A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  “Goddamn the fellow, will he not give!” screamed Anto. “The bastard is getting on me nerves. We’re all knackered hard, sure we is. What, how many buckets now, Jimmy?”

  Three, thought Bob, I’ve lasted three buckets on these motherfuckers.

  “That would be seven now, Anto,” said Ginger.

  Seven! He’d lost track, his mind was falling in and out of gear. Seven. He must have been there for hours. He had no idea.

  Someone slapped him hard in the face. His eyes opened, revealing nothing but blur and sparkle behind which figures moved, and then someone wiped them clear of water, and he saw now the four had stripped off their shirts and were down to undershirts, the bulky ones, tattooed muscles glistening with either sweat or splash from their labor, and scrawny Raymond like a wet rat. They were breathing hard, and all had hair pasted down flat and damp.

  Seven buckets on you motherfuckers, he thought, even though it was hard to remember who, exactly, he was, and why he was here or what this was all about. That had vanished somewhere along with the untracked buckets.

  “Jaysus Janey Mac, he’s hard of head,” said Anto. “All right, goddamn your black heart, Swagger, now I’m giving it to you straight. You listen hard. I’m bloody tired of you acting the maggot. This time, we kill you. If you’d any to tell, you’d have told, I’m sure. Your silence makes its point: you’ve told no one of your findings, because if you had, you’d give them up. You’d put them between you and the horror of the water. Remember Winston in Room 101, when finally he gave up Julia out of fear of the rats lunching on his nose. If you had a Julia to give us, you’d have given us she long before. So there is no Julia—”

  What was this asshole ranting about?

  “—there is no Bureau, there is no report protocol nor coded words, there is no waiting SWAT team. You’re on your own, Sniper, and I should have known because us snipers is lonely bastards, out beyond, doing the dark thing solitarylike and crawling back then where all the boys pretend they don’t see you because you’re naked death, whilst they’s battle-killin’, a whole different kettle of shad, unless of course Johnny Muhammad has snipers, and then it’s your ass sure they be lovin’. But you’re alone in this one, and that means that in the way things are, you’re no better at all than I. You’re not a holy warrior fighting for some holy cause like the goddamned rug weavers, you’re a bloody mercenary. You take your wages and you’ll soon be dead, and heaven ain’t suspended and earth’s foundations ain’t fled. You’re just dead. Okay boys, this is it, I’m done fooling with this one. Swagger, ’tis a shame to end up drownded dead in a bucket like a Titanic rat after all ye’ve been and done, but there it lies.”

  Again the towel was clamped and the hard muscled limbs pressed against his bound body to hold against the spasms of the drowning man, and again he felt the dread infiltration of the water, its first mild licks, its rising chill, its fingers somehow clawing to rip at his mouth and nose and tear them wide open to fill them and kill him dead drowning.

  This bucket was blue. That is to say, as the water rushed through the towel and clamped its intensity across his face, he was taken back in memory close on fifty years, and he remembered a day at the public pool in Little Rock, sometime in the fifties, a bright, hot summer, he and a thousand other kids flapping and jostling and splashing in that vast blue wetness, and he was trying to swim on his own and somehow his thin boy’s arms propelled him a certain blind distance in a certain blind direction and for just a second he actually was flat in the water propelling himself along on the rhythm of his muscles and then he ran out of strength and settled to the bottom, and that was when he realized he had swum too far in the wrong direction and was now in over his head. This is how children drown; caught in the grip of panic, he opened his mouth to scream but it didn’t happen and instead the cold, chlorinated brew of the pool raced in torrents into lungs and gut, and the lack of oxygen tripped off a flare of fear and he flappity-flap-flapped and he sank yet further and he had a moment when he knew he was dead and he saw blue blue blue shot with bubbles arising as if he were dying in Alka-Seltzer or some terrible thing, and suddenly someone strong had him, and the sun burst above him as if it were some kind of skyrocket, and the air rushed him, sucked with all the hunger of the young, and he was propelled this way in the strong hands of his savior, who of course was no one less than his father.

