Concentrate, he instructed himself. Man on the run. No friends. Where does he go? Where can he go? Who would have him?

He had the files of data assembled by Research in its first evaluation of the subject and his own psychological reports.

Breathing heavily, he began to shuffle through them. Bob’s life in the years before his recruitment seemed comprised of two things: his guns and his long walks through the Ouachitas. He was hiding from the world, Dobbler thought, feeling himself unworthy of it.

The detritus of Bob’s life spoke of no warm personal relationships, at least not outside of Polk County. His only friend was that crotchety old Sam Vincent, who’d helped him sue the magazine. If he were alive, he might eventually try to return to Polk County, and maybe to Sam. But now, on the run, where would he head? There was no indication – no sisters, no brothers, no old Marine buddies, no women, not a thing. The man was too much like some kind of exiled warrior – Achilles sulking in his tent came to mind – to need companionship of any kind.

Even the financial records, uncovered by a credit agency, confirmed this pattern. Clearly, Bob kept his finances in control by iron discipline – he could live off his fourteen-thousand-dollar government pension because his expenses were low and he had no creature comforts, no interest in clothes beyond their function, no travel or diversion. There was no record of what he’d done with the thirty thousand dollars he’d received from the magazine in his out-of-court settlement. He had a credit card – a Visa, from the First National Bank of Little Rock – but the reason seemed to be convenience; he could make telephone purchases of reloading components and shooting supplies, thus saving himself time and trouble writing up orders. He bought his clothes from Gander Mountain, Wisconsin, his powder from Mid-South Shooter’s Supply and a couple of other places. He lived to shoot, that’s all; and, Dobbler supposed, he shot to live.

Would he run to shooters?

This was an alien world to Dobbler, so he tried to imagine it. Then he realized that from what little he knew of shooting culture, there’d be no place in it for Bob. Those folks tended to be conservative rural Americans; they’d have no sympathy for a man whom they thought had winged a shot at the president of the United States. Which left him with…

In several hours of close scrutiny, he came up with nothing. He looked around; it was late in the afternoon. The place was quiet. There were no answers anywhere. He was ready to give it up. Maybe tomorrow he’d notice -

And then he saw it.

He looked, blinked, squinted, looked again. It was so little. It was so much nothing. It couldn’t be.

It was a telephone billing on Bob’s December 1990 Visa bill.

A place called Wilheit’s, in Little Rock. The phone number was given.

It seemed… familiar.

He rifled through the credit report, looking for the other Visa bills, and found nothing until…December 1989. Wilheit’s.

Quickly he found December 1988… Wilheit’s.

The bill was roughly the same, seventy-five dollars.

What was Wilheit’s?

He called the number, and waited while AT &T shunted the connection through dialing stations and off satellites, and the phone rang, sounding far away, and then was answered.

“Hello, Wilheit’s, c’n ah hep you?” was how Dobbler heard the Little Rock accent.

“Er, yes. Um. What do you sell, please?”

“Whut do we sell?” said the voice.

“Yes. What sort of establishment are you?”

“We’re a florist, son. We sell flowers.”

“Ah,” said Dobbler, hanging up.

Now who on earth would Bob Lee Swagger be sending flowers to every December? A Christmas thing? But Bob wasn’t a Christmas sort of guy.

Jack Payne was not a happy camper.

Like the other two men who had been in the room at the time, he was haunted by the resurrection of Bob Lee Swagger.

Since then, Jack had stayed clear of the colonel, knowing he’d probably have to answer for the blown shot.

But how could it have been blown?

Well, someone on the team had said, the damn Silvertip probably didn’t open up, that’s all, so it just went on through, and old Bob fought his way through the shock, and was up and running. He was a Marine, see, Marines are tough.

No, Jack thought there was something else. It was his own rotten luck with a handgun. In truth, he hated pistols. That’s why he carried the cut-down Remington, because almost was good enough with six 12-gauge double-oughts at your fingertips. In Vietnam once, his first tour, ’62, Jack just a scrawny corporal, he had been on the way to the shitter and looked up in horror as a gook came at him with a bayonet on an old French boltgun and sheer murder in his eyes. Jack had left his carbine somewhere and pulled a.45 and squeezed off seven quick ones as the little man charged crazily at him. He missed all seven. Missed them all, fell to his knees and waited for the blade. What happened next was that from thirty yards some guy with a grease gun cut the gook in two – literally, into two pieces – and Jack lived to fight another day. But he hated that moment because he had pissed and shat in his pants as he went to his knees, knowing he was finished and too weak to do anything.

“Hey, Corporal, you’d best git yourself a pair of diapers,” his A-team leader had said to him after the firefight, and the whole goddamn team erupted in laughter. That’s what he hated the most, the fury of the humiliation. And that’s when he swore he’d never carry a handgun again and he’d never humiliate himself again.

But now Swagger had humiliated him twice.

That’s all right, Payne had told himself. I’ll get me another shot at you and this time I’ll put two, three, maybe all six double-oughts into you, motherfucker. Some of these kids on the team think you’re some kind of bull-goose macho motherfucker, some kind of super-cracker, a Dixie boy full of piss and leather; not me, Swagger. Double-ought cut you down to your rightful size real good.

Then Jack snickered, remembering.

I already started having my fun with you. I killed your fucking dog.

A thousand leads, a thousand nothings. The man had just vanished. Nick, now more a glorified clerk than an actual federal investigating officer, sat in the office for twelve hours at a stretch and watched every single lead dissolve into wisps, every report fizzle, every trace turn up counterfeit.

The other men didn’t like to be seen talking to Nick. They’d deny it, of course, but he noticed that when he joined a knot of kibitzers on the rare down minutes, one by one the guys would peel off and he’d be stuck facing a blank wall. Only Sally Ellion always said hi because she was too pretty and popular to run any danger of career contamination. She once even told him she was sorry he was having troubles.

“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” she said.

“I’m sure it was,” he replied.

“I heard that you might be going to another office.”

“Yeah. Well, not for a while, not until this thing gets done. They need bodies now. Somebody’s got to wash out the damned coffee cups. But I’ll probably be heading out. Maybe not such a bad thing. New Orleans hasn’t really worked out. I’ll get a start somewhere else.”

“I know you’ll do well, Nick,” she said, “wherever you go.”

He smiled; she was a nice girl.

Meanwhile the office pool was running odds of eight to one that Bob was dead; no man could disappear so completely from the largest federal manhunt in history, leaving no traces at all. Especially a man who, as reports developed, hadn’t a friend in the world, had no network of allies, no organization, no peers. The complete and absolute loner.

But meanwhile Nick clerked and cleaned for the first-stringers, bearing his humiliation with as much dignity as he could muster; and maybe it was while he was washing out the coffee pot that he had his bright idea.