I came back out into sunlight and open air and saw the screen only ten, twelve yards away.
Someone was scrambling away from its base toward the stand of trees behind.
Scrambling as once before he’d scrambled over a Dumpster and through a delivery door.
He was almost to the trees when his foot caught in something-weeds, a tangle of roots, a sinkhole-and he fell.
He got up, looked down, looked behind to see me advancing, and shot off into the trees.
Where I lost him.
I plunged on for some time-thrashing about, turning this way and that, stopping to listen-but there was little doubt my bucket had sprung a terminal leak.
At last I found my way back out. Traffic on Airline was picking up fast. More cars and pickups than trucks now, as people started home from work.
Sam Brown said, “Little ways off your post aren’t you, Lewis?” So much for my bright future with SeCure.
I shrugged and walked over to where my pursuee had stumbled. No doubt about it. A professional’s piece, assembled by hand or made to order. Winchester bolt action, with a Zeiss 10x scope. The rifle’s original barrel appeared to have been replaced. Only the receiver was attached to the stock. The new barrel was free-floating. I’d seen snipers carry similar hot rods.
Sam Brown had followed me.
“Who is he?” I said, looking up.
“
“Sam.” I stood. “Now, I can’t be absolutely sure, of course, but I think we can both assume this weapon is loaded. Since it hasn’t been fired yet.”
I was careful to avoid touching trigger and guard, places on the stock where fingerprints might be, though I knew there wouldn’t be any.
“People know your shooter was on the job, Sam. You go down here, under his rifle, he’s the one did it. No one will say different.”
He started to raise the walkie-talkie and stopped himself. “You’re crazy, Griffin. Crazy as everyone says you are.”
I shrugged. “America. I’ll yield to the majority opinion. What are you going to do?”
Moments shouldered by. Twenty or thirty cars, pickups, service vehicles.
“I authentically don’t know who he is, Griffin.”
“How’d he get on the SeCure roster?”
“Again: I don’t know. You’d have to go higher up on the chain. But my feeling is,
“Everything okay across the street? Weaver handed on safely?”
He nodded.
“Good. I need one of your men to drop me-and this-off downtown, at the central police station. That all right with you?”
He shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” Then as I started away he said: “Lewis.”
I turned back.
“This is what you were after all along, right?”
I told him it was and he said he had wondered.
Never as invisible as we think. Us or our motives.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“It’s a Winchester, all right. Model 70, 308 caliber, two or three years old. A real hot rod. The new barrel’s a Douglas Premium, floats free for maximum accuracy. Fires a 173-grain, boat-tail bullet in a metal jacket that the ballistics boys tell me can travel at close to 2,250 feet per second.”
“Not the kind of thing you pick up at your local Sears.”
“Not hardly.”
“And it’s the gun used in the shootings?”
“Probably so. They’re still playing with it. And trying to track down sources. Where the Winchester came from, the barrel, scope. But usually we don’t have much luck with this kind of thing. Lot of it’s strictly underground.”
“What about the ammunition?”
“We know where that came from: Lake City, Missouri. There’s no other source. But when we go looking it’ll have passed through eighteen hands and a couple of blinds and there won’t be any way in hell we can trace it.”
“So what do we do?”
“Hope we get lucky. That’s mostly what cops do.”
“You’ve talked to the good folks at SeCure.”
“And to at least three of their lawyers. The company has no official connection with this alleged shooter, knows nothing of his identity or whereabouts, and perhaps it would be best if we did not return for any further chats without a court order.”
“I almost had him, Don.”
“So did I.”
“Oh yeah? That’s not the way I remember it. But thanks, man. Talk to you soon.”
I hung up the phone, went over and sat at the bar. Place called Bob’s I’d never been before, a few blocks town and lakeside of Tulane and Carrollton. Lots of Bobbie Blue Bland and Jimmy Reed on the jukebox.
The bartender stepped up and looked at me without saying anything. One of those places.
“Bourbon,” I said. “Preferably from a bottle with some kind of label on it.”
He grabbed one out of the well (yes, it had a label) and up-ended it over a shot glass. Put the bottle back with one hand as he set the shot glass before me with the other.
“Been a long walk,” someone said from the open door behind me. “I could do with one of those myself.” I knew it was open because the bar had flooded with light. And since the whole place was maybe ten feet square, I didn’t have to squint too hard to see who it was once I turned around.
“Is there a bar anywhere in New Orleans you
“Course there is. Way bars are apt to come and go, sometimes they don’t stay around long enough to become in-co-operated in my i-tinery.”
“Their loss, I’m sure.”
I signaled the bartender for two more bourbons as Doo-Wop took the seat beside me. The bartender could barely restrain himself. The joy of it all.
Doo-Wop drank off the bourbon between breaths.
“Hoping I might run into you, Captain,” Doo-Wop said.
I waited. Finally I waved another drink his way.
“Many thanks.” But he hadn’t touched it yet. “Papa and I had a drink together over on Oak. I don’t know, could of been the Oak Leaf. Papa says there’s a man out there looking for something special.
“What’s the man looking for, Doo-Wop? You know?”
“You mind if I go ahead and have a taste, Captain? Tongue’s near stuck to the roof of my mouth.”
I told him sure, go ahead.
He put the empty glass down. “Many thanks.” Then: “Man wants a Winchester, model 70.
I slapped my last ten on the bar, then picked it up and put down a fifty instead. The fifty I always carried in my shoe, under the insole, back then-to beat vagrancy laws, for bail, whatever. What the hell, I could live a few
