I, Sniper

11

In the town of Cold Water, there lived an outlaw by the name of Texas Red. He kicked open the swinging slatted door to the Spotted Dog saloon and slid through as it rode its hinges back and forth. The piano man stopped his tinkling, and cowboys cleared away from the bar. He stood, tense, as the crowd cleared, leaving but three, who seemed not in the least perturbed.

They were the Mendoza brothers, Mexicans. They had greasy mustaches, bandoliers crossed on their chest, guns worn low, gunfighter style.

Red appraised them. He was thin and wiry with a straw mustache. He had hard black eyes. He wore a tall, round-topped Stetson, pale gray, a lot of hat. He wore a faded red placket shirt, a pair of suspenders to sustain the weight of his tight wheat-colored jeans, a pair of well-beaten boots with silver, jingly spurs. Across his waist, in a Mexican flap holster, engraved beautifully in a floral motif by the folks in El Paso after the artist-gunman Bob Meldrum, he wore a first-generation Colt Peacemaker in.44-40 with yellowed, ancient ivory grips. It contained five cartridges because he had carefully loaded by pattern so that the hammer of the old revolver, with its fierce prong of firing pin, now rested on an empty cylinder. It was a safety measure. You wouldn’t think at nut-cutting time with the Mendozas a fella would think about gun safety. But Red had.

“Bastards,” said Red under his breath.

The Mendozas said nothing, not because they were tongue-tied but because they were black metal plates.

He heard the buzz of a timer, signifying go!

Texas Red drew, and he was smooth and that meant he was fast, and he cocked as the gun came up, fired from instinct honed on practice, and sent a wad of lead to bang hard off and knock down José Mendoza’s black-plate chest, another to gut the black-plate belly of Frank Mendoza, and-dammit-a third which just missed Jimmy Mendoza in the black plate. Then Texas Red thumbed back the hammer fast-this had taken months to learn-and in the same motion tried to ride the gun up to his eyes and fired a fourth time, hitting Jimmy in the center of the black plate. The black plate fell. Cottony swirls of old-time black powder smoke rolled in the air.

“Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn, goddamn.”

“I think Jimmy might have toasted you, Mr. Constable,” said Clell Rush, the legendary Hollywood gun coach. “I saw you go to sights on the fourth shot. Because you missed the third shot. And the reason you missed the third shot was the gun didn’t set up in your hand correctly on the recoil after the second shot. And the reason that happened is that after each shot, the gun was a little higher in your hand. The first two shots were good, though. But if you go to sights, you’re thinking, and all the time you’re thinking, that black plate is shooting back.”

Texas Red turned.

“I can’t seem to get to three,” he said. “I’m fine through two, I can do two, but I get tangled up and it makes me cautious on the third.”

“Are you drawing each night like I said?”

“I do my homework, Clell, you know that.”

“Well then, you’re momentarily plateaued out. Same thing happened to Bob Mitchum on El Dorado. He got good and then he stopped developing. I didn’t think he’d ever get it. But he was a pro, like you, Mr. Constable, he did the work, and when he had the saloon scene, he was smooth as butter. Sometimes you get a natural-Dino was a natural, he just took to it with super hand speed and coordination-but if you didn’t get the gene for gunwork, you have to practice.”

“I guess I’ll just have to work harder,” said Texas Red-Tom Constable. “The real Cold Water is next month and I do mean to win.”

Tom Constable was fond of winning, and pretty good at it too. He’d won a fortune in his twenties by pushing his inherited advertising agency (it specialized in roadway signage) into other forms of media, and he got into cable early, rode it hard, and made his first billion. Then the sailing bug caught him and he put two years into that and won an America’s Cup. Then sports, then news, buying or creating teams and networks. Then he married a movie star, decided to become a rancher, bought more land than anybody in America, reinvented buffalo herds, started a restaurant chain, and now he was into a new obsession called cowboy action shooting.

It was an interesting diversion. It played with his old Wild West fantasies, which had first been cultivated in front of the TV in the golden decade of the fifties, when Paladin, Marshal Dillon, Chris Colt, Cheyenne, and the boys from Laramie and Bonanza had dominated the American popular imagination. The way it worked: you got yourself all dressed up like one of the old boys, you called yourself by a nickname, you packed four guns-two handguns, a rifle, a shotgun, all of them of a design preceding 1898-and you shot real bullets and buckshot (black powder loaded) in low-key fun house scenarios adapted from the TV shows of yore.

