Point of Impact

CHAPTER TWENTY

Here I am, Nick thought, in Arkansas!

He was sitting around the temporary bull pen in the Mena, Arkansas, Holiday Motel, wading through the oceans of paperwork that attended the task force’s relocation from New Orleans to Polk County, yet at the same time managing not to grieve too overwhelmingly for the passing of Leon Timmons, dropped by a mugger in a New Orleans alley two days or so ago. He wished it didn’t please him so and he wished the publicity – HERO COP SLAIN IN FREAK CRIME – would go away, because his own incompetence was a part of the story.

“You sure you didn’t smoke poor Leon there, Nick?” asked the ever mischievous Hap Fencl. “You know, in blackface, with a little throw-down gun?”

The others had laughed; they couldn’t mourn the braying Timmons either, who’d made the Bureau look so bad.

But Nick just smiled grimly and stayed on station as the operation’s prime goat. Outside the window, the green and thunderous Ouachitas rippled away toward Oklahoma in the late afternoon sunlight. He returned to his document, a witness sighting report from the New Mexico State Police; a motorist claimed he’d seen Bob the Nailer, big as life, tooling down the highway in an ’86 Merc. That was the common element in the sightings: as if Bob would be so bold to bull on through in broad daylight, sure his courage and his determination would get him through. These people were imprinting their own sense of Bob on ambiguous events and coming up with the strangest stuff.

The phone rang across the room and somebody else got it.

“Hey, Nick, it’s for you.”

Nick turned to the phone.

“Nick Memphis.”

“Nick, it’s Wally Deaver.”

A little burst of excitement went off in Nick’s chest.

“Wally, Christ, how are you? You got the pictures?”

“Yeah,” said Wally and Nick didn’t like the tone in his voice.

“It’s not him?” he asked quickly. “That’s not the guy you talked to in Cartagena? That’s not Eduardo Lanzman of the Salvadoran National Police?”

“Shit, Nick. That’s the terrible thing of it. I wish I could say one way or the other. I wish I could just tell you. But…I don’t know. I was only with Eduardo during the meetings which lasted maybe a day or so. Two days max. And a bunch of us went out to dinner, had a few drinks. I can’t say I knew him well. We exchanged cards, you know, the way cops do. Now these pictures – ”

“Yeah.”

“Nick, death doesn’t do anybody any favors. Maybe this is the same guy. Maybe it isn’t. It could be. It might be. Maybe it is. But…maybe it isn’t. You didn’t have the passport photo?”

“It didn’t look a goddamned thing like him.”

“What about any corroborating evidence?”

“Nothing. It all checked out, at least as near as we can tell. You know I can’t get budget to go down there. And the Salvadorans, they say they don’t know him at all, except that this is through our formal liaison with them which is run by the State Department, which means it’s got to go through so many layers – ”

“Yeah, that’s why I bailed out, Nick. So many layers. Look, Nick, to be fair, it’s a pretty dead horse without corroborating evidence. I mean, in good conscience, I couldn’t go before a grand jury and – ”

“Yeah, sure, I understand.”

“Great.”

“But tell me this. It could be. Just maybe, just somehow? At the outside.”

“Okay, Nick. Yeah, yeah. It could be.”

“Great, Wally.”

“But Nick. Don’t bet your career on it.”

“Sure,” said Nick. “I won’t.”

But he realized he already had.

She was rebandaging him.

“You must be a very tough guy, Sergeant Swagger. Looks to me like there isn’t a weapon made they haven’t tried out on your hide. You’re a one-man proving ground.”

“They had some fun with me, ma’am.”

“I count – what, four gunshot wounds? Old gunshot wounds, that is. As opposed to the two new gunshot wounds, which resulted in three holes. The hole total comes out to – five? Six? You’re a piece of Swiss cheese, Sergeant.”

“I was only hit three times. Twice the first tour, none the second, then the bad one, the bullet in the hip that ended the third tour. They had to glue and wire the whole gizmo back together again. Don’t know how they did such a thing. I thought I was set for the wheelchair my whole life. And that one old hole isn’t a bullet.”

“What is it?”

“You’re not going to believe this. It’s from a curtain rod.”

