Point of Impact

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Newly promoted Detective Sergeant Leon Timmons was drunk and he was high. He was sailing, he was floating. He felt so good.

“Hey, Payne, hey, damn, boy, we, we got it made, huh?”

Payne snorted. They were in Big Sam’s, on Bourbon. Up on the stage a buxom woman shimmied. To Payne she looked like an animated piece of beef on a hook in a Jersey warehouse.

“Damn,” Timmons said, “damn, boy, she all girl, eh, Payno?”

“She’s all girl,” said Payne. “She’s a girl and a fuckin’ half.”

“Wooooo!” said Timmons, his eyes lighting up like headlamps.

Payne took a long swallow of Dixie beer. It was the only thing he liked about New Orleans and he was glad to be just about out of New Orleans.

Somebody put another beer in front of Timmons.

“Huh?” said Timmons.

“Leon, honey,” said the waitress, “gintlemin over thar said thanks to the man what almost shot the man what almost shot the president.”

Timmons raised the bottle in salute to his benefactors, who appeared to be a crowd of dentists from Dayton. They applauded in the red wash of light from the overheads, then went back to hooting at Bonnie Anne Clyde and her smoking.45’s up there on the stage.

“You’re quite a hero,” said Payne.

“Damn betcha. You know, Payne, ain’t yet heard whether old President what’s-his-name gonna have me up at the White House. Hell, that old boy ought give me a ticket to the town with my name written all over it.”

“That he should,” said Payne. “You saved his life, man. You stopped Bob Lee Swagger from blowing him up and you almost nailed Bob the Nailer, the great sniper himself.”

“That’s right,” said Timmons, who by now pretty much believed he’d actually fired the shot. He told Payne the story again in excruciating detail, with a few embellishments thrown in. Payne listened dully. Finally Timmons said, “You know, I might even be the NRA Police Officer of the Year.”

“You ought to think about selling your story to the movies, bub.”

“Ahead of you there, Payno. Got me a agent already, out in Hollywood. A very big guy. We gonna make a potful of money.”

“You don’t need no agent. You already got a potful of money.”

“Cain’t have too much money,” said Payne. “Ain’t no such thing as too much money.”

“Ummm,” said Payne.

Timmons’s eyes went back to Bonnie Anne Clyde. He licked his lips; his face had the hard set of a man who’d seen what he liked and liked what he’d seen.

“I believe you could get yourself that girl,” said Payne. “Seems to me she ought to be pleased to spend some time with the hero cop of New Orleans, who almost shot the man who almost shot the man who – well, you know.”

“I believe you are right,” said Timmons.

With a self-important twitch of his head, he beckoned the manager over. Quickly he told him what he wanted.

“Be right back,” the guy said.

“Whooo, think I’m gone be in the hot spot tonight,” said Timmons eagerly.

“Pussy-o-rama, Leon. Wall to wall and floor to ceiling,” said Payne.

The manager came back after Bonnie left the stage, to be replaced by Miss Suzie Cue and her eight-balls.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said. “She says, yeah, sure, anything for Detective Sergeant Timmons. Only thing is, see, she has the boyfriend, mean nigger motherfucker. So, what she wants is, um, discretion. Quietude. Nothing to rile Ben, ’cause Ben whack her upside the haid he catch her with another man.”

“Okay,” said Timmons. “So how we work it?”

“Out back at midnight. He’s a fireman, goes on duty at eleven-thirty. So you meet her out there, she takes you to her crib, you git your windshield wiper fluid changed but, like, good, my friend, Ben ain’t the wiser, she done bagged a celebrity, and the old world just goes humpty-humping along.”

“Oh, I lak thet,” said Timmons greedily.

“You goan have a time,” said the manager, a weaselly little rat-man with a pencil-thin mustache.

So Payne and Timmons sat through a couple of more sets, trying to put the Dixie Brewery out of business or at least get it to working nights, as if they were a pair of Navy bosun’s mates on shore leave for the first time since the sixties. Timmons’s elaborate hair, which bent in strange ways as it flowed off his ample, heroic brow, gleamed with mousse; he was set for a big night. Meanwhile Payne just sat there, sinking into himself further.

By the time it was nearly midnight, Timmons was extremely drunk. Payne got up, pointed to his watch, and Timmons lurched obediently to his feet, bulling his fat and sloppy way over.

“All set,” he said hornily.

“Then let’s go, big guy,” said Payne, pulling him down the narrow aisle and out to Bourbon.

The street had filled. It looked like party time in Hell. College kids from Ole Miss, northern tourists, large groups of sailors, a few aristocratic types in blue blazers and khakis with their sallow, nearly fleshless women in tow, all seethed and bucked along the narrow concourse. There was smoke everywhere; up and down the street lines had formed, some to get into the strip joints or the transsexual shows, some to buy T-shirts in the dinky souvenir shops, some to get into the fancy restaurants like Antoine’s or Arnaud’s. A few disconsolate wallflowers peered down from the balconies overhanging the scene.

