I, Sniper

“I can’t seem to get to three,” he said. “I’m fine through two, I can do two, but I get tangled up and it makes me cautious on the third.”

“Are you drawing each night like I said?”

“I do my homework, Clell, you know that.”

“Well then, you’re momentarily plateaued out. Same thing happened to Bob Mitchum on El Dorado. He got good and then he stopped developing. I didn’t think he’d ever get it. But he was a pro, like you, Mr. Constable, he did the work, and when he had the saloon scene, he was smooth as butter. Sometimes you get a natural-Dino was a natural, he just took to it with super hand speed and coordination-but if you didn’t get the gene for gunwork, you have to practice.”

“I guess I’ll just have to work harder,” said Texas Red-Tom Constable. “The real Cold Water is next month and I do mean to win.”

Tom Constable was fond of winning, and pretty good at it too. He’d won a fortune in his twenties by pushing his inherited advertising agency (it specialized in roadway signage) into other forms of media, and he got into cable early, rode it hard, and made his first billion. Then the sailing bug caught him and he put two years into that and won an America’s Cup. Then sports, then news, buying or creating teams and networks. Then he married a movie star, decided to become a rancher, bought more land than anybody in America, reinvented buffalo herds, started a restaurant chain, and now he was into a new obsession called cowboy action shooting.

It was an interesting diversion. It played with his old Wild West fantasies, which had first been cultivated in front of the TV in the golden decade of the fifties, when Paladin, Marshal Dillon, Chris Colt, Cheyenne, and the boys from Laramie and Bonanza had dominated the American popular imagination. The way it worked: you got yourself all dressed up like one of the old boys, you called yourself by a nickname, you packed four guns-two handguns, a rifle, a shotgun, all of them of a design preceding 1898-and you shot real bullets and buckshot (black powder loaded) in low-key fun house scenarios adapted from the TV shows of yore.

Most folks did it because it was a nice baby boom wallow; it was relaxed and social and all men met as equals. But Tom, as always, wanted to win; it was a part of his unmalleable personality, the least pleasant thing about him, the way he got fixed on something and all life ceased to exist except that issue. That’s why he’d had so many wives, was so estranged from his children, drove so hard in business, and could not stand to be bested in anything. Who’d have guessed such a handsome man had such fiery pathologies hidden beneath?

And in Texas Red, he’d stumbled upon a creation that pleased him immensely. In the sport you could cook up your own character, and for some reason Constable had instantly conjured Red, twenty-four, of South Texas, a kind of Billy the Kid knockoff, young, fast, loose, dangerous. Red was the dysfunctional deviant boy that Tom’s well-disciplined business life and public image could never acknowledge, but who lived somewhere inside him, hiding under layers of polish, tailoring, grooming, and flossing. He was all id, he was a killer, he was a fast-draw piece of work, and when he saw wrong or threat by his own standards, not society’s, he faced it and gunned it down. One and nineteen men had tried to take him in his fantasy, and one and nineteen were dead. The next man who faced him, whoever he was, wherever he was, soon would be dead.

Meanwhile, on the dreary planet called reality, he’d immediately commissioned a famed Peacemaker gunsmith to build him the most refined and accurate six-gun possible, ditto the rifle and shotgun, and he paid the legendary Clell Rush an outrageous fee for private coaching. He’d gotten good too. Tom worked every damn day on it, shooting privately reloaded.44-40s by the bucketful on his vast western ranch. There too he’d had the scenarios from last year’s Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot in Cold Water, Colorado, recreated. He wanted desperately to place well in the upcoming matches, because like so many other things, a victory wouldn’t be from who he was but from what he’d done.

He reloaded the Colt, sliding the big cartridges through the loading gate, just as generations of cowboys had in this land two centuries ago. Around him, the mountains of southwest Montana towered, glistening peaks lit by snow at their higher altitudes, under a sky so blue it made your teeth ache and wads of cirrocumulus clouds piled high. Of course, he noticed none of that.

“I don’t know why I can’t get it to set right on that third shot,” he said. “Maybe that one had a little extra powder in it and it kicked a little harder.”

“Could be. Most likely you held it too tight and didn’t give with the recoil, and it acted up on its own. You can’t be fast fast. You can only be fast slow.”

“You know, Clell, you tell me that every damn time, and one of these weeks I’m actually going to understand what you mean.”

“Well, sir, what it means is, you can’t fight it. You can’t conquer the gun. You can’t beat it down, make it do what it don’t want to. You got to do it with love. You got to meet it gentle, let it have its way, and in that way you get your way. It’s like a horse. Or a woman.”

“It isn’t like any of the women I was married to, I’ll tell you,” Tom said with a laugh. “They like to broke me, the bitches. Anyhow, I will-”

“Mr. Constable?”