“Oh, now there’s a new weapon. Your wife, I presume, and I’ll bet you gave her very good reason.”

He laughed.

“My aunt. My mother’s sister. A sweet woman. I was helping her in the farmhouse. 1954. I was eight. She lost her balance and the curtain rod she was hanging fell and she fell on top of it and it went through my side. It didn’t hurt much. Bled a lot, didn’t hurt much.”

“I’ll bet.”

“That was before my daddy died. The year before. It was a happy year, I remember. Now let me ask you: How long before you think I’ll be able to get out of here? The longer I’m here the more danger I’m putting you in.”

“Another few weeks. Don’t worry. The neighbors have seen men live here before. I’ve been around the block a few times myself.”

He just nodded blankly. This didn’t please him, though he didn’t want to face it.

“How long has it been?” she said.

Since when? he wondered.

“You don’t even know what it’s called anymore? You know. With a woman. Wo-man. Female.”

“Oh, that? I don’t know.”

“A month? A year? Ten years?”

“Not ten years. More than a year. I’m not sure.”

“You could live without it that easily?”

“I had other things to keep me busy.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He paused, considering it.

“I didn’t want the complications. Someone said, ‘Simplify, simplify.’ ”

“Ann Landers?”

“No,” he said earnestly, “it was some old guy called Thoreau. He went and lived by himself, too, as I understand it. Anyway. I wanted to simplify. No wants, no needs, no hungers. Only rifles. Crazy as hell now that I think of it.”

“So you went off and became Henry Thoreau of Walden, Arkansas?” Julie said.

“I was at my best with a rifle in my hand. I always loved rifles. So I decided to live in such a way that the rifle would be all I needed. And I succeeded.”

“Were you happy up there in your trailer in the mountains without any people?”

“I didn’t know it then. I suppose now that I was. I was raised and then trained not to think a lot about how I feel.”

It was twilight of the third day since he’d been awake. The sun suffused the room with an orange glow. The quality of light was almost liquid and held everything it touched in perfect serenity. Her face had acquired a grave look in this fantastic light; and he loved the way she had of slyly making him see how ridiculous he could be. She seemed like some kind of angel to him, so radiant a savior that he could not hold her strong gaze and instead looked out the window, to where the mountains stood like a savage old bear’s teeth on the rim of the earth. He remembered looking at her picture in the boonies. Donny always had it with him.

“Why is it men like you always have to be so alone?” she asked. “Why do you want to live by yourself and contrive situations under which you can go against everybody to prove how smart and tough and brave you are?”

Bob had no answer.

“You see, you make it so terrible for us,” she said. “For the women. Because normal men want to be like you, they learn about you from movie versions of you, and they try for that same laconic spirit, that Hemingway stoicism. They manufacture themselves in your image but they don’t have the guts or the power to bring it off. So they just exile themselves from us, pretending to be you and to have your power, and we can never reach them. Are you aware that Donny was scared every single day? He was so scared. He was no hero. He was a scared kid, but he believed in you.”

“It doesn’t matter if he was scared. He did his job; that made him a man. That made him as much man as there is.”

“I’d rather have a little less man, who is alive now and could sleep with me, and be father to the children I never had and never will have. His being a ‘man’ didn’t do me a hell of a lot of good. It’s the same craziness that makes these poor Indian boys cut each other up on Saturday night. What do they get out of it, I wonder?”

“It can’t be explained,” he said. “It can be foolish as all get-out, yes, ma’am. It doesn’t make much sense. But I was just taught to hurt no man except the man who hurt me and mine. I have no other star to steer by. That and to do my duty as I understand it. If I followed those two rules, I’d be okay.”

It was so quiet you’d have thought it was the last second before a nuclear bomb was to go off, ending life on this earth. But instead, through the metal walls of the trailer, there came the shriek of a child.

Something came into her eyes and onto her face that he’d never seen before; it was pain.

