Point of Impact

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“Partial body found in bayou,” proclaimed the cheerful headline.

“Go ahead,” said Shreck, “read it.”

Dobbler squinted.

Lafayette Parish

The partial body of a man was found floating yesterday near Spencerville, Lafayette Parish. Sheriff’s deputies said the victim, who has been identified by fingerprints as Tomas Garcia Montoya, of McDonoughville, was evidently the subject of an alligator attack as his body, from the chest down, was missing.

Cause of death, however, was listed as a gunshot wound to head.

Montoya, a Cuban émigré, had listed his occupation as “consultant” but was known to police and other New Orleans law enforcement agencies as a paid informant. He was 54 years old.

Deputies speculated that he may have also been a victim of the escalating drug warfare in the state’s rural parishes, in a struggle for control of the city’s drug routes between old-line mob interests and newcomers representing the cocaine cartels of Central America.

Montoya was shot in the head by a heavy caliber rifle bullet.

“Only a large-caliber center fire rifle bullet does massive damage like that,” said Lafayette Parish coroner Robert C. LaDoyne. “This man was shot, judging by the wound channel and tissue displacement, by a hollowpoint bullet of.30 caliber or more.”

Parish deputies said it may represent the coming of a new kind of professional killer to the parish’s drug wars.

“Mob boys favor the silenced.22 from close range,” said Deputy Ed P. St. Etienne. “The Colombians like little machine pistols, and fire a hundred bullets into their victims. This boy is something entirely new.”

“He’s not new to us, is he, Dobbler?” said the colonel.

“No,” said Dobbler, swallowing. “How on earth -? He’s dead! We saw the – ”

“Dobbler,” snapped the colonel. “Look at me.”

Dobbler looked into the colonel’s forceful dark eyes and felt the full might of his wrath.

“Tommy Montoya was a free-lancer we used when we operated in the South. He was with Nick Memphis. Now he’s dead, sniper-dead. That means one thing and you’d better get used to it fast. All right? Comprendez, amigo?”

Dobbler swallowed miserably.

“Yes,” he said. “I see.”

“Swagger is alive. How, why, I don’t know. I don’t even give a fuck, because it doesn’t matter. What matters is this new reality: he’s teamed with the one man in America outside the proper circles who’s seen our file. So right from the start, he knows more than anybody who’s come after us before.”

He looked hard at Dobbler.

“In case you don’t get it, Doctor, we have a war on our hands. This motherfucker wants to track us down and blow us away. But what we’re going to do is blow him away first. Are you listening, here, Dr. Harvard Psychiatrist? No bullshit; we have to get close, put the muzzle against his head and blast his brains all over the landscape. Or he’ll do it to us.”

The colonel’s glare was unsettling; Dobbler swallowed.

“What do you want me to – ”

“What I need from you is an idea how they’ll operate. Their relationship – how’s it going to play out? Will they get along? Will they fight? Do they make a good team?”

“Ah,” said Dobbler, unprepared, “ah, Bob will be the strong one. He’ll dominate the younger man. The younger man is no problem. Bureau trained, he’ll be orthodox and plodding. No, Swagger is dangerous because of the unconventionality of his mind. He’ll come at us out of instinct, brilliantly, improvising madly. He’ll – ”

“Where will they head?”

“Bob will head home. If he was in New Orleans to meet or rescue Memphis, then he’ll take him to the Ouachitas. It’s where he’ll feel safest. And the sense of safety is – ”

“The chances of us making an interception are nil. Not in his territory. All right,” said Shreck, leaning forward, “let me ask you a question. Have you ever hunted?”

“Hunted? Good God, no. I mean, it’s so…barbaric.” A faint look of distaste came across Dobbler’s face, unintended.

“Yes, well, you put all that aside now. You just became a hunter. It’s your job to work out a way we can lure this tough old boy and his new pal into ambush. Hunt him, Dobbler. You don’t have to kill him – we’ll take care of that – but you have to hunt him.”

Dobbler nodded apprehensively. And he noticed something he’d never quite seen before.

