One Perfect Shot

Chapter Thirty-one

I retrieved a small plastic evidence bag from my briefcase.

“At what point do you have to call for a warrant?” Estelle asked.

“When our friend,” and I nodded toward Mark Arnett, who apparently believed that if he glared long enough, the Pontiac would reappear, “decides not to cooperate. I’m hoping that won’t happen.” I made gloving motions. “So, kid gloves.” I counted her question as great progress.

With the car door open, a heavy, throbbing exhaust note attracted my attention, and I looked down the street to see Bob Torrez’s pickup cruising toward us. A ’69 Chevy 4x4, it had been battered, bruised, and wrung out by a string of contractors when he had rescued it a couple of years before. He’d scrounged various parts here and there, and referred to the truck as his “junk yard dog.” He’d been on the team for a drug sting in Cruces the year before, and the truck had gone undercover with him.

Torrez eased the pickup to a stop behind my unit. A half a dozen lengths of PVC pipe were lashed to the headache rack and hung back over the tailgate.

Mark Arnett approached us, hands now hidden in his back pockets. “What do you want to do?” He nodded at Torrez as the deputy joined us. “Bobby, how’s it goin’?”

I handed the plastic evidence bag to Arnett, and he examined it for a second or two before asking, “What’s this?” He looked up at me. “I mean I know what it is. What’s the deal?”

“That’s the bullet that killed Larry Zipoli, Mark.”

“You’re shittin’ me.” He turned the bag this way and that, then donned a pair of half glasses and examined it some more. “Looks like a Mountain States,” he offered. “Didn’t come apart, did it.”

“Nope.” I was impressed that someone could just look at a projectile-not even an entire cartridge-and make an educated guess about its manufacturer. Bobby Torrez could, of course, but his gunny knowledge was legendary.

Arnett pushed his glasses up on his nose and squinted. “This son-of-a-bitch don’t have rifling cuts.” He looked up quickly, a little disappointed when he saw that he wasn’t telling us something we didn’t know.

I asked, “You use these?”

For a long moment, Mark Arnett didn’t answer, then he handed the bag back to me. “I use ’em in silhouette matches from time to time. Expensive as hell, for one thing. But they shoot tight, and I like the extra weight. What’s with this, anyhow?”

“You want to show us the ones you use?”

He frowned at me as if I had threatened him with a cattle prod. “Now wait a minute. What are you saying, sheriff?”

“What we’re trying to do is find out as much as we can about the circumstances of Mr. Zipoli’s death, Mark. To do that, we go to the experts whenever we can. Nobody in Posadas knows more about ballistics and the shooting sports than you do, so here I am.” I shook the bag a little, hoping that flattery would get us everywhere. At this preliminary stage, I didn’t want to waste time with a warrant, but I knew that in all likelihood, that was on the horizon.

“I want to know as much as I can about these little bastards, Mark.” I poked a finger at the evidence bag when I said that, and then shook it for emphasis. “I want to know about this. What can you tell me?”

“Other than that each one costs about half a buck? Not a whole lot. I mean, you got what you got, except I don’t understand why there’s no rifling marks.” He peered at the slug again, rolling it this way and that under the plastic. “Not even a scuff.”

“Worn out barrel?”

He scoffed. “Had to be damn near a shotgun, then. And that wouldn’t give the kind of accuracy you’re talkin’ about-unless the whole thing was some kind of gross accident.”

“We weren’t thinking along the lines of accident,” I said.

Mark regarded me for a long moment, then jerked his head toward the door. “Well, come on inside and let me show you.” He started to turn toward the house, then stopped short. “But none of this is going to find my boy, Sheriff. That’s what’s important to me right now, not some damn bullet. I need to find his ass before he gets himself into a round of trouble.”

“I can’t argue with that,” I said. “We’re going to find him, Mark. Take my word on that. Zipoli’s death has upset a lot of youngsters…neighbor kids, family friends, neighbors, you name it. Right now, Mo doesn’t know what to think. When he’s done chewing it all over, he’ll be back.”

Mark nodded dubiously. “I got the feeling that you know more about this than you’re telling me, Sheriff. You guys are looking for my son. Is he involved somehow? Is that it? Are you going to tell me what I need to know?”

“I wish I could, Mark. I wish Mo was standing right here, right now, explaining himself to you. But he’s not. So we do what we can.”

Arnett sighed and shrugged. “Come on in.” We trooped into the house after him, taking the side door from the driveway. A steep stairway plunged down from the first landing, another shorter one angling up to the kitchen. We headed down into the basement.

A pool table sporting a rich green cover occupied much of the floor space, with a stereo system mounted on one wall that looked as if it was capable of busting windows. A selection of chairs, a rack of pool cues, an apartment-sized fridge and a variety of other toys jammed the basement-not a bad haven for a contractor after a day simmering on a hot roof. I skirted the stereo and eyed a CD case lying on a shelf. I flipped it over and saw that the recording included Frankie Lane’s “Mule Train,” along with a selection of other favorites.

“Is this Mo’s?” I glanced down the table of contents. “‘Liberty Valance,’ ‘High Noon’…this is all good stuff.”

