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  “That’s right. Nothing back there but bad news. But it’s not just my father, Earl. It’s his father, Charles, the sheriff. He’s the mystery. Another gunman. He’s the scary one.”

  It was so true. The Swaggers, on back over the years, men with guns. And the men of the last three generations, Charles, his son Earl and his son Bob, they had it in spades and were, each of them, defined by war. Throw in Bob’s son, Ray, now at the FBI, defined by the War on Terror in the world’s brutal sandboxes. That made four straight. They all had it, that Swagger singularity that set them apart, curse or blessing, as circumstances dictated. Who knew where it came from, that odd gift to take a firearm, understand it, and make the first shot count—always.

  But it was Charles, the grandfather of Bob, the father of Earl, who was the strangest of them all. He was a hero in the Great War, and came back to Polk and put his skill to work as a deputy and then became the sheriff of the county. But it seemed the man didn’t want anyone knowing his business, anyone poking about. He was solitary, a figure of rectitude and distance, blazing good with the gun but otherwise not a chum, a pal, a buddy, a laugher, a storyteller. He just stood for pure force, and his reputation alone, especially after a 1923 shoot-out with three Little Rock hotshots called the Warrens (final score: the sheriff, 3; the Warren brothers, 0), kept most bad boys out of Polk. Death was too sure a thing at the speedy hand of the sheriff.

  But—the stories were unclear, always blurry, ever-shifting—something persisted that carried the information that Charles had turned not just drunk and mean and surly but against the law he enforced. In 1940, there’d been a train robbery in Hot Springs, some real Mob professionals, and they’d simply vanished. Someone who knew the forests—Charles had hunted them his whole life—had to have gotten them out. Did someone have something on him? Was he compromised by criminal interests? It was like an inkblot, a smear, that warned all to stay away.

  But if there were civic mysteries encapsulated by his public career, there were even more abiding ones on the family circuit. Why did Bob’s father, Earl, never speak of the old man? Hate, fear, anger, unforgiveness?—it could be anything except indifference. Why’d Earl leave home at sixteen for the Corps? Then there was Bobbie Lee, Bob’s own namesake. Earl’s brother, Charles’s second son, evidently some sort of damaged goods. He hung himself in 1940—almost simultaneously with the train robbery. Why? Was Charles abusing him or was he just so beyond the bend there was no helping him and he himself saw no further point. Why was all this shrouded in mystery? Any small town is a nest of scandal and shame, and this was one of Blue Eye’s juiciest, and yet so powerful, it kept people away seventy-five years later. Was there a truth too terrible to bear?

  Swagger decided to put it from his mind. But the past was like a big cat, a black panther, that, having slipped the cage, would not go away. Instead, it haunted the fringes of the property, leaving sign, howling in the night, possibly seen as a dark blur for a second or so when least expected, somehow ominous and waiting at the same time. Invisibly, it prowled, scuffled, left bloodied carcasses about. Bob knew it would come.

  It attacked when Bob was riding the rim one morning. A bitter memory leapt from a tree and took him down hard and clawed the wound that never healed, the death of Earl Swagger in 1955. The wound opened, bled, puckered, and hurt like hell. It put in Bob’s head the thing he hated the most: the memory of his father on that last day, pulling out of the farm in his black-and-white, waving at his only son.

  How does such a man happen? How can a man contribute so much and demand so little? Where does pure moral strength come from? It doesn’t come from nowhere. As Bob’s character was formed in obedience to his ideal of his father, Bob now saw that Earl’s was formed in a different smithy; he was formed to be the anti-father, the anti-Charles. He ran his life in such a way as he would never end up as that dark figure who haunted it, his father. So, yes, inescapably, everything his father became had to do with the man the sheriff already was.

  It all had to do with the sheriff. Who was he? Why was he? He scared Bob.

  —

  THEN THAT SAME AFTERNOON—it had to be coincidence because he was too sane and too old to believe in any system running the universe but brute whimsy—Bob looked in his email and saw something unexpected. From: jvincent@smathersvincentnichols.com.

