I, Sniper

55

Last stage, the Mendozas. The hard one. Oh, he was so close. He now sat in second, because Marshall Tilghman had screwed up his reload in the Buffalo Gulch thing, and Two-Gun Jack had had a couple of misfires-his own handloads!-on the last stage, Ambush on the Overland.

So only Tequila Dawn stood between Texas Red and the seniors championship. Tequila had been at this a long time, had won championships in other divisions, had even quit for a while and licensed his name for use on holsters, an Uberti Colt clone, boots, run a cowboy action shooting camp, but had finally come back to the game. He was good, but like Red, he was old, and he made the old-guy mistakes that Red had heretofore avoided, like dropping a cartridge in reloading or missing a target and having to come back to it, breaking his rhythm. That’s why Red, so much slower, was still close. But now they were at Tequila’s best event-straight pure pistolero artistry-and Red’s worst one: the Mendozas.

Five into five Mendozas, shift guns, five into five more; then move through the saloon doors, reloading one, then the other gun as you went, and in fifty feet or so, you were in a corral where ten more Mendozas waited. Sure were a lot of Mendoza boys; well, maybe some weren’t brothers but cousins or in-laws or something. And of course by the rules of political correctness, they were no longer identified as Mendozas, as that might be considered disrespectful to Latino Americans, more and more of whom were coming to the cowboy action world. They were just bad guys, but since the stage was a classic and had been around a long time, most people still called it by its original and now memory-holed name.

He was in the standby circle, alone, gathering. His hands felt good, and he’d only raised one cut-the front sight of his left gun had nicked and drawn a little blood-but no bandages were allowed in cowboy action, as there hadn’t been bandages in Deadwood in 1883. But the cut wasn’t deep and only hurt a bit when a drop of salty sweat fell into it. He wiggled his fingers, occasionally bent forward to stretch out his calves and thighs, or reached overhead with one hand to touch the other shoulder, stretching bi- and triceps. He tried not to pay any attention to Tequila. It was best if he didn’t know. He didn’t want to watch and psych himself out of his best per-

Tequila’s first gun rang a quick staccato, and each shot banged home with a clang as the plate fell. Then came the switch of guns; it was fast, and again the five shots were fast but-he missed one! The agonizing seconds ticked by as Tequila reloaded one round, spun the cylinder, and fired, taking down the last target. Then he was on the run, reloading each gun as he went. He got to the corral, and Red heard the shots, lickety-split, each completed by the Gong Show sound of the plate struck at six hundred feet per second by a large lump of lead and-God, he missed another. Quickly the old gunslinger finished the string and decided to reload and fire rather than accept a ten-second penalty for a missed target, and he probably got the reload in and the shot off (clang!) in seven seconds.

Oh God, thought Red, I have a chance. I just can’t miss a target. Slow, calm, collected, the gun reset just right. It’s there. It’s for me. I can do it.

He took a deep breath, trying to keep himself calm as he stepped into the loading area. He showed guns empty to the range officer running the stage, then, one at a time, slipped the cartridges in-one, skip one, four more-then cocked and gently lowered the hammer, keeping the muzzle downrange. Did it twice.

Turned to face the reset plates.

“Do you understand the course, shooter?”

“I do.”

“Are you ready, shooter?”

“Yes.”

“All right then-”

“Mr. Constable! Mr. Constable!”

Aghhhh! There went his concentration. It was Susan Jantz, his secretary. What could she want? Aghh, he could get disqualified.

He turned and saw the range officer trying to push her gently back to the cordoned crowd area. But Susan was persistent, slipped by him, and raced to her boss with his cell phone.

“What on earth-”

“You have to take this call.”

“Shooter,” said the range officer, “I’m going to have to call a ‘spirit of game’ infraction if you don’t-”

Red put the phone to his ear.

“Constable.”

“Mr. Constable, you don’t know me. My name is Randall Jeffords. I’m an accountant in your New York office.”

“Why the hell are y-”

“Sir, I came in to catch up and the place was being torn apart by federal agents. I asked, and they wouldn’t say, but there were some cops with them, and one of them said-I know you won’t believe this-felony murder one. I just can’t believe it. Against you, sir. I’ve been trying for hours to get your number. I thought you ought to know.”

“You did the right thing,” Texas Red said, clicking the cell closed.

He had a moment of disbelief, of stunned nothingness. His first cogent thought: where the fuck is Bill Fedders? He’s supposed to be wired into that system. I’m supposed to know in advance when-

But quickly enough he saw the pointlessness of that line of inquiry. He realized a decision had just been made for him; he had to instantly accept its reality and deal with it first and fastest. There was but one answer: he had to get clear of the country, now. Nothing else mattered. From Costa Rica, he could sort things out, but the deal now was to avoid custody-the circus, the humiliation-and to see what they knew and didn’t.

