Point Of Impact

No, I think I’ve got some old cartons out in the garage.”

“Could we see them?”

“Sure. This way.”

And he led them out into the garage, where against one wall a pile of cardboard boxes stood.

“Oh, Lord, I just don’t – ”

“Mr. Porter,” said Bob. “Tell you what. If you get me some coffee like you offered before this young man said no, I’d be happy to go through those boxes for you. And I’ll make damn sure it’s as neat when we leave as it is now. Fair enough?”

“Well, that’s the best offer I’ve had in weeks,” said Porter.

Bob and Nick got busy, and it was Bob who worked the hardest. Taking off his coat and folding it neatly, he threw himself against the task with that same thorough intensity that always numbed Nick. He’d pause to take a sip of the coffee now and then, but mainly he just plunged ahead.

He’d make a good cop, thought Nick, who had never been outworked before.

It was in the last box and it was Bob who found them: the first thousand or so subscription forms to Accuracy Shooting, now yellowed with age. Many were simply letters that had had checks enclosed and still bore the imprint of a paper clip or the punctures of a staple; some were index cards or postcards. Only a few were forms. It was a box of old memories crumbling into dust. Hard to look at it and think that something so utterly banal – a box of forgotten letters and forms – might hold a key to something so monstrous as the shooting of Archbishop Roberto Lopez in New Orleans.

“I’ll be,” said Porter. “That takes me back awhile. I’d forgotten all about those. Didn’t even know I still had them.”

“Sir,” said Nick, “what we’d like to do is write you out a receipt for this material, then return it to you when we’ve completed our investigation.”

“Oh, I don’t know. If I’d have found them, I might have thrown them out myself. Why don’t you just take the damned things and if you lose them, so much the better.”

“Yes, sir, but I’d be happy to write out the receipt.”

“No, you just go on and go. I’ve got work to do.”

The next day, Shreck drove alone down through Virginia and into North Carolina, following complicated directions. There, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, just over the state line, he turned down a private road for perhaps a mile until he came to an electronic gate. He got out of the car and pressed the buzzer on an intercom system.

“Yes?” came the voice.

“My name is Shreck,” he said.

“All right,” came the voice.

The door slid open, and Shreck got in and drove for another two hundred yards. Sitting in the shadow of a six- hundred-foot hill was a handsome ranch house, rambling, bright, and open. Shreck had always lived in apartments, almost monastically: but he had a moment of awe when he saw the spread – it was beautiful, and if he ever had a place, this is the sort of place he’d have. Whoever this guy was, he had money. He parked and got out. A cement ramp led up to double doors. The house had no steps.

Shreck walked up the ramp, found the door open.

“I’m in the shop,” came the call over the loudspeaker.

Shreck walked through the house, through its wide doors, past the sun deck. Out back he could see the rifle range, the white targets lodged against the base of the hill.

At last he reached the rear of the house, and stepped through another wide door. A man who looked ten years older than he was sat curled in a wheelchair and was very carefully turning a single brass shell in his hand as he worked it with some kind of metalworking tool, a keylike handle that embraced a brass cartridge case locked in a vise.

“Hello, Colonel Shreck.”

“Hello, Mr. Scott.”

Lon Scott wore his gray hair short and neat above the long face and aquiline profile of a blue blood. His eyes were dark and ropes of veins showed along the muscled ridges of his forearms and hands. But his body was horribly twisted, the spine bent like a bow, his dead legs awkwardly spindled beneath him. He couldn’t exercise his body, so it had acquired a packing of fat, and his stomach bulged under his belt. Once beautiful, he was now grotesque.

Shreck tried to let nothing show on his face, but he knew a trace of horror had crept into his eyes; and he knew Scott noticed.

“Not very pretty, is it? That’s what a bullet in the spine can do to a healthy growing boy, Colonel. Turn him into a geranium.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I just – ”

“Don’t worry. I can handle it. Now, my friend Hugh Meachum said you had some bad news for me. Let’s have it, Colonel. You don’t look like the sort of man who pulls his punches.”

“Yes, sir,” said Shreck. “It’s a loose end. A detail that won’t go away. New Orleans. The man we were using as our asset.”

“The Marine?”

“Yes. He was supposed to be dealt with; by some freak he survived a point-blank chest shot. Must have missed his heart by a hair. And now he’s back, teamed up with an FBI agent.”

“This Marine. A good man?”

“The very best.”

“As good as you are? I understand you’re quite the warrior.”

“Better.”

“But you have a plan?”

“That’s correct. It’s our feeling that he’d be unusually responsive to something from shooting culture. For example, he may have identified the rifle of yours that he used in Maryland. It’s our idea to put an ad in The Shotgun News for a book of some sort, a privately printed volume as is common in the culture, on famous target rifles or shooters or some such, and if he sees it, he’d want to approach the author. And we nail him.”

“Why do you need my permission?”

“Well, sir, in this business, we find that as close as we can come to the authentic when we fabricate, the better off we are. We can’t just make stuff up. We’ve got to build a legend that he can verify himself from other sources. This is a very careful man. And that’s why we need…well, information as well as permission.”

Lon Scott nodded.

“My past? My family? That sort of thing?”

“Yes, sir.”

Scott seemed to have a funny moment here; it was an odd shiver, something between a shudder and a snort. As if he almost laughed or almost choked.

“My father,” he finally said. “My poor old father.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I see,” said Scott, following intently.

“There are alternatives,” said the colonel, who had now, with much effort, mastered the blank look in the face of Lon’s infirmity. “We can hope to ride this out while Swagger and this FBI agent peck away at us. Our tracks have been hidden well, but…but they’ve consistently surprised us. Eventually, they just might stumble onto something, and possibly by that time it would be too late. My theory of war has always been aggressive offensive operations. I was once called a meat grinder. But I believe you ultimately spare lives by responding aggressively.”

Lon listened raptly, only stopping momentarily to hawk up a wad of brackish phlegm from somewhere in his throat to dribble it into a spittoon that the colonel had not until then noticed.

“There are risks, of course. The first is that we must feed him your name. I understand your privacy is important to you.”

“My name has not been in public print since I stopped bench resting in the early sixties. I’m sure I’m forgotten now. It frightens me, of course. It’s such a small thing…but of course it opens up the faint possibility of inquiries