"But," the doctor continued, "the skeletal remains were in good shape and the marks of the wounds were recorded there."

"Yes," said Bob. "Go on."

"I initially noticed two wounds. The first was on the leftside ulna, the outermost bone of the forearm, just down from the thickness of bone we call the olecranon, an inch or so beneath the elbow. I could tell from impact beveling that a bullet struck and shattered that bone; there was a traumatic ovoid indentation visible on some of the fracture segments. This is characteristic of a high-velocity solid-point bullet delivered at close range."

"Thirty-eight Super."

"A jacketed .38 Super would get the job done nicely, yes. The bones were in such fragmented disarray that, pending further lengthy examination, I couldn't rearrange them to get a caliber reading on the damage."

"Not necessary," said Bob.

"The second wound resembled the first. The same shattered bone, the same fragment presence, the same ovoid groove in some of the pieces, again characteristic of a smaller-caliber, high-speed bullet. This was observed at the frontal curve of the third rib of the left-hand side of the cadaver."

Bob mulled this over.

"Could he move, hit like that?"

"If he wanted to."

"Both wounds were survivable?" he finally asked.

"Well, that's a subjective judgment, dependent upon the subject's viability. Given that your father was in extremely robust health, that he'd been hit before and understood that getting hit didn't automatically equate to death, and given that he stanched his blood flow and that help arrived within a few hours, and given that there were no serious soft-tissue wounds not registered in the skeletal system, then yes, my judgment is that those two wounds were survivable. But there was a third wound."

"Go on," Bob said.

"I missed it at first," said the doctor. "Some tissue remains were present and the condition of the bones was not pristine. Of course I'm not in my lab working under the best conditions."

"But you found something?"

"Yes, finally, I did. In the sternum, a frontal plate of bone that shields the heart and anchors the ribs. There's a very neat round hole, or almost round. Ovoid actually, suggestive of a downward angle, that is, a high to low shooting trajectory. There's impact beveling suggestive of an entry wound. If you extrapolate from the placement of the penetration of the sternum on that angle, you get a real solid heart shot. The bullet path leads straight into the right ventricle where the pulmonary artery pulls the deoxygenated blood in. That artery and the ventricle would have been instantaneously destroyed. Brain death would have followed in, say, ten to twelve seconds."

"So he couldn't have been shot in the heart and walked three hundred feet back to where he was found?"

"He couldn't have moved a step. I doubt he was conscious much more than three seconds after impact."

Bob nodded and turned to Russ.

"So how's goddamn Jimmy Pye hit him a hundred yards out in the corn and he walks all the way back to the car?"

Russ just looked at him.

"You measured the hole, I take it," Bob asked the doctor.

"Yes, I did."

"I'm guessing it wasn't .357 or .429, right? It was, what, .311, .312 inches?"

"Good. Actually, .3115."

"As I understand it, the impact beveling always widens the diameter by a couple of thousandths of an inch?" "Typically," said the doctor.

"So the bullet that killed my father, it was, say, .308 in diameter? That would make it a .30-caliber rifle bullet?"

"That's what every indicator says," the doctor replied.

"I don't get it," said Russ. "What's all this with the numbers?"

"It tells me who killed my father," Bob said, turning to look at him. "It sure as hell wasn't no Jimmy Pye."

"Who killed your father?" asked Russ.

"A sniper," said Bob.

19.

The snake rattled again in the corn. The arm hurt. The side had gone to sleep. The legs ached.

Earl, sitting sideways in the front seat of his cruiser, straightened his legs out before him. He was all right. He would make it. A little smile came to him.

If that goddamn snake don't bite me, I made it again bite me, I made it again.

His radio crackled.

"Car One Four, this is Blue Eye Sheriff's Department, Earl, you hang on, goddammit, we are inbound and closing fast and I have an ambulance a minute or so behind. You hang on, son, we are almost home."

There was always that moment in the islands when it finally occurred to you that you had somehow made it again. It was like a little window opening, and a gust of sweet air floating through the room, and you experienced the simple physical pleasure in having escaped extinction. Other things would come later: the guilt you always felt when you thought of the good men lost forever, the endless dream replays where the bullets that missed you hit you or your own weapon jammed or ran dry. But for now it was okay: it was something God gave to infantrymen, just a moment's worth of bliss between the total stress of battle and the dark anguish of survivor's guilt. You just got one moment: Hey. I made it.