“Okay,” he said to his number one bodyguard, who had by this time bullied his way forward, violating the rules, and stood waiting near him, “we’ve got to get out of here. Call the plane, tell them we’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Yes sir.”

“Thanks, Susan, you’re the best,” he said to his loyal secretary and daily sex servant.

He started to walk off the event stage.

“Shooter, you cannot leave without showing empty, you cannot leave, I will DQ you if you do not immediately return to the loading area and make your weapons safe.”

Tom turned.

“Fuck you,” he said, and walked off.

“DQ! DQ! Shooter is DQed!” shouted the range officer but made no step forward as the three beefy guards closed in behind Texas Red and the crowd parted in the thrust of the armed man and his armed bodyguards as they headed down the main street of the town of Cold Water, through the corridor of stunned competitors and fans.

And then a tall gunman stepped into the empty street ahead of him, raising one hand.

“A cowboy!” said Nick. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s the Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot, Cold Water, Colorado. I saw something on CNN about it this morning and realized I’d heard the Irishmen talk about the boss being off playing cowboy. So being Sherlock Holmes, I put one and one together and came up with Cold Water. It was only a hundred miles from where we was. I had my pal Chuck drive me hell-for-leather over here, but since it was a gun crowd and I wanted to fit in, we stopped off. Chuck’s an ex-lawman; he could buy a gun without no wait. We picked up a nice used Colt in a pawnshop. At a gas station I bought a hat, and when I got here, I picked up a holster and some black powder forty-fours. I wanted to see this guy face to face.”

“You haven’t called him out or something insane like that?”

“Of course not. I only look stupid. I just wanted to see him. He don’t know nothing about me.”

“Boy, was that ever the right decision. I am one lucky little federal flunky today. Just a second.”

Bob waited as he assumed Nick was shouting orders to his people to get the information to the closest field office to Cold Water, Colorado, and get a SWAT team gunned up and on the way by helicopter.

Nick came back, sounding breathless.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ve gotten Denver. They’re on the way. They were on the runway because of an earlier alert. I’m told it’ll be less than half an hour. Just stand by and-”

“Oh, shit,” said Bob. “Something’s going on. He’s up there to shoot but all of a sudden his gal comes over, hands him a phone. He talks real urgent into it. Now he’s breaking away, his mob of boys. They’re getting out of town, Nick. He’s going to his plane.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Nick. “How many?”

“It’s him, three bodyguards, heavy guys. I don’t see no guns but I’m guessing they’re carrying.”

“Oh, shit,” said Nick.

“I can stop them,” said Bob.

“Oh, God,” said Nick, as if envisioning details of a terrible shootout in a huge crowded area, dozens dead, the whole thing a complete fuck-up, his career, just saved, trashed beyond redemption.

But then he thought, I rode this far with the gunman. Might as well go all the way.

“Okay,” he said, “use your best judgment. If you think following them is the way to go, then-”

“You better give me some kind of verbal authorization to shoot damn quick, ’cause they’s a hundred feet away and coming toward me.”

He heard Nick whisper to others, “Witness this and record it,” then he said loudly, “Do it. Take him down.”

It took a second for the situation to dawn on the crowd, but then they all seemed to get it at once. Two gunslingers facing each other in a western town under a blaze of sun, shooting for blood. They backed off-not away, but off, cordoning themselves along the streets of Cold Water, witnesses to that which had not been seen for real in a century. Nobody was going to get them to look away.

“Kill him,” said Texas Red to his bodyguard.

“Sir,” said the man, “I am a bonded employee of Graywolf Security, and I am not empowered to open fire unless fired upon. I cannot engage unknown civilians, particularly in a crowded area. I have no idea who this guy is.”

“Who are you?” yelled Red.

He saw the man start to answer, but someone else from the crowd yelled, “He’s an Arizona Ranger,” for some odd reason.

A moment of silence creaked by, then the bodyguard said, “Possible law enforcement agent. Cannot engage. Graywolf rules.” He stepped away from Texas Red and led his colleagues to the sidelines. They wanted to watch too. That left Clell Rush.

“Don’t do this, Red,” Clell said quietly. “He’s got a big iron on his hip.”

Red looked, recognized from the top view exactly what he himself was carrying, only his Colt wore the gunfighter’s 4¾ inch barrel, while the Arizona Ranger’s iron was indeed big; it was the 7½ inch model, which gave him a lot of metal to clear from leather.

In an instant, something ticked off in Red, or was he back to being Tom? Whatever, something flashed vaingloriously before his eyes. He imagined himself killing this “Arizona Ranger” in a fair gunfight-who, after all, could stay up with him?-then making the getaway. He knew that by the twisted currents loose in

American culture, such an act would make him not merely famous but legendary. It would take away the onus of the murders he’d committed or ordered, all of which could be called cowardly.

