The Protector

13

In the motel room, Cavanaugh stared at the makeup kit Jamie had left on the bureau. When he phoned the hospital, he was again told there was no change.

He pulled the mattress off the bed and used clamps that he'd bought in the hardware store to secure the shotgun to the bed frame, stabilizing it so the barrel protruded. Then he picked up the hacksaw and started sawing four inches off the barrel's eighteen-inch length, reducing it to the compactness that many police departments preferred. The effort took him an hour and several blades, but he wasn't conscious of the time passing-he had a great deal to think about.

After another phone call to the hospital ("No change"), Cavanaugh opened two boxes of federal double-aught "tactical" buckshot. He liked that ammunition because the large pellets gave him a compact pattern over a long distance.

To make the pattern even tighter, he thumbed open a new Emerson CQC-7 knife that he'd bought at the gun store and used its blade to cut around the plastic shaft of each shell. He chose a spot about two-thirds down each of them, at the dividing line between the gunpowder and the pellets that would be discharged when the gunpowder was ignited. He had to be careful not to cut so deeply that the plastic cylinder would break in two while he worked on it. At the same time, his cut had to be deep enough that two-thirds of the shell would break away when the shotgun was fired. The blast would thus propel not only the pellets but the plastic shaft in which they were contained. The consequence would be that the pellets would not spread but would remain in a tight clump, causing near-explosive force when they hit their target.