet strikes and the dust they ripped free as they buried themselves in wood or plaster.

He was not stupid, and he was not without aesthetic impulse. At this moment, he took in the dramatic spectacle of what lay before him and knew that this was where he belonged, amid the smell of burned powder and the hammering of the guns, illuminated by flashes dancing out of muzzles, the whole thing livid and clear in the coldness of an early-spring evening in the northern latitudes. It didn’t get much better.

He oriented the gun easily, and his finger went fast to the trigger, knowing that, against the chance of visitors, he kept the bolt cocked and the safety lever down, because if you needed it, the chances were you needed it that second. It seemed to melt into his body, so brilliantly engineered was it, and he hunched, braced, smiled, and fired.

Machino spoke. It lay a long strip of .45s against the tree line, and though he did not see the bullets strike, he saw dust kick, branches shudder, leaves disintegrate, trees vibrate, under the wondrous power of machino. The drama of the gun at full blast offered other pleasures too, the spray of spent shells ejecting like kernels of popped corn from the skillet, the building shudder of the vibration, the superspeed blur of the bolt as it rammed forward and back under the power of the firing cartridges, the flame squirting upward, almost over the gun, as the configuration of the gun’s compensated nozzle aimed it upward in order to hold the muzzle down by counterforce, the glint of the fins on the barrel, the solidity of each grip in his strong, tight hands. So much to enjoy, such pleasures to behold! It filled his anarchistic heart with joy. Some men are born to destroy, and nothing satisfies them but that. Whatever you’ve got, they want to tear it apart, from architecture and bank vaults to order and society itself, anything, just to watch it twist, shred, and die.

Then the gun ran dry. He’d dumped the whole drum in a few seconds, sending fifty half-inch death warrants out into the night, and tough luck for anyone who got served by them. This, however, issued a problem, which was, where was another drum? And, second, how quickly could he get it in? For the drums, with all that ammo, were so heavy, the engineers had come up with a sliding rather than a clicking mechanism by which to attach them to gun, and slipping the lips of the drum into the slots that were milled into the frame was never easy. But even as he identified the problem, he solved it. He had another weapon, so unique it seemed to have been just planned for this situation.

Thus, he dashed back in the cabin while the federal gunners ducked, pulled back, tried to gauge this new stream of incoming fire, and he picked up something as yet unseen in the world. It was built for him — he had several and had even given one to Johnny as a gift, as an acolyte gives the cardinal a small token — by a gifted gunsmith in San Antonio. It was a true machine pistol, a Government .45, but with certain adjustments to its internals so that one pull of the trigger emptied all the rounds in a three-second blast. Because it fired so fast, it needed a lot of ammo, and the gunsmith, Lebman, had carefully welded several magazines together so that it held eighteen of the robin’s-egg-sized .45 ACP cartridges. Because the longer the trigger was held down, the more the recoil built, it meant rounds ten through eighteen would have been hosepiped aimlessly across the sky, but Lebman had thought this one through as well. He had mounted both the Cutts compensator and the horizontal foregrip from a full-sized Tommy to the pistol, the comp to fight the muzzle’s rise, the forestock to offer the second hand a sculpted wedge of wood with finger grooves by which it could be pulled against the same muzzle’s rise. You could zip off a magazine, therefore, with a fair chance of staying on target through the whole of the transaction, all eighteen rounds’ worth, as no force on earth or in engineering could halt the gun’s hunger for ammo once the trigger had been jacked.

So he couldn’t have been more perfectly prepared for what lay ahead. Nothing beats or satisfies like the perfect tool for the otherwise undoable job. He ducked back to the porch, cut left, and dashed down its short length. Bullets came his way, but were magically dissuaded from his flesh, or so he believed, by the charisma of his boldness and the size of his personality, and indeed a few struck nearby, tearing out splinters and debris and pulverized wood, but nothing struck him, and in a second he was off the porch and had deviated backwards, where the woods soon swallowed him.

