He waited. Seemed to be scraping and jostling inside.

Finally, the door opened and a young black woman peered out at him.

Her face was tight and she was scared.

Peck liked that a lot.

"Y-yes?" she said.

He smiled. "Ma'am?" he said as charmingly as he knew how, "ma'am, I'm Deputy Duane Peck of the County Sheriff's Department. I'm here to talk to a Mrs. Lucille Parker."

"That's Mama. What is this in reference to, please?"

"Ma'am, I'm investigating the death of Sam Vincent, the former county prosecutor. He died night before last. That day, he came out here and talked to Mrs. Parker. I happened to see him out here. I'm just checking up to make sure everything's on the up-and-up. I know she's an elderly lady, ma'am, and I don't mean her no bother. Just got a few questions is all. Be over and out of here in a jiff."

"Just a minute," the woman said stonily, shutting the door.

The anger rose in Duane, like smoke. A nigger gal treating him like that! He has to stand in the hot sun! But he quelled it, telling himself to be cool, for this here goddamned thing was going to lead to a bigger job working for Mr. Bama permanent, and no one would treat him like white trash ever again. Neechee said so!

The minutes passed and eventually the door opened.

"Mama will see you. She's upset over the death of Mr. Sam. You go easy with her, you hear? She's eighty-two years old."

Duane walked into the house, astonished to find it so nice and whitelike. He'd always thought these people lived like pigs in a sty.

The woman-the daughter, he knew-led him through a living room to a back porch, where the old lady sat like a queen of the village, in regal splendor and glory.

"Ma'am, I'm Deputy Peck. Hope I'm not bothering you none, but we have to make inquiries. I'll try and be out of here fast."

She nodded.

"Ah, you know that poor Sam Vincent fell down the stairs of his office night before last and died?"

She nodded.

"Poor Sam," Duane said. "Anyhow it looks like a straight accidental death, but I have to ask a question or so."

"Go ahead, Deputy."

"Ma'am, did he seem agitated about anything? Was he in control of hisself? What was he talking about?"

"My daughter was killed in this town forty-odd years ago," said the proud old lady. "He prosecuted the boy they said did it. I had written him a letter about the crime some years back. He came by to talk about it, that's all."

"I see. But he was okay? I mean, he weren't in no state state, what you might call it. So excited-like, he might fall or something. Balance problems. Did he have balance problems?"

"He was a good man. It seems like good people die around these parts and the bad ones just go on and on."

"Yes, ma'am, it do seem that way sometime. But he was physically all right, wasn't he? Is that what you're telling me."

"I don't think Mr. Sam would fall down no stairs, no sir," said the woman. "He was strong as a bull and very sharp and clear. I didn't see any evidence of balance problems."

"Yes, ma'am."

"His death is a terrible thing. He was a good man."

"I agree, ma'am. Old Sam: he was like a daddy to me."

"He was the only man in this state with the gumption to prosecute a white man for the murder of a black man. That took courage."

"Yes, ma'am," said Duane, trying to bite down his delight. The woman had brought him right to where he wanted to be.

"I looked it up," he said. "Jed Posey, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Davidson Fuller, back in 1965. Beat him to death with a shovel."

The old lady shook her head. She was tracking the tangled coils back to the murder of her daughter Shirelle. Shirelle was killed, the law said, by Reggie Fuller, who was sentenced to death. Davidson Fuller, his father, lost everything everything trying to free his son but was somehow made strong by the ordeal and emerged in the early sixties as the most energetic and fearless of the civil rights leaders in Arkansas. He had stopped for gas out near Nunley and a terrible white man came out of a gas station and hit him three times with a spade, just for nothing, just for being black, then went back on the porch to drink a Cherry Smash until the police arrived. Mr. Sam couldn't get the death penalty but he got Jed Posey to spend the rest of his life in prison. trying to free his son but was somehow made strong by the ordeal and emerged in the early sixties as the most energetic and fearless of the civil rights leaders in Arkansas. He had stopped for gas out near Nunley and a terrible white man came out of a gas station and hit him three times with a spade, just for nothing, just for being black, then went back on the porch to drink a Cherry Smash until the police arrived. Mr. Sam couldn't get the death penalty but he got Jed Posey to spend the rest of his life in prison.

As if they both reached that destination simultaneously, their eyes met. And Duane gave her the news he'd been sent to deliver.

"D'ja hear they finally paroled that old boy Jed Posey?"

She looked at him in horror.