  That was Jake Vincent, his Arkansas lawyer, one of Sam Vincent’s boys, all grown up and made good and partnered up in a fancy law firm in Little Rock.

  Jake had represented him on the sale of the land to a big corporation for residential development and he was a fine one for dotting all t’s and crossing all i’s. A small fortune had been spent on stamps to get the deal finally done and the money transferred into the Swagger accounts. Jake had done it all, as Bob had no other reason to conclude, superbly.

  “Bob,” the email read, “something small and odd has come up involving the property. I don’t feel comfortable discussing it by email or even letter. Can you call me on my private cell tonight?” and he gave the number.

  That night, Bob called.

  “Jake, it’s me.”

  “Ah, right on time. Thanks so much.”

  They palavered a bit about recent fortunes, the state of the estate, Arkansas politics, the Razorbacks’ chances in football and basketball, the destinies of their children.

  “So anyway, Bob, this odd thing has happened.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “As your lawyer, let me formally inform you—this is for your protection as well as mine—that some of the information I’m about to give you suggests commission of a federal crime, and if you don’t report it, you could be subject to indictment yourself. It’s probably a long shot, but I’m not earning my money if I’m not telling you that.”

  “What kind of law?”

  “I’d guess receivership of stolen property.”

  God, had Earl been on the take and stowed away a quarter million that had just come to light? Bob wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  “Lord,” he said.

  “The objects in question are two. One is a government-property Colt .45 ACP automatic, serial number 157345C. We tracked the number via the Colt Company and it was from a lot that was sold to the Department of the Post Office in 1928, the year of its manufacture. It wasn’t an army gun but a commercial variant, purchased for use in certain law enforcement situations. Now—I don’t know, but somehow it ended up in a tin strongbox that was hidden under the foundation of your old farmhouse. The clear implication is that it was illegally appropriated. It had been very carefully secreted away, God knows when, and after the house came down, the excavator was tearing out the foundation and the bucket caught on the corner of the box and pulled it out of the ground.”

  “I sure don’t know nothing about that,” said Bob. “I know my father brought a Thompson back from the war, but after he died, my mother turned it over to the State Police out of fear of legal entanglement. But if it’d been a gun my dad cropped from the Corps—it must have happened to a million .45s in the war—”

  “At least. I think my dad had one too.”

  “—it would have had a government serial number and said ‘Property of U.S. Government’ on it, so it doesn’t sound like a Marine Corps pistol. You say there was something else that could have been stolen?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “A thousand dollars in cash.”

  “A thousand!”

  “A fair amount of money now, a lot more then.”

  “Maybe my father confiscated it from some bust, maybe he— Well, he was no angel, hero or not, and that much money in 1955, unaccounted for, you know, maybe he just figured . . .” He let the words trail out.

  “I don’t think so. First off, it’s only one bill. A thousand-dollar bill. On top of that, it appears new and uncirculated, which could mean many things. By serial number, it�
��s a 1934-A type bill. We’re consulting a numismatist to learn more, and possibly we’ll try to trace it through the Treasury Department, but that takes time. Maybe months.”

  “So the 1934 serial number and the fact that it’s uncirculated shows it can’t have nothing to do with Earl Swagger. He was in the Marine Corps in China or Nicaragua then, didn’t get back for two more years, no way he could have laid a finger on it. That’s a relief. Anyhow, that money should be returned with the gun as soon as possible and this thing put right.”

  “Then another gun exhibit. Or we think it’s related to a gun. It’s a kind of machined cylinder—very high-quality metalwork—but weirdly gigantic, too big for any rifle or shotgun of the time. Maybe it’s a machine-gun muzzle. Has slots milled into it. Heavy piece of work.”

  “I don’t have no idea at all.”