“And I suppose the joke is, none of us care about that kind of man, the kind that you want to be. What we want is the kind that would stick around and be there the next morning. Mow the grass. Bring home a paycheck. That kind of man. And I see how funny that is now,” she said, her anguish suddenly palpable. “You come in here, and I care for you, patch you up, and hide your car and get myself so deep into this I can never, ever get out, and never, ever have a normal life…and you don’t care. You have to go off. And be a ‘man.’ ”

After a time, he said, “I didn’t just come here because I had to. I came because I wanted to. A long time ago in Vietnam when Donny Fenn showed me his young wife’s picture, I had a moment where I hated him for having such a woman waiting for him. A part of me wanted him not to make it, and wanted to have you for me. But that passed when I saw what a damn fine boy he was, and how he deserved the very very best. And he had it, I see that now.”

She touched him. A woman hadn’t touched him in years, really touched him so that he could feel her wanting in it. Maybe no woman had ever touched him like that. It had been many years.

“What do you want from me, Sergeant?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It makes going back to it hard. Truth is, I never ever stopped thinking about that picture and the fine woman Donny Fenn had waiting for him.”

“That’s why you kept writing?”

“I suppose it is. And you’d just send ’em back, unopened.”

“I knew if I opened them, I was lost.”

“Are you lost now?”

“No, I don’t suppose so. I know where I’m headed. I can’t stop it. Straight into catastrophe, and I don’t even want to stop it.”

He drew her to him. In the kiss there was an extraordinary sense of release. He felt himself sliding away, down a drain, surrounded by warm, urgent, healing liquids. He thought he’d slide until he died. He was also overwhelmed by smoothness. Everything about her was smooth; she was smooth everywhere, he’d never imagined that a person could be so smooth.

The explosion, so long in coming, seemed to build until it could not be held back, and bucked out of him in a series of emptying spasms. He was falling through floors toward solid earth, each one halting him for just a splinter of a second; and then he fell through to another one, and then another. He fell and fell and fell, stunned at the distance of the fall and how far it took him from himself.

“My God,” he said.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

The days passed. She was on the day shift and during it he stayed in the trailer and read what she had brought him from a trip to seven bookstores and every newsstand in Tucson. He told her to get everything. And she did. He read it all, the events of two weeks, then three weeks, then four weeks ago. He read about the Kennedy assassination, about other famous assassinations. He made copious notes and worked steadily, trying to find a line through the material.

When he learned that the hero policeman of New Orleans, Leon Timmons, had been killed in one of those stupid, pointless urban accidents, shot by a mugger during an attempt to prevent a crime, it didn’t surprise him. He just breathed heavily. Timmons had been a link; of course he had to die. These boys were sealing themselves off, leaving no possible leads into their organization. They were pros. This bothered him but it also relieved him; it meant he didn’t have to go back to New Orleans, for now there was nothing in New Orleans. But where would he go? He didn’t yet know.

One night, NBC news did a special on it. He taped it on her VCR, taking notes. He watched it over and over, the diagrams, the interviews, the speculations. But particularly he watched that terrible moment when the bullet came shrieking out of nowhere and seemed to blow the president from his feet, while it had really just been the force of the other man, the archbishop Roberto Lopez, who had gone into him as the bullet opened in him and destroyed his brain.

Bob thought: It was a great shot.

Over twelve hundred yards from that damn church steeple, shooting into a very complicated sight picture, no matter how good his scope, shooting at a downward angle. Lots of problems to solve, and you solved them all.

Oh, my oh my, but you’re a good boy, he thought.

Not but five, maybe six men in the world could hit a shot like that, or have the perfect confidence to risk everything on making it.

Bob realized the shooter was the key.

The whole plan, all the elaborate seduction of himself, the manipulations, the subterfuge, all of it rested only upon the fragile vessel of confidence that this shooter could make that shot.

Hell of a shot, Bob thought.

He thought of the man up there in that steeple behind the louvers just waiting, just gathering himself.

Could I have made that shot? Bob wondered.

He wasn’t sure. It was right at the very edge of what he could do with a rifle. Whoever he was, he was a shooter.

Bob remembered the superb neck-turned.308’s he’d run through his rifle when they were gulling him on in that Accutech thing in Maryland. Those were precision-made rounds. Everything else about “Accutech” was a con, but the rounds were the real thing. Whoever made them knew how to sling a cartridge together for world-class long-range accuracy. It wasn’t something many men knew: it took you into the realm of micromachining, of tolerances so fine most tools wouldn’t register them, of actions worked like the inside of watches, of rifle barrels so polished and perfect they were jewels themselves almost; it was a rarefied part of the shooting world.