  “Whoa, Bobby, you almost went to Davy Jones on your old dad, would have upset Mommy for days!” his father sang as he brought the boy to safety. “Yes sir, she’d never give me a moment’s peace!”

  The man laughed, and Bob saw his father’s face clearly for just a second, a great man, a good man, a brave man, the best who ever lived for this among a million other reasons, all much better than this one, and it occurred to him that if he died, who on earth would remember his father? No one. He was the last who’d shared time on earth with Earl Swagger, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, the son of Sheriff Charles Swagger, Earl who’d gone off to war with the Marines and won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima and come home for ten good years as a state trooper in the Arkansas Highway Patrol before he was taken from the world for nothing, really, nothing that counted. And Bob felt some kind of sudden strength: if you kill me, if I die in this water, it is of little interest to the world, but it means Earl Swagger’s memory dies too, and I cannot let that happen.

  Time passed.

  His father aged.

  It was a few years later. Daddy left in the late afternoon, knowing without looking that his son watched him go, and he raised a hand. So long, little boy. See you soon, little fellow. Daddy’ll be back and we’ll play some catch or walk in the woods or something, yes sir.

  But his father didn’t come back again, ever. Instead, late at night, the colonel showed up, and then Sam and then some newspaper people and then some neighbors, and then some Negroes from the other side of town. They were all silent, except for his mother’s sobbing, and in time, the colonel came up and told him that his father was dead. Compared to that pain, that long, hard trek through wasteland and jungle, this shit was nothing.

  “Goddamn him,” screamed Anto, in lost and wild fury, as the towels came off in what seemed like only three hours. “Look at the bastard. He just looks at us, him growing stronger, with them mad sniper eyes. Does he like it, do you think? Has he grown gills to live in water? Has he evolved himself backwards to some fishy lurker? The bastard, the bastard,” and he let fly, smashing Bob hard in the face with a muscle-clotted palm, driving him to the floor with a clatter.

  There was silence in the room, except for the heavy breathing of the torturers. Finally Anto spoke.

  “Get him cleaned up. Rinse him down. Get him some food. Let him piss and finally shit. I’ve got to try something else. The bloody fooker. He must be Irish to have a head or heart that much of steel.”

  40

  Nick had, for the first time in his life, taken to sleeping in. And why not? He had nowhere to go or be; he was just home, besieged by press, waiting for various accusations and investigations to reach some kind of clarity or resolution.

  But that morning, Sally nudged him awake at 7 a.m.

  “Umm. Ummphh. Yeah, what?”

  “Sweetie, sweetie, wake up. Something’s happened.”

  He blinked, rubbed shellac out of his eyes so that they finally cracked open to admit the dawn, and sat up.

  “Whattya mean?” he mumbled, his tongue still stuck to the roof of his dry mouth.

  She stood by the window, trim in her blue business suit, her horn-rim glasses glinting.

  “The vultures,” she said, hooking a thumb to indicate the alien gathering on the lawn, “they’ve tripled. Maybe quadrupled.”

  “Kill some of ’em when you back out, will you?” he said.

  “I just want to break the foot of that prissy little bitch Jamie whatever. She’s out there, the wan, pale little zombie. She nailed me on the Mason thing with an ambush on the courthouse steps. I still owe her.”

  “Really
,” Nick said, “it’s much cheaper to kill them. If you just maim them, you have to support them for years. If you kill them, their buddies lose interest in a couple of weeks.”

  “Okay, sweetie, have to run. Summary’s at ten thirty. Have a good day.”

  “Doubtful.”

  She turned and left, hustling with efficiency and purpose. She hadn’t let this thing throw her off one iota and believed that Nick would, as usual, triumph in the end.

  He lay there, heard the door slam, the garage door rise, her Volvo ease out as the reporters reluctantly made room, and then she sped off.

