"Nobody went into a body bag around me that didn't deserve to. It's just some old business. About my father."

"Did it involve mine?"

"I asked him to do some legal work for me. That's all."

"That's it?"

"My young friend over there. He come to me because he wanted to write a book about my daddy. No one remembers Earl Swagger, except maybe your father and old Miss Connie. He's dead, she will be soon. It seemed to me to be worthwhile. Better'n writing a book about me."

"Okay. You should know, people are asking. You walk alone, but you cast a long shadow, my friend. Now come with me, I have something for you."

They walked through the crowd, which in effect was a walk through the fragments of Bob's past. He saw Sara Vincent, Sam's eldest daughter, who had married twice and divorced twice; she was now the town's travel agent, prosperous and lonely. She alone of the Vincent kids did not have Sam's magnetism, though she'd once conceived an awful crush on Bob, and even now threw an awkward, hot-eyed glance at him. But she alone made eye contact; for the others, he knew, he was an embarrassment.

I killed men. I am the sniper. I am apart.

It was the crushing sense of exile that the killer feels, which sometimes makes him more of a killer. Everyone knew from the publicity three years back: Bob Lee Swagger, not just a drunken marine vet alone on his mountain, but a sniper, an executioner, a man-hunter, the man who reached out and touched eighty-seven somebodies. In Arizona, nobody really cared because that's who he was from the start, but here it had the effect of a scandal. They connected him with a past and wondered: Why him? What sets him him apart? What does the sniper know that other men don't? What's it like to send a piece of lead and copper through somebody's head and blow his brains out? The pink mist effect: turn a man to colored rain. What's it feel like? apart? What does the sniper know that other men don't? What's it like to send a piece of lead and copper through somebody's head and blow his brains out? The pink mist effect: turn a man to colored rain. What's it feel like?

There was a girl once named Barb Sempler: he'd been on a date with her in high school but she thought he was too wild, a country boy. Wasn't her father a lawyer or something? Now she was oddly inflated, having picked up the forty pounds, her once beautiful features spread across the wide face. A boy over there, now fat and bald and well dressed, had once blocked him blindside on a football field and laughed about it until Bob had jumped him and the coach had pulled him off. He'd grown up to sell insurance, Bob to kill men. Strange. That woman. He thought her name was Cindy-ah, what, Tilford, that was it-and he'd gotten backseat tit off her one night in 1961. So long ago. Tit seemed like paradise. She was now slim and hard, where she'd been fat and dumpy. A divorcee, therapy, lots of aerobics. She smiled, scaring him. He yearned for his wife. He yearned to feel whole and connected again: father, family man, lay-up barn owner. Julie, YKN4, horses: he missed them, but also what they represented, which was the normal way, not the sniper's way. But they parted, to let him pass, to let him stand alone.

I am the sniper. I stand alone.

They reached the stairs, again the crowd parted magically, and they went down into the basement where Sam had had his office. John walked to the closet, opened it, took something off the shelf.

"I had to clean out Dad's office," he said. "Here, I think this stuff belongs to you. It was locked in the safe."

He held out a cardboard box: in it were his father's old notebook, with its brown blasphemy of blood, that old tablet of half-issued tickets.

"And this too," said John, holding out a sheet of yellow legal paper. "Dad had inscribed some notes. He seemed to be working on a case. Maybe it'll help you."

Russ was talking to an extremely pretty girl who seemed to know all about him, or at least to be very interested in him. It was slowly dawning on him that in this odd world he was a minor celebrity: the sidekick of the famous, mysterious, dangerous and-yes-sexy Bob Lee Swagger. He felt a little like Mick Jagger's gofer.

"So Princeton," the girl was saying, "why'd you drop out?"

"Oh, my mother and my father separated. I knew it would be hard on my mother, so I didn't want to be twelve hundred miles away. I spent the last year in Oklahoma City, working on the Daily Oklahoman Daily Oklahoman. That, plus the fact I didn't really like the East. I spent my life trying to get out of Oklahoma because I was too good good for Oklahoma. Then I got to the for Oklahoma. Then I got to the Ivy League Ivy League and the people seemed to be so, you know, and the people seemed to be so, you know, little little. They were fundamentally bigots. They viewed the world through such a perverted prism. Everyone outside was a redneck Nazi, anyone who owned a gun or was in the NRA or voted Republican was subhuman at worst and an amusing ignoramus at best. I just couldn't stand it. They didn't know anything anything. I somehow ended up working for a year on the Oklahoman Oklahoman, where I discovered that I fit in ... nowhere ... nowhere."

"Oh, go on. I'm sure you'll find a fit. You're very bright."

"I was was very bright. In Oklahoma, I was very bright. In Oklahoma, I was so so smart. Then I got to New Jersey and I was just another toad on a rock." smart. Then I got to New Jersey and I was just another toad on a rock."

She smiled.

"Aren't you some sort of writer?"

"The unpublished unpublished sort. Very glamorous." sort. Very glamorous."