Most folks did it because it was a nice baby boom wallow; it was relaxed and social and all men met as equals. But Tom, as always, wanted to win; it was a part of his unmalleable personality, the least pleasant thing about him, the way he got fixed on something and all life ceased to exist except that issue. That’s why he’d had so many wives, was so estranged from his children, drove so hard in business, and could not stand to be bested in anything. Who’d have guessed such a handsome man had such fiery pathologies hidden beneath?

And in Texas Red, he’d stumbled upon a creation that pleased him immensely. In the sport you could cook up your own character, and for some reason Constable had instantly conjured Red, twenty-four, of South Texas, a kind of Billy the Kid knockoff, young, fast, loose, dangerous. Red was the dysfunctional deviant boy that Tom’s well-disciplined business life and public image could never acknowledge, but who lived somewhere inside him, hiding under layers of polish, tailoring, grooming, and flossing. He was all id, he was a killer, he was a fast-draw piece of work, and when he saw wrong or threat by his own standards, not society’s, he faced it and gunned it down. One and nineteen men had tried to take him in his fantasy, and one and nineteen were dead. The next man who faced him, whoever he was, wherever he was, soon would be dead.

Meanwhile, on the dreary planet called reality, he’d immediately commissioned a famed Peacemaker gunsmith to build him the most refined and accurate six-gun possible, ditto the rifle and shotgun, and he paid the legendary Clell Rush an outrageous fee for private coaching. He’d gotten good too. Tom worked every damn day on it, shooting privately reloaded.44-40s by the bucketful on his vast western ranch. There too he’d had the scenarios from last year’s Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot in Cold Water, Colorado, recreated. He wanted desperately to place well in the upcoming matches, because like so many other things, a victory wouldn’t be from who he was but from what he’d done.

He reloaded the Colt, sliding the big cartridges through the loading gate, just as generations of cowboys had in this land two centuries ago. Around him, the mountains of southwest Montana towered, glistening peaks lit by snow at their higher altitudes, under a sky so blue it made your teeth ache and wads of cirrocumulus clouds piled high. Of course, he noticed none of that.

“I don’t know why I can’t get it to set right on that third shot,” he said. “Maybe that one had a little extra powder in it and it kicked a little harder.”

“Could be. Most likely you held it too tight and didn’t give with the recoil, and it acted up on its own. You can’t be fast fast. You can only be fast slow.”

“You know, Clell, you tell me that every damn time, and one of these weeks I’m actually going to understand what you mean.”

“Well, sir, what it means is, you can’t fight it. You can’t conquer the gun. You can’t beat it down, make it do what it don’t want to. You got to do it with love. You got to meet it gentle, let it have its way, and in that way you get your way. It’s like a horse. Or a woman.”

“It isn’t like any of the women I was married to, I’ll tell you,” Tom said with a laugh. “They like to broke me, the bitches. Anyhow, I will-”

“Mr. Constable?”

It was his secretary, Susan Jantz, standing next to him in her pantsuit, an extremely plain but unbelievably capable woman.

“Susan?”

“A call from DC. Mr. Fedders. He says it’s urgent.”

Tom made a little comic face for the benefit of Clell, took the phone, and stepped away.

“Yes, Bill.”

“Tom, I’ve got some news. Not good, I’m afraid. I’ve heard through a source that the FBI’s going to postpone releasing its report for a little bit.”

“I thought you-”

“Tom, Jack Ridings and I went and had a one-on-one with the director himself. We met the head guy on the investigatory team. It looked to be in the bag. It seems there’s a new direction they want to pursue.”

“Lord, I don’t want this dragging on all year. I don’t want books, I don’t want TV specials, I don’t want any who-killed-Joan bullshit selling product and little weasels getting rich off Joan’s death.”

“Yes, Tom, I understand. It’s the chief of the task force. He’s somehow reluctant to sign off on the narrative they’ve established, so there’s some dicking around, I’m not sure exactly what and I’m not sure how long it will take. He seemed like a guy who was reading the wind, and I just don’t know what’s happening with him now.”

“Bill, I’m paying you a great deal of dough. If this FBI guy is suddenly getting cute, then find some way to get him out of the picture. Have him shipped to Toledo, dig up something about him and plant it in the papers, just get him the hell out of there.”

“Tom, of course, I just wanted you in the loop. I actually know a young Times reporter who can be very helpful to us in this case.”

“Please handle it, Bill.”