G-Man, Page 2

  “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 f
elt 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

  OUTSIDE CASCADE, IDAHO

  The present

  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.”