“Now which way we go?” asked Payne, surveying the turmoil. “I can’t believe I’m skulking around to avoid riling some big nigger.”

“Shoot,” said Timmons, “no sense gittin’ the boy upset when his old lady be handing out the sweets for free. Maybe you wanta little old taste after I finish?”

“How long you be? Maybe twenty seconds?”

“Haw! I can ride a mare like that half the damn night!”

“Well, thanks, I’ll pass. Number Two in the saddle ain’t for me.”

They ambled through the raucous crowd, were jostled by sailors. Payne hated sailors from the Army, where you were supposed to hate sailors. And he sort of felt like a fight. He wanted to drive one of his fat fists into the dumb, girlish face of some aviation candidate over from Pensacola, and watch the boy collapse, spitting blood and teeth. But he just pushed on. The night was blue. The moon was full, over the low pastel buildings of the quarter. It reminded him of a jungle city. Felt like Saigon. No gooks, though. Lots of niggers, lots of fatboys and pretty girls, lots of action; no gooks. He remembered the sense of war and doom and what-the-hell-we-die-tomorrow joy that he had so loved when he was a lean and dangerous young Forces sergeant in the ’Nam, floating on amphetamines, just back from a long crazed month or so in the fuckin’ boonies, taking frontals.

Payne sighed, swept by melancholy. The whole world seemed to be here on Bourbon, coursing down the narrow street, all hot to trot, seething to get fucked, except for him. He stood apart. Jack Payne was different. He did the hard things.

Next to him, Timmons was aquiver with sexual tension. It was said that he could visit any brothel in New Orleans and have himself serviced mightily, so friendly and helpful was he to certain people, but there were always new experiences and sensations. So he was all hotted up.

“She a girl and a half,” he said again.

“She sure is,” said Payne. “Now where the hell we goin’?”

“Up here. Turn right, then behind the restaurant you turn left and we head down the alley. She’ll be in back, where the dancers park.”

“You sure know this town.”

“Know it well, that I do,” said Timmons, almost singing with anticipation. He was a happy man.

The crowd thinned as they turned off Bourbon down Toulouse and then saw the alleyway, a small gap, just the width of a car, between the old brick buildings. They turned into it. It smelled of old garbage and piss.

Up ahead, however, there appeared to be something of an altercation. It was difficult to make out, but it looked as if a large black male was beating on a small white male.

“I do believe,” said Jack Payne, “that that’s a crime, isn’t it?”

“Oh, shit,” said Timmons. He reached under his jacket, and from the high-hip holster withdrew the famous Beretta and advanced at a coplike gait, yelling, “Halt, Police! Goddammit boy, y’all stop that.”

Payne watched him go with something that wasn’t quite sadness, for he truly detested Timmons, but out of some sense of camaraderie. The two had shared a lot, after all, and each had come to recognize the other as a man who walked the same side of the street.

“Goddamn, I say, stop!” shouted Timmons. He fired a shot into the air, and then rushed in harder, a little surprised that the black man hadn’t cut and run, as was customary. He stopped short when he saw that the black man had a pistol of his own, which had come from nowhere.

“Now, wha – ” Timmons began, when the first bullet hit him in the throat and the second, a split second later, under the left eye. They were only.25’s, from some piece of junk that wouldn’t shoot accurately over ten feet; the range was seven.

Timmons died clawing at the small hole in his face, which spurted blood like a broken pipe.

The black man ran by Jack Payne, pausing only to wink. It was Morgan State, as he was called, from the unit, Payne’s second in command, a great shot, a cool hand with a lot of in-country time behind him, good man in a gunfight. Then he was gone.

The tourist was crying and bleeding from the beating but otherwise unhurt, as had been the plan, for an innocent witness was the fulcrum.

The sirens began howling, and in a few minutes the first cop car would be here.

Payne melted into the dark.

She had brought the magazines, all the newspapers, everything that she could find or acquire in Ajo without making a big fuss.

It was ten minutes into the reading that Bob found the mention of Mike’s death. There it was in print. Somehow, that made it official.

Bob put the magazine down slowly, and stared out the window. He could see the bright desert light, the hot flat blue of the sky, an endless cruelty of needles spangling the low rills.

He just sat there most of the morning, mourning Mike and trying to figure who would kill him. Then of course he had it. To get his rifle from the trailer, of course, they’d have to shoot Mike. Mike wouldn’t have let them in, he would have stayed on station come hell or high water; and if they drugged him, that would leave traces.

He read the sentence again.

“Evidently aware that after his deed he couldn’t return to care for the dog, Swagger shot the animal once in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun and buried it in a shallow grave.”

All right, he thought, feel sorry for him later. You have some work to do.