Les was bold, but he was also lucky. He had no map, he had no particular sense of the terrain, indeed had never set foot into this part of Wisconsin until yesterday afternoon, driving up with Helen and Tommy Carroll, and even now the spurs of evergreens and as-yet-unleafed maple and elm sprigs cut at him but did not slow him down. He had no orientation, as woods skills were not among his talents, and the trees were too heavy, in any case, to make out any direction-suggesting stars. He just ran. He was young, twenty-six, full of a sense of fun, and sucking so powerfully on his badness and his glamour and yet another slick escape that no branch dared oppose him seriously, and the forest itself did not conspire against him by leading him off on twisty return trails so that he’d run like hell without advancing anywhere.

He ran, ran, ran. Behind him, the firing had stopped, and now and then he turned, swung around and looked for targets. But he could see no shadow pursuers, and when he managed to still his over-dramatic intake of oxygen, heard no crunching in the brush or thudding in the dust that might signify pursuit.

In time, the forest offered him a path carpeted with pine needles, and his night vision had adjusted to the low illumination, so the way was as sure as any of the Chicago alleys in which he’d grown up. He felt relaxed enough to steady up on his gait, sliding into something of a smooth jog, as opposed to the helter-skelter ragtime of insane escape speed. The shoulder holster held the .45 tight under his arm, as it was designed to do, and though the heft of the machine pistol grew in his hands (no holster could accommodate it because it was so big and ungainly), it rode in his hands, and he sometimes carried it lefty, sometimes righty, sometimes pointed up, sometimes pointed down, subtly shifting the point of balance and relieving his muscles. But it was too necessary to even think about jettisoning. If he fell in a lake, it would drown him, that’s how much clinging to it meant.

He drifted on, hearing the silence of the night, his powerful eyes keenly locked ahead in case of ambush. But he was not the paranoid type and so no dread crushed against him. He did not see phantoms from the Division behind every tree, and the natural sounds of the forest — the hooting of owls, the scurrying of small mammals, the click and clack of branches moving against each other in the wind, the leaves propelled by the same force rubbing — did not grow in his imagination. He didn’t have much imagination beyond guns, cars, his kids, and his wife. His whole world was feral, not planned, narrow, not broad, predatory, not nurturing, tough-guy proud, not afraid, and though not now, insane at times with rage. He needed anger management desperately but there was no anger management yet, nor were there antidepressants or other drugs that could have pulled him back to the normal range, but he’d been crazy for so long, and had enjoyed it so much, there was no getting him back.

How much time? An hour, not more than two. But at a certain point the fact that God himself is also crazy rewarded him, and he did not fall into a lake or a ditch and spare the world much pain, he came instead to a road, and in no time at all a Model A came chugging along. God was again taking care of Les.

“Goddammit,” he yelled, pointing the strange little machine pistol at the two astonished occupants. “Get me out of here, goddammit!”

He scooted into the back.

Nothing happened. Both were frozen with fear. After all, imagine what an apparition he would have seemed, a dapper, rather handsome chap, well dressed in a suit, a thick head of hair, a sprig of movie-star mustache on his square pug face, yet armed with a weapon the likes of which they had never seen even if they recognized its deadly components, most notably the yawning .45-inch bore, and the fellow was acting fully insane, red-faced, swaddled in sweat, which flew off of him as he moved like a dervish toward them, eyes as wide as a rabid dog’s. He looked like the picture-show comic boy Mickey McGuire with a real big gun, hopped up on tequila.

“Get this sonovabitch moving,” commanded the man, and reluctantly, with shivering fingers and stunted movements, the driver eased her into gear and began to move.

But the tricks weren’t done for the night, not by a long shot. The light beams filled the vault of trees curving over the road, and the car edged ahead, began to build speed, and Les had a glimpse of the perfect escape he so richly deserved. And then the lights went out.

“What the hell!” he screamed.