  “There’s a couple more oddities. The first is a map of some sort. Very crude, just the diagram of what I take to be an oddly laid-out wall with ten steps marked off to what could be a tree trunk, then another few steps to an X that marks the spot.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Bob, maybe that crisp bill was stolen from a bank or something. Maybe other money, more money, is under the X. But of course without knowing where or what the building was, the map is useless.”

  “Yeah, I see,” he said, trying to mull it over in his mind.

  “And there’s one other thing. Was any of your family ever an FBI agent? I mean other than Ray of course.”

  “What?”

  “Any FBI agents in the family tree? I think I would know, but I’m getting nothing.”

  “Well, Ray’s the only one—” His son Ray was second in command at the FBI sniper school at Quantico.

  “No, no, I don’t mean that. I mean in the thirties.”

  Bob had nothing to say. But he realized his grandfather, Charles Fitzgerald Swagger, who had lately occupied his thoughts, the sheriff of Polk County and victor of the famous Blue Eye gunfight in 1923, war hero and mystery, would have been, what, forty-three in that year. Just the right age, and just the right profile, salty yet still spry, a gunfighter with much killing behind him and no fear in front of him.

  “Because we found an FBI Special Agent’s badge in the box too.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Bob.

  “Not a bit. And there’s more. It actually was a badge for the Justice Department’s Division of Investigation, which they called the FBI for a single year.”

  “Oh?”

  “That year was 1934. The year of all the gunfights.”

  3

  BLUE EYE, ARKANSAS

  1934

  IT WAS A TYPICAL DAY for the sheriff of Polk County.

  He made sure his .45 Government was cocked and locked and slid it into the floral-engraved shoulder rig, made custom by a fellow in San Antonio, one of the few “nice” things he allowed himself, and the gun felt especially heavy. Then he pulled his fedora low over his sharp eyes and set out. He pulled out the long driveway, turned left, and headed into Blue Eye, the county seat, with its seven church spires, water tank, and two-funnel power company twelve miles to the west.

  He had rounds: first to check with his one deputy in Niggertown, where he only wanted a general report, as it didn’t do to look too carefully at how Jackson Johnson, his Negro deputy, ran the law-and-order business down here. Jackson kept the crime down, and made sure no one ever acted disrespectfully toward a white person, and so was otherwise left alone.

  Then Charles checked on his two snitches among the subversives. There were basically two subversive groups in Blue Eye—Communists and Republicans—and Charles confirmed quickly enough that neither group had any revolutions planned. Then he dropped in at Tom Bode’s to tell Tom that the bank was complaining to the judge about Tom’s delinquency on his mortgage and he didn’t want to have to do any foreclosing, as that was nasty business for everyone. Tom said he’d let a man go and they’d work triple overtime to get the okra in.

  He rolled into the actual sheriff’s office about 11. He usually found his clerk, Millie, and one of the three deputies on the day shift, the other two being out on patrol, driving slow, careful patterns around the county, ready for anything and reachable instantly by a primitive radio. At the transmitter, he ran a check on both, and all seemed okay, quiet and pleasant, meaning no labor agitators and no one using too much sugar at the doughnut shop. He went to his desk in his office off the squad room and went through his in-box, which contained the night’s tickets and reports, expecting nothing, finding nothing. No real crime seemed to exist in Polk County, assuming you didn’t count when a Willie thumped a Willie or some trashy transient farmworker broke a bottle over another’s skull or the even rarer domestic disturbance among the town’s quality, usually involving liquor, untoward accusations, and a fist or slap in anger that announced itself by loud crying and a call to the sheriff. It happened. People were people and it happened, all of it of no real significance. It just rolled on, well-oiled, self-sustaining, unseen, but trusted by nearly all.

  But this day there was something unexpected.

  “Sheriff, a Captain Hamer from Texas called you. Wants you to call him back. Shall I call him?”

  “Yes, can you, Millie?”

  It took a few seconds for Millie to put the call through, operator by operator, so that finally Blue Eye and Dallas were connected, by which time Charles had gotten into his office and closed the door.

  “Hamer. That you, Charles?”

