Read The Third Bullet for Free Online Page B

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 throughthe 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 musthave 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