"Yep, he gets out today. They say he's going back to his brother Lum's cabin somewhere in the damn mountains. A shame a boy like that can't die in the pen, where he belongs."

He smiled.

"Well, thanks so much, ma'am. You cleared it all up for me."

Jack Preece opened the gun vault and stepped inside. It was a large vault, extremely expensive, with space in it for two hundred rifles. But there were only thirty or so, all ready for shipment, various of his products destined for the world's hot spots.

He tried to think it out.

Night shot. Infrared or passive ambient light? Range, two hundred yards or less. What to take? Match the weapon to the mission.

State-of-the-art, of course, was the Knight SR-25 with the Magnavox thermal sniperscope mounted and zeroed and a JFP suppressor, the No. 1 System. It was at this moment in time the best sniper rifle in the world. But the businessman in him looked at the one unit locked in the rack, the demonstrator. It represented an investment of about $18,000, for the rifle, the very expensive thermal scope, the suppressor and the complex array of armorer's skills to unify all the elements into the single system. There was always the possibility of a breakage or even a battlefield loss. Could he absorb that much of a financial bite? Worse, the gun was not wiped clean; it still bore Knight's serial numbers and the Magnavox unit bore the Magnavox numbers, both traceable to him. If by some twist of fate, he got out but the gun didn't and it was recovered by authorities, it led them straight to him, literally in a matter of hours. Of course he had his powerful allies in the intelligence and military communities, and the helpful mantra of national security could always be invoked, but that was much less powerful nowadays. You couldn't be sure it would work at all: newspapers had no commitment to a higher thing called national security, they hardly believed in the concept of the nation, much less security! His friends could only protect him so far; in the realpolitik of Washington, he could find himself served up fried and covered in gravy for somebody's Pulitzer Prize. So the Stoner was out.

He looked next at the rack of lesser semiautos. These were mostly recovered M-14s or Springfield M-lAs, all in 7.62 NATO, reconfigured as the standard army M-21 sniper rifle of Vietnam, accurized and mounted with an ambient night scope, usually the AN/PVS-2 Starlight scope, and the JFP suppressor. Fine weapons, with a hundred custom tricks to make them shoot straighter and more reliably than off-the-rack 14s. But they had something in common with the Knight weapon: they were traceable to him, although there might be some salvation there, as the guns were older, had a much longer history and had come through many sources and via many avenues. That meant that the paper trail could be very complex, with dead ends and red herrings strewn throughout it, depending on the actual weapon. Would it be complex enough to protect him if the weapon was lost and then recovered? There was no way of knowing and he wasn't sanguine about living the next ten years of his life waiting for some government computer to kick out the serial number connection to him. Nix to the 21s.

Next were the bolt guns. These too came from a variety of sources, many of them civilian. All were basically the same rifle, the Remington 700, though they had been worked over by secondary contractors, in some case the Remington Custom Shop, some cases Robar, or McMillan or ProFiber, or individual custom gunworks, like Tank's Rifle Shop or D&L Firearms or Fulton Armory. Some had the night-vision device, one or two had lasers, one or two had simple Leupold police marksman scopes or Unertl 10x's, the marine choice. Again, the possibility of tracing these guns was present, though possibly not paramount, if he consulted the records and chose carefully. But another difficulty presented itself to this system: that was tactical.

Preece knew he'd be hitting two targets, Swagger first and then that kid. The bolt gun was a highly accurate system, as Swagger himself had proven in Vietnam and hundreds of SWAT and Delta or FBI HRU engagements had since proven; it was the quintessential exemplar of the professional's code: One Shot, One Kill. But it was not the system of choice for engaging multiple targets. There was that damned bolt throw after the shot, an inch up, three inches back, three inches forward, an inch down. Peter Paul Mauser had cooked it up back in 1892; it was a hundred years old. A good, trained rifleman could do it under a second and there was a time when Preece was as fast as anyone in the world. This was not that time. He didn't want to be throwing a bolt then looking for target number two; the whole thing fell apart if one of the targets made it out.

So he wanted a very clean gun, untraceable, he wanted a semiauto capacity, he wanted accuracy.

There was only one choice, really.

It was outmoded weapons technology, to be sure, but it had the great attraction of stepping out of the long tradition of black operations. He owned it more as a curiosity than as an item for sale. Who would buy something so antiquated? The Agency had evidently used it in Nam as part of SOG's Operation PHOENIX, the infrastructure eradication program that targeted high-profile V.C. suspects for assassination by special killer teams. Then it had gone God knew where, done God knew what for a number of years: if weapons could talk, then this one had the experience of a best-selling book in its sleek contours. Certainly, it had seen much action in South and Central America, perhaps even in Africa and Europe as well.

