The Third Bullet (5 page)

Those seemed to be the facts which, after much haggling, all had come to believe and accept. Swagger believed them and accepted them—that is, until his chat with Jean Marquez.

Her words touched one of his own memories, not a public memory at all but a private, long-buried one. He had been stalked once by a certain team of men in his long and turbulent past, and the smudge she had reported on the back of a coat had a meaning for him that it would have for no other man on earth. Amazing that it had, in some form and after all these years, reached him.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” said someone, and Swagger was pulled from his time travels to see a friend, younger, better dressed, a kind of Dallas up-and-coming executive type in a worsted Hickey Freeman suit, approaching on a beeline to sit next to him.

“We put the dumbest intern on the JFK squad,” the man said as he shook Swagger’s hand and dispensed with the how-are-you bullshit. “He fields the ten or twenty calls we get each day from people who’ve solved the case and now know for sure the Gypsies were involved with the Vatican and Japanese imperial intelligence.”

Nick Memphis was now the special agent in charge of the Dallas field office of the FBI. In most instances it would have been a plum assignment, but for him it was a last stop on the way out. His career had topped out when a new director took over the Bureau, heard he was intimately involved with the tragic incident at a huge mall in Minnesota, and wanted him far from headquarters. An assistant, some acid-blooded corpse named Mr. Renfro, had handled the delicate task of prying Nick from his deputy directorship and reassigning him to fieldwork in an office that was big and produced more than its share of cases closed but didn’t need radical shaking up or bold new leadership, just a dozing caretaker to sign the requisitions, approve the budget, and make sure the squads were adequately staffed until he retired.

Swagger didn’t say a thing. He knew he’d shaken up his pal with a strange request a few days ago and that Nick had to vent. He let the younger man flail away, unburden himself, get it all out.

It was typical Swagger, laconic and detached and seemingly camouflaged even if he wore a suit, an off-the-rack khaki rag that resembled a grocery bag on a scarecrow. He had one leg cranked awkwardly over the knee of the other, showing a beat-to-hell Nocona, and looked younger sitting than walking, because when he walked, the vibrations of several competing wound-deficient parts of him turned his progress into a slow and uncertain shuffle. You winced for the pain that hip had to cause him and wondered why the old coot was too stubborn to take painkillers. At least he wasn’t wearing that goddamn faded Razorbacks cap.

“I can’t believe I wasted a Justice Department witness protection identity on you,” Nick fumed. “Who do you think you are, Mark
Lane? It’s over. Oswald did it. Nobody else. That’s what all the sensible research shows, that’s what the latest computer re-creations show, that’s what all the House panels concluded. Only fruitcakes and vegetarians believe in a conspiracy. Man, if it gets out that I bought in to this kind of scheme, Renfro will have my ass on a clothesline by Wednesday.”

“I appreciate your kindness,” Swagger finally said. “And no, I ain’t gone insane. I think my mind is working normally. Slow, as usual, but normal.”

Nick made a sound that expressed frustration. “Man,” he said, “I should never try to outguess you. JFK! Never in a million years would I guess you’d tumble into that slime pit.”

“If it helps, and you have to justify it”—the secret identity didn’t require formal computer paperwork and headquarters approval, which could be penetrated by hackers, only the okay of the senior bureau field officer, that is, Nick himself—“you can tell them you took a flier on a murder investigation. Fellow came to Dallas, your neck of the woods, went home to Baltimore, and got himself killed under circumstances that look very much like a professional hit.”

“Murder isn’t in our jurisdiction,” Nick said grumpily. “That’s a local issue.”

“True, but the wheelman traveled from somewhere to Baltimore to do the job. Maybe from Dallas. We know that because there can’t be but two or three professional car killers in the world at any one time, and they ain’t known to hang out in Baltimore.”

“You don’t even know it was a pro. It could have been a kid on meth.”