Again, only a few dozen men in the world knew it.

And the rifle itself. Where do you get a rifle so tight that you can count on it to send a 200-grain.30 caliber into, say, four inches, from twelve hundred yards? You’re talking about.333 minute of angle at over half a mile. He knew a master gunsmith could build a rifle technically capable of such a thing, if a human could be found to get all that could be gotten out of it. Then he remembered the Model 70 he’d fired at the Accutech place, the last one, late in the day, when he’d fired the exercise that had more or less been the duplicate of Donny’s death with a Model 70 he still yearned for; a rifle with a stock so dense and rigid it felt as if it was manufactured from plastic and an action so slick and a trigger so soft you could breathe on it to make it fire. He remembered: Number 100000. That was such a rifle. There couldn’t be but one or two or three or four out of the millions of Model 70’s that Winchester made that were that fine.

Who would own such a rifle? Then he remembered that somebody told him a man had won a bunch of thousand-yard championships with that rifle.

And as he thought he began to puzzle the one aspect that had so far evaded him, the piece that was somehow wrong.

It was the bullet.

If they were going to hit the archbishop, they’d have to assume the police would recover the bullet. And that the bullet would have the imprint of the bore it had been fired down, as irrevocable as a fingerprint. They couldn’t know the bullet would be mangled; that was a one in a thousand chance.

Why wouldn’t this perturb them? It would screw up their entire plan. When the bullet didn’t match the bore in Bob’s rifle, the whole ruse would collapse. Somehow they’d figured a way to beat it. Somehow he had figured a way to beat it.

The bullet, he thought.

The mystery of the goddamn bullet, just as tantalizing in its way as the famous Kennedy assassination 6.5mm that had passed through one man’s body, another man’s chest and wrist, and yet was undamaged and unmistakably bore the imprint of Lee Harvey Oswald’s bore.

It was as if the two mysteries were mirror opposites of one another, or different sides of one coin.

But they had bullets, he thought. They had bullets from my rifle.

He’d provided them with sixty-four bullets fired from the bore of his rifle, in Maryland.

He sat back.

“Bob?”

“Shhh.”

“Bob, what are – ”

He held up a hand to quiet her.

Then it was gone.

“Dammit.”

“What?”

“Oh, I – ”

Then he had it. It might be possible. He’d never heard of anyone doing it and there was no reason for anyone to do it, but…yes, it was possible.

You dig a fired.308 bullet out of the sand, scored with the imprint of a bore, but otherwise pristine and possessing the same ballistic integrity as a new bullet. You can reload that.308 bullet into a.300 H & H Magnum shell, a much longer shell with a much greater powder capacity and therefore a much longer range. You’d have to protect the bullet somehow, and this puzzled him, until he remembered an old technique called paper-patching, by which a fellow could wrap a bullet in wet paper before he loaded it on a shell; the paper would harden and form a sort of protective sheath. The trick was, you had to fire it down a slightly larger bore, maybe a.318. But even that was so simple: rebarrel the rifle with a custom bore, and refire Bob’s bullet down the bore. The paper patching protects the ballistic signature; then burns off in the atmosphere; Bob’s bullet, fired from this other rifle, arrives to do its terrible damage.

Oh, you were a smart boy, he thought.

But…if you were so smart, how come I had to bird-dog it out for you? I was your legs, wasn’t I? That was part of it. I wasn’t just there to be used as a dupe but I did the thinking, the seeing, the planning. Why? Why couldn’t you do it? Why couldn’t you go to the sites yourself and see what I saw?

One day he drove to Tucson, and concealed behind his new beard and sunglasses, stopped in a rummy old Gun and Pawn store in the Mexican section of the town. Didn’t even look at the rifles that were on the wall, but went on and found in the back, as usually these places have, a big pile of old gun magazines. Guns & Ammo and Shooting Times, a long though tattered run of The American Rifleman. The mags were of little use to him, being far too full of pictures of new guns. But there was one that was useful: Accuracy Shooting, which was about benchrest shooting, those boring technocrats who worked on rifles so fine they could throw bullets in the same hole all day long. He himself had subscribed since the late seventies. But these were earlier, from the mid-sixties.