Arnett’s laugh was immediate and disgusted. “Hell no. If you can understand the words, it ain’t his. Borrow it if you want.” I put the CD back, making a mental note that such wonderful things existed and that I should own a copy. Arnett reached up to the top of a door frame at the far end of the room and found a key-one of those magical hiding places that no one could possibly discover-and unlocked both knob and deadbolt.

When he snapped on the light, I saw a neat room about a dozen feet square, with a large safe in one corner. The safe was concreted in place, sunken up to its ankles, not about to be hauled away by some ambitious burglar. It must have taken Mark Arnett and a crew of friends a lot of sweat and several cases of beer to install the unit.

Twisting at the waist, I took the opportunity to scan the room, fascinated. Arnett’s inventory of ammunition reloading components was neatly organized on shelves above the work bench, and revealed a significant investment in this hobby. A series of reloading presses were bolted to a three-inch thick laminated table top, and on the opposite side of the room, three steel wall cabinets were mounted at a convenient height.

I bent slightly and examined a wooden loading block on the bench that held a hundred cartridge cases, little pudgy bodies that necked down sharply to a small caliber bullet. Of the hundred cartridges, thirty were finished. Bob Torrez glanced at them and knew exactly what he was looking at. I looked at the ammo, not recognizing a damn thing.

“I have a bench rest match next week,” Arnett explained. “Up in Ratón.” He saw the puzzlement on my face. “Those are six millimeter PPC’s. That ain’t what you got from Zipoli.” He reached past me. “This is what you want to see.” The unopened red box of Mountain States bullets that he slipped off the shelf featured a fifty-six dollar price tag from George Payton’s shop. He split the tape and opened the box, setting it down on the counter. I lifted the slip of paper that covered the bullets and regarded the shiny array of brass-jacketed slugs, each with a crisp lead tip. “Just like you got there, sheriff. 170-grain flat point, 308 caliber.”

I picked one out of the box, fumbling, then caught it before the slippery little thing skittered across the counter.

“Moly coated,” Arnett explained. “Fancy stuff.”

I nestled the brand new bullet on the plastic bag that contained the recovered slug. A microscope might disagree, but to my eye they were identical-or had been before glass, bone and brain ruined the one’s aerodynamic shape.

“Three Ten, PCS on channel three.” The damn radio was so loud it startled me. I hauled it off my belt.

“Three ten.”

“Deputy Reyes has an urgent phone call. Ten-nineteen.”

I glanced across at the young lady and saw the excitement in her eyes. This wasn’t the time or place to ask how many other roads she was planning to investigate all by herself, the ink of her contract barely dry on the dotted line.

“Ten four. It’ll be a few minutes.”

I heard a jingle of keys, and turned in time to see Deputy Torrez extending his hand toward Estelle. “Take my unit,” he said. I nodded agreement. Maybe she understood my expression as permission, but in fact it was amusement at the image of this slip of a girl behind the wheel of Torrez’s rusted, battered heap. She left the basement.

“You thought some about the gun involved in this shit?” Arnett watched Estelle’s backside as she ascended the stairs, but his question was clearly directed at Deputy Torrez.

“Some.” The deputy’s voice wasn’t much more than a whisper, and I guessed that his reticence was an issue of rank. We hadn’t had time to discuss who was going to say what to potential witnesses, so his natural inclination was to let me spill as many beans as I saw fit.

“You got the shell casing?” Arnett pressed.

I didn’t hedge my answer. “No, we don’t have it. But I can’t see why the rifle would be anything other than something with a tubular magazine. Winchester, Marlin…some lever action like that? I mean, what would be the point of using flat-nosed bullets like these,” and I patted the red box of Mountain States slugs, “in something other than a gun with a tubular magazine?”

“Or in a smooth bore. No point. No point all.” Mark’s reply was immediate and emphatic. “That’s the weakness for lever action rifles, sheriff. I’m sure Bobby told you all about that. ‘Cause the cartridges sit nose to tail in the magazine tube, the tips of the bullet need to be flat so they don’t strike the primer of the bullet ahead during recoil.”

“That could ruin your whole day.”

“Damn straight. But that flat nose also means the long-range ballistics aren’t worth a shit-like pushin’ a brick through the air.”

“So we’re left with a major conundrum,” I said. Mark Arnett didn’t know about Bob Torrez’s extensive session out in the gravel pit, or the conclusions we had already reached. “Why no rifling marks? How does that happen?”

“Beats the shit out of me.” He turned to the safe, punched in numbers and twisted the handle. The door opened to reveal a neat row of a dozen long guns, with a half dozen handguns hanging by their trigger guards from rubber-jacketed hooks.

He selected a rifle and hefted it out of the safe. “My dad bought this at a Sears store in Cruces in 1939.” He jacked the lever open and peered into the empty chamber, then held the rifle out to me. “First rifle he ever bought.”

“A Winchester,” I said.

“Just a plain old Model ’94,” he said. “There’s millions of ’em on the planet, but this one means a lot to me.”