Earl thought of the things he had to do. He made a list.

1. Take Bob Lee to that football game. The boy had never been. He himself hadn't been since 1951, on a visit to Chicago, when he'd seen the Bears play the Rams. It was a lopsided game. He wanted Bob Lee to see a good good game. game.

2. Buy a Remington rifle, Model 740A, the new autoloader, in .30-06. He'd read about it in Field & Stream Field & Stream. Said they were building them even more accurate than the Winchester Model 70s, and you had that second and third shot automatically, without a recock.

3. Kiss his wife. Tell her how much he liked her strawberry pie. Buy her a present. The woman needed a present. Hell, buy her two two presents. presents.

4. Face it out with Edie. It had to be dealt with. Do it, put your house in order, clean up your mess.

5. See Sam Vincent. A policeman had to have a will. Sam could recommend a lawyer. Get a will, figure it all out.

But at 6 an odd thing occurred. It seemed like time stopped for a second and Earl's soul flew out of his body. He imagined himself floating through space. He watched from above as the black Arkansas woods and hills flew by. In the distance, beyond Board Camp, he saw a well-lit little house off by itself. He descended and flew through the window. His wife, June, was there. She was doing something in the kitchen. She was dutiful, erect, a little irritable, in an apron, looking tired as usual, and not saying much. He floated up to her and touched her cheek but his finger had no substance and sank through her. He stroked at her harder, but could make no contact.

Puzzled, he flew up the steps. Bob Lee sat in his room, trying to put together a Revell model airplane. It was a Bell P-39 Airacobra, very dangerous-looking, but Earl knew the pilots hated it and that it never flew after 1943. Bob Lee, still wearing that damned coonskin cap and that Crockett T-shirt, was bent earnestly into the effort, trying with clumsy boyish fingers to cement the clear plastic cockpit bubble to the cockpit frame, a tricky operation because too much cement could smear the transparency of the ersatz glass, ruining the entire illusion of reality. Usually, Earl did this job himself, though the boy glued the bigger pieces together and was getting better and better at it. Earl reached to help the boy, but again his fingers were weightless; they touched nothing.

Bob Lee, he called. Bob Lee, Bob Lee, Bob Lee, but Bob Lee didn't hear him and struggled with the cockpit and somehow got it mounted. Earl watched as his boy's face knitted in disappointment and fury, and he beat a single tear away. But Earl knew too the model was ruined. He ached now to take the boy into his arms, and say, now, that's all right, maybe you didn't do so good this time, but there'll be other times. But when he reached he touched nothing.

7. Stop vomiting blood.

The blood was everywhere. What was happening? It spread across his chest and poured from his absolute center. When had this happened? It must have occurred in that split second when Earl went out of his body. It occurred to him that he had been shot and he looked out into the goddamned darkness and heard only the hooting of the owls and the stirring of other animals. It was so dark.

He had the consciousness of it all slipping away. He thought of a drain, of being whirled down a drain. His mind grew logy and stupid. He yearned to see his son again and his wife and his father; he yearned but it did no good.

20.

Red was at an executive meeting for Redline Trucking when the call came, and he was almost happy, because Thewell Blackwell II, of Blackwell, Collins, Bisbee, over from Little Rock, was halfway through his briefing on potential complications if Interstate Commerce Regulatory Bill H.355 got out of the House Interstate Commerce Committee without serious reconfiguration, namely that the requirement for weight inspections at interstate borders be open on weekends as well as during the week, which had a long-term downsizing application in terms of routes serviced for out-of-state clients. It was all very interesting but Thewell was hardly the world's most commanding speaker arid somewhere in paragraph 13, subsection II, subpoint C, Red began trying to decide whether he should go to a No. 8 shot for the long floater at Cherokee Ridge, where next year's nationals were slated.

The buzz against his hip shook him from his reverie. He leaned over to Brad Pauley, his vice-president for legal affairs and liaison with Blackwell, Collins, Bisbee, and whispered, "Be back in a sec."

