came down here to take some depositions.'
'A Texas doctor?'
'No, ma'am. Actually, I guess a Baltimore doctor.'
That seemed to relieve the young lady considerably. She did not want to get into anything involving a Texas doctor.
'He's published a lot in medical journals, public health journals, you know, and it's mostly gibberish to me. Can't make out heads nor tails.'
'I see.'
'See, there's this one thing, don't know if it's a disease, or what, that appears in all his work. And there might be some connection with nuclear medicine. Atomic rays, that sort of thing? Are you familiar with that?'
'Well, sir, experiments are underway to use atomic power to cause genes to mutate to specific purpose. I don't know much about it, but it's evidently one of the great benefits of the atomic bomb research.'
'Hmmm,' said Sam. 'I wonder how that would apply to our subject. Are you familiar with the term? It's called, ah, Treponema pallidum. Would you know what??'
But the horror rose on her pretty young face, and she started to scream, and campus security got there within seconds, and they dragged Sam off before he could do any real damage, and held him until the Austin vice detectives got there.
A L L the talk is done now. The old enmities have run out of steam, the gossip on the misfortune of others has lost its lure, the fascinations of the technical have been discussed until they've been drained of all meaning. Bourbon has been drunk. Gunfights, famous and obscure, valorous and pathetic, have been gone over again and again; great pistol eros have been analyzed, respected or dismissed. Heroes have been saluted, cowards shunned. There is nothing left. Even Earl feels it.
Men about to go into battle acquire a certain pallor. They may be salty old dogs, such as these boys, or innocent kids, such as his Marines, but they know death is very close at hand and that there's no guessing what lies in the immediate straight-ahead. It settles them, it drains them, it stills them.
Still, they must turn to something.
And you can learn a lot about a man in what he turns to. The very good turn to the Bible. The very carnal turn to images of the flesh, in the thousands of sepia-toned male magazines of the war, with their starlets cupping ice- cream scoop breasts, or their skirts a-fling, showing luscious, stocking-kissed gams with fancy undergarment riggings. The prosaic turn to facts, memorizing the operational orders, studying maps and weather reports and even current charts. The physical turn to action: they must unleash themselves in basketball or wrestling or just plain horsing around. The warriors turn to guns. we are in the revolver kingdom. Those brilliantly crafted devices, the hallmark of unnamed genius engineers of Hartford, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, dominate both the law enforcement and the civilian imagination.
So there sits Elmer Kaye, the dean of the revolver boys. Elmer has cleaned his guns before and will again, but tonight he cleans them with a new cold knowledge. Meanwhile, outside on a calm night, a silvery moon edges toward extinction and battle.
Elmer will fight with his guns, and has decided to ignore Earl's injunction to use guns that can be abandoned easily and lead authorities nowhere. Better to love and trust what you fight with, and worry about the consequences later, than to go into the fight with a gun you don't trust, which lets you down and gets you killed.
So he's running a rod through the four inches of his big-framed Smith &
Wesson.44 1950 model, a plug-ugly thing made grotesque by the thickness of the barrel combined with a hood for the hand ejector rod, which gives it the look of a cartoon gun, as Donald Duck would carry, not a real one, that Elmer Kaye would carry. It wears ivory stocks from the Gun Re-Blue Company with the visage of an eagle on both sides, and the thickness of that grip will cushion Elmer's hand from the heavy recoil of his specially loaded 'improved'.44 cartridges, with a dose of new powder and his own design of semi wad cutter bullet. The gun will buck hard when fired, but whatever that bullet hits, it will knock down and keep down. Elmer's already cleaned the other he'll carry, a Colt Police Positive as a hideout gun in a shoulder holster (it's delicate and ladylike, and he doesn't want Jack O'Brian to see it and tease him) and a Colt Single Action, that is, an old cowboy-style revolver, also in.44
Special, with a specially hand-honed action, so that cocking and shooting it is like squashing your fingers around a stick of butter.
