One Perfect Shot

Chapter Three

The holes in the county road grader’s windshield and Larry Zipoli’s skull didn’t offer much of a datum line. Deputy Mears conjured up a duct-tape and pencil solution to secure the contractor’s foundation twine to the inside of the windshield. From there, the line was strung forward over the seventeen feet of the grader’s big yellow prow, off into the hard, sinking sun. I stood on the blade, one hand on the cab, with Tom Mears gingerly sitting in the driver’s seat. Tom was slight of build, perhaps five-eight, with a short torso.

Larry Zipoli had been at least six feet tall, long of torso. To hit him in the eyebrow would have meant that the bullet was angled slightly upward-exactly what made sense to me. The bottom of the cab door was about sixty inches from the ground, another three or four feet up to a spot even with the victim’s eyebrow. Fired from in front, the bullet would naturally angle upward, unless the shooter had either scrambled aboard the grader’s nose, or had set up a stepladder in the middle of the road.

“How curious,” I muttered. Torrez was obviously excited by the whole thing, though, like figuring out the perfect five hundred yard shot on a trophy antelope. If there was something about firearms, shooting, and hunting that he didn’t know, I hadn’t stumbled across it yet.

I trudged out a couple of yards in front of the grader, where Torrez stood, string in hand. “What’s all this tell you?“ Down the road a bit, Trooper Aguilar waited.

“The main thing is that it wasn’t real high velocity, sir. Pretty stout bullet that wasn’t goin’ fast enough to break up. Pretty good sized.” He raised his voice, calling back to Mears. “I’m going to be pullin’ hard on the line, so make sure that thing is secured.”

We then walked down Highland, away from the grader, the twine spinning out behind us. We reached a point about a hundred feet in front of the grader. By then, when Torrez held the twine at shoulder height and pulled on it until it twanged, he could sight along the slight sag, all the way back to the grader, clearing its massive snout, to Deputy Mears’ forehead.

“Somewhere right around here,” Torrez said. “If the shooter was shorter’n me, then on down the road a bit.” If we continued westward on Highland, we’d cover a couple hundred feet before reaching the intersection. Had the shooter parked on Hutton and then walked toward his target? That was coldly calculating. Had Larry Zipoli seen him advancing down the lane weapon in hand, and wondered what the hell was going on? Had the gunman fired, then walked forward to gaze up into the grader’s cab, admiring his handiwork? Had he first driven past the grader, made sure of his target, and then returned? Tracks weren’t going to offer a convenient answer, since the dirt of the ungraded portion of Highland was hard as concrete.

“That’s a good shot, though,” I mused. “To place it like that.”

“A hundred feet? Nah. You could do that with a rock.”

“I couldn’t.” But I knew what Torrez meant. A skilled rifleman could place an easy shot like that, and that told me something else. This didn’t look like a snap, panicky shot taken by a shaking amateur-no “buck fever” involved here, and that would be what Bob Torrez was thinking. I imagined that the shots he took during his hunts were coldly calculated, too. He didn’t need a trophy. He wanted to fill his freezer, and would place a careful, confident shot to do the trick.

He traced a line through the air. “It’s going to matter what kind of gun it was, sir.” I noted the trace of satisfaction in his tone. He held the string motionless while Mears took a roll of film from every angle possible. “I don’t think the shooter was standing any farther out.” Without releasing his hold on the string, Torrez turned and nodded westward. “The angle says that ain’t likely. Then there’s that arroyo on out there where a lot of folks go and shoot, but it’s deep enough that a bullet isn’t going to stray this far unless the shot is deliberate.”

“Ricochet?” I prompted, even though I could see for myself that the bullet that had killed Larry Zipoli was no errant fragment.

“A ricochet ain’t going to drill a straight hole like what we got here. And it’s far enough away that a deliberate shot from the arroyo would have to cover five or six hundred yards. That’s a whole different thing for the shooter. There ain’t many people who can shoot at those kinds of ranges.”

I looked down Hutton. A couple of cars had parked across the field, driven by curious onlookers who had the sense not to approach any closer.

“Somebody drives up, stops about here, and takes one shot.” The freshly graded surface on the south half of Highland included a fair collection of tracks that were going to take a careful inventory to sort out. It would have been nice to see a clear trail of shoeprints, but in all likelihood the shooter had skirted the freshly graded side. We hadn’t had time to complete a formal, complete survey, but nothing obvious had jumped out at us. No tracks, no stash of fresh butts, no shiny shell casing-no nothing.

“All right,” I sighed. “I want Highland closed from one end to the other, Roberto. Nothing missed.”

“I’d like to have that shell casing,” Torrez said.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky. That’s more than Zipoli got.”