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  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 .2
23 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. 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.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Jorge, “whatever. Anyhow, we tie the whole thing together on secure cellulars. We move south this afternoon, as I say, three cars, three men in a car, and me, I’ll be in a pickup, I’ll hold the goddamned thing together while I’m talking to the boss. We know where he lives, but I don’t want to do it there. We hunt him on the roads. We move in hunter-killer teams. You get a sighting, we work the maps, we plot his course, we pick him up. Very professional. Like we are the fucking FBI. We get him and his pal on a goddamned country road, and then it’s World War III. We’ll show this cabrón something about shooting.”

  21

  Now it was his turn to dig. He looked around, making certain. Yes, yes, this was it. The fallen loblolly, over there, snarled in moss, that was the first marker. The gray chunk of rock ten feet away was the second; he remembered it well, though it seemed to have worn over the years. Standing where he could see a notch in the high ridgeline of Black Fork Mountain through a gap in the pines was the third. Triangulating between the three, he knew: this was the spot.

  Bob set himself, and with the same sure spade strokes that he had seen liberate the coffin that was not his father but some poor young man he attacked the earth. It fought him, but he was in a mood for a fight. The spade sliced and cut into the earth and lifted it; he began to sweat as he found a rhythm, and beside him a pile of dirt grew.

  It was still early. He’d arisen before dawn, while the boy slept, and headed up this trail, a mile from his trailer. He used to walk it all the time with the dog Mike, but Mike was gone now. So Bob was alone, with the spade and the earth. As the sun rose it sent slats of light through the shortleaf pines and they caught the dust that his efforts raised, enough to make a man cough. He worked on, taking pleasure in the power of his movements.

  It wasn’t a coffin he uncovered. It was a plastic tube, nearly a foot in diameter, nearly four in length. Pulling it from the ground at last, he felt its considerable weight, even as its contents shifted a bit, but that was fine. He got it out on the ground and stood for a moment, breathing heavily. All around him it was quiet. His actions had scared the birds. No animals came around, and it was too cool yet for bugs.

  He wiped his brow with his handkerchief. Then he put his boot on the cylinder to hold it steady and thrust the sharp blade of the spade against the cap of the cylinder, punching at the Loc-Tite bonds that sealed the capsule, until at last they gave. With his hands, he pulled the cap entirely off, then reoriented the cylinder so that he could get at its contents easier and began to empty it.

  First came a Doskosil gun case. He opened it, flipped away the envelope of desiccant and took out a Colt Commander .45, dead black, with Novak sights and a beavertail-grip safety. He pinched back the slide to reveal the brass of a Federal Hydrashock; eight more rested in the magazine. It settled into his hand, almost nesting; he hadn’t touched a gun in years. Thought he was done with guns. But in his hand the gun felt smooth and familiar, knowing almost. It fit so well; that was the goddamned thing about them: they fit so well. He cocked the hammer and locked the safety up; cocked and locked was the only way to go. Somewhere in here there was a holster too, and a couple of more magazines, but for now he only wedged the pistol, Mexican style, into the belt above his right kidney.

  What came out next was a longer gun case, and when he got it out and opened, he saw a Ruger Mini-14, a kind of shrunken version of the old M-14, almost delicate-looking, light and handy. He seized the weapon, threw the bolt and clicked the trigger against an empty chamber. It was a carbine-style semiauto, capable of firing a 5.56mm cartridge that could chew through metal or men, depending. It looked fine too, though oily after three years underground. The film of oil and the packs of desiccant strewn about the tube had done their job.

  He pulled out a last trophy, a canvas sack, and looked inside: four Mini-14 magazines, one of them an oversize forty-rounder, the Galco holster for the Commander, six boxes of .45 Federal Hydrashocks, five boxes of hardball 5.56mm and five boxes of M-196 tracer.

  He sat back, then turned.

  “Whyn’t you come on down and fill in this hole for me?” he called.

  Silence.

  “Russ, you don’t know enough how to move through the woods quietly. Come on out.”

  The boy came out sheepishly.

  “I saw you go. I followed you. I heard the sounds of your digging.”

  “You shouldn’t sneak around on an armed man.”

  “You weren’t armed when you left.”

  “Well, I am now.”

  “What the hell is going on? You have to tell me. You owe me.”

  “What is going on is I want you to go home. This thing may get hairy. I was meaning to speak to you on it. Yesterday, I realized. I should have realized earlier.”

  “Bob, I’m not going. This was my idea from the beginning. I have to stay.”

  “I don’t want to have to call your father and say, ‘I got your boy killed for nothing.’”

  “It doesn’t matter about my father.”

  “Your mother, then. It would kill her.”

  “She’s been killed before.”

  Bob said nothing.

  Russ came over and started shoveling the dirt into the hole.

  “I’m not giving you a gun,” Bob said. “I don’t have time to train you and I won’t be around an untrained man. If there’s shooting, boy, you just hit the deck and pray for the best.”

  “I will.”

  “Well, we’ll see how it goes. I’m sending you home at the first sign of heavy weather. This ain’t a picnic. Ask your father. He’ll tell y
ou. It’s about as goddamned scary as it gets. Now let’s move out. You carry the ammo. It’s the heaviest.”

  They walked down the path. It was a fine morning, with the sun now up and blazing through the pines; between the shafts, Russ could see the green heights of the Ouachitas dominating the horizon. It was a quality of his mind that he was highly irony-conscious. Thus it provoked him that the scene was so innocent and sylvan, such an emerald-green panorama of natural goodness, and here he was walking with a heavily armed and very dangerous man, setting off on a mission that this man suddenly thought could end in violence. He shook his head. He was a writer! What was he doing here?

  “Something funny?” Bob asked.

  “It’s just ridiculous,” said Russ.

  “Whatever it is, it ain’t ridiculous,” said Bob. “It may be dirty, it may be ugly, it may be evil. It ain’t ridiculous and the people who put it together ain’t funny. They’re professionals.”

  “The sniper who killed your father?”

  “He’s just a little piece of it. He’s working for someone else. Someone called the shot, someone laid it out, someone put it together very tight and solid.”

  “How do you even know there was a sniper?” Russ finally asked.

  “It started with the bullet weights,” said Bob darkly, as though he hated to explain to an idiot. “They recovered three bullets from my father. Two were 130 grains. One was 110 grains. The 130-grainers were clearly from Jimmy’s .38 Super. But the 110? It’s possible a third 130-grainer hit him and broke apart and only 110 grains’ worth was recovered, but the goddamned list didn’t say nothing about that. So that gets me thinking: where the hell does a 110-grain bullet come from? And what is a 110-grain bullet? Do you know?”

  “No.”

  “Your father would.”

  “Fuck him.”

  “It’s a carbine bullet. M-1 carbine, handy little job they used in World War II. Underpowered, but sweet-handling.”

  “Okay. So? What would the significance of that be?”