Brad nodded, and Red smiled tightly and slipped out of the meeting, walking through the quiet hush of the suite that everyone assumed was the hub of his empire. He knew the name of everyone and everyone knew his name and as he moved toward the executive washroom just outside his fabulous corner office, he nodded and exchanged pleasantries with his employees.

But at last he was alone and punched in the number on his folder.

"Uh, sir, uh, I don't know what this means," the dull voice of Duane Peck, spy and idiot, reported, "but, um, I found out early this morning that Bob and that kid done reapplied for a Motion of Exhumation. I got to the cemetery and found out that they removed the body they wanted and it went to Devilin mortuary. They had that doctor come on down from Fayetteville to look at it. Don't know what he told them, but he told them something. I don't rightly know where they went. I drove by Bob's place just a few minutes ago, but it was deserted, though the truck was there. Maybe they was out in the woods out back or something. So anyway: that's what it is. I'll spin on by the old man's place later and see what's going on."

Red didn't curse or stomp or do anything demonstrative: he was too disciplined and professional for such exhibitionism. But now he knew he had a serious problem and it must be dealt with swiftly, or the time would pass when it could be dealt with at all.

His first call was back to Duane.

"Yes sir?"

"Where are you?"

"Uh, I'se headed back to town."

"All right. I want you to back off from Swagger and the boy. You'll have no more business with them, for now."

"Yes sir," said Duane.

"Someone else will deal with them. Now, you concentrate on the old man. I have to know what he's up to. You find that out, do you understand? But you have to do it easily; you can't carry on like a goddamn hog with a corncob up its ass."

"Yes sir," said Duane. "I'll be gittin' right on it."

Red disconnected. He didn't like what came next. This business was tricky and always involved the immutable law of unintended consequences but thank God he'd thought ahead and had good people in place and it could be done neatly and professionally, with maximized chances of success. He thought his father would be proud, for this was an old Ray Bama trick: Avoid violence, avoid force, always negotiate. But when violence is unavoidable, strike fast, unexpectedly and with total commitment and willpower.

He dialed a number. A man answered.

"Yeah?"

"Do you know who this is?"

"Yes sir." The voice had a familiar Spanish accent to it, Cuban probably. "The team is ready?"

"The guys are all in. It's a good team. Steady guys. Been around. Solid, tough, know their stuff. Some are-"

"I don't want names or details. But it has to be done. You do it. I'll get you the intelligence, the routes, and you clear everything through this number. When you're ready to move, you let me know. I'll want a look at the plan, I'll want on-site reports. No slipups. You're being paid too much, all of you, for slipups."

"There won't be no slipups," the man said.

The man on the other end of the phone, in a farmhouse just outside Greenwood in far Sebastian County, let the dial tone come up and then he consulted a card and began to dial pager numbers.

Nine pagers rang. Two, one right after another, went off at the Blood, Sweat and Tears Gymnasium on Griffin Park Road in Fort Smith, where two immense men with necks the size of lampshades were hoisting what appeared to be tons of dead weight at separate Nautilus stations. Each was olive in skin tone, with glistening black hair and dark, deep, watchful eyes, identical even to the tattoos that festooned their gigantic arms, though one had a crescent of puckered, bruise-purple scar tissue that ran halfway around his neck, evidence of some grotesque encounter about which it would probably be better not to ask. They had bodies of truly immense mass, not the beautifully proportioned, narcissistic sculptured flesh of bodybuilders, but the huge, densely muscled bodies of men who needed strength professionally, like interior linemen or New Orleans mob drug enforcers and hit men.

Another pager rang in the back room of a crib just across the state line in Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, where a sleek black man was enjoying an act of oral sex being committed on him by a blond-haired woman of about thirty. He knew that she was really a man, but he didn't care; a mouth was a mouth.

Another pager buzzed on the firing line at On Target Indoor Firearms range over in Van Buren, as its owner stood with a customized Para-Ordnance P-16 in .40 S&W, calm and steady as a rock, blowing an ever-widening tattery hole in the head of a B-27 silhouette hanging from a pulley-mounted wire twenty-five yards out. He finished the sixteen-round clip, pulled in the target and examined the orifice he'd opened. Then he smiled, returned the gun to its case and checked out. In the parking lot, he made a show of putting the case in the trunk, but adeptly slid the .40 into an Alessi inside-the-pants holster, after, of course, inserting a fresh sixteen-round clip and cocking and locking.

