Point of Impact (41 page)

“The boy was in the hospital and in physical therapy for two years. All that he’d wanted for himself and that Art had wanted for him was gone. A week after the shooting, Art used the same rifle on himself. Blew his own brains out in the family cabin in Vermont. The boy lost everything in that second’s carelessness: his legs, his life, his father.”

“What happened to him?”

“When he recovered, he didn’t destroy the rifle. You’d think he would, wouldn’t you? But he didn’t, because he believed that the firearm was simply a tool, and it had no guilt. But he wasn’t untouched. If anything,
he set out to master it. For about five years in the mid-fifties he gave himself up entirely to the discipline of the rifle and became one of the premiere thousand-yard shooters because he could still fire from the prone, of course. Won the championship in 1956 and 1957. He was a great benchrest shooter, too. But I wonder? What can it do to a vital young person to have his life twisted so terribly by a bullet?”

Nick, silent all the time they had been there, finally spoke up.

“I think I know. I was married to a woman accidentally paralyzed in a shooting. If you were a good person, like my Myra, you become a better one. But if you were bad—fundamentally bad—it can turn you black and horrible. I used to talk to the doctors when I took Myra in for therapy once a week. They once told me that there was nobody more bitter than a strong, firm man exiled into a metal chair forever.”

Bob said, “Is that what happened to Lon Scott?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to say,” said the colonel. “That’s between himself and God.”

“What did happen?”

“He gave up. He disappeared. No one knows where he went. But he was a genius, all right. He was one of the first to enter the world of micro-accuracy. He was the first, for example, to see the importance of neck-turning for precision reloading, to get maximum accuracy. In 1963, his last year of competitive shooting, at the National Bench Rest Championships at Lake Erie, Ohio, he shot a three-hundred-yard group that measured .289 minute of angle; it’s been surpassed in the last few years now that the equipment has gotten so refined, but it stood for over thirteen years, the longest single accuracy record in American history. And that was the last time anybody ever saw him.”

“There must have been rumors,” said Bob.

“Oh, the usual nonsense. That he was this or that. More likely, he just went off and got on with the rest of his life. Nothing dramatic. That’s all. But that rifle today—hell, it would be worth a half a million dollars, I’d bet.”

“You said Lon Scott was a genius?”

“I suppose he might have been. He knew how to get the most out of a rifle, I’ll say that. He, Warren Page, P. O. Ackley, Pop Eimer, a few others.”

“Well, Colonel O’Brien, I thank you. You’ve done me right well. I’ll see you get Bob the Nailer’s rifle, you can bet on that.”

“Now that old Bob the Nailer, he’s another interesting case. Can’t figure how a boy like that would go so wrong.”

“Maybe he was used by bad people.”

“Well, I’d like to believe that. Hate to see a hero brought low. Ever read
Othello
, gentlemen?”

“Don’t read plays,” said Bob.

“I read it in high school,” Nick added lamely.

“Well, old Bob reminds me of Othello. A great soldier, a good man. Twisted, played with, used by an Iago for some dreadful purpose. That play was a tragedy, one of Mr. Shakespeare’s finest. Just like poor Bob’s life—an American tragedy.”

“Well,” said Bob, “don’t believe Mr. Shakespeare had much use for happy endings, but the Bob Lee Swagger I knew all those years back, he may have been as stubborn as a goddamned mule, but he wasn’t a fool either. So maybe somehow it’ll work out for him. Goodbye, Colonel.”

“Well, I hope so, boys,” said the colonel, with just a hint of glee in his voice. “Because I’m too old for tragedy. I like a nice happy ending too.”

As they drove away, Nick found himself increasingly agitated. Finally, he let it all spill out.

“What the hell was that all about? Why did we drive three days to—”

“I’d read in the records of five great shooters in the late fifties. Lon Scott just happened to be one of them. I had to tie one of them to that damned black rifle. I figured if anybody could give us a line, it’d be that old man.”

“But what did we—”

“Don’t you get it yet, boy? These boys, they didn’t just want me to use as a dupe. No sir. I had to go to all the shooting sites and bird-dog them out. I had to read the angles, I had to figure the positions, I had to test the winds. 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.

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.

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.

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.

“Now I think we should—”

“Memphis, don’t
explain
anything to me. All right?”

Nick, fuming and pissed at himself and at Bob, had never known anybody so used to silence and so uninterested in conversation, so hidden behind an impassive face. But it wasn’t the impassivity of relaxation—that was a complete illusion, Nick now saw, like some kind of mask to keep the world away while its owner shrewdly calculated moves two jumps down the line.

“Where are we?” asked Nick.

“Ouachitas,” said Bob. “Nobody’s going to find us here, unless we want them to.”

“Ah,” said Nick. “Um, what are your thoughts on what we do next?”

Bob just went on skinning the squirrels.

“I haven’t figured yet.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” said Nick.

“Uh-oh,” said Bob.

“I still think the damned key is Annex B. Now, where is Annex B? Well, it’s got to be in Washington. In fact,
everything’s
in Washington. I think that’s where we ought to go. We can do some nosing around, maybe get a line on it. Then …”

He had nothing to say after the
then
.

“Now, don’t you think they might figure that out?” Bob asked.

“Well …” said Nick.

“One thing I know. In a war, you don’t go where they expect you. That earns you a body bag.”

“Well, then … what?”

“We lay up here a few more days, till the buzz dies
down. We both need sleep; I’ll kill a deer tomorrow so we’ll eat good. Then I’ll figure something.”

“Look, I have to tell you as a professional criminal investigator of twelve years’ experience, we just aren’t—”

“Young Mr. Pork Memphis, I am not a fancy government man. I only studied at the University of Vietnam. I don’t know anything about investigating anything. But I do know the key to this damn thing is a rare rifle that has been used at least once in mortal circumstances. And I know its owner is one of the best shots in America and one of the great ballistic technicians, as well as having spent almost forty years in a wheelchair. And I have a funny feeling that he works for this RamDyne. That’s the only card I got, so it’s the card I’m going to play. Now let me think on it. Go for a walk or something. But don’t get lost. I don’t have time to go looking for you.”