“Sir, I didn’t do nothing, swear to God— Oh, Christ, I don’t know—”

“I swear, sir, this here’s an old buggy, wiring’s all shot to hell, I could dicker with her under the hood, maybe get the shine on again—”

“Jesus H. Christ!” screamed Les. Yet he couldn’t imagine these two bozos conspiring against him on the spur of the moment, and he knew if he killed them, the damned gun was done for the evening, as he had no other big mag. “Goddammit, get going, take her easy, don’t pile us up, Grandpa, or I will have your ass for breakfast.”

Slowly the car crept ahead, essentially feeling its way through the woods, stopping now and then when someone’s eyes detected a problem with the road. At this rate, he’d be free and clear of Wisconsin well before Christmas.

“This ain’t working, goddammit,” he screamed at them.

“Sir, I am so sorry, I just—”

“Okay, okay. Shut up, now. See, isn’t that a house up on the left?”

“It’s Koerners’,” said the other occupant, as if Les was going to answer, “Oh, that’s where the Koerners live.”

“Pull in,” he commanded, and the rube slid the car off the road, up the driveway in front of a well-lit clapboard, back in the trees, off the road. They sat there while Les tried to figure out what to do next. Best thing: crash the house, see if they had a car, then take off in it, presumably lights running, and whiz through the night until he reached the Illinois or Iowa or Michigan state line, he didn’t know or care which. That was the best idea, and he took a deep breath and began to compose himself to issue instructions, when, absurdly, another car pulled in, just behind them, and three men got out.

Jesus Christ, was this an escape in a Keystone comedy? People keep showing up exactly where they shouldn’t be, and he’s got hostages coming out the butt. What’s he supposed to do with these hostages. Start a band?

He leapt from the car, leveled the machine pistol at the three, noting intently even in the dark that they lacked that cop deportment — he’d been studying it his whole life — which was equal parts size, steadiness, and seriousness, and screamed, “Get those paws up, you mooks, or I’ll blast you to hell.”

The three turned, hands flew up, but he knew instantly that whoever these mooks were, they knew there’d been action at Little Bohemia, and the night would be full of spooks, gangsters, feds, and machine-gun fire. They eyed him with fear, expecting difficulty, offering no resistance, as if obedience could buy off his craziness.

“Go on, goddammit, get in the house, you two”—meaning the two he’d already nabbed — and the five of them formed into a loose confederation of civilians, with hands high, controlled from the rear by a man with a nasty pistol.

This motley crew marched into the Koerners’, and those folks looked equally stunned at the size of the menagerie that had just tromped into the living room, particularly the extremely agitated young fellow who was calling the shots, yelling orders, dancing this way and that, sweating like a boxer, his eyes racing over everything as he drank it in for information.

“All right, everybody, get on the goddamned floor if you don’t want to be in a massacre. If I have to fire, you get famous, but you’re dead, so no time to enjoy it.”

The group eased awkwardly to their knees in front of a nice sofa-and-love-seat arrangement the Koerners had set up, near the switchboard, which was how Koerner made his living.

“Okay,” he said, “sorry for the yelling, don’t mean to hurt no civilians. But I have to get out of here and I want you down and quiet. Keep your mouth shut and maybe you’ll live to tell your grandkids. You and you”—he pointed to the two men nearest the door, who happened to be in the party of three he’d just taken—“we’re going out and get in your car and drive away, got that? Play ball and you should be okay, except for the extra trip. The rest of you, stay down, stay quiet, be calm. I don’t even have time to rob you.”

He eased them out of the house, off the porch, and over to the last car in the now crowded driveway.

“Now, get in the front, and— What the—”

Astonishingly, there was already someone in the backseat. Another band member! Now what? He was just making this up.

“You, outta the car. Jesus Christ, where do you people come from?”

This one, who seemed to have been sleeping, rousted himself and staggered out of the car, utterly befuddled, but wise enough to keep his hands up.

“Okay, you, lie down, go back to sleep, don’t make a peep. You others, get in, start ’er up, and we’ll get the hell out of here”—and, just like that, another car suddenly appeared out of nowhere, this one also carrying three men, and it pulled off the road right at the driveway.