“I saw the Baltimore report. There was a witness, a girl walking a dog. She was observant. He accelerated clean through the hit and kept on a line afterward, without a waver or a wobble, then took a hard left at speed and was out of the neighborhood in about three seconds flat, without one squeal of brakes, one skid mark, one spinout or dent. That’s professional driving, even if nobody in Baltimore figured
it out. If he went from anywhere to Baltimore, he’s your baby, and when you’re done with him on interstate violations, crossing state lines to commit a crime, five to eight, you hand him to the Baltimore prosecutor and he goes down for the long one and rots out in their pen.”

It was hardly enough, Nick knew. Murders were a dime a dozen. He tried to spin it enough to make friends with it. He came up with: contract killings were rare, and a good bust on some flashy mechanic from the Dark Side might be a good career feather, even if Mr. Renfro had knocked the cap off his head. Nice to go out taking down some pro kill jockey with a flashy résumé. Maybe if the guy was hard-core enough and the evidence was strong enough—Swagger was good at digging up evidence—they might get an HRT team to go in hard and cap his ass and save everybody the hassle of a trial. The press loved it when HRT whacked genuine bad guys. It was so commando-chic.

“If you have any interaction with local or fed LE, don’t you mention the JFK angle. Not a word. It’s straight interstate to commit a crime. I didn’t want a local player, so I got an undercover who’d worked with the bureau before and that I knew and trusted. That’s the game. Who are you this time, by the way?”

“I seem to be one John ‘Jack’ Brophy, a retired mining engineer from Boise. I did some counterchecking against myself, and those boys did this one real good. You don’t find good work like that just anywhere these days.”

“The program was designed to keep Mafia snitches alive long enough to testify, then incentivize the possibility of a new life away from the Mob, although they usually revert. Putting one together is expensive and time-consuming work, and it requires a big payoff to make it worth the time and effort. That’s why I hate to waste it on somebody who isn’t named Vito.”

“Well, if it makes you happy, call me Vito.”

“Give me your plan, Vito.”

“I have the victim’s notebook. It ain’t much, because his handwriting is so awful that I can’t read most of it. It’s got his schedule and his appointments. I know exactly where he went and who he talked to and the issues he raised. I’ll follow that same path. Maybe someone will try to smoke me. Then we’ll know we have something.”

“Jesus, that’s it? You, sixty-six years old with a hip that hasn’t worked in ten years, are going to play the tethered goat? What on earth makes you think you can match it up with a pro forty years younger and walk away?”

“If it comes to guns, I’ll put ninety-nine out of a hundred in a hole in the ground to this day.”

“Are you packing?”

“Not yet. If I pick up cues that I’m in someone’s crosshairs, I have a .38 Super and three mags of straight hardball stashed in my room at the Adolphus. I figure if I’m shooting, I’m shooting through windshield glass or door panels, so I need speed and strength, not expansion.”

“That stuff ricochets like crazy.”

“I know. I’ll be careful.”

“All right. This is how it has to work. You call the number I give you every morning and report your sked and plans for that day. If I can, I’ll put a backup team on you to make certain no one else is on your tail. If someone is, I’ll call you on the cell I’m going to give you, and we’ll set up our own ambush. I don’t have to tell you this as a friend, but as the federal officer who’s running you, I am obligated to do so: No cowboy shit. Shoot only when shot at or your life is in danger. I would so much prefer if there was no shooting, not because I think you’ll miss, but because one of them might, and with my luck, he’ll hit the orphaned violin prodigy on his way to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. You keep me informed, Brother Brophy, or I’ll have to pull you in.”

“I always play by the rules.”

“No, you never play by the rules, and my career has benefited
from it to no end. If you say this ultimately might have to do with something we nearly unraveled twenty years ago but which slipped through our hands, that’s fine. I’ll buy in to that, cautiously, like the pension-scared bureaucrat I’ve become. But I remember. Everything I got since then, I got because of that wild ride we went on out of New Orleans that made me a Bureau star back in ’93. And I don’t forget you saved my life on that ride. I will always owe you, and I will stand by you on this last wild ride, even if it goes straight into craziness. Just . . . be careful.”

