Or back in Wyoming, had been. He’d traveled with the gun in a foam-padded case, but it generally wasn’t healthy to assume that a scope sighted-in six months earlier, and moved two thousand miles, was still on.
He looked at his watch: he had just enough time to get to Merle’s and back to Madison’s at nine o’clock. He whistled a line from Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” took the rifle, shotgun, and hunting-gear bag down to his bedroom, packed an overnight bag, and carried it all down to the car.
Made a mental note to stop at Wal-Mart.
Endgame coming.
Arlo Goodman was in the mansion’s front parlor, feet up on an antique table donated by the Virginia Preservation Society, talking to Darrell. “Can we wall ourselves off? That’s the only question that matters.”
“Absolutely. Nothing points at us,” Darrell said. “Nothing. Bell and the others swear to God that Barber jumped. I think the feds believe them. For one thing, his office would have been wrecked if a guy Barber’s size was thrown out the window. He was like a goddamn weight lifter, and Bell’s fifty-five years old and is fifty pounds overweight. He threw
“The problem is, eighty percent of the equation is image,” Arlo said. “They have an image they want. They want a guy who’s an economic liberal, but who’s in touch with the prayer people, who’s in touch with the gun people. Right now, I’m it; but with just a little twist, I become Hermann Goring. Then I’m not it. Then my fifteen minutes are up.” He stood up, took a lap around the room, gnawing at a thumbnail, tugging at it. He wrenched a sliver of it free, spit it into the carpet. “Look. We need a leak. We need to leak to the media that the feds think Barber killed Bowe. We need that out there right now. Everything’s right on a knife edge . . .”
“We can do that. I can do it,” Darrell said.
“If we can get that out for tomorrow—even if the feds equivocate—we’re in good shape. If we can get that out there tomorrow, it’ll make suicide more reasonable. It’ll take the story away from Bell and those other fuckups, no matter what they did.”
“I’ll move,” Darrell said eagerly. “The
Merle’s was a long, low concrete-block building painted an anonymous cream, buried in a block of warehouses in the flight path of Dulles International. The sign outside, an unlit wooden rectangle, said, MERLE’S, and nothing else, in fading red paint.
Jake parked, carried the rifle around to the front door, pushed in, was hit in the face by the not-unpleasant tang of burned gunpowder. The shooting lanes took up the back of the building; the first fifteen feet in the front was the salesroom, isolated from the shooting lanes by a double concrete wall, with panes of double vacuum-glass on both walls. You could still hear the gunfire, but distantly.
Merle Haines was leaning on the counter, paging through a copy of
“And two boxes of that Federal Vital-Shok, the one-hundred-grain Sierra, if you’ve got it, and two targets.”
“Goin’ huntin’,” Merle said. He took two boxes of 100-grain Federal off the shelf and two target faces from under the counter, and passed them over. Jake paid him, took his earmuffs out of his pocket, put them on, and pushed through the door into the range. The first eight lanes were for pistols, the last three lanes for rifles, with shooting tables. He walked past two fat guys shooting revolvers and one in-shape military-looking guy shooting a Beretta, down a short flight of stairs, to lanes nine, ten, and eleven. He was alone.
He’d be shooting down an underground tunnel at fifty yards—not long, but long enough to get an idea of where the gun was. He sat down at a table, arranged a pile of sandbags on the table in front of him, took the rifle out of its case, pressed three rounds into the magazine, and jacked one into the chamber.
The .243 was a comfortable gun, accurate and easy on the shoulder, if a little slow to reload. He fired five shots slowly, carefully, breathing between shots, then pulled the target in. Four of the shots were tight and all over the bull, right where they should have been. The fifth was a half inch to the right; he’d pulled it. Nothing had moved since Wyoming.
He fired five more shots at the second target, and got one ragged hole three-quarters of an inch wide, across the lower face of the bull. He packed the gun up, collected the remaining cartridges, and walked back out through the salesroom.
“Short and sweet,” Merle said, as he handed over Jake’s car keys. “Good luck with them critters.”
On the way to Madison’s, she called and said, “I’m in the backyard. Johnnie Black is here, I’m calling on his phone. We’re talking about Howard. Johnnie’s got a source who said that the FBI crime-scene investigators have found something weird with the body. There were some scratches on his wrists like he might have been handcuffed and they’ve gone to the three cops and collected their handcuffs.”
“Jeez. How could they, he wasn’t . . .”
“The thinking is, they cuffed him, he didn’t resist, then one of them hit him on the back of the head with something heavy, and they threw him out the window—but because he went out and landed on his back and head, there’s no evidence that he was slugged. That’s what the thinking is.”
“The FBI’s thinking?”
“No, no, that’s Johnnie, trying to figure out what could have happened. But he’s going to talk to a couple of his media pals, just pass the speculation around. It’ll be on the air tomorrow—keep Goodman shuckin’ and jivin’.”
“All right. I doubt that’s what happened, though,” Jake said. “Too complicated—especially with witnesses right