What now? Les thought with exasperation. Next a bus, or maybe a plane will land or a ship will come sailing up the river?

He turned the muzzle on the three new passengers, dangerously near rage, screaming again.

“Get out, get out, goddammit,” and he pulled open the rear door to discover himself staring into the maw of a Thompson submachine gun.

He was dead.

I’m dead, he thought.

But he was not dead, for though the federal’s face broadcast effort and exasperation, no flash announced the release of a bullet stream that would, from this range, cut Les in half.

Les had no reaction, but, faster than a leaping rat, his finger saved his life by jerking hard on the trigger of Mr. Lebman’s machine pistol and it emptied itself in three seconds, kicking out a spew of spent shells as the gun ate its magazine, as it had been designed to, in one gulp.

It felt like he had a rocket by the tail, all whoosh and burn and shudder, bucking and twisting, yet with both his fists locked around the grips, it did not deviate, and its freight hit and devastated the automobile and its passengers, hazing windows with webs, pulling out puffs of horsehair from the upholstery, spreading punctures in a general south-to-north pattern across the exposed metal that comprised the body of the car.

The G-Man never got his trigger pulled but instead reared backwards, dropping the weapon, hands flying to throat and the sudden jets of blood that were gushing his life away, staggered from the car, the Thompson spilling off his lap, and fell to earth. The others beat it too, hit or not, and Les didn’t even see them go, as he was too absorbed in the drama of killing.

When he came back into his real head, he found himself standing alone by the car in a fog of gun smoke amid a pile of spent brass. All other humans had vanished from the earth, as hostages and targets alike had taken off like rabbits and managed to find cover in the dark.

Les jumped in the car, tossing the gun on the seat behind him. The driver hadn’t even killed the engine, so he simply clutched it into gear, pulled onto the road, and sped away.

Ha! he thought. I made it.

Or did he?

After a few miles of forest road, well lit by his headlights, he came to a straightaway, and a quarter mile ahead, two other headlights came onto the same stretch of road, a sedan driven fast, so fast it had to be law people.

Fuck! he thought.

And then he thought, Fuck them!

And then he thought, You boys want to play tough. Let’s see how tough you are.

He foot-stomped the gas pedal and he felt the engine surge in aggression, now swallowing gasoline at full hunger, and around him the forest, the road, the onrushing headlights of the enemy car, all went to blur.

We’ll see who’s got brass balls, Lester J. Gillis, known to press and cop as Baby Face Nelson, thought with a snort, a laugh, and a sudden injection of joy, as he aimed the car straight between the headlights and floored it.

6

Between firing ranges, the differences hardly matter. This one was in a strip mall, contained a retail store of late-modern pistols, not so many hunting rifles as many might have, a fair sampling of assault rifles and shorter-barreled shotguns, and no doubles or over-and-unders. It was not paneled in knotty pine, and no deer heads gazed at eternity through marble eyeballs from its walls; instead, zombies and insane clowns were on display, as well as anatomically revealing silhouettes and competition cardboard. Clearly, its theme was self-defense for the burgeoning concealed-carry market, and at the reception desk of the range proper, which lay in darkness behind thick plexiglass windows, the old Colt excited some comment.

“Wow,” said the range officer, “that’s a nice piece, sir. You sure you want to shoot it? It might have some collector value.”

“I want to run a function-and-accuracy check,” said Bob, “before I strip it down for detail cleaning and put it on the market. It hasn’t been fired since 1934. I need a box of hardball.”

“Yes sir, but, again, we do have 200-grain lead semi-wad reloads. A lot safer, a lot less kick.”

“I reckon I can get through the hardball,” said Bob. “If my granddad could, I could. It was built by Hartford to play the hardball game. That was the only game in town in ’34, but you know that.”

“If I did, I forgot,” said the man, who had the face of a Roman legionary behind glasses that had last been fashionable in the ’70s.