Facing and slaying an enemy old-style, in the oldest of Old West styles, as captured on a thousand cell phone videos, would make him perversely admired. He was a bastard, but he was a brave bastard, they’d say.

“I warn you,” he called to the Ranger, “these guns are loaded.”

His adversary cracked a dry smile.

“Mine too,” he said. “Never saw no use for an unloaded gun.”

It was quiet. How could it not be? Of all the audiences in the world, this was the one that appreciated the ceremony of the gunfight more than any other and had worshipped its warriors like the old gods. And all were in the garb, some slightly theatricalized, of the 1880s, so as a tableau, it looked as if it belonged captured in the sepia of the best photo Matthew Brady ever took or in Remington’s or Russell’s brushstrokes. Everyone understood the dynamism, the thunder, the flash and pain that was about to be released for real.

The two men began the slow walk toward each other, by now oblivious to crowd and setting. Their boots sloughed dust; their neckerchiefs were tight. One wore red and one wore blue. Texas Red slipped out of the stylish black leather vest he was wearing, in case its tightness proved an impediment. He set his white hat lower on his eyes, to shade the sun.

The stranger wore jeans and a denim shirt; he was a rhapsody in worn blue. His handkerchief was black; his hat was crushed and bent, and you’d have thought it was one of those ridiculous Richard Petty imitation hats that gas stations sold, but of course a man so elegant and brave would never wear such a thing. His gun was in a Galco Texas Ranger rig, heavily figured with floral motifs, on an equally figured belt, which also supported a row of twenty more robin’s-egg-big.44 cartridges. But all present, having seen Red shoot, thought this handsome stranger was about to meet his death.

There was forty feet between them when they came to make their play. No words, no smiles, just dead-faced gunfighter’s harshly focused concentration, eyes slitted, mouths tight and grim, no visible breathing, no visible emotion, and as if on silent agreement they went to leather.

Red was fast and loose and strong, and the truckload of adrenaline in his bloodstream turned his gunhand into a blur as it flew to grip, thumb to hammer, driven by an ideal unspooling in his mind, as if from the myth-pure western that no man had made, the one where the hands flash and the guns jackhammer a bolt of flame and a blast of smoke and it’s the other man who’s spavined to the ground, oozing blood and sorrow. That did not happen.

The Ranger’s hand abandoned time and physics as it seemed to pass into invisibility, and in the next nanosecond, when it returned to the known universe, it had somehow already oriented the old revolver, cocked it, busted cap with spurt of muzzle flame and white cannonade of rocketing gas, and launched a fat.44 on its track across space.

Red had not cleared leather before the bullet fairly ripped, hit, mutilated, and exited. He went down hard, kicking up a puff of dust, which the wind took, just as it took the gunsmoke of the Ranger’s speedier Colt. Red curled as he fell, gun flying away in a twisted angle, the sound of the shot lost to all, so intent were all in the essence of the age-old drama.

The moment was utter antique. Not a single thing spoke of later times that any man or woman or child could see. The white smoke and dust, teased to action by the relentless wind, seemed to lie over all for just a second, glazing and blurring all surfaces, suggesting again that this was ancient times.

But then the applause broke out. Well, who could blame them? And the chants, “Ran-ger, Ran-ger, Ran-ger!”

One might think, how terrible to cheer a mankilling, no matter the circumstances. However, it became instantly clear that Texas Red may have been fairly ripped by the bullet’s progress, but he was not dead by a long shot. Instead the Ranger had brought off that trope of fifties cowboy TV-shooting the gun out of the hand, as Gene and Roy and Hoppy had done countless times, so that the bad guys gripped their sore mitts and shook them as if experiencing something akin to bees in the bat.

Red rolled, screaming for help, and it then became obvious what was different about this particular variation on the theme: the Ranger had not quite shot the gun out of his hand but had shot the hand out from his gun. The bullet had struck him in the wrist bone and deflected downward, knocking the gun this way and three fingers of his right hand that way. The mangled paw now spurted a crimson jet unseen in fifties tube time.

The Ranger slipped his gun back into its holster and walked to the fallen man. Texas Red gripped his destroyed hand as if with finger pressure he could stop the blood flow, but as his eyes came up to his victor, he tried to slither backward, caught in a vise of fear. The man waited until at last eye contact was made.

“I don’t know who you are,” Red said, squinting into a sun that turned his opponent to a black silhouette.

“Oh yes you do. I am the sniper.”

Then he turned and walked clear, hearing someone scream, “Get him a doctor,” but before that was accomplished, the whole nineteenth-century illusion was devastated by an updraft of dust, a sudden density of shadow that announced a helicopter was settling out of the sky, right there in Cold Water. It was the FBI apprehension team, and as the bird settled, its rotors beat up a mighty wind, filling the air with a hurricane of dust, driving folks this way and that. The Arizona Ranger seemed to disappear in the drifting grit just as mysteriously as he had arrived.