  Lord God, thought Nick, looking at the now swollen mass camped in the front yard of his home, where they crushed grass to mud, left McDonald’s cups and wrappings everywhere, and annoyed the hell out of the neighbors, though nothing was said, as all of them worked themselves for the gov and knew this sort of thing happened every once in a while. It was what you got for pursuing a career in the town of power.

  Nick stumbled into the bathroom, decided to shave for the first time in three days, showered, then climbed into blue jeans, New Balance hikers, and his favorite University of Virginia hoodie. His glasses were where he’d left them, which happened about twice a month; usually the strange men who came in and moved his clothes around in the dark did the same for his glasses. He made it downstairs, turned on the pot she always left prepared, and in a few seconds had himself a nice cup of joe, dead black and steaming, while he watched the news, which didn’t, for once, picture him and bring out breathless updates. These guys outside, they were ahead of the curve then, while local TV was behind or couldn’t get its stand-ups into position quickly enough.

  He thought he might let ’em stew; he thought he might go online and read the papers and get the info that way, but after a while, it seemed sort of pointless. He got up, went to the front door—no jog today, too many morons on the front steps—and opened up.

  “Nick, Nick, what do you have to say about the Times’s photo?”

  “Nick, were you there? Did you let them pay your way? Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Nick, did you just forget about the photo somehow? It slipped your mind or something?”

  “Nick, are you going to resign today? Save the Bureau the trouble of putting together charges against you, going through the whole charade, a hearing, that kind of thing?”

  “Nick, have you talked to your lawyer yet?”

  “Nick, is this like the classic Greek thing, where a mighty hero makes some errors in judgment out of a sense of entitlement and—”

  Nick held up his hands, and near-silence briefly alighted on the mob.

  “You guys, I can’t comment, I don’t know what the hell you’re even talking about. And no, I haven’t talked to my lawyer because I don’t have one.”

  “You’re going to need one now,” it seemed a dozen people said at once, and somehow a copy of the morning’s Times was located, expressed hand-by-hand through the mob, and presented to Nick, who looked into his own face, kneeling, surrounded by two guys said to be FN reps, holding a rifle and looking at a group he’d just shot. It had a terrible familiarity to it but it touched nothing coherent enough to be called a memory.

  photo shows fbi agent at gun company, said the headline.

  There was—it was the Times, after all—a subhead: “Evidence disputes Memphis’ claim to ‘no prior involvement’ with Belgian firm.”

  The byline, of course, was that of David Banjax. The story began,

  The New York Times has obtained and authenticated by laboratory examination a photograph showing beleaguered FBI special agent Nicholas M. Memphis at a shooting range owned by a Belgian armsmaker after having tested a new rifle for consideration by the Bureau’s SWAT teams, in contravention of Bureau rules.

  Charges have been raised that Memphis, whose stewardship of the famous ‘Peacenik Sniper’ investigation has been called into question, inappropriately attended gun firm functions as the federal investigative agency prepares to decide on a multimillion-dollar sniper rifle contract.

  The photograph, which was obtained by the Times’s Washington Bureau, depicts Memphis kneeling with two executives of FN, an international arms company headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. Memphis is displaying a target he has just tested the rifle on, the new FN PSR model, which is to be included in upcoming FBI sniper rifle trials, the winner of which stands to gain not only the agency contract but commercial advantages throughout the world.

  “Whoever wins that contract,” said Milton Fieldbrou of EyeOnGovernment.com, a think tank that keeps track of government procurement and its commercial implications beyond the actual monies, “will have a PR bonanza that could spell survival in the troubled firearms industry.”

  FBI regulations specifically forbid employees to attend industry sales events, particularly at industry expense, and despite documents that seemed to suggest Mr. Memphis had traveled to the Columbia, S.C., headquarters of FN USA, he has denied any involvement with the company.

  Oh Christ, he thought. This is what my good pal and drinking buddy Bill Fedders was warning me about. Not warning. Just telling me to hang on, I was about to get creamed.

  He looked at the photo and half-believed he’d been in Columbia, South Carolina, for a second. Who wouldn’t believe it? And how do you prove a negative, in the face of visual evidence so compelling? And who were the two grinners on either side of him? And how the hell had he shot such a great group at three hundred yards?