He swallowed.

Shreck is scared.

Some days later, Nick Memphis was in a contrary mood.

“Now what the hell is this?” he said. “Why are we – ”

“I think I liked you better when you were Baby Googoo, and you just looked up at me with your mouth open. Now you won’t shut up. Talk, talk, talk, like a woman. Now, don’t say nothing here. You let me do the damned talking. Got that? I don’t want you explaining something to this old coot and putting him into a coma.”

There was no give in Bob’s voice as he looked through the dust-spackled windshield at an extremely spacious ranch house on a spread just outside of Fort Supply, in western Oklahoma.

“You better – ”

“You just smile, boy. This old man isn’t going to want to give up his information easy to strangers, but he knows more about what he knows about than any man alive. Come on, now.”

Bob got out of the truck. He wore a straw Stetson and had found a gray jacket to go over his denim shirt; suddenly he looked strangely like some kind of cowboy royalty.

“I still don’t – ”

“Button it, Pork. You’ll see.”

An old lady sat in a rocker on the porch at the top of the stairs. She just watched them come, made no gesture of welcome. She fanned herself; it was hot and dusty out and the sun lurked over the hills behind a gassy spread of clouds.

“Howdy, ma’am,” Bob sung out.

“Whachew want?” the old lady asked.

“See the colonel.”

“Colonel don’t see nobody these days.”

“Hell, I have me a line on a pre-’64 70 in.270 once owned by a famous bad boy. Thought he might be interested.”

“He’s got enough guns.”

“No such thing as enough guns, ma’am, I’ll beg your pardon for saying so.”

The woman eyed him suspiciously, then got her weary body up and yelled inside. “Rate? Rate, you in there? Fella out here says he gotta line on a 70.”

“Well, shoo him in, then, honey,” came the call from the dark interior.

Bob walked in and Nick followed.

The room was large. The man who owned it had at one time or other killed every creature large and dangerous that walked upon the earth, and now the heads of his victims looked down upon their slayer, who was a plump man in his seventies sitting in an Eames chair reading a copy of – Nick blinked, double-checked to make sure, but, yes – The New York Review of Books.

He didn’t rise. The beasts stared from the walls. Most of the furniture was wooden and sleek and expensive, and Indian blankets and pottery were all over the place. And so were books, hundreds and hundreds of books. And rifles. Nick had never seen so many rifles and so many books in one place before.

“And who might you gentlemen be?” asked the fellow. He removed a blanket from his lap to reveal a six-shooter, high chromed, seven-and-a-half-inch barrel, and he had merry, clever eyes. There wasn’t a morsel of fear in him anywhere. Nick had never seen a man who had less fear.

“Name’s Bob Jennings, from over in Arkansas. Do some trading in fine firearms. This here’s my associate, named Nick.”

“Well, Mr. Jennings, I must say I know most of the fine gun dealers in this country, having spent much money in their abodes. Can’t say I’ve heard much of you.”

“I’m new to the business, sir,” said Bob. “Just starting my reputation. But you know that fellow the FBI killed, that Bob Swagger?”

“That bad boy took that shot at our president and hit a poor cleric instead?”

“That old boy, yep.”

“Heard of him.”

“Well, he had a pre-’64.270, rebarreled with a Douglas and restocked on a piece of English walnut by Loren Eccles of Chisholm, Wyoming. It was serial number 123453, which means it came off the line in about 1949. A fine rifle. He was a man who much loved fine rifles.”

“I just believe he was. Some say if he’d have meant to shoot the president, he’d have hit the president.”

“Well, who can say? Now, it so happens that his property will eventually come out of FBI impoundment and it so happens that his father, Earl, had a sister named Letitia who happened to be my mother. Bob Lee was my cousin, though I hadn’t seen him in years. An ornery soul, if I recall from childhood. Now as his only living relative, it so happens his guns will therefore come into my possession and knowing how you treasure the Model 70, I might be persuaded to see it come your way.”

The shrewd fellow looked Bob up and down and then lit out with a cackle and a yowl.