Bob accepted the white box of fifty generic Winchester 230-grain full metal jackets, the man-stopping load the government had issued for seventy-three years under the designation “ .45 caliber ball,” thus earning it the nickname hardball forever. Then he put on the mandatory safety glasses and earmuffs and pushed through the double doors. As he entered, the officer turned on the lights, illuminating a cavern with eight shooting booths, each with an electric pulley setup to run targets out to the twenty-five-yard line. Bob went to his assigned booth, put the briefcase on the shelf, and pinched an NRA bull’s-eye target, a simple black circle on an otherwise blank sheet, into the clamp. He turned, found the toggle switch, which sent the target downrange twenty-five yards until it bumped the far wall.

Then, quickly and without ceremony, he removed the gun from its case, popped open the white box, poured the ammo onto the shelf, where it clicked and rolled with heavy authority, then locked the slide back and pressed the button to remove the mag.

He threaded seven in, for Charles Swagger would have carried it that way, or perhaps he cranked one into the chamber, put the safety on, removed the magazine, and inserted one more against the tightness of the compressed spring. An old gunfighter’s trick, it would give him one more round in a fight where one round might be the difference.

Charles would have shot one-handed too, for in those days the concept called modern technique, which counsels a two-handed, bone-tightened isosceles grip in all applications, hadn’t been invented, and wouldn’t be till the late ’50s. Everybody saw a pistol as a one-handed implement, as all the old pictures showed, which may be why they missed so much in those days.

But Bob hadn’t practiced one-handed shooting in years, as it had all but vanished from the earth, and he knew if that was his theme today, he’d get nothing but disappointment. Instead, he bladed himself at forty-five degrees to the far target and commenced locking down, meaning right grip on pistol, locked down hard; left hand wrapped around right hand, locked down hard; right elbow, locked down hard; straight back; left arm, pulling right hand, locked back hard. The point was to go robotic, but when he found the sight, again he marveled at the skill of the first-generation 1911 shooters, for it was only a pinprick, and the embracing rear sights, whose ears were supposed to buttress that pinprick, were miniature too. But he got the front aligned in the rear, as narrow a margin as could be imagined, felt his trigger-finger pad lock flat on the curvature of the trigger, and slowly eased back.

When the pistol fired, it was a surprise break, coming sooner than he anticipated, kicking harder, administering a shot of pain to the webbing between his gripping thumb and index finger because he’d held way up high, as modern technique demanded when there was no oversize safety grip to cushion the shock, so the pistol discharged its energy right smack into the tender spot.

He looked, could see no sign of a hit, thought, Damn, I missed the whole thing, and went through the drill six more times, holding to the same six-o’clock position on the target. There wasn’t much smoke, but in the little room only eight lanes wide, it collected and drifted back, and would have brought a lifetime of memories to him — hard places, lost men, desperate nights, fear everywhere — if he’d let it. He didn’t.

Glancing toward the target, he saw he’d missed clean.

Out of practice, he thought. So out of practice.

But when he reeled the target in, he was surprised to find a cluster of four in the black, just bisecting the 10 ring, and three more punctures close at hand, the farthest out splitting the 6 and 4 rings.

He reexamined the shooting experience, trying to find nuance against the harshness of the recoil and the pain it had injected into the webbing in his hand. He realized then how smooth the trigger pull had been, smooth without grit or little micropatches of resistance, not a hair trigger but certainly a useful one. Peering intently at the weapon, he noted as well that its front sight was slightly bent to the right by the expert application of a padded hammer, a testament to this particular weapon’s insistence on throwing shots to the left, and its caretaker — his grandfather or some other gentleman? — had made a hairsbreadth adjustment to stay in the black.

He quickly ran through the remaining forty-three rounds, and found that at twenty-five feet, for example, he could stay within an inch without hardly trying, even after adjusting his grip so that flesh wasn’t jabbed by the fulcrum of the safety grip. He shook it, heard no rattles, signifying that the gun was tighter by far than most government-issue .45s, which were built loose so that even clogged up with Flanders’s mud, Iwo’s ash, or Da Nang’s grit, they’d function long, hard, and hot.