Holding the rifle gingerly by the butt plate and the barrel just shy of the muzzle, I turned the Winchester to read the caliber stamped on the barrel just forward of the receiver. “.30–30,” I said. Arnett snapped on a bore light and held the curved tip of the little flashlight into the rifle’s open chamber.

I angled the rifle so that I could peer down the bore. The sharply-cut spiral grooves of rifling winked in the bright light. They’d slice nice crisp tracks in any bullet headed outbound. “Sweet,” I said, the old gunnery sergeant genes tweaked by seeing a nice clean weapon. Shifting my grip on the rifle, I took the bore light from him and turned it this way and that, examining the bore more carefully. “Not a speck, soldier. Outstanding.”

“That Winchester has won a bunch of matches for me,” Arnett said. “Sixty years old, and look at that rifling-still crisp and sharp.”

I stood silently, holding the rifle, enjoying its classic lines. Every movie goer who ever enjoyed a western had seen some version of this gun. After a moment, I eased the lever closed, pulled the trigger and lowered the hammer with my thumb. I wasn’t looking closely at the rifle, though. My gaze was locked on the open safe behind Arnett. The row of rifles, all good soldiers standing in line, included a couple of semiautomatics, and at least four bolt-actions. Four other lever actions, three of them short enough to be carbines, rounded out the row.

“The other levers?” I asked.

Before answering, Arnett accepted the.30–30 Winchester and put it back in the rack. He put a finger on the muzzle of one rifle and tipped it forward a little, not offering it to me. “Marlin.45–70. I bought this big old bad boy for an elk hunt up north in Montana.” Shifting his finger to the muzzle of what was obviously another Winchester, he explained, “This one is a later model ’94 carbine in.32 Winchester Special. I use it during the long range portion of the three-gun matches. That and this little jewel for the twenty-two event.” He tapped the muzzle of a slender lever action.22 caliber rifle, then moved on to a fancy little number that showed a lot of brass and an octagon barrel. “I picked this up just this summer.” He hefted it out of the safe, but by then my attention was elsewhere. I knew the rifle that he held was a more-or-less repro of a ’66 Winchester, a gun that wouldn’t come close to accepting the cartridge size we were interested in.

He held the replica long enough that he could see I wasn’t much interested. “What?” he prompted.

“Tell me about the.32,” I said.

“Yeah, so?” He slid the replica back into place, and reached for the.32 Special, picking it out of the safe rack with a one-handed grip on the fore-end wood. “A late one. 1959,” he offered. “It’s a good solid gun. George Payton had that in his shop, and I couldn’t pass it up.”

“Ah, George,” I said. My fingers were tingling.

“He’s got another one right now,” Arnett said. “Priced out of my league, but he’s got it. Made before World War II.”

I didn’t mention that the specimen from Georgie Payton’s inventory had been in Deputy Torrez’s possession out at the gravel pit, blasting the wrong sized bullets down range. At the moment, we were far inside without a warrant, and Mark Arnett had been the proud owner, enjoying showing some friends his collection. That might change in a heartbeat. But what the hell. I drew the slender ballpoint pen out of my pocket, reached out and slid it down the barrel of the.32.

“Mind?” I said, and again, with one hand on the butt plate and the other using the pen as a handle, I hefted the rifle, not adding my finger prints to the rifle’s collection. Torrez was on the same page. He snapped on a pair of surgical gloves, and that earned a frown from Arnett.

“I got the lever,” the deputy said to me, and as I held the rifle, he opened the action.

“Shit,” Mark Arnett said, and I could imagine how he felt. We weren’t old friends any longer, enjoying a collection. If he was smart, he’d stop the whole show now and tell us not to let the door hit us in the ass on the way out. If he was smart, he’d tell us to fetch a warrant and in the next breath, he’d call his attorney. But he knew us, and I could flatter myself that he trusted us. So he did none of those things. “You want the bore light?”

I nodded. Arnett held it in the action. With Torrez supporting the rifle with his gloved hands, I removed my pen from the bore and peered inside. For a long time, that crisp, bright bore held my attention. When a cartridge is fired in a rifle, it’s a contained symphony. About forty grains of gun powder ignites in this particular version and burns in a microsecond, creating an incomprehensibly huge cloud of brilliantly hot gasses. Contained in a brass shell casing that is in turn contained in the chrome steel chamber of the rifle, the erupting gas seeks exit. By moving the projectile, the ‘plug’, forward, there’s relief, and the whole mass of gasses propels the bullet down the tube and out the muzzle, on the way to the target…in this case, Larry Zipoli’s forehead.

“Do you always clean your firearms after a session?”

“Absolutely. Sometimes several times during a match.”

“Always?”

“What’s your point, sheriff?”

“I think you can probably guess, Mark.” He knew-far better than I-that even a single round, a single symphony of burning powder and brass projectile hustling down the barrel, would leave its mark on the bright steel. Turning the bore light, I could see the haze of powder residue. I could see a fleck or two of unburned powder just forward of the chamber. Closing my eyes, I bent my head and inhaled slowly and deeply through my nose. Even as a mending smoker days removed from my last cigarette, I could smell the sweet aroma of burned powder.