“I think I see a family resemblance,” he said. “My, ain’t life just full of surprises?”

“And since no man alive knows more about the Model 70, I can’t think of a better man to receive that rifle, sir, than Colonel Rathford Marin O’Brien, author of The Classic Rifle, the premiere big game hunter of this country and our greatest living expert on the Model 70 rifle, Winchester’s best.”

“It sounds like a piece I’d be interested in. Lord knows, I’ve spent lots of foolish money on interesting rifles. If I didn’t have so many damn oil wells, I might not be such a spendthrift, but I’m too old for women and I tired of killing some years back, so interesting rifles and the folly of New York intellectuals are my last remaining vices. And what would the price be?”

“Sir, I’ll not insult you with talk of money,” said Bob. “I’ll trade you that damn rifle even up, for information. That’s all I want. Some talk.”

“They say a man who asks for little is always meaning to take a lot.”

“Maybe they say that, sir, and maybe it’s right. But I know Bob Lee Swagger thought you were a great American and he’d be pleased to have one of his rifles come to rest in your collection. And he’d consider it an even bargain and a good swap.”

“All right, then, boy. Ask your damn questions. What I know that could be worth that much – properly authenticated, that gun would easily go fifteen thousand dollars at the big Las Vegas show – is mighty interesting to me.”

“The Tenth Black King.”

O’Brien looked at him, his hard eyes gleaming with sudden insight.

He glanced briefly at Nick, found him uninteresting, then returned to Bob.

What the hell was going on? Nick was thinking.

“Hell, boy,” said Colonel O’Brien. “The Tenth Black King is a damned mystery.”

Dobbler could no longer stand his office. The walls seemed to press down on him and his mind had ceased to operate. He had sat there for hours, trying to think of ways to get at Bob and he had come up with nothing.

So now he was wandering around the RamDyne complex, ducking now and then when a 747 would scream in on the flight path to Dulles. He knew that sometimes his unconscious could solve a problem if he did not let his conscious deal with it directly. It just happened, under the surface, so to speak. He prayed for such a leap in insight now. But he only saw blue sky, airplanes and crummy buildings.

He’d come at last to a large corrugated shed toward the rear of the complex. It bore the sign, OPERATIONS MOTOR POOL/NO ADMITTANCE TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.

Why did he enter? Because it was there. No one stopped him as he slid in and in the darkness he blinked to adjust his eyes. He found himself in a garagelike structure of some size, in the center of which a number of men were bent over benches, working intently. The odor of gasoline, grease and some kind of chemical solvent filled the air like a vapor. He heard the click and snap of metal parts. He smiled at one of the workers, who just worked away contemptuously.

He saw then they were working on guns. Machine guns or assault rifles, complicated, dangerous-looking. They were snapping them, assembling them, greasing them, goofing around with them. And there were bullets too, crates of bullets, and some of the men were fitting the bullets into magazines. They all looked like barbarians. They were wild boys, yardbirds, the same breed of tough, scary trash that had frightened Dobbler into Russell Isandhlwana’s comforting ministrations. Some had crew cuts, some ponytails, all had tattoos and bad teeth. And the guns: he could tell. They loved the damned guns.

There was so much electricity between the men and their weapons. It was like nothing he’d ever seen. How they adored them!

The guns, Dobbler thought.

“Well,” said Colonel O’Brien, “I’d guess you think you might find that damned rifle and make yourself a half a million dollars. Friend, I’d bet you’re chasing a mirage. I think it’s buried in some unknown hole with its poor last owner.”

Bob couldn’t tell him he’d fired the damn thing in Maryland last January.

“Now you know that the Ten Black Kings were ten extra-fine Model 70 target rifles in the model known as the Bull Gun, with a heavy, extra-long barrel that the company planned to put out as Presentation Rifles in the year 1950. These ten rifles – serial number 99991 through 100000 – were stocked from a trunk of black American walnut from a tree that had been felled in Salem, Oregon. For some odd reason, the wood in the tree really was black; that is, it was so old and dense it was almost like ebony. The completed rifles were so lovely that someone came up with the name ‘Black Kings’ to describe them. I’ve handled several. They are beautiful rifles, believe me.

