Nick looked at him with love-filled, moronic eyes.

“You’re some sorry sight, sonny,” said Bob. “Chained and trussed like a coon in a bag after a hunt. Those boys were about to have your patty-cake butt for breakfast.” Nick watched him go over to each of the bodies, and search them for keys and papers.

He plucked two keys out of the late Tommy Montoya’s pocket and came back over to take the cuffs off Nick.

“Goddamn,” he said in disgust, “these boys even had a rig for phony suicide.”

He stripped the tape from Nick’s fist. Nick kept looking at him stupidly while he freed the little Colt Agent. It fell to the earth. Swagger bent and picked it up.

“You’re not going to shoot me with this little bitty gun, are you, Pork? I couldn’t be sure the last time.”

Dumbly, Nick shook his head.

“Here. Don’t lose it. Now come on, boy, we’ve got to get these two pieces of human shit into the water, and more or less sanitize this area. You don’t want the Louisiana State Police on your ass, do you? I sure don’t, no sir. I’ve seen enough damn police to last me a century.”

With that, he laid his rifle down on the hood of Nick’s car and bent to one of the two bodies. As he bent, Nick saw that he had a Colt.45 automatic wedged cocked and locked into his jeans in a high hip-carry holster. The pistol was a custom job, with low mount sights and neoprene combat grips. It was the sort of pistol a man who has thought a lot about pistols might carry, as were the three spare magazines in Sparks mag holders on the other high hip.

Bob pulled each of the bodies to the lip of the river, and launched them with no ceremony at all. They sailed sluggishly out into the current, held afloat by the bladders of air trapped in their clothes; each man trailed a slick of blood.

“We’re going to make some damn ’gators happy today, that’s for sure,” Bob said. “Now come on, boy, don’t just sit there like a toad on a rock, get a move on!”

But Nick had lapsed into some kind of poststress letdown and was incapable of operating rationally. He just stared at Bob, eyes wide open, mouth agape, while Bob went to the men’s station wagon. Finding nothing to interest him, he turned the key, gunned the engine, drove off the dirt road, aimed at the swamp, stepped out of the car and bent over, and with one hand gave the gas pedal a goose. The car took off with a squeal, blew through some weeds, sloshed into the river and disappeared under the surface in a commotion of bubbles and oil stains.

He turned.

“Now your car, sonny. Can’t leave evidence. I’ll buy you a new one some day, okay?”

Nick watched him repeat the ritual, and his little Dodge, once the pride of his life, disappeared in the black, quiet water.

“Okay, boy, take a last quick gander. Police up anything that doesn’t belong. Come on, boy, just don’t sit there like something’s got a hold on your pecker, do something. Shit, you are some kind of lazy-ass yankee dead dick.”

By this time, Nick could get himself up, but he didn’t answer and he left it to Bob to do most of the checking.

“Okay. Time to take the freedom bird back to the world.”

They walked a half mile down the road and found a white pickup pulled off under some trees. Nick, still silent, climbed in. Carefully, Bob drew a rifle case out from behind the backseat, wiped down and inserted his Remington, then climbed into the driver’s seat. “Put your seat belt on, dammit,” he said. “I’m not having you crash through the damned windshield.”

Nick stared ahead, not registering anything as the swamp gave way to fields, to crops. On they drove through Louisiana in Bob’s white rattling pickup, leaving the bayous and New Orleans miles and miles behind.

Finally Bob asked, “Hungry? There’s a goddamned sandwich behind the seat and a thermos of coffee.”

“I’m all right,” said Nick. They were his first three words.

An hour later, just past the Arkansas line, they stopped at a diner by the roadside in a town called Annalisle.

“Need a burger,” said Bob. “Hungry.”

He got out of the car and went in. Nick watched him walk. He never looked back, his eyes kept straight ahead, his shoulders gunnery-sergeant erect, his bearing precise. Nick stirred himself at last and followed. Bob was sitting in a booth at the far end by himself. A girl came, and they ordered a burger and coffee for Bob and scrambled eggs for Nick.

Nick spoke at last. “Thanks. That was fantastic shooting.”

“I had to wait till the light was on them properly,” Bob said. “I wanted to shoot out of the sun. I was afraid the damn birds would take off and tell them where I was. But it worked out.”

“How do you throw a bolt so fast?”

“Practice, son. I’ve done some rifle shooting over the years.”

“I saw you die. I saw the flames at the church. I was there when they found the body.”

“Son, the closest I came to dying was when I walked away from you and you had that bitty little Colt. You were the only man that had me that day.”

“I don’t – ”

“I’d been there over three days. The body you found belonged to a sad old boy named Bo Stark, dead by his own hand in a garage in Little Rock, and buried in the Aurora Redemption Baptist graveyard by myself and the Reverend Mr. Harris last year, a few months before all this started.”

“But the dental rec – ”

“Bo went to my same dentist, Doc LeMieux. Night before all that at the health complex, I broke in, and just switched his X rays with mine, easy as you please, because Doc LeMieux just has paste-on labels on the files. Old Bo finally did somebody some good in the world, even if it was a few months after he departed it.”

“The flames. You were in – ”

“I wasn’t in anything, Memphis. As that church burned, I was twenty feet below it and a hundred feet to the west, in a limestone cave, drinking an RC Cola and eating a Moon Pie. There’s a trapdoor under the altar, built back in the days when some people ran run-away slaves up North, until they were burned out by some bad old hill boys. Heard the stories myself, from my granddaddy. I knew the church would burn; I knew it would collapse; I knew Reverend Harris was raising funds to build a new church. Everybody’s happy now. You boys especially: if you found a body, you’d not be likely to keep digging through the damned ruins.”

“Jesus,” said Nick.

“I am a very careful man, Pork.”

“Jesus,” said Nick, again.

“I had to have the freedom to do some looking into some matters. Being dead was the only way I could figure. And so I’ve been looking into things. And then I decided that I needed help. Only man I could trust was you, because you’d had a chance to kill me and didn’t. So I was going to pay a visit on you at your house. Only, when I got there, I saw a fellow driving out in your car. He was one of the fellows I saw on a shooting range in Maryland some months back. Was Payne there?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so,” said Bob. “That boy gets around. Payne shot me in New Orleans. Payne shot my dog in Blue Eye. Sooner or later, time will come to settle up between the two of us.”

The girl brought the food. Nick found he was ravenous.

“So who were they?” Bob asked. “Do you know?”

Nick took some pride in his answer. He thought if anything, this might impress Bob Lee Swagger.

“It’s an outfit called RamDyne.”

“An Agency front? I figured Agency. Only Agency works that professionally.”

“No, they’re not Agency. They’re something else – but maybe invented by the Agency in the year 1964, certainly under the protection of the Agency, certainly useful to the Agency. But they’ve become something of their own, and they take pride in their professionalism and their ability to do the right thing, the hard thing. Motherfuckers, I’ll tell you that. Been in some shit. While you were fighting, they were all over ’Nam selling torture instruments and guns to the secret police.”