Other sites: Ben & Jackie's Harley-Davidson shop, on 271 South, where a huge man in black leather and the lush hair of a rock singer, drawn into a ponytail, contemplated a chrome-plated extended muffler; the Central Mall Trio Theaters, on Rogers Avenue, where two rangy men who could have been ballplayers but weren't sat watching an extremely violent but idiotic movie; Nick's Chicken Shack on Route 71, where a large, pie-faced black man with a great many rings and necklaces ate a second extra-spicy breast; and finally at the Vietnam Market on Rogers, where a snake-thin Asian, also with a ponytail and a webbing of tattoos that ran from his neck down one arm (and scared the hell out of the proprietors), was trying to decide between diced mushroom and dried asparagus for the three-color vegetable salad he was contemplating for that night. He was a vegetarian.

The team leader, a Marisol Cuban with a gaudy career in Miami behind him, was named Jorge de la Rivera. He was an exceptionally handsome man and spoke in his vaguely Spanish accent to the assembled unit before him.

"We're thinking mainly of going for the kill from cars. Not a drive-by, not this guy, but a setup assault off a highway ambush, coordinated and choreographed, with good command and control. Three cars, a driver, two shooters in each car. Body armor. Lots of firepower up front. You want to go at this guy behind a fucking wall of nine-millimeter."

He waited. They were assembling their weapons, a selection of submachine guns stolen in a raid three weeks earlier from the New Orleans Metropolitan Police Property Room. He saw a couple of shorty M-16s, three MP-5s, one with a silencer, another with a laser sighting device, a Smith & Wesson M-76 with a foot of silencer, and the rest that universal soldier of the drug wars, ugly and reliable as an old whore, the Israeli Uzi.

Those who had satisfied themselves with their weapons loaded ammunition into clips: Federal hardball, 115-grain, slick and gold, for the subs; or Winchester ball .223 for the 16s.

"You been paid very, very well. If you die, money goes to your families you got families, your girlfriends otherwise. You get caught, you get good lawyers. You do time, it's good time, no hassle from screws or niggers or dirty white boys, depending on which color you are. Good time, smooth time.

"That's 'cause you the best. Why do we need the best? 'Cause this fucking guy, he's the best."

He handed a photo around: it passed from shooter to shooter. It showed a thin man who might have been handsome if he hadn't been so grim, leathery-faced, with thin eyes, squirrel shooter's eyes.

"This guy was a big fucking hero in that little war they had over in fucking gook country."

"Hey, Hor-hey, you not be talking about my country that way, man," said the ponytailed Asian, as he popped the bolt on a 16 and it slammed shut.

"Hey, we can be friends, no? No bullshit. I'm telling you good, you listen. Nigger, spic, cowboy, motorcycle fuck, wops, slope, fucking southern-white-boy asskickers, we got to work together on this. We're a fucking World War II movie. We're America, the melting pot. Nobody got no problem with nobody else, right, am I right? I know you guys have worked alone mainly or in small teams. If you want to go home in one piece, take it from Jorge, you do this my way."

"I don't like the gook shit."

"Then take it out on this boy. He killed eighty-seven of you guys. That was back in '72. They even got a nickname for him; they call him Bob the Nailer, 'cause he nails you but good. You think he forget how? In 1992, bunch of fucking Salvadorean commandos, trained by Green Berets even, think they got his ass fried on the top of a little hill? He kills forty-four of 'em. He shoots down a fucking chopper. He sends them crying home to mamasita mamasita. This guy is good. They say he's the best shot this great country ever produced. And when it gets all shitty brown in your underpants 'cause the lead is flying, they say this guy just gets cooler and cooler until he's ice. Ain't no brown in his pants. His heart don't even beat fast. Part fucking Indian, maybe, only Indians are like that."

"He's a old man," said the lanky cowboy. "His time has passed. He ain't as fast or as smart as he once was. I heard about him in the Corps, where they thought he was a god. He wasn't no god. He was a man."

"Were you in Nam?" asked Jorge.

"Desert Storm, man. Same fucking thing."