When he was done and reentered the shop through the double doors, the range officer said, “Say, I watched you, I’d say you done a peck of shooting before. Most people here can’t hold in the black at twenty-five yards. That’s why they shoot at zombies.”

“I shot a lot of practical many years ago,” he said. “Is there any chance you could take it to your gun-cleaning station and break it down so we’d get a good look at the parts? I need to get a sense of what’s been done to it.”

“Sure, be damned interesting,” said the officer, who was turning out to be one of those immediately likable men who was probably half the reason this place stayed open in a bad economy.

They went to the bench that was mounted against a wall where rental guns were cleaned when too much crud jammed them up. The range officer took the pistol and broke it down expertly.

“You’ve done that a few times, I’d say,” said Bob.

“Army. ’Nam. ’Sixty-nine, ’seventy. Did twenty years, got out with eight stripes.”

Bob laughed.

“You beat me, Top,” the universal term for a first sergeant, “I only managed six before they kicked me out.”

“Army?”

“Marines. ’Nam too. Pretty interesting.”

“Wasn’t it, though?” said the sergeant. “Anyhow, let’s see what we got here.”

The two men took turns closely examining the thirty-seven parts that Colt Commercial Model, serial number 157345C, disassembled to.

“Clearly,” said the Top, “someone who knew what he was doing did a once-over. Look how all the sharp edges of the trigger surfaces have been filed with a very soft hand, just to break the ninety-degree angles a bit, and smooth up the trigger, without cutting out any loops of the spring.”

Bob squinted, eyes not what they once were.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I also notice he took a ball-peen hammer to the slide rails, very carefully tattooed them, very skillfully widened them just a hair, so they hold the slide much more tightly. Then he polished both surfaces, both the top of the rail and the groove in the slide. Nice tight, smooth fit, sure helps accuracy.”

“I see that,” said Bob, who’d noticed — and felt — the same.

“He’s also polished the feed ramp and broken the ninety-degree angle there where it fits against the frame. The cartridges will never hang up, just extra reliability insurance. With hardball, these things hardly ever jam, but that wasn’t good enough for him, he had to change ‘hardly ever’ to ‘never, ever.’”

“Good catch,” said Bob. “I missed that.”

“Basically, he’s given a sloppy combat gun all kinds of accuracy and reliability enhancements. He knew what he was doing.”

“Finally,” said Bob, pointing to a subtle linear variation in the pistol’s black sheen that ran around the front of the grip just under the trigger guard, “you got any idea what this is?”

“Never seen that before,” said the Top. “Looked at a lot of .45s, that one’s new to me.”

“You didn’t look in the right place, which would be the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco. The Rangers used to tie a rawhide strip around the grip to hold the grip safety in — that is, off. In case they had to go to gun fast, and I guess a lot of them did, they didn’t want to miss the grip safety in their hurry and come up with a click instead of a bang. So this one had rawhide tying down the grip safety, and over the months it rubbed a strip of finish off. That’s what you’re seeing. Some of ’em were so sure they’d have to go to gun quick-time, they milled off the trigger guard. Have to be plenty serious kind of situation before I’d do anything like that.”

“If I tried to holster a 1911 with no trigger guard and the grip safety tied down, I know I’d blow my own knee off by the third day.”

Bob laughed.

“But seriously,” said the Top, “if you could prove Texas Ranger provenance, you’d double, maybe triple, the value for certain collectors. Lots of Texas Ranger fans out there.”

“I bet the owner of this gun knew Texas Rangers, had seen how they operated, and picked up a few tricks from them. I don’t know that he was a Ranger himself.”

“But if he was going to some kind of war, he’d give himself every advantage,” said the Top. “It figures.”

“This has been a great help,” Bob said. “Can I pay you for your expertise?”

“If you did ’Nam, brother, no payment at all. You already paid up in full.”

At the hotel, he found a FedEx envelope on the floor of his room, slipped under the door, and he knew exactly what it was. He called his wife.

“Hi, it came, thanks.”