  “Nick, Nick, what do you say?”

  “I have no comment at this time,” Nick said, and ducked indoors.

  Oh Christ. He sat on the sofa, stared at the photo so long he began to believe it was real. He tried to straighten it out in his mind: did I forget?

  But that was insane. Amnesia was for bad movies from the fifties.

  It was phony. Yet the goddamn thing had a familiarity to it that haunted him, that rooted it in some sort of previous experience, though he could not place it. The two other men were utter strangers. Then there was the rifle: there was something peculiar about it too, but again his brain couldn’t find the file and yielded no information. He knew one thing: it was a suit day.

  He poured himself a cup of coffee, went upstairs, and opened his closet to his festive collection of workplace garments. Hmm, which shade of gray? Okay, he decided, plucking a middle-toned, somewhere-between-destroyer-and-sweatshirt hue, a brilliantly colored white shirt and a tie that was more toward the R than the O of the Roy G. Biv spectrum, and oxfords that were shined up too gleamy to show off that nice shade of black suggesting death, taxes, and cervical cancer. He had the pants on and was buttoning the shirt when the phone rang.

  “Memphis,” he said, having recognized the caller ID as the director’s office.

  “Special Agent Memphis, hold for the director, please.”

  “All right.”

  He waited, and then the man himself wished him a brusque good morning.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said.

  “Nick, I suppose you’ve seen the Times.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Are you lawyered up?”

  “No sir, not yet. I’d hoped this would go away when the full forensics report on the documents came in and the suspension remained unofficial. Has that changed, sir?”

  “Well, Nick, we have to discuss it, I’m afraid. Can you come in today for that discussion?”

  “It’s not as if I had anything else to do,” Nick said.

  “Okay, I have to restructure my whole morning, and I’ve got a lunch I can’t avoid, so let’s say three p.m.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Nick, I’d like to send a car. You don’t sound upset, but I’d prefer not to take any chances.”

  “That would be an excellent idea. I might lose control backing out and crush nineteen reporters to death.”

  “That would probably make you America’s hero. Okay, Nick, I’ll have it there at two.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

/>   Nick continued dressing, and then, feeling rebellious, tore off the white shirt, dumped it in the hamper, and put on a nice blue one. Now that was sending a message! he thought as he tightened the tie.

  41

  They cut the flex-cuffs off after clamping on walking manacles that allowed him mobility and slightly more freedom of movement. He was allowed time in the bathroom. Food followed, served carefully—protein bars, a frozen meal thawed by microwave, a diet Coke. He ate it down, astounded at how hungry he was and how desperate for sleep. He began to feel slightly civilized again until a blindfold was plastered over his eyes.

  Then Jimmy and Raymond marched him in the small-step shuffle of the bound man along a hallway, their bulks marshaled against his, turned him through a door, and sat him down on a folding chair. He sat for five minutes, hearing mechanical things being manipulated behind him, some small appliance of some sort, he guessed, wondering if the water phase was over and now came the telephone electrical generator for applications of voltage to delicate areas. But why coddle him first?

  “All right, Sniper,” Anto said, having slipped silently into the room and sidled up close, “God help me, but I love you. I’ve fallen hopelessly into a man-crush. What a bucko you’d be. Lord, wish I was as much man.”

  “Anto, have you joined the fairies now?” asked Ginger.

  “Sounds like it, don’t it, boyos. No, I don’t want to fuck the fellow, I just want to pay him what he’s due, even as I struggle with the problem of putting him down. That won’t be a fun task, but it has to happen then, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” said Raymond.

  “But look what he’s done. He’s made us sniper fellas look good, brave, tough, the best. He’s made us the chivalric heroes of the land, instead of the screwball creepy killer dogs we’ve been so many years. He’s stood up against the water over what was left of night, the whole morning, even into the afternoon. He is a dead-on lad, no man can deny it. Game, yes he is.”