Old Ed Mcgriffin is also a Smith & Wesson man. Been one his whole damned life. Set all his records, did all his exhibitions, trained many a policeman and Boy Scout, all with Smiths. Ed has two hand honed mid-framed.38s with graceful six-inch barrels. He's fired each it least ten thousand times, and he knows them as well as any man can know a gun.
His pretty niece, Sally, cleans them for him, but he watches, and once again his eyes are sharp and focused, as if he's willed himself back from the place of content and memories, for what she is doing is important. She scrubs out each cylinder, she ramrods the barrel, she uses a piece of screen to peel the impacted lead out of the barrels. She knows the guns, too; she's been cleaning them for Grand pap since she was eight.
Jack O'Brian isn't a hand gunner not really. His weapon of choice will of course be a Winchester Model 70 in his beloved.270, which is accurate as hell, especially with the loads he's prepared for it. But he knows he has to have a handgun, and the one he chooses he can't let Elmer see, for Elmer will tease him, because it represents exactly the opposite of his public position on these matters. He doesn't mind being a hypocrite if it'll keep him alive. So he cleans it furtively, up in his room.
It's a Colt New Service, in.45 Long Colt. It's a giant's gun, the biggest Colt ever made, its frame spreading the hand wide on it, its trigger-pull taut, even its hammer-pull a little tense. It's ugly, humpbacked, with its checkered wood grips, a Pachmayr grip adapter to swell out the gap between grip and trigger guard. But it's the preeminent man-stopper; in fact, many knowledgeable New York detectives carry such a piece, but with its barrel cut down to two inches. They know that if they have to put a man down, they have to put him down fast and solid, and Jack has done his research.
It shoots gigantic shells that seem like ostrich eggs in their heaviness and density. Jack deposits each into the gaping chambers in the cylinder, then gently locks the cylinder shut. The gun trembles when he does so and, loaded, the whole weapon feels charged with electricity, with stored energy. Immense and sagacious, it waits to speak.
Bill, taciturn and controlled in all things, is the same in this. He does not have relationships with his guns and they do not speak to his imagination, nor is his ego expressed through them. They are totally and completely tools to him. He has three, all Smiths, all.357 Magnums, which he'll load with the.38–44 super-high-velocity 158-grainers that Earl has provided. His actions have been honed, but what's odd about his revolvers that marks them as different from the others are the grips. He can't use the standard Smith magna grip, not even with a Pachmayr or a Tyler adapter to fill out the curve behind the trigger. Bill's hands are simply too big. Bill has huge hands, long arms loaded with fast twitch muscles, and at six feet four inches enough lanky body to make sleeping in a normal bed or walking through a normal door an exercise in patience. But the hands are the secret to his gun work, because in them, the guns can be manipulated with extraordinary effect, if he can get a good grip. Thus his Smiths wear a somewhat magnified set of stocks, swollen, though polished smooth, seemingly without art to them at all.
They simply look like the noses of bowling pins or some such, but they are big enough to extend his fingers and make contact with his palm all the way around, and place the pad of his forefinger against the curve of the trigger, so that his strong forearms can provide the muscle for that steady, straight-back pull that is the core of all great revolver work.
Equally odd is his holster. Unlike the others, who'll wear Lawrence or El Paso Saddlery gear with a Western flavor to it, in basket-weave or floral carving, and fancy leather rigs for under shoulder carry for their backup pieces, Bill's holster is a simple pocket of leather, smooth and black, his trigger guard exposed. With the big grip, the smooth, small holster, his incredible hand size and reflexes, Bill can draw and fire faster than most people can see. He has even been on the TV, where he held a Ping-Pong ball on the back of his gun hand, drew and fired (a blank) so fast that his muzzle blast sent the plastic ball flying across the studio, setting an audience alight with glee.
Charlie goes the Colt way. Charlie uses a Police Positive Special with a King's sighting rib along the top of the four-inch barrel. It's got a slim, now yellowed ivory stock, with his initials 'CH' carved vividly into it, and the gun has been honed and tweaked. But he's a devotee, it turns out, of the famous Colt shooter John J. 'Fitz' Fitzpatrick, who