“The rifles were then presented to the usual great men and now rest in various museums around the world. Except for the last one – serial number 100000, in the thousand-yard caliber – ”

“.300 H & H Magnum,” said Bob.

“You have it, son. This one was presented to an employee, Art Scott, who’d for many years been Winchester’s expert marksman. Art was a wonderful rifle shot. He’d won the Wimbledon cup and won the thousand-yard match at Bisley, in England, and won the nationals at Camp Perry, and had been the NRA shooter of the year several times. He may have been the best shot this country ever produced, until that man in Vietnam came along.”

“You must mean Carl Hitchcock?” said Bob.

“That’s the boy.”

“Go on, Colonel,” Bob said. “What happened to the Tenth Black King? You didn’t say in your book. You said, ‘Someday the tragic story of the Tenth Black King will come out, but for now, as it is unfinished, I will not begin it.’ ”

“Well, it’s a sad story. The Tenth Black King was the only one of the ten that was regularly used in competition; its action had even been specially milled from a new Swedish steel so that it was mighty strong and could stand up to the heavy powder loads the thousand-yard shooters burn up. It was used not only by Art, who was in his sixties by that time, and had lost a bit of his edge, but by his son Lon. Lon Scott was a lovely young man, handsome and fair, a Yale graduate, a shooter’s shooter. He had his whole life before him; he’d been accepted at Harvard Law School in 1954; he had everything, including the Tenth Black King and his father’s inherited fund of shooting knowledge, learned from growing up in a shooting family. A father-son thing, quite holy in certain precincts. Do you shoot, young man?”

“Now and then,” said Bob.

“It’s not as simple as point and pull the trigger, you know?”

“So I hear,” said Bob.

“Well, anyway, in 1954, Lon Scott finished fourth in the National Thousand Yard Rifle Championships at Camp Perry. The season was over. He had a few of his loads left, and he and his dad went out one afternoon to shoot them up. But you know the curse of the rifle. When you think you’ve mastered it, it’ll punish you for your vanity, reach out and destroy everything you’ve ever earned or made in your life. A rifle can be a cruel and vengeful slut. One of those stupid accidents, where the basic law of safety – treat every gun as if it’s loaded – was violated. A target-grade trigger, very delicate, one of them putting the rifle in the case, the safety not off but not quite on either. Art Scott accidentally shot his son in the spine, paralyzing him forever from the midchest down. Sentencing him to a lifetime in a wheelchair.

“The boy was in the hospital and in physical therapy for two years. All that he’d wanted for himself and that Art had wanted for him was gone. A week after the shooting, Art used the same rifle on himself. Blew his own brains out in the family cabin in Vermont. The boy lost everything in that second’s carelessness: his legs, his life, his father.”

“What happened to him?”

“When he recovered, he didn’t destroy the rifle. You’d think he would, wouldn’t you? But he didn’t, because he believed that the firearm was simply a tool, and it had no guilt. But he wasn’t untouched. If anything, he set out to master it. For about five years in the mid-fifties he gave himself up entirely to the discipline of the rifle and became one of the premiere thousand-yard shooters because he could still fire from the prone, of course. Won the championship in 1956 and 1957. He was a great benchrest shooter, too. But I wonder? What can it do to a vital young person to have his life twisted so terribly by a bullet?”

Nick, silent all the time they had been there, finally spoke up.

“I think I know. I was married to a woman accidentally paralyzed in a shooting. If you were a good person, like my Myra, you become a better one. But if you were bad – fundamentally bad – it can turn you black and horrible. I used to talk to the doctors when I took Myra in for therapy once a week. They once told me that there was nobody more bitter than a strong, firm man exiled into a metal chair forever.”

Bob said, “Is that what happened to Lon Scott?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to say,” said the colonel. “That’s between himself and God.”

“What did happen?”