"Are you going to write a book about Bob the Nailer?"

"No. Bob has secrets so deep ten years of therapy followed by ten years of torture couldn't get them all out. He's spent his life trying to live up to his father's ideal. And, unlike the rest of us, I'd say he made it. He wouldn't say he had, but I would. Anyhow, the book is reputedly about the dad. Earl Swagger was an extremely heroic man, killed in a shoot-out with white-trash scum, after winning the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima. I had the idea of doing a long narrative on his last day, how it summoned up a whole slew of American pathologies. But all I've done is run around and get coffee."

"It sounds interesting. I like the idea of a symbolic episode: you learn so much about the macrocosm by evoking the microcosm."

"Wow," he said. "You must be an English major."

"I'm a junior at Vanderbilt."

"That's a good school."

"Thank you. I'm writing my senior thesis on Raymond Carrrrrr," Russ not quite catching the last name.

Raymond? Writer? Begins with C C, has r's? Russ panicked. Had she said Carver? Carver? He'd never read any Carver. But maybe she'd said He'd never read any Carver. But maybe she'd said Chandler Chandler. That was much better. He hadn't read any Chandler either, but at least he could bluff his way through.

"The L.A. private-eye guy? Lots of neon, that sort of stuff."

"Yes, but so much more," she said, and Russ sighed with relief. "He could really tell a story. Maybe it's a southern thing, but I love it when you can just sink into a book's language. Will your book be like that?"

"Yes," said Russ, thinking I hope hope.

"How far are you?"

"Well, we're really still researching. Listen, I'm sort of mixed up. Who are you?"

"Oh," she laughed. "One of the grandchildren. You knew Grandpappy?"

Now he got it.

"At the end, I went with Bob to see him. He was a crusty old boy, I'll say that. He told me a thing or two."

"Crusty as they come. The original male tyrant king. But somehow, a necessary man," she said. "And sweet. Underneath. He was getting vague, though."

"We noticed. But there was something heroic in the way he fought it. He was an Arkansas Lear," Russ said, really pleased with the Lear remark, though he'd never gotten around to reading it either.

"Such a man. A tyrant, a ruler, but somehow, oh, I don't know, necessary necessary. They don't make them like that anymore, do they?"

"No, they make 'em like me me," he said-she laughed-"and I agree it's a kind of a comedown."

"Oh, Russ, you'll do fine."

"You're ... whose daughter?"

"My father is John, Grandpap's oldest son. He's a doctor in Little Rock, an internist. I'm Jeannie."

"The New York one? I heard someone call you 'the New York one.'"

"Oh, that. I interned last summer in New York at Mademoiselle Mademoiselle."

"Oh," said Russ. Shit, she was ahead of him!

"I just got coffee for assholes in too much makeup who'd done too many drugs and now did too much aerobics. Not helpful."

"It all helps. Or so they tell me."

"Have you picked up on the big scandal yet?"

"No, what's that?"

"All the blacks are scandalized. I just learned this from my friend Tenille. She's over there with her mother."

"I don't-"

"My grandfather won the Silver Star at the Battle of the Bulge but the bravest thing he ever did was prosecute a white man for the murder of a black man. His name was Jed Posey."

The name rang some kind of bell with Russ, but he couldn't quite nail it down.

"In 1962 he beat a civil rights leader to death with a spade in a gas station."

"Oh, yes," Russ said. "One thing about this, I'm becoming quite an expert on the Faulknerian substrata of Polk County, Arkansas."

"Faulkner would have won two two Nobel Prizes if he'd been born here, that is if he didn't drink himself to death beforehand. Anyhow, Grandpappy prosecuted him and though he couldn't get the death penalty, Jed Posey went away for life." Nobel Prizes if he'd been born here, that is if he didn't drink himself to death beforehand. Anyhow, Grandpappy prosecuted him and though he couldn't get the death penalty, Jed Posey went away for life."

"Yes?" said Russ.

"It cost Grandpappy the election and he was out of office for twelve years, after eighteen years in office. Finally, in 1974, he won again, and had eight more years. By that time, he'd turned into an anti-gun-control liberal, if you can imagine such a thing."

"Just barely," said Russ.

"Anyhow, they just paroled him. Jed Posey. Two days after Grandpappy died, they paroled him."

"Jesus," said Russ. "That's disrespectful."

"No," she said. "That's Arkansas."

But suddenly Russ wasn't there. It all fell away, the wake, the noise, the crowd, even impossibly bright and pretty Jeannie Vincent in front of him.

He saw that name somewhere in infantile print, but couldn't quite pin it down. Jed Posey.

It was part of a list.

Lem Tolliver.

Lum Posey.

Pop Dwyer.

Where?

"Russ? Are you going to faint?"

"Ah no, I just-"

He remembered suddenly. Jed Posey. His name was on the inside of Bob's father's last notepad. He was in the party that found Shirelle Parker. He and Miss Connie were the only two people still alive who'd spent time with Earl Swagger on his last day on earth, July 23, 1955.

