CHAPTER 1
Outside Cascade
The Homestead
THE PRESENT
He was an old man in a dry month. Swagger sat on his rocker on the porch, hard, stoic, isolate, unmelted. Nothing much engaged him these days. Indifferently, he watched sun and moon change, he watched the variations of the clouds, the flocks of birds, the far prairie dog, occasionally the antelope on the horizon. He watched the wind blow across the prairie, and saw the mountains in the distance. It meant nothing.
He drank the coffee his wife left brewed every morning. He played with his laptop until he got bored, and then he watched the wind in the grass until he got bored. He sat, he rocked. He was lonely.
Jen gone most of the day, one daughter a TV correspondent in Washington, D.C., the other at a summer riding program in Massachusetts where she would try to turn her western grace into eastern swank, his son the assistant director of the FBI sniper training school in Quantico, Virginia, Swagger spent most of his time on the porch in the company of ghosts and memories.
Dead friends, forgotten places, calls too close to call close, long shots paying off, luck by the ton, a lost wife, a found son, a murdered father, some justice here and there, all of it purchased with enough scars to carpet a house, the smell of fire and gun smoke eternally in his nostrils: it didn’t seem like anything that could be called an odyssey, just one mess after another.
“You are depressed,” said his wife.
“I got everything I ever wanted. I have friends, a fine wife, wonderful children. I survived several wars. Why would I be depressed?”
“Because you never cared about any of those things. Getting them is incidental and meaningless. You cared about something else. You cared about pleasing your goddamned father because he died before you could, and it has never left you. That is why you are depressed. You haven’t pleased him lately. You will never please him enough. You have issues. You need to see somebody.”
“I am fine. I ride every day, I don’t eat too much and never collected a gut, I can still put a bullet near anyplace I can see. Why would I be depressed?”
“You need a mission. Or a new young woman to fall in love with and never touch. I notice those things seem to come together. You need a war. You need someone to shoot at you, so you can shoot back. You need all those things, and as beautiful as this place is and as much as it’s everything a man could want, it’s not enough. For most, maybe. Not for Bob Lee Swagger, sheriff of dry gulches and high noons every day of the week.”
But then an e-mail had arrived that actually had been authored by a human being: J. F. Guthrie, an ex–British service armorer who had made a career writing books about sniper warfare through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and had approached Bob about telling the Bob story. Bob turned him down flat cold—he had no urge to refight old fights, since he visited them every night in his nightmares—but the man was so charming that a friendship had developed and the Internet allowed it to blossom.
Dear Swagger, wrote “Jimmy” Guthrie, thought I’d invite you to the British Gun Club’s annual WWII Sniper Match, to be held this coming October at the old British service range at Bisley. You’d have a fine time. The admirers and fan boys would know enough to keep their distance and you’d also meet some fellow tradesmen, Brit style, for a nice spot of shop talk. Everybody loves shop talk.
I’ll be shooting my treasured Enfield No. 4 (T), of course, and I’d be happy to loan you either a Garand M1D or a Springfield with Unertl for yourself from my collection. Or you could bring an M40 of your own, if you care to do a dance with our antiquated customs.
Know you’d get a cheer-up, know the real boys would love to rub shoulders with the Nailer himself. Details if you’re interested. Do consider.
Jimmy
It would be fun. It would be a goal, something to organize and prepare for. It would reengage him in the world, and prove to him that at sixty-eight, he still had some fuel left in the tank.
But: it would also put him into contact with people who were drawn to the killer. He knew, he understood. Certain folks, though they might never admit it, dreamed of killing and in some unsavory way were powerfully attracted to an artist of the craft, which Swagger certainly was. Not for sex, not for wisdom, not for fantasy or even, really, friendship; just in some soft-vampire way to feed on his aura. Maybe Jimmy himself was such a man; maybe if so, he hid it better. Swagger always felt a little debased by such transactions, not that there was any ill spirit in them, but they just felt wrong. They made too much of the killing, as if the killing itself were the point, when the truth was nobody could last in the profession for the killing alone. You had to believe in something bigger, and in service to that—duty, honor, country, the kid in the next foxhole, the will to survive, to win, something never clearly understood called the Big Picture, something never talked of called honor—you could persevere, even occasionally flourish. Whatever it was, it was not shared easily, particularly since he had made the big mistake of reading way too much on the subject and understood he possessed a dangerous amount of data that opened him up to the horror of self-knowledge.