blue oxford shirt, and has a shell pouch around his waist. He raises the shotgun to his shoulder and calls 'pu//.' It is not the sharp pull! of the aggressive shooter, not the interrogative pull? of the hesitant shooter, but an unhurried, relaxed command that somehow sounds like a prefix. Puuull… His voice is deep and clear. The clay bird hurls from his blinded left side, streaks in front of him, rising, then disappears in a cracking little cloud of black dust. Holt steps back and reloads, staring down at his gun in the way a tennis player might ponder the strings of his racquet. There is a distinct air about him. Seen from any angle, Vann Holt is a man who emanates assurance, engagement and capability.
Behind the station, Lane Fargo rests his gun across the crook of one elbow and watches.
Holt steps forward into the box again and calls for the second bird. It comes from his left again, but flies lower, faster, and more directly away from him. There is a quick pop, a short follow-through of barrel, and the disc jumps ahead, nicked but still flying.
'The magic pellet,' says Lane Fargo. 'Pick up your double now, Boss.'
Holt appears not to hear. He steps back, breaks open his Browning over-and-under, puts the spent shell into his pouch, then pushes two thin green. 28 gauge loads into his gun and snaps it shut. He enters the station house again, positions his feet and raises the stock to his shoulder. Everything he does seems deliberate, experienced. He calls for the bird in his usual way, puuull…, the way that seems to presage an automatic bursting of his target. The first bird whizzes away, untouched, through the report of Holt's gun. Then the second, faster and further out, escapes too, streaking across the clay-blackened range and settling out of sight behind a hillock.
For a moment Holt stands there, looking out as if he can see them again, each missed bird. He raises the gun again and makes the shots in his imagination. Then he backs out of the station, breaks open his weapon, removes the shells and joins his partner.
'Well, that's an eighty-four,' says Fargo. 'Put you in A's almost any club in the world.'
'Behind them again.'
'Yep.'
Lane Fargo goes into the station, knocks down both singles and the double. He's shooting a. 12 gauge with a heavy load, and the report of his gun booms across the range. He returns to Holt with a cautious look, but apparently pleased.
'Ninety,' he says.
'That's good shooting, Lane. You'll slay them tomorrow.'
They case their guns and lay them in the bed of a little pickup truck.
'You're not picking them up as soon, Boss,' says Fargo.
'The eyes.'
'I'm not happy about that.'
'I'm less.'
'Give you one of my own if I could.'
'Hang on to what's yours, Lane.'
'Stay out ahead of 'em tomorrow, and you'll limit by ten, Vann.'
'Nine-thirty, Lane,' says Holt with a warm, genuine, and somewhat impish smile.
Holt is quiet as they drive back toward the Big House. He has, in his law enforcement years, confronted his own mortality enough to be familiar with it, but this new enemy, which introduced itself during a yearly physical eight months ago, is more unnerving than any creep with a gun. What demoralizes him most is not the fact that the disease is inoperable, nor the slow sapping of his strength, but rather the inexorable diminishment of his eyesight. Fifty-five years of 20/10 vision and now some of the clay birds are just a blur.
Much to do, he thinks, while there's still daylight inside.
'Lane, we'll cast off at five tomorrow.'
'I'm ready. You want to me to take care of the guns and dogs?'
Holt, of course, has taken care of the guns and dogs for the last thirty-five opening days of his life. He shakes his head and tells Fargo he'll handle it. Fargo is the only one he has told about the blood, and he regrets it. Nothing on earth is more irritating to Vann Holt than condescension. Lane Fargo means well and that is what makes it so disgusting.
'Got those covered, Lane.'
'Yes, sir.'
Later that night, after dinner and a brief discussion with his daughter about which dogs to take in the morning, Holt roams the main house. Still dressed as he was at the range but without the shell pouch, he has a tumbler of scotch and water in his hand rather than the Browning. He has replaced his shooting glasses with heavy bifocals.
It is late-almost midnight-and he is done with the work of the day. He has talked to the caretaker down at the Lake Riverside Estates place; he has confirmed times and weight loads with his helicopter pilot; he has spent almost an hour on the phone with a close personal friend who is in the middle of a messy divorce. He has talked briefly with Carolyn, his wife.
Now, unsaddled by obligation, Holt is free to tour the enormous house. He has still not gotten used to its beauty and size its varied atmospheres and internal climates. Lately, he's been particularly drawn to the library, which faces west, is cool ii the mornings, sun-dazzled in the evenings, and oddly hushed am handsome after dark. It is on the third floor of the house and provides an overview of Liberty Ridge and the rest of Orange County to the north.
He sits on one of the leather library sofas, with a reading lamp over his shoulder and the day's newspapers set out on the coffee table before him. Holt always reads his papers at night because his mornings are hurried. He scans the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and of course, the Orange County Journal.
He sips his scotch. Holt finds it increasingly difficult to read the mainstream American press. He does not believe that what he is reading is actually the pertinent news of the day. He thinks that large news organizations have an agenda to follow, and that they choose which stories to print and which to ignore, accordingly. He thinks that papers were better three decades ago, when the reporters were less righteous and egotistical, less obsessed with biographic, crowd-pleasing dirt. Still, he reads them, and they inform, amuse, and infuriate him. Here, he notes, is the dread Susan Baum again, in the Orange County Journal, bleating on about the 'first annual' Gay Pride Festival last weekend in Laguna Beach: 'The feeling of empowerment I sensed there was strong. There was a life- affirming scent in the air, as surely as the scent of eucalyptus. I saw the love between a lesbian couple and their two-year old, adopted son. I saw the uncloseted faces of young gay males, stepping into the straight world, without shame, for perhaps the first time. Yes, the American family ha changed, and now includes these divergent lifestyles. To deny this is to deny the truth, but to see it, is to glimpse America's future.
Holt himself had toured Laguna during the Gay Pride Festival-Liberty Operations was hired by certain individuals to provide security-and thought that the town had been transformed into one big happy gay bar, a sanctioned street-hustle under the PC banner, a mindless cluster-fuck of the naive by the depraved. God knew how many viruses were passed and caught that weekend. Baum failed to mention that. It makes Holt feel sick and angry. He wonders if the moral sickness of the Journal has somehow gotten into his own blood and turned it against him.
And here, another article of the sort that infuriates Holt, this time about the NRA: 'considered by some to be a greater threat to public health than the Tobacco Institute.'
One lie always leads to another, he thinks: Must send Wayne another five grand.
There is a computer station in the library. In fact, there is a computer station in every room of the house except the bathrooms and kitchen. The computers are linked to practically every other room of every other building on Liberty Ridge, connecting the people on the huge estate like nerves connect parts of the body. There is a computer in the boathouse, a computer in each of the Liberty Operations buildings, a computer in each of the citrus workers' cottages, in each of the guest flats and even a computer in the entryway to Holt Alley. All are linked.
Holt signs on, finds his own mailbox and makes the note to send Wayne LaPierre, the NRA President, $5,000 to blow as he sees fit. Holt knows that Wayne takes extreme positions at times, but believes they are the only things that will work in times of extremity. In times, for instance, when the Attorney General has publicly admitted she wished the citizenry of her country was completely disarmed.
He signs off, sighs, refills his glass from a crystal decanter on the table before him, then walks out to the