  “It is, Captain.” Frank Hamer was one of the few people in the world that Charles felt at home around.

  “How’re you feeling? See all the ink we got for steppin’ on them two pip-squeaks?”

  “Yes sir. You’re a hero, Frank, but you always were a hero.”

  “You’re just pulling an old man’s leg, Charles. As I said, plenty of glory to go ’round. It ain’t too late. You can magically appear in the accounts just like you magically disappeared.”

  “Not sure how the damned judge would take it, Frank. The job was its own reward. An out-of-season hunt, what could be better reward than that?”

  “Well, I do agree. Clears the sinuses better than a shot of fine whiskey. Now, I have something for you, Charles, thought I’d best mention it.”

  “I’m all ears,” said Charles.

  “Seems the federals are recruiting gunfighters. That cucaracha dance in Little Bohemia, where all the gun boys just went through their ranks like shit through a goose? And the federals only bagged a few innocent townsmen? Mighty embarrassing. That’s because they got no old salts, just wet-eared college boys. Fools and poofs, nobody righteous who’d stand and shoot it out.”

  “I see,” said Charles.

  “So a fellow comes to me yesterday, an Inspector Cowley out of Chicago. My reputation being so sterling and all, would the captain be interested in going up north, appointed a Special Agent in what they call the Division of Investigation, to be part of a unit that’s going after all them famous bad boys—mainly, Mr. Johnny H. Dillinger—but the other big ones, the one they call Baby Face, the one they call Pretty Boy, then there’s a Wilber, a Harry, an Alvin, even a old lady called Ma. The Division needs shooters, Charles, men who can shoot and take fire without panic. And this inspector wanted me to head it all up.”

  “Sounds like a fine opportunity, Frank,” said Charles.

  “Maybe for a younger man. But, Charles, the six weeks after Bonnie and Clyde done flattened me out. I mean to sleep and drink and hibernate until the fall at least. At my age, a fellow can’t be running around and sleeping in cars no more.”

  “I feel the stiffness myself.”

  “You are ten years younger, Charles, and tough as a buzzard that feeds on coyote.”

  “Well, sir,” said Charles, “I might have some tough left in me.”

  “I gave him your name, Charles. Told h
im about the war, about 1923, about all the frays since then, told him special how it was for duty, not glory, you put your grit to the use of the law. He liked that. He liked that part a lot.”

  “Thanks for the advertisement, Frank.”

  “So any day now he may show up. He may invite you to join the federals and their hat dance. Be a fine move, Charles. More money, a dose of fame, freedom from that damned judge, better opportunities in Chicago for your sick boy.”

  It had its appeal, no doubt about it. It’s what Charles was born to do. It would fill his mind too, keep it from going other places, places it shouldn’t want to go but, goddammit, did anyhow.

  “I’m thanking you for the tip, Frank. I’ll give it hard thought, and if the inspector shows, I’ll be ready for him.”

  Inspector Cowley showed up two days later. He was a well-dressed, handsome thirty-five-year-old, who seemed much older and graver than his years, more Grandpop type than Pop type, and seemed immediately to Charles somewhat soft for the job he had. To face men with guns with your own guns took a certain steel. Men could master it under severe military discipline for a year or so—Charles had seen it in the war—but to make it a career took a certain harshness of spirit, a lack of care for the pain dealt to other men, an obsessional quality, a certain gimlet-eyed view of reality, quick reflexes, the talent to shoot well and fast, to say nothing of first, and finally a grit that would drive you forward even with—especially with—the possibility of your own death. That’s what Frank Hamer had, which is why he became a legendary Texas Ranger, and Charles knew he himself had it, along with the cold heart, which was he had no trouble pulling the trigger on a fellow human being, making him go still forever. Some men deserved killing, you had to believe that.

  But clearly such was not the case with Inspector Cowley, who admirably made no pretense that it was. He seemed instead like a sort of pastor. His was the kind of talent for quiet leadership and organization and inspiration, but he’d never be a barker, a shouter, a discipline monster, a man killer.