"Do you know where this Jed Posey would be?"

"I don't-what's going on?"

"We have to find him. We have have to!" he said, and thought he'd explain it to her, when Bob grabbed him suddenly and pulled him away from the young woman, with a look on his face like the war was just about to start and it was time to load the damned guns. to!" he said, and thought he'd explain it to her, when Bob grabbed him suddenly and pulled him away from the young woman, with a look on his face like the war was just about to start and it was time to load the damned guns.

35.

Sometimes he even impressed himself!

Red Bama sat back for just a moment and reflected upon the wondrous thing that he had brought off and how quickly he had snatched an apparent victory from the jaws of defeat.

He felt now like crowing loudly from the roof of Nancy's. The secret war he had been fighting was about to pay off.

His lawyer reported: the parole of Jed Posey happened with alarming alacrity. Posey himself was well prepared, initially by a screw whom Red controlled and then by a private detective in Red's employ: he had been told that he would be paroled and that in order to stay out of stir, he had certain obligations to the man (unspecified) who had arranged all this. He would be located in his old cabin, a mile or so off old County 70 at the foot of Iron Fork Mountain in the densest hardwood forest in Arkansas. By this time, Jed was an experienced professional convict, with over thirty years in stir: surviving and finally flourishing, he had become an adept liar, a shrewd manipulator, a vivid reader of human weakness, a tough, scrawny, tattooed old jail rat, capable of witnessing the most extraordinary violence without a wince. Other people's sorrow meant nothing to him at all; empathy had been milled out of him by the prison and, in fact, his favorite of all memories was the recollection of that blissful day in 1962 when he had stove in that nigger's head with a spade, then sat down and had a last Cherry Smash before cops arrived.

So it turned out freedom meant little to him; a chance to strike at the goddamned skunk-ass Swaggers was enough to get him happily through his old age.

His role was easily within his grasp. He was told that sometime in the next week or so, Bob Lee Swagger would come to him in the forest. Don't ask how or why, he just will; trust us. Your role, Jed, is twofold. First, simply step on a rigged floorboard that will send a radio signal. The second, keep him there until after dark or at least until twilight. You have no other responsibilities. In the daylight, Bob Lee is a formidable man. In the night, he is just another target.

Jed knew he could do this. Cackling evilly through his toothless gums, he thought he had a trick or two up his sleeve that would keep them boys busy for a time.

The sniper was the second part of Red's plan. Now located on a farm just on the other side of 70 in the charge of Duane Peck, Jack Preece had spent the past few days in night-fire exercises and Duane reported that at ranges out to two hundred yards he was extremely deadly. He regularly patrolled, both by day and by night, the terrain on which the engagement was slated; terrain familiarity, after all, was the sniper's best ally. When he was alerted that Swagger had arrived at Jed Posey's, he would move swiftly over the familiar ground to intercept. The access in and out of the draw in which the ratty old Posey cabin sat was through a narrow enfilade where a creek cut between two hills. Under combat discipline, of course, Swagger would never take such an obvious path; but he wouldn't be thinking in such terms, but merely be obsessed by the mystery he was trying to unravel. Plus, it would be dark, and going up or around the hills would be dangerous and time-consuming.

Preece set up his hide about 150 yards out, oblique to the left, with a good clear field of shooting, an arc of more than forty degrees. The M-16 didn't have much recoil. They'd come along into the cone of infrared light, bright as day, and he'd drill the man first, the boy second, one 55-grain ball round to each chest, velocity a little under 3,000 feet per second, delivering about 800 foot-pounds of energy. The man would be dead before the boy knew a shot had been fired; the boy would be dead before the man had begun to fall.

As this was explained to Red, he thought of it as an incoming simo in sporting clays, two birds coming right at you. You panic the first or second time, but you learn quickly enough to simply pull through the last bird to the first, shooting as the barrel covers up the bird. It's a shot that's quite easy to master but demands aggressiveness and confidence more than talent.

It was beautiful. It turned on Bob's predictability. He would learn that Jed Posey was free, for Red had seen to it that the black woman herself was told. He would think on it. He would investigate, and satisfy himself that it was not a trap. He would sniff, paw, hesitate, think, but in the end, because he believed, he would go forward. He had to. It was his nature to push on, heroic to the end, destroyed by his very heroism.

Only this last bothered Red a bit: the man, like his father, was a true hero, bold, smart, violent and aggressive. Such men were harder and harder to find; possibly Bob was the last one left in America, outside a few Army Rangers or Green Berets. Red respected heroism but he was not sentimental about it. If it came at him, it must be destroyed and what was accomplished must be preserved. It was that simple.

The phone rang.

"Bama."

"Mr. Bama?"

It was a Bama lieutenant who was officially on the books as a security consultant to Redline Trucking, but actually served as Red's troubleshooter in all aspects of communications that his enterprises demanded.

"Yeah, go ahead, Will."