might merit, and got to Dallas’s West End, a nightclub and entertainment zone a few blocks northwest of Dealey, where cabs were plentiful.
He arrived in twenty minutes at his destination, a randomly selected Econo Lodge on a road that led to the airport, and checked in, paying cash for a week so no one could trace him via credit card. He didn’t think Richard had that capacity, but the big detective agency might. He called Nick’s number and left his new address, then went back to bed.
Nick called at three the next afternoon. “My news is that the boys are going crazy trying to find you.”
“Let ’em sweat.”
“What’s your plan now?”
“I’m going to chill here for a few days and hunker up and reread all this crap. As he said, it’s so goddamn big, and no matter how you enter it, you get lost in the maze. I’m going to try out a more concentrated, less scattershot approach.”
“I thought you had it nailed good by sticking with the rifle stuff.”
“The rifle stuff is great as far as it goes, but I can’t get beyond the timing issue. How’d they do it so fast? If it couldn’t be done that fast, then the whole thing goes away, Lee Harvey’s the bad boy, Robert Aptapton got smacked by a punk on meth, and Bob Lee goes back to his rocker, wiser but poorer. You could go nuts with all this stuff.”
“Many a poor man has, I know, I’m one,” said Nick.
“In a couple of days I’ll pop in unexpectedly on Richard, and we get to the new game of now-he-sees-me-now-he-don’t.”
“Okay. Let me know what I can do.”
That was that. Bob spent the three days poring over the three books, cross-checking, trying to find a pattern, looking for something that might tie everything together in a nice little package. A million others had done so before him, and like them, he failed. Nothing. No holes. Oswald did it, that was all, had to be, nothing else worked. Shot from Dal-Tex? On the wildest frontier of the physically possible but unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, except the generalized conceit that the third bullet came from behind and above, and certain windows at Dal-Tex were within the cone of trajectory that the computer age had imposed upon the reality of the event. No known photo existed that showed the upper floors of the building at around 12:30 that day, which would document whether or not a window had been open.
The one new fact was that someone had killed James Aptapton. If so, then maybe it was over something mundane, not the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Maybe Aptapton had divulged his theory, and that guy had recognized it as something new and special, wished it were his, and decided it was his. So he killed him in Baltimore for it. Murders have happened for lesser reasons by far, for pennies, for toys and gym shoes, for pride and prejudice, for honor and glory, for blow jobs and rim shots. Maybe it was Richard himself, though it was hard to feature someone so rumpled and disheveled as a badass killer. But maybe if “Jack Brophy” came clean with Richard, Richard might have some suggestions about who in the assassination community was capable of such a thing.
It was hard to know what to do next.
On the third day, Swagger could tolerate the inactivity no more and took a cab to an address in the suburbs that he’d found on the Internet. It was a huge sporting goods place called Outdoor Warehouse, and it lived up to its claim of holding nearly everything indoors thatcould be used outdoors. That included the hunting department, where, among the beautifully crafted new rifles and the black plastic assaulters and the endless variations of 9 mm, .38./.357s, and .45s in the gleaming showcases, he found a wide-ranging aisle of ammunition offerings and, between the 6.5 Creedmore and the 6.5 Swede, some boxes of 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano. It was Czech or something, from an outfit called Prvi Partizan, but in the requisite 162-grain load. It was surprisingly cheap, at around fifteen
He arrived in twenty minutes at his destination, a randomly selected Econo Lodge on a road that led to the airport, and checked in, paying cash for a week so no one could trace him via credit card. He didn’t think Richard had that capacity, but the big detective agency might. He called Nick’s number and left his new address, then went back to bed.
Nick called at three the next afternoon. “My news is that the boys are going crazy trying to find you.”
“Let ’em sweat.”
“What’s your plan now?”
“I’m going to chill here for a few days and hunker up and reread all this crap. As he said, it’s so goddamn big, and no matter how you enter it, you get lost in the maze. I’m going to try out a more concentrated, less scattershot approach.”
“I thought you had it nailed good by sticking with the rifle stuff.”
“The rifle stuff is great as far as it goes, but I can’t get beyond the timing issue. How’d they do it so fast? If it couldn’t be done that fast, then the whole thing goes away, Lee Harvey’s the bad boy, Robert Aptapton got smacked by a punk on meth, and Bob Lee goes back to his rocker, wiser but poorer. You could go nuts with all this stuff.”
“Many a poor man has, I know, I’m one,” said Nick.
“In a couple of days I’ll pop in unexpectedly on Richard, and we get to the new game of now-he-sees-me-now-he-don’t.”
“Okay. Let me know what I can do.”
That was that. Bob spent the three days poring over the three books, cross-checking, trying to find a pattern, looking for something that might tie everything together in a nice little package. A million others had done so before him, and like them, he failed. Nothing. No holes. Oswald did it, that was all, had to be, nothing else worked. Shot from Dal-Tex? On the wildest frontier of the physically possible but unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, except the generalized conceit that the third bullet came from behind and above, and certain windows at Dal-Tex were within the cone of trajectory that the computer age had imposed upon the reality of the event. No known photo existed that showed the upper floors of the building at around 12:30 that day, which would document whether or not a window had been open.
The one new fact was that someone had killed James Aptapton. If so, then maybe it was over something mundane, not the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Maybe Aptapton had divulged his theory, and that guy had recognized it as something new and special, wished it were his, and decided it was his. So he killed him in Baltimore for it. Murders have happened for lesser reasons by far, for pennies, for toys and gym shoes, for pride and prejudice, for honor and glory, for blow jobs and rim shots. Maybe it was Richard himself, though it was hard to feature someone so rumpled and disheveled as a badass killer. But maybe if “Jack Brophy” came clean with Richard, Richard might have some suggestions about who in the assassination community was capable of such a thing.
It was hard to know what to do next.
On the third day, Swagger could tolerate the inactivity no more and took a cab to an address in the suburbs that he’d found on the Internet. It was a huge sporting goods place called Outdoor Warehouse, and it lived up to its claim of holding nearly everything indoors thatcould be used outdoors. That included the hunting department, where, among the beautifully crafted new rifles and the black plastic assaulters and the endless variations of 9 mm, .38./.357s, and .45s in the gleaming showcases, he found a wide-ranging aisle of ammunition offerings and, between the 6.5 Creedmore and the 6.5 Swede, some boxes of 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano. It was Czech or something, from an outfit called Prvi Partizan, but in the requisite 162-grain load. It was surprisingly cheap, at around fifteen
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