Benchresting was the R & D lab of all shooting; if you were at all serious about the game, you had to bank your time at the loading bench and the shooting bench; all other things stemmed from it. If his boy learned his stuff anywhere, he learned it in benchresting. The magazine, he learned, had begun as the newsletter of the first American benchrest shooter’s club, which started up in the early fifties in upstate New York, following on the work of men like Warren Page, Harvey Donaldson and P. O. Ackley in the twenties and thirties. They were loaded with tabular matter, with long and dreary accounts of shooting matches of years ago, obscure names of great shooters and obsolete calibers like the.222½ and the 7 × 61 Sharpe and Hart.

He bought them all and that night he began to read them. When he’d read them all, he found more, and read them too. He haunted the secondhand shops, looking for old copies. When he found them, he read them, looking for something but what it was, he couldn’t say.

I’ll find you, you old bastard, he thought, for he assumed his quarry was old. Only old men could shoot like that, for it’s a dying skill, not practiced by the young much; there was only one younger man who could have made that shot, but he was an illusion. Bob tried to put it out of his mind, because it spoiled things for him.

It’s not T. Solaratov, he said to himself. It’s not. It can’t be.

In the evenings they made love. They made love for hours. Sometimes he felt like a piston that just kept on going.

And finally, several times, after he’d fallen through the last of his floors and lay there as if every atom in his body was at rest, he felt himself yielding to the fatigue. He couldn’t move a thing.

“God,” she said. “You must have saved up all that time at Walden Pond.”

He snorted.

“I seem to be doing okay.”

“I’ll say,” she said.

They lay there, breathing their way back to earth.

The terror of her was that she carried in her the seed of possibility. In her, he saw an alternate life. It occurred to him that he didn’t have to live in solitude, hating the world, and that he didn’t have to give himself to his rifles, like some kind of mad Jesuit. Didn’t have to live in a little trailer off in the misty mountains, and face each visitor with mistrust.

The world was full of things that could be. He had a flash of them together somewhere, just enjoying each other, no complications. Somehow it had to do with water; he saw them at a beach, maybe Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, or maybe outside Biloxi or Galveston or some such; anyway, sand, water, sun, and nothing else in the world.

“What are you thinking of?” she asked. “You almost had a smile on your face. What was it?”

He knew if he told her he was lost. There would be no turning back from the softness. He lay there and the temptation to give in rose and rose in him. He wanted to let it swallow him up. He could feel himself disappearing in the wanting.

“Something from the Marines.”

“That’s a lie,” she said.

“Sure. I was thinking how much I like this. It’s a life I could love. But I have to tell you square-up: maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it costs me too much or gives me too much to hold on to. I have to be able to let go of things. It’s like I’m bargaining; I have to be able to walk away from the deal at any time, elsewise I can never win. I have to be willing to die at any time, or I can’t ever win. Any man in a war will tell you that; you must be willing to give up your life at any chance. If you’re thinking about what’s at home, you lose your edge.”

She looked at him with those gray, calm eyes.

“I was right. I knew. Give me a taste. Then pull away. Go off on your crusade.” She almost laughed. “I wish I could hate you, Bob. You are a true and deep son of a bitch. But hating you would be like hating the weather. No point to it at all.”

“I’m sorry. There was never a better time. It was the best. It was special. Another time or two and I’d never leave.”

“No. That’s a lie. You’d leave. I know your type. You always leave.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’d leave. I have to.”

She found this one a laugh.

“You are a bastard.”

Bob nodded. Not much passed on his grave face.

“When?”

“I think it has to be tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“Yeah. It’s time. I’ve got some ideas. I’ve got something of a plan, even.”

“I just never thought it would be so soon.”

“The sooner I leave, the sooner I come back.”

“You’re lying again, Bob. You’re not coming back. You’ll be dead in a week.”

“More than likely,” he said. “It’s a shaky plan. But it’s the only one I could come up with. But first, I’ve got a couple of things to do.”

“And what’re they?” she said, trying to show no pain.

“I’ve got to dig up my cache in the mountains where I’ve got thirty thousand dollars and some guns stashed, so I can pay my own way and defend myself. And then,” he said, “I’ve got to bury my dog.”