“He gave up. He disappeared. No one knows where he went. But he was a genius, all right. He was one of the first to enter the world of micro-accuracy. He was the first, for example, to see the importance of neck-turning for precision reloading, to get maximum accuracy. In 1963, his last year of competitive shooting, at the National Bench Rest Championships at Lake Erie, Ohio, he shot a three-hundred-yard group that measured.289 minute of angle; it’s been surpassed in the last few years now that the equipment has gotten so refined, but it stood for over thirteen years, the longest single accuracy record in American history. And that was the last time anybody ever saw him.”

“There must have been rumors,” said Bob.

“Oh, the usual nonsense. That he was this or that. More likely, he just went off and got on with the rest of his life. Nothing dramatic. That’s all. But that rifle today – hell, it would be worth a half a million dollars, I’d bet.”

“You said Lon Scott was a genius?”

“I suppose he might have been. He knew how to get the most out of a rifle, I’ll say that. He, Warren Page, P. O. Ackley, Pop Eimer, a few others.”

“Well, Colonel O’Brien, I thank you. You’ve done me right well. I’ll see you get Bob the Nailer’s rifle, you can bet on that.”

“Now that old Bob the Nailer, he’s another interesting case. Can’t figure how a boy like that would go so wrong.”

“Maybe he was used by bad people.”

“Well, I’d like to believe that. Hate to see a hero brought low. Ever read Othello, gentlemen?”

“Don’t read plays,” said Bob.

“I read it in high school,” Nick added lamely.

“Well, old Bob reminds me of Othello. A great soldier, a good man. Twisted, played with, used by an Iago for some dreadful purpose. That play was a tragedy, one of Mr. Shakespeare’s finest. Just like poor Bob’s life – an American tragedy.”

“Well,” said Bob, “don’t believe Mr. Shakespeare had much use for happy endings, but the Bob Lee Swagger I knew all those years back, he may have been as stubborn as a goddamned mule, but he wasn’t a fool either. So maybe somehow it’ll work out for him. Good-bye, Colonel.”

“Well, I hope so, boys,” said the colonel, with just a hint of glee in his voice. “Because I’m too old for tragedy. I like a nice happy ending too.”

As they drove away, Nick found himself increasingly agitated. Finally, he let it all spill out.

“What the hell was that all about? Why did we drive three days to – ”

“I’d read in the records of five great shooters in the late fifties. Lon Scott just happened to be one of them. I had to tie one of them to that damned black rifle. I figured if anybody could give us a line, it’d be that old man.”

“But what did we – ”

“Don’t you get it yet, boy? These boys, they didn’t just want me to use as a dupe. No sir. I had to go to all the shooting sites and bird-dog them out. I had to read the angles, I had to figure the positions, I had to test the winds. I had to set it up for them. Now why? The real shooter would want to do that himself…unless he couldn’t. The sleep I’ve lost thinking this one through! Why couldn’t he? He couldn’t because he’s in a wheelchair, remember? I was his damn legs.”

Nick bolted upward. Of course!

“We just learned the name of the man who shot Roberto Lopez in New Orleans. Don’t you see, dammit, everything these birds have done has turned on one damned thing. And that is that they had at their disposal a world-class shot. They wouldn’t have set up the operation they set up if they didn’t have a man who could hit a standing target at twelve hundred yards, like he did in New Orleans. That’s fantastic shooting. Aren’t but seven, maybe eight men in the world who’d have the confidence to take that shot.”

“But none of this is worth a damn in a court of law,” Nick protested. “And we have no leads on where this Lon Scott is! If he’s even alive! Nothing. That old man couldn’t tell us a damned thing about where this crippled sniper was! We ought to be looking for Annex B. That’s where – ”

“You are the most contrary man I ever met. If someone handed you a glass of free beer that was nine-tenths full, you’d cry over the missing tenth. Listen, if I have a name, I can dog him out. Shooters will know of him. It’s a small world, the shooting world. He’ll have left tracks, you’ll see. And when we find him, we find them.”

They drove away, down the bumpy road.