Preece had bought it sub rosa from one of his own sniper cadre, a man with much experience. One look into that man's lightless, hunter's eyes and at that flat dead face told the general that further inquiries were pointless. The man was facing his third divorce, needed to raise cash; he sold it to the general for $4,000, no questions asked, no papers given, nothing recorded. It was the weapon that never was, unless it was firing at you.

The piece was an M-16, firing the little 5.56mm round, but at its muzzle it boasted an old long, thin Sionics suppressor, the HEL-H4A model, and, by special mount, it wore the last operational American military infrared weapon sight, the AN/PAS-4. This was no ambient night sight, and still less a Magnavox thermal sniperscope, but it was miles better than the old carbine sniperscopes. For one thing, its battery pack had been miniaturized. Specs described it as "a battery-operated sight and aiming device consisting of an infrared light source, an infrared sensitive image forming telescope (4.5) with integral miniaturized high-voltage power supply and a light source power supply (a belt-mounted 6 VDC rechargeable nickel cadmium battery)." The telescope assembly was thirteen inches long; the telescope and light source were approximately fourteen inches long; the entire sight assembly weighed about twelve pounds. It looked like a scope with a searchlight mounted atop it, awkward and crude but surprisingly easy to manipulate.

It had but one disadvantage: that light source. That is, it was active infrared, as opposed to the Magnavox's passive mode: it had to project a beam of infrared light from the light source to the target area for the sensitized telescope to pick up. In a technologically sophisticated combat environment such a system was inherently dangerous because for sure the enemy would have an infrared spotting scope through which his light beam would be a vivid indication of his locale, and countersniper measures would be undertaken with massive firepower. Thus it was better in the undeveloped portions of the world, Central America, Africa, West Arkansas.

He picked the weapon up, ran a quick battery check. Everything was fine. He snapped the charger back and released it, felt the weapon cock with a satisfying clack. The trigger pull was a dry, light snap, like a glass rod breaking. He set the weapon down and went at last to the ammo locker within the vault and selected six boxes of Ball M-193 5.56mm, confident that the night belonged to him.

34.

The funeral was in the late morning but they couldn't make it, because the Baltimore-Dallas flight and the hop via American Eagle to Fort Smith didn't get them back until about noon. But there was a wake to be held at Sam's old house at four, and, driving hard down the parkway, they knew they'd make it by at least four-thirty.

Russ drove; Bob was even more sealed off than usual. The sniper's stillness: part of the legend. His bitterness, his repressed anger, his sense of isolation-all a part of the same package. But behind those calm, dark eyes, Russ knew there was something going on.

"So what are you thinking?" Russ finally asked.

"That we just wasted a good solid day and that I'm out thirteen hundred bucks in tickets."

"I'll pay you-"

"It ain't that, I don't want your money. It was just waste. We are heading in a wrong direction."

"No sir," said Russ. "I honestly believe that there has has to be a connection between the death of that child and the death of your father." to be a connection between the death of that child and the death of your father."

"You bonehead," said Bob cruelly, not even looking at him. "That's impossible. My father was killed the same day that girl was found. There's no way no way they could have set what they set up that fast. It was a four- or five-day operation, Frenchy working at his goddamned craziest. And second: there was they could have set what they set up that fast. It was a four- or five-day operation, Frenchy working at his goddamned craziest. And second: there was no way no way anybody could have predicted that my daddy would find that body that day or any day. That was pure goddamn luck or whatever. Her mama came to him, and he went a-looking. Suppose he hadn't have found that body? He'd still be dead by 11.00 anybody could have predicted that my daddy would find that body that day or any day. That was pure goddamn luck or whatever. Her mama came to him, and he went a-looking. Suppose he hadn't have found that body? He'd still be dead by 11.00 P.M P.M. That body could have laid for weeks yet before someone came across it, and by that time it could have been so decomposed that it would take still more weeks before they got around to identifying it. No, what happened to that girl is a crime, and if poor Reggie Fuller died on its account, that is a pity and a sorrow, but it don't mean shit to us."

Russ still believed that there was some connection.

"It had to. What else could possibly have been going on in Polk County in 1955 that would have been worth setting up that elaborate conspiracy? Frenchy Short wouldn't just do something for-"

"That is right as rain," said Bob. "So here's what I think. I think my father was on some kind of investigative team or something the state police were running. Maybe it had to do with what was going on at Camp Chaffee. And somehow he found something out. And had to be stopped."