But the pain of it amazed him. He realized in a tiny part of his mind he’d been harboring some kind of illusion until now; he saw himself back at the place, and old Mike come up to nuzzle him, to press his sloppy jowl against him and gaze up with those dumb, adoring eyes.

All right, he thought, you killed my dog. Now I got some work to do, so that I can settle up.

He read slowly, without hurry, each article, from the earliest Julie had been able to find – which meant the most inaccurate – to the very latest. Nothing showed on his face. He sat on his bed and read it all, straight through. Then he read it again.

He saw himself laid bare, penetrated, turned inside out. He was fair game for them all; everybody had a theory, an idea, a notion. He realized he was no longer his own property; his private self had been taken from him forever.

They had it right – but wrong, too, terribly wrong. They were looking at him from such a twisted angle.

“Swagger’s Navy Cross bespeaks his aggressive nature and his reckless will to kill and precurses the tragic events of March 1,” Time said.

It was the second highest award his country could give him; and he’d saved a hundred lives those two days in the An Loc Valley. They made it seem like a crime.

“Violence is inbred in the Swagger clan. His father, Earl Swagger, destroyed three machine gun nests one morning on Iwo Jima and returned to violent encounters in law enforcement, climaxing in a bloody shootout where he killed two men but died himself off Highway 67 near Fort Smith.”

They turned his old daddy, who only did his duty to country and state, into some kind of mentor in murder. Nothing about the lives his dad had saved in giving up his own against Jimmy and Bub Pye that terrible evening.

There was a paragraph recounting his lawsuit against Mercenary magazine, which had put a picture of him on the cover and called him the most dangerous man in America. It told how sly old Sam Vincent had shaken thirty thousand dollars out of their pockets and warned all those gung-ho books to stay the hell away. But then Time dryly remarked, “It is doubtful that Swagger could win his case today.”

He shook his head at all this, wondering what could twist people so. Where do these people come from? How do they learn things like this? Is there a school that teaches them? What gives them the damned right to just take over your life and bend it any which way they please?

They hadn’t missed a damn thing. They’d pried everywhere. The inside of his trailer was photographed. His books were listed: the writers found it amusing that among the loading manuals and the classic works on rifles and shooting, such a violent man had poetry by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, though it was noted that the works were “only bitter war poetry.” There was his gun rack in loving detail, the weapons cataloged and judged by reporters who seemed disappointed to discover that he had no “assault rifles,” as they called them. His rifle range was diagrammed. His two victories in the Arkansas State IPSC championships were probed. And he saw schematics of the shot he had supposedly taken in New Orleans from 415 St. Ann into Louis Armstrong Park. The madness of that second was broken down and analyzed, its physics and ballistics choreographed in infinite detail, its trajectories laid out in dotted lines to little X’s that marked the strike of the bullet, all of it convincing, all of it wrong. He saw stills drawn from the videotape of what went on at the podium, the fall and twist of the man he’d supposedly “hit,” the archbishop of whom he’d never even heard.

The completeness of it blew him away. They’d been so careful, they’d set it up so perfectly, and, worst of all, they’d known him so well.

Not these damn reporters who didn’t know a thing, but them, the Agency boys, whoever they were. They’d known him perfectly. It was as if they’d lived his life or gotten in his brain.

“You look so hurt,” she said.

“These people, they knew so much about me,” he said. “It’s scary how careful they were. Not that they took the time, but that they knew so much, they knew how my mind would work.”

He thought back to the moment when he’d been truly hooked: when they came up with a trophy he couldn’t say no to, the Russian sniper Solaratov, who he now realized probably didn’t exist. It was so perfect. They knew how desperate he’d be.

Then he discovered, from Newsweek, that the guy he’d jumped coming out of the house on St. Ann Street was named Nick Memphis and he was from the FBI!

Now here was something that twisted in his imagination. Memphis, Memphis, where’d he heard that damn name before? It hung there, tantalizing him until he remembered after a bit. Memphis was the joker in Tulsa who’d missed and hit some woman. His was the archetypal botched shot, the sniper who fouled up. And he, Bob, back in Maryland, had re-created the whole thing in front of the fancy boys while they were gulling him along with their “Accutech” stuff.

He wondered if this Memphis were a part of it. Then he remembered the stunned surprise of the man, the slack, dumb look on the wide face, his squirming, the easy way the 10-mil came out of the holster when he reversed on him, and he doubted it. If he were one of what Bob thought now merely as “Them,” he guessed that this Nick Memphis would have been ready and waiting. Besides, he wouldn’t have left his car with the door open and the key in so helpfully there right outside on St. Ann Street.

There was a picture of the guy, a blurry thing snapped out front of the New Orleans FBI headquarters.

“Agent Memphis, who missed collar, hurries to car,” the caption said.

It was the same man, equally disturbed, this time with a grave and somewhat embarrassed look to his face.

You screwed up, and now these people are going to nail you for it. You screwed up almost as big as I did, he thought.

Bob read on, looking for answers.

But there were only more questions.