It was his secretary, Susan Jantz, standing next to him in her pantsuit, an extremely plain but unbelievably capable woman.

“Susan?”

“A call from DC. Mr. Fedders. He says it’s urgent.”

Tom made a little comic face for the benefit of Clell, took the phone, and stepped away.

“Yes, Bill.”

“Tom, I’ve got some news. Not good, I’m afraid. I’ve heard through a source that the FBI’s going to postpone releasing its report for a little bit.”

“I thought you-”

“Tom, Jack Ridings and I went and had a one-on-one with the director himself. We met the head guy on the investigatory team. It looked to be in the bag. It seems there’s a new direction they want to pursue.”

“Lord, I don’t want this dragging on all year. I don’t want books, I don’t want TV specials, I don’t want any who-killed-Joan bullshit selling product and little weasels getting rich off Joan’s death.”

“Yes, Tom, I understand. It’s the chief of the task force. He’s somehow reluctant to sign off on the narrative they’ve established, so there’s some dicking around, I’m not sure exactly what and I’m not sure how long it will take. He seemed like a guy who was reading the wind, and I just don’t know what’s happening with him now.”

“Bill, I’m paying you a great deal of dough. If this FBI guy is suddenly getting cute, then find some way to get him out of the picture. Have him shipped to Toledo, dig up something about him and plant it in the papers, just get him the hell out of there.”

“Tom, of course, I just wanted you in the loop. I actually know a young Times reporter who can be very helpful to us in this case.”

“Please handle it, Bill.”

12

You’re a little ahead of us,” said Nick. “We don’t even know where to begin.”

“Someone here knows where to begin. That fellow, there,” said Bob, pointing to a man.

“I wondered when you’d remember,” said a mild-looking older man, hair gone thin but still combable, sitting at the far end of the table. He looked like the professor at the frat party, among all the young go-getters.

“How are you, Mr. Jacobs? Are you the lab boss yet?”

“I’m fine, Mr. Swagger, and yes, actually, I am the lab director. I remember how I tried to send you away; it was like this, all the evidence pointed to you. But you’d figured it out and pulled the rug out from under me.”

Years ago, in a different lifetime, Walter Jacobs, then a young technician from the lab, had testified for the government in a case in which Swagger had been accused of the murder of a prominent man by long-range rifle fire. It was a complicated thing, and it almost got him killed, but it also got him out of the bitter woods, lifted the anger that had weighed like a yoke across his shoulders, got him married to a fine woman, and got him two of the best daughters a man could dream of.

“That old lawyer was spectacular, Mr. Swagger. I’ve never forgotten it. But before I answer your question, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Was waiting for it when I saw you.”

“I’m aware that once again, or so it appears, someone extremely knowledgeable has apparently manipulated ballistic evidence to frame a Marine Corps sniper. Though in the first case the sniper survived-you-and in this one he died-Hitchcock. But you’re playing the same role, aren’t you? You’re still the man who sees through it and on his own goes into the wilderness and puts a conspiracy under the ground, so that justice, in some form, pays out. But it also seems you could be reinventing your biggest triumph. Maybe subconsciously you’re trying to recreate that episode in your life, like Captain Queeg and his strawberries aboard the Caine. Maybe it’s all a delusionary structure that the much older and perhaps less rational Bob Lee Swagger is subconsciously forcing on all of us. Are you Swagger or Queeg?”

“Has anyone here read Mr. Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny?” Bob asked. No hands went up.

“See, Mr. Jacobs, I have, so I’m with you. And I’ll let you decide. But before you decide, let me ask you my question. And I bet when you hear it, you withdraw yours.”

“Well, isn’t this interesting,” said the director. “Nick, you do give a good meeting, very dramatic, even if your coffee sucks. Go ahead, Mr. Swagger.”

“All right,” Bob said. “Yeah, maybe I am a foolish old coot who’s playing tricks on myself and on you to have a taste of old triumphs. But let’s just examine the technical stuff a little. I’m betting that when that rifle came to your lab, you went over it at a microscopic level. It ain’t got no secrets, not even among the atoms, you don’t know about, is that right?”

“That is right, Mr. Swagger. Even to the point of measuring the firing pin to make certain that it was up to spec, even to the last two or three thousandths of an inch, so that nobody could have cut it and soldered it back so that it wouldn’t fire. We learned that one the hard way.”

“Yes sir. Now, is it not true that any object in the world picks up microscopic debris of some sort? A record at the smallest level possible of where it’s been, what it’s done.”

“Yes sir, just like on the CSI shows.”

“Never seen one. Figured it out on my own. Now, a sniper rifle would be particularly rich in such a micro record, wouldn’t it? I mean, mostly it’s kept cased or in a safe, so it’s not picking up a lot of random crap. It’s rarely used, and when it’s used, it’s used in some dramatic enterprise. So the stuff aboard ought to tell a