Point Of Impact

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.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Dr. Dobbler’s fingers were black with newsprint. He sat alone in his office late at night, turning the pages, concentrating. He was surrounded by piles of magazines, some slick and gaudy, some amazingly primitive. But he had, after much investigation, settled on this document as his road map to Bob Lee Swagger.

It was cheaply printed, on newsprint, and its ink soaked into his fingertips. The words were often semiliterate, almost always utilitarian, the type packed together inelegantly, without reference to any modern theory of layout, as if the men responsible were just trying to crush as much information in as possible, the pictures often murky and sometimes indecipherable. It could have come from a different universe.

Dobbler turned one of the flimsy pages, feeling as if he were sinking deeper and deeper into strangeness.

Tokarev Military TU-90. Free Ammo. $119 each.

Banger’s Distribution, America’s Best Colt Distributor, Offers You the Colt Gold Cup Ten – $669.99 each/2 or more $649.99 ea.

Subscribe Now to Machine Gun News – Special Introductory Price.

Paragon Makes It Easy to Buy Ammo.

Maryland/Howard County Weapons Fair, November 10-11.

The Gun Cellar – Prices Are Lower in the Cellar.

Machine Gun Conversion Videos.

And on and on it went, for 195 pages. The publication was called The Shotgun News, though shotguns were only a small part of the news. If it shot or related to shooting or documented shooting, you could find it in The Shotgun News, the urtext of the subculture.

Dobbler was fascinated. Guns everywhere, of every shape and form and description, for every taste and wallet. They could be so cheap and so expensive, so demure and so awesome, so ridiculous and so sublime.

He wondered about the men who worshiped them with such ardency, whose lives were bounded by their complexities or liberated by their possibilities.

What was there to see in all this?

Well, passion for order for one thing. So much of gun culture was about parts, units, systems, things fitting together. There were whole institutions that existed merely to sell parts of obsolete weapons. So there was a puzzle aspect to it, a sense of bringing order to chaos.

Power? The damned things were so absolute in their meaning that yes, there had to be the lure of power. But beauty also. Some of them, he was stunned to discover, were strangely beautiful. He especially liked one called a Luger and another called a New Frontier single action.

And freedom, or at least the illusion of it, by the narrowest of definitions. To Dobbler, freedom was essentially intellectual, but he supposed that to someone in a more primal world, it was physical – freedom of movement, freedom from harassment, freedom from being messed around with. Outdoor freedom. And a man who holds a gun in his hand must feel it passionately. No government can rule you absolutely. Yours is always the last option.

And masculinity. Nothing soft and feminine about guns: they were too direct, too brutal. The phallic business so provocative to Freudians didn’t seem to him to be very helpful; if these guns were penises, their purchasers were too self-oblivious to know or care.

And then again: data. To him a gun was just a gun, but to some of these people it was obviously an endless font of information – a history, a set of specifications, an involvement with a company, usually a corporate entity, a connection to certain traditions, a whole hierarchy of meanings that yielded yet more meanings and had to be deciphered like some runic code. To shoot wasn’t enough: there was something almost Borgesian about the labyrinths the damned things conjured in the imagination.

The clock ticked away and the pages fled by and after a bit, he ceased looking at the display ads from the gun wholesale places, but instead, fascinated, looked to smaller fry: the columns and columns of classifieds, where more oblique needs were addressed. It was like The New York Review of Books personal ads, only for guns and their affiliated phenomena, not sex.

REMINTON 25, Rifle in mint. cond, 25-20, 99% original blue, mint bore, wood perfict, SN 26827, 100% unaltered, these little pumps are a joy, only $895

Pre-64, M70 220 SWIFT, Super grade, 98% overall, nice dark wood, factory jeweled bolt body and extractor, exc. bore, $1,595.

LUGER list and price guide, 200 + quality collectors Lugers and accessories for sale on each bi-monthly list. Send $1 for sample or $5 for year subscription.

MILITARY RIFLES OF JAPAN, 1989 Third Edition, $37. Postpaid! SASE for discriptive flyers. At your dealer or Fred Honeycutt, 6731 Pilgrim Way, Palm Frond Village, FLA 33411.

DISCOUNT GUN BOOKS: ALL SHIPPED FREE. Great New Book, Winchester, An American Legend, Wilson, $58.50. Colt Encyclopedia II, Cochran, $58.50. Discount Gun Books, P.O. Box 762, Nescopeck, PA 18635.

It was somewhere in here, lost amid the lists of old guns, new books and reloading components and magazines for pistols that hadn’t been manufactured since World War I that something began to tick in his mind.

They hid deep in the timber, after disappearing down many remote lumber roads. It was a small, one-room hunting cabin, built years ago, a rustic place of logs and wooden roof. Bob swiftly shot three squirrels with a Mini- 14, then set about to skin them for the stewpot.

“Is there anything I should be doing?” asked Nick.

“Just don’t get in the way,” said Bob.