you might want to consider retaining private counsel just to be on the safe side. And give General Howard a heads-up, as well.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
She discommed, and he pressed the button for John Howard.
A lawsuit. Wonderful. Just what they all needed right now.
Junior liked to get to the combat range in the middle of the morning on a weekday when he could. Those were the slackest times, and he would usually have the place to himself. The only other people who ever showed up at those times were some of the cleanup guys working at the old closed-up Naval Surface Weapons Center just south of there.
You’d think they could pop off rounds on the base, though. Clearly there was plenty of room for it. Seven hundred acres, it had been more or less shut down since the mid-nineties, but they still hadn’t cleaned up all the contaminants, oil, and PCBs. At least that was what Junior heard from the reclamation contract guys who came by here to shoot. Every time they thought they were done, they’d find some more that needed doing.
Junior laughed at the thought. His tax dollars at work.
Today was a good day, though. There was only one local deputy cooking off nines down in bay five. Junior’s favorite bay, B1, was open.
He backed his car into the slot. It was just a cut-out in the side of a hill, probably done with a backhoe and Cat, with dirt and rock walls rising from the ground at the entrance to about twenty feet high at the back.
He got out, pulled his shooting bag from the trunk, and put it on the old plywood table.
This bay had a reactive target, a kind of big sawhorse-shaped thing made out of heavy steel extrusion with falling plates mounted above, just below eye level. The frame’s crosspiece extrusion was angled so that if bullets hit it, the rounds would be deflected into the ground. The six targets, each of which was made of half-inch-thick tool steel and a little bigger around than a salad plate, were hinged at the bottom. You simply set up the plates, backed off, and shot them. A hit would knock the plate over backward. The thing was, they were set for IPSC minor power factor. That meant you needed at least a warm.38 or a 9mm special to knock ’em over, and major power factor stuff was a lot better — a.357, 40, or.45, like that. With what he was using, he could make ’em ring, but not knock ’em over.
But there were ways to get around that.
He pulled the can of flat-white spray paint from his bag and walked toward the target. Along the way, he stooped and picked up half a dozen used shotgun shells. Some shooters always left the brass and plastic hulls, which was good for him.
He set the falling plates up, and used the shotgun shells to lean and prop them in such a way that a light tap would knock ’em over. Then he sprayed each target with a light coat of white paint, enough so that a hit would show up as a dark splotch.
He went back to the shooting table and pulled his earphones out, along with a box of ammo and two speedloaders. The earphones were Wolf Ears — electronic jobs that would shut off loud noises but let you hear regular sounds. He slipped those on, put the speedloaders in his jacket pockets, picked up the spray paint, then stepped away from the table and walked to where he was twenty-one feet from the targets.
He put the paint down. Straightening, he took a deep breath, let part of it out, cleared his jacket on both sides, and fast-drew both his revolvers simultaneously. He didn’t use the sights, but indexed the guns like pointing his fingers. He shot the far left target first, using the gun in that hand, squeezing the trigger twice for a double-tap. Then he shot the one on the far right with his right-hand piece, again firing twice. Even as the first two targets clanged and fell, he worked his way back and forth, alternating from left to right.
He cooked both guns dry.
Five seconds, twelve shots, six targets, two each, all hits.
He holstered his left gun, thumbed the latch and shoved the cylinder out on the right one, and popped the empties out with a fast palm hit on the extractor rod. He pulled a speedloader from his pocket and reloaded the revolver, holstered it, then repeated the reload with the left piece. Both guns holstered, he took the spray paint and moved to inspect the targets.
The hits were all close to the center and usually a couple inches apart, except for the second right-hand one, which had two gray splotches in a binocular hit, but slightly high. Not bad, though. They would have hit a man in the mouth.
He set the targets back up, shotgun shells in place, and repainted them.
He was using a pair of tuned Ruger SP101s, two-and-a-quarter-inch barrels, in.22 Long Rifle caliber. “Mouse guns,” most serious shooters would call them. The.22 LR round was fast, but tiny. A.38 Special or 9mm bullet would be three or four times as big. According to Evan Marshall’s Stopping Power Stats, the smaller.22 would only knock the fight out of a man with a torso hit maybe one time in three. Given that a hot.40 or.357 round would put that same man down and out better than nine and a half times out of ten, most shooters felt that thirty percent was pretty crappy. Sixty-six percent odds the guy would keep coming if you shot him certainly wasn’t something they’d want to risk their life on.
Junior grinned as he reached the firing line. A body shot with a mouse gun might get you killed by return fire or an angry guy swinging a tire iron, but a head shot? That was something else. If you put a forty-grain.22 round in a guy’s eye, it didn’t matter how tough he was.
Junior used to like talking trash to the big-bore guys when they’d laugh at his.22s.
Nobody had taken him up on it.
Putting the paint down, he turned back to face the targets. Without a pause, he drew, pointed, and emptied both guns.
Six for six.
He reloaded and went to reset and repaint the targets. Yeah, the little Rugers would kill you as dead as a howitzer, if you were good enough to put the bullets where they needed to go, and they had some advantages over the hand cannons. They were small and lighter to haul around. They were quieter. They didn’t have any recoil to speak of. And ammo was cheap. You could shoot all day for a few dollars.
Best of all, when he was on the road and couldn’t make it to the combat range, he could take a little drive out into the country just about anywhere, walk into some woods, shake up some cans of Coke, put ’em against a backstop, and start blasting away. He could spew fizz all whichaway and not bother anyone more than a few hundred yards away. Fire off a.357 and it sounded like an big bomb going off,
Of course, he had given himself some additional advantages. Bill Ruger’s little guns were built like bank vaults. You could drop one off a tall building and it would still shoot. The SPs were also head and shoulders above an S&W or Taurus for reliability. That made ’em a little stiff right out of the box, the actions a little hard, but a couple hours with a Dremel and some polish and he had rounded the triggers and hammers. That had slicked up the actions so they each had a nice eight-pound DA pull, and broke like an icicle at just over two pounds single-action, smooth as oil on glass, no creep. New springs and spec lube, too.
Four-inch barrels would have been better, accuracywise, but they were harder to conceal in summer clothes. The factory stocks were too small for his big hands, so he had switched to Pachmayr’s hard rubber Compacs, which were the perfect size, and not going to slip if his palms were sweaty. He could have put Crimson Trace laser grips on ’em, but that was
And he took care of things from the ammo end, too. He used CCI Minimags exclusively, the solids, not the hollow points. He’d buy a brick, a full five hundred rounds. Then he’d sit in front of the TV with the sports channel on and his little Dillon scale and weigh each cartridge. It turned out that seven or eight out of ten rounds weighed fifty-one grains. All the fifty-ones went into one box, the other stuff into another — he used those for his little lever-action Winchester rifle. It didn’t really
When that was done, he would use the little headspace gauge he had made. With that, he could check to make sure the bullets were all the same size and shape. Any that were deformed or a hair too long or short went