"That sounds like a crummy movie," said Russ.

"I know it does, and I don't even go to movies," said Bob grumpily.

"Well, maybe-"

"Slow down," said Bob, "and don't turn around fast."

A moment or two ticked by.

Bob slid his .45 out of the inside-the-belt holster which Russ hadn't even seen him put on.

"What the hell-"

"Easy, easy," said Bob.

Russ became aware of a van, blue, riding in the dead man's slot just where his mirrors couldn't track it.

The van suddenly accelerated and began to pull even.

"Don't look" said Bob, "and if I say go, you hit the brake hard hard, you understand?"

Russ swallowed, tasting pennies. They were back.

But the van kept passing them and Russ could no longer obey; his head sneaked sideways, where he saw, in the backseat, a very pretty little girl who stared intently at him. She stuck out her tongue.

"Shit," said Russ. "You had me scared."

"Maybe I am losing it," said Bob, sliding the pistol back behind his jacket. "I didn't see that boy pull up; he was in the slot. I got to be paying more goddamned attention."

"So what do we do next?" asked Russ.

"You're the Princeton boy. You tell me."

"Well," said Russ, and then he realized ... he didn't know either.

The complexity that had been Sam Vincent was on full display in the odd mob that congregated at his house to mourn his passing, or possibly to celebrate it, or at least to get drunk at his expense. African Americans from the west side of the tracks, aristocrats from Little Rock, cronies from the thousands of hunting trips he'd taken, old boys who'd guided him, farmers who'd traded with him, politicians, police officers, children, bitter secretaries, opposing lawyers, corrections officers, even a few men that Sam had sent away. Each had a Sam story to tell, but the one that was making the rounds when Bob and Russ finally arrived and found parking-the street was thronged with cars, everything from Mercedes to forty-year-old pickups-had to do with the ultimate disposition of Sam's estate, itself quite large from a lifetime of extremely shrewd investing and trading. He'd been wisely sidestepping the estate tax by dispensing his wealth in $10,000-per-year chunks for a number of years to his children and even to his sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, divorced or not, second marriage or not, no questions asked, on the principle that anyone who'd had to put up with him in the family deserved a nice little present. He'd also already established trust funds for each grandchild worth $200,000 but only payable to educational institutions in the form of checks for tuition, food or housing. He left each of his fired or resigned secretaries $10,000 except for the one who'd become a drunk: she got $15,000. That left an untidy sum in the estate of $19,450.

"God, Dad," said Dr. John Vincent, Scotch on his breath (the bar was well stocked) and amazement in his voice, "he left $9,725 to the NRA's ILA fund and $9,725 to Handgun Control, Inc. I can see him cackling when he thought that one up!"

"He was a good man," said Bob, who seemed in the crowd of revelers the only one who was morose and still grieving.

"Oh, he was a mean old bastard," said the doctor, the eldest son, the one who'd borne the brunt of his father's rages and praises. "Smart as a whip, mean as a rooster. He whaled the tar out of us when we were growing up. But by God each of us turned out. Two doctors, a lawyer, a travel agent, an investment counselor and an impressionist painter."

"Who's the painter?" Bob asked.

"Jamie."

"I thought he was a lawyer."

"He was, for ten years. Then he finally screwed up his courage and did what he he wanted, not Dad. I think Dad respected him for it." wanted, not Dad. I think Dad respected him for it."

"He was a stubborn bastard," Bob said.

"Jesus. And tough. You know in twenty-two years at home, I only saw him cry once. He didn't even cry when Mom died. He only cried when your father was killed. I remember he sat downstairs all by himself when he got back. Must have been well toward dawn. He sat down there and had a drink. I was awakened by a sound I'd never heard. I snuck downstairs. He was sitting in that old rocker there"-John pointed through the crowd to a threadbare old chair that had stood in the same spot for fifty years-"and rocked back and forth and sobbed like a baby. He loved your father. He thought Earl Swagger was the most perfect man ever put on earth: hero, father, police officer, incorruptible symbol of everything that was right and strong about America."

"I keep telling people: my father was only a man."

"Well, my dad didn't think so. Bob, I have to ask: what's going on? I keep hearing things."

"About old crazy Bob Lee digging up some Confederate?"

"Yes. That. And suddenly you're here and there's a terrible gunfight over in Oklahoma and ten men are killed. Never happened before you came back. Nothing connects you to it, but people still remember you went hunting a few years back, and two boys came out of the woods in body bags. Old Dad saved your butt in a federal court."