Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 4, September 1967

Volksweapon by Gene Wolfe

Who had murdered Judy? Only a dead girl knew.

Centered in the light of his electric torch, the girl lay among last year’s leaves with her skirt hiked past plump, white thighs.

Wilt Smythe, game warden, had run down the road to her, leaving the moon-faced young man who had apparently been her escort as soon as he had examined his wound, fearing that the girl might be more seriously hurt — perhaps dying. But she was dead.

Three small, powder-rimmed bullet holes were almost lost in her blonde hair.

None had bled much, and none of the bullets had forced its way through her skull to make a messy exit wound, but they had penetrated the brain, and been as deadly to her as big game slugs or artillery shells might have been.

“Who are you?” the boy said behind him.

“I’m a game warden. What went on here?”

The boy seemed in better control of himself now than he had been a few minutes ago, although he still clutched his bleeding side and his breath came in gasps.

“Judy and I came out here to park — you know. Then all of a sudden there was this fellow at Judy’s window with a gun. It’s her car, so she was driving. He said something, and she kind of screamed, and tramped on the accelerator. I guess she was trying to turn the car around, but she dropped one wheel off into the ditch. You can’t get it out. I just tried.”

“I know. I heard the motor roaring as I came up. Take it easy now, son, and talk slow.”

“Anyway, I jumped out of the door on my side and ran around the front of the car at him and he shot me. It was just like somebody had kicked the legs out from under me. I must have passed out, because when I woke up Judy was like this and he was gone.”

“Did you get a look at him? Could you describe him at all?”

Although he was obviously in pain, the boy shrugged his shoulders. “I didn’t get a good look. About my age, I guess. Maybe a little shorter than I am.”

“Have you any idea of how long you were unconscious?” A puff of warm night wind touched the game warden’s cheek, somehow hinting of a summer thunder storm to come.

“I don’t think for long. Maybe five or ten minutes.”

“Stay here.”

Before the wounded boy could protest, Wilt Smythe had brushed past him, running with long smooth strides down the little used road until he reached the lake and the cluster of weekend cottages which were the reason for the road’s existence. The moonlit expanse of the lake was unmarked by the wake of any boat.

Hurriedly he shook the doors of the cottages, but all were closed and he saw no signs of violent entry. Running again, he returned to the boy, having been gone no more than five minutes in all.

“Nobody down there to rouse,” he said. “You’ll have to wait here while I hike to the highway and flag down a motorist. You’re not likely to go into shock this late, but just to be safe I want you to get into the car. Sit in back, or if you can, lie down on the seat and cover yourself up.”

Like a hound loath to leave a fresh scent, Smythe made a last cast around the girl’s body before he left.

The fallen leaves and dry soil held no footprints, not even the girl’s or his own.

He was accustomed to traveling swiftly on his own legs and he did so now, trotting easily and almost silently as he played his light over the road before him. He was a good three-quarters of a mile from the little car and the boy who held a sodden hankerchief to his side, when the lane made an abrupt turn and he saw the glimmer of lights through the trees. Acting instinctively, he switched off his electric torch.

The men with the lights were making no effort to conceal themselves and carried no rifles. Even before he could see their faces the murmur of their voices told him that one was young and the other older, and a moment later he recognized them.

Both were enthusiastic hunters, and he had recently come to suspect that neither was letting the game laws interfere too much with his sport. Now they were so deep in some discussion that he was able to come almost within touching distance before either noticed him.

Before they had time to ask questions of their own, Smythe snapped, “How long have you two been standing here?”

The older, a lanky man whose cheeks had been deeply pitted by some skin disorder, said, “I’ve been here about a quarter hour, Warden. Marty just come up. You ain’t hear two hounds after a coon, have you?”

The game warden shook his head. “You’re coon hunting?”

“Coon’s a varment in this state, Warden. No license and no season. You know that.”

The younger man, Martin, put in, “Just runnin’ the dogs, really. You can see we haven’t got no guns. Only we lost them dogs somewhere around the old timber trail. We each made a big circle, him east and me west, but couldn’t either of us get a smell. I think them dogs have gone home.”

“In the fifteen minutes you’ve been here, then,” Smythe addressed the older man, “has anyone come down this road?”

“Nope, not a soul. What’s the matter, Warden? Something wrong?”

“There’s been a rape and a killing. You come with me. I think the three of us ought to be able to lift the front wheel of a Volkswagon out of a ditch.”

The wounded boy was jacknifed into the rear seat of the little car when they arrived, and his pale, sweating face told plainly of the further loss of blood he had suffered while the game warden had been away.

They did not try to move him before the three of them by main strength heaved the front end back up onto the road. While the warden was starting the engine and making a U turn in the narrow confines of the road, both hunters hastened over to peer with morbid curiousity at the silent, huddled figure on the leaves.

Rolling down the window, the game warden yelled back to them, “Come on, you two. You’re going into town with us.”

“Look here, Warden.” It was Martin, holding out a shiny object not much bigger than an pack of cigarettes. “This was laying right along side of her. It was mostly under some sticks and trash, but I seen it right away.”

He displayed his find proudly, illuminating it with the lantern he held in his other hand. It was a tiny chrome plated automatic of Belgian make.

“I suppose you’ve ruined any finger-prints that might have been on it.” Using the tips of his fingers, Smythe picked up the little weapon by the trigger guard and dropped it into one of the pockets of his khaki shirt.

The older hunter asked, “Shouldn’t one of us stay here with the girl?”

“No. You sit beside me here in front. Martin, you get in back and do anything you can for that fellow. You got enough room back there?”