“I hope it helps,” she said.

“Well, you never know, I might pick something up, even if the chance is small.”

“How much longer in Little Rock?”

“I’m done now. Heading to Blue Eye tomorrow, Andy Vincent is going to meet me. I told him I want to keep it discreet, no conquering-hero-returns-home kind of thing, and, again, I doubt if much is left of the old man. Hell, there wasn’t much left of my father, I don’t expect anything from a generation earlier.”

“All right.”

“And then to D.C. to see if Nick’s fished anything out of the files. I should be home in three or four days.”

“I’ve heard that before,” she said.

At last he turned to the envelope. He opened it and took out a single four-by-six-inch sheet of ancient paper and, turning it over, looked into the harsh face and unforgiving eyes of Charles Fitzpatrick Swagger, snapped one fine spring day in 1926. It had been his own father Earl’s only acknowledgment that he had a father, and it had been in a tattered old Buster Brown shoe box with other Earl documents and souvenirs that he’d last looked at twenty years ago. He’d noted the photo but not checked it at all.

Now he stared at the murky sepia, turning it back over to read the inscription, “Daddy 1926,” in what had to be his grandmother’s flowery fountain-pen script.

Charles had a man-killer face, all right, if you believed in such things, and Bob could see both his own and his father’s bone structure in the thinness and length, the prominence of cheekbones and hollowness of scraped-clean cheeks, the severe and unyielding prows of nose. The mouth looked genetically incapable of cracking a smile; its hard dash might have been rectitude or moral authority or self-belief or just plain cop-tough.

The man leaned against a rural fence on a sunny day and posed for his wife’s Brownie box camera. He was into a cowboy kind of look in 1926, with a lot of hat covering up his hairline, a white Stetson twelve-galloner, with prim, flat brim circling under the bullet-blunt crown. He wore a dark three-piece suit with the insouciance of someone who wore a dark three-piece suit every day of his life and would not think of stepping off the porch without such. The shirt was white, with a round, stiff collar held tight by a collar bar, above which a black tie sprung, which hung down his chest and was swallowed by the tightness of his dark vest. A star-in-circle badge dominated the left lapel, and no one could miss it. Around his waist he’d cinched tight a much-tooled gun belt, its loops displaying a healthy number of .45 Colt big boys, making the statement that no matter how hot and heavy it got, he would not be running low on ammo. On his right hip, revealed by a suit coat dramatically tucked back by a seemingly casual hand in pocket, he displayed from the forward angle the familiar plow curve of the 1873 Model Colt, the Peacemaker, that had decorated every Western or Southern lawman’s belt for close to fifty years, as well as appearing in enough cowboy movies to win its own Oscar. It was probably a ceremonial gun, its lines proclaiming the heritage of the Western lawman, but for real work he’d use the Government .45, which he’d used so well in the trenches. Only the hammer and curve of the butt strap of the Peacemaker and the ivory of its grips were visible above the embrace of the holster, but Bob looked and saw strong, large gunman’s hands that would have been adept at the draw and could probably put lead in any antagonist out to forty yards or so in less than a second, even with a single-action antique — so obsolete in 1926!—like this one.

Bob looked at the face. Born in 1891, Charles would have been thirty-five at the time, Earl would have been nine, Bobbie Lee, Bob’s namesake, not yet conceived. Perhaps little Earl clowned just out of the frame in this frozen moment of long-ago life, and Daddy was going to take him for an Eskimo Pie at the general store in a few minutes. Or perhaps he’d beaten him raw for some infraction of a code only he knew yet enforced with the rigor of a prison guard, and the child languished in a locked cellar room, sore everywhere, but mostly in the mind.

You couldn’t tell. Not a bit. It was just a picture of a mid-’20s American lawman, proud of self and devotion to duty and social rectitude, incorruptible, brave, willing to shoot it out with anybody for the safety of the citizen. It was almost a poster for a movie called I, Lawman that only got made in its country’s mind, and like all symbols, it did not yield its secrets easily.