“Thanks, Nick. Stick with me, and we’ll get you back to Washington.”

“Yeah,” said Nick, “maybe in a casket or a pair of handcuffs. So what’s the first stop?”

“Up there,” Bob said, suggesting by shoulder twitch the sixth-floor corner window. The sniper’s nest.

He paid his $13.50 and received some kind of tape recorder to wear around his neck. The instructions were to push a certain button when the elevator dumped him off at floor six, and thereby launch the recorded narrative that would guide him across the floor at a certain pace and direction. He saw that the point of the tape recorder wasn’t to inform people, most of whom, if they self-selected themselves for the trip, knew where they were going and what they would see, but to isolate them, to keep them moving at a steady pace and to cut down on the chatter, as if it were a reliquary.

And it was, holding not the bones of a saint but the bones of the past. Now the empty, box-filled space of nothingness that had been the sixth floor fifty years ago had been turned into a generic JFK museum, a polite narrative of the themes of that day expressed neutrally, without outrage or snark, in the old journalism tradition of the five Ws. Swagger knew the five Ws of this one already and didn’t need a refresher, so he left the tape recorder silent and slid through
the thin crowd of tourists who clustered in smallish groups at each of the signboards and photo displays that followed the strands. It all led to one spot.

Swagger looked at it. The good fathers of Dallas had decided to cut down on the vicarious teenage thrill of being Lee Harvey and lining up the head shot from exactly his place and posture; they had erected a cubicle of Plexiglas to seal off the corner but also as if to preserve it in amber, a frozen ghost of a lost bad time.

Swagger stared at the array of Scott Foresman boxes, arranged just as the screwball from New Orleans had done, building a childish little fort that would block him from the view of anyone else on the sixth floor and also give him a solid supported position for the shot. The guy had been a marine, after all; the importance of the sound position had been drilled into him, and on his day of days, he had not forgotten it.

Swagger looked, unsure what he was supposed to feel. Too many people were drifting by or resting on benches for it to have any ceremonial dignity; it was just a crummy corner of a crummy building looking through a crummy window. He went to the window—not Oswald’s, which was unreachable behind the Plexiglas, but the next one over, and saw how close the two crosses in the street were. The longest was 265 feet away, if he remembered correctly. The head shot. Under a hundred yards. The range wasn’t as important as the angle: he was here for the angles. This one was an outgoer, about three or four degrees to the left, diminishing slightly as the distance increased, moving laterally right to left but just as slowly. With any modern hunting rig and a hundred bucks’ worth of Walmart optics from low-end Chinese glassworks like BSA or Tasco, it would be an easy enough shot. Given the angle and the speed, it was hardly a mover at all; given the stability offered by the carefully arranged boxes, it was like shooting bull’s-eye at the bench.

There were other things that leaped out at him. The first was that when the big limo had pivoted around that 120-degree turn, it must
have been almost still, or at least moving so slowly that the movement would have no play in the shooting. Moreover, it was so close. It was seventy-five feet away, almost straight down, and JFK’s chest and head were in total exposure and the windshield between the passenger compartment and the driver’s compartment was overcome by the vertical angle of the downward trajectory. That was the shot. He tried to figure out why Lee Harvey hadn’t taken it.

Maybe he would have had to lean out too far. Maybe if he’d had a better shot, they also would’ve had a better shot, and even a good pistol guy with a four-inch Smith .357 or a Colt .45 ACP, as both feds and Dallas cops carried in those days, could draw, fire, and hit in a second’s worth of move. Maybe Harvey would be the one with the brain shot from some Secret Servicer’s Smith four; he’d be the one with cerebellum shredded and blown raggedly everywhere. Or maybe he’d fogged the scope. Maybe he’d had a qualm, a regret, a bolt of fear, and lost his killer’s determination, a brief crisis of confidence. All of those could explain it, but which one did?