“Sure, I’ll just squeeze in on the floor here. Kinda cramped, but I’ll make it.”

The boy said weakly, “Somebody ought to stay with Judy.”

“That’s out.” Smythe gunned the little car’s engine. “And there sure isn’t room to take her with us, not even if we could disturb the body.” Heavily laden and driven at high speed, the VW jolted abominably on the uneven road.

“You think Marty or me did this, don’t you?” the older hunter asked.

“You said no one came down the road, and there wasn’t anyone in the summer cabins or out on the lake. The man who did this could have been on foot and cut through the woods without meeting either you or Martin or me — Martin and I both seem to have been wandering around not too far off when this thing happened, but I don’t think it’s likely. Do you?”

“Well, I feel sorry for the girl.”

“She was one of those college girls,” Martin put in. “I didn’t know her, but I’ve seen her around town.”

“She was wearing engagement and wedding rings,” the game warden said. Addressing the wounded boy in back, he asked, “You weren’t her husband, were you, son?”

The car swung on to the paved state highway to town and picked up speed as the boy told them the girl’s husband had been an Air Force officer stationed in Europe and it was none of their damned business.

Martin gaffawed and the men in front told him to shut up.

At the hospital a pair of efficient young men in white pulled the boy out of the car and hustled him on a stretcher to an emergency room for a blood transfusion. The game warden spoke grimly into a telephone and the two hunters leaned against a wall in the uncomfortable positions of men who feel they ought to be doing something without knowing what it is they ought to do.

“The police will be coming for him soon,” Wilt Smythe said when he had finished his call. “They’ll want to talk to us too, so we’d better wait right here.”

Surprisingly, Martin was the first to grasp the implications of what he had said. “You mean he done it?”

The game warden nodded.

“Well, he didn’t shoot himself, did he?” the older hunter asked.

“I doubt it. Did you happen by any chance to notice the markings on that gun?”

“Sure,” the hunter said. “Some kind of foreign writing.”

“French. Those little automatics are imported into this country by the thousand, but the ones produced to send here are stamped in English. This one,” Smythe tapped his pocket, “was intended for sale in Europe. Those Air Force men can always hitch a ride back home on a military plane when they get a leave, and I think we’ll find out eventually that the girl’s husband bought this gun for her in Europe and gave it to her to protect herself with.

“I suppose that she and that fellow were driving out to one of the summer cottages on the lake — maybe not for the reasons you would think. She dropped that wheel into the ditch some way — maybe he was bothering her. When they got out to look at it he attacked her. When it was over he let her up and let her get back into the car, figuring she’d be too ashamed to tell anybody and that was his big mistake. She had that little gun; probably it was either in her purse or the map compartment of the car.

“And she was mad enough to shoot him with it. Those twenty-five’s don’t have any punch to speak of, though, and since all the bullet did was rip a furrow in his belly muscles he was able to wrestle the gun away from her and kill her with it.

“The first thing that made me wonder about him was when he told me he’d been knocked cold for five minutes when he was shot. Of course a man might faint with fright, even if the bullet he was hit with didn’t have much shock power, but he didn’t look that type; and although he was bleeding pretty bad there wasn’t any one puddle of blood where he might have been lying that long.”

Martin said wonderingly, “Then you knew all along, huh?” An ambulance came clanging up to the emergency entrance and there was a rush of interns through the corridor.

“No, I straightened out a lot of it on the drive in. Of course the main thing was your finding that gun in the leaves. I had looked all around the girl before, and I knew good and well there wasn’t any chrome plated gun there then. He’d had it in his pocket when he talked to me the first time of course, and he got scared that it would be found on him.”

“Well,” the older hunter said slowly, “if you knew it wasn’t us, I still don’t think it was right for you to take us with you like you did. One of us could at least have stayed with the body until the police came.”

“In the first place,” the game warden said, “the police wouldn’t want anybody rooting around after more evidence before they got there. In the second, somebody’s been jacklighting deer out there, and I’ve got kind of interested in that. You know how it goes, don’t you? The jacklighter shines a lamp or the headlights of a car into the woods and kind of hypnotizes the deer. Since the deer’s eyes reflect the light, your poacher has a perfect target; the range is short and the deer’s not moving. Usually your jacklighter uses a car and you can stop him on the road with the carcass in his trunk.

“Recently, though, there’s been two men working together and packing the deer out on foot, and that’s a lot harder to catch. Now any hunter’ll tell you a rifle gets in a man’s way a good deal when he’s trying to tote a deer carcass, but a jacklighter doesn’t really need one — he can use something a good bit handier.”

With a movement almost as deft as that of a magician taking an egg from a child’s ear, the game warden thrust his hand into the side pocket of the hunter’s coat and came up with a stubby, two-barreled pistol.

“A three-fifty-seven derringer,” Smythe commented drily. “Plenty of punch for head shots on deer at short range, and weighs less than a pound.”

The hunter’s face flushed, making the pits in his cheeks more apparent than ever. “Listen here, Warden. Just my having that in my pocket ain’t proof of killing deer with it. You take me to court with that and they’ll laugh at you.”

“That’s right,” Wilt Smythe agreed, “but here in town,” he tapped the white hospital wall significantly, “having it in your pocket is carrying a concealed weapon.

“Now I suppose this gun cost you about thirty or forty dollars, which is just about what a judge would fine you for first offence poaching. I think I’ll just keep it and drop it in the lake the next time I’m out there. We’ll call that square.”

Smythe looked at the chunky little gun reflectively. “She’d have let daylight into him with this. I wish I could have given it to her.”