They walked down the path. It was a fine morning, with the sun now up and blazing through the pines; between the shafts, Russ could see the green heights of the Ouachitas dominating the horizon. It was a quality of his mind that he was highly irony-conscious. Thus it provoked him that the scene was so innocent and sylvan, such an emerald-green panorama of natural goodness, and here he was walking with a heavily armed and very dangerous man, setting off on a mission that this man suddenly thought could end in violence. He shook his head. He was a writer! What was he doing here?
“Something funny?” Bob asked.
“It’s just ridiculous,” said Russ.
“Whatever it is, it ain’t ridiculous,” said Bob. “It may be dirty, it may be ugly, it may be evil. It ain’t ridiculous and the people who put it together ain’t funny. They’re professionals.”
“The sniper who killed your father?”
“He’s just a little piece of it. He’s working for someone else. Someone called the shot, someone laid it out, someone put it together very tight and solid.”
“How do you even know there was a sniper?” Russ finally asked.
“It started with the bullet weights,” said Bob darkly, as though he hated to explain to an idiot. “They recovered three bullets from my father. Two were 130 grains. One was 110 grains. The 130-grainers were clearly from Jimmy’s .38 Super. But the 110? It’s possible a third 130-grainer hit him and broke apart and only 110 grains’ worth was recovered, but the goddamned list didn’t say nothing about that. So that gets me thinking: where the hell does a 110-grain bullet come from? And what is a 110-grain bullet? Do you know?”
“No.”
“Your father would.”
“Fuck him.”
“It’s a carbine bullet. M-1 carbine, handy little job they used in World War II. Underpowered, but sweet-handling.”
“Okay. So? What would the significance of that be?”
“I’ll tell you when I’m ready. The next thing was the grocery store job. Forget why. Don’t worry about why. Just look at the job: too clever. The right grocery store, the right time of day, very professional. Jimmy was a small-potatoes car thief. How’d he figure on that so quickly?”
Russ said nothing.
“Then the getaway. Even you got that one. How’d they get sixty miles south, through all them roadblocks? You could write it off to luck, I suppose, unless you looked at it carefully. They had a lot of other luck that day too. How’d they get so damned lucky? On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a thing to load that car in a semi and haul it down here. You’d sail through. Trucks sail through all the time.”
Russ said nothing.
“The .38 Super. It’s a pro’s gun, a criminal’s gun. It’s a man-killer. Bank boys love them, mob hitters, that kind of thing. Seems very goddamned odd the best man-shooter in the world just happens to show up in Jimmy Pye’s hands the day he gits out of jail.”
Russ nodded.
“Then the shooting site,” Bob said. “I’m a professional shooter. I kill people for a living, or at least I did. And if I’m setting up a shot, that’s how I’d do it. You have to be high, because the corn gets in the way of a level shot. He’s in the trees, maybe a hundred yards away, in a stand. His job is to watch. The setup is to have Jimmy Pye kill my father with the .38 Super. But whoever’s pulling the strings, he has to worry if Jimmy’s quite the man for the job. And Jimmy wasn’t. So there has to be another guy there, just in case. Shooting slightly downhill at a sitting target on a windless night. It was an easy shot,” said Bob.
“It was at night. It was at night!!” shouted Russ. “Could he see in the dark?”
“Yes, he could,” said Bob. “That’s why he was using the carbine and not a ballistically better weapon. Remember the rattlesnake?”
“The snake?” Why did this strike a note of familiarity with Russ? Who had spoken of snakes? But then, yes, he remembered. The old man had mentioned somebody named Mac Jimson shooting a snake on the road. He said he’d never seen anything like it.
“Snakes are cold-blooded night hunters, but they have some advantages,” Bob explained. “They’re sensitive to heat. That’s how they hunt. They’re sensitive to infrared radiation, in other words.”
“I don’t—”
“Infrared,” Bob said. “Black light.”
Russ swallowed. Infrared? Black light?
“Infra is light below the visible spectrum, the light of heat. It has certain military applications. If you radiate heat, you radiate light in that wavelength and you have an electronic device that can amplify it, you can see in the dark. Or you can put out a beam in that wavelength and you can see it in such a device. Ours was called the M-3 sniperscope, pretty much state-of-the-art in 1955. It was a scope and an infrared spotlight mounted on a carbine. Worked best on clear, dark nights. He puts out a beam. He watches my daddy in that beam. My daddy never knows a thing. One shot. Only the snake knew. It felt the heat; it has pit organs in its skin, heat receptors, and when the light came onto it, it stirred, rattled. Then it did what a hunter would do. It went toward the source of the infrared. That’s why it crossed the road, no matter all the cops. It was hunting the sniper.”
“But you can’t know,” said Russ. “It’s all abstract theory. There’s no real proof.”
“Yes, there is,” said Bob. “The bullet hole in my father’s chest. It was .311 of an inch, which is the diameter, with impact beveling, that an M-l carbine bullet would make. Jimmy had a .38 Super. Its diameter would be a little more than .357. Bub had a .44 Special, which hadn’t been fired. My father was killed in the dead of night by a .30 carbine bullet.”
“Jesus,” said Russ.
“You see the whole thing was about killing my father. I don’t know why. My father must have known something, but there’s nothing in his behavior that last week to suggest anything unusual was going on. But these guys maneuvered very cleverly. Stop and think: They investigated Earl and found his weakness, his soft heart for a white trashy punk named Jimmy Pye. They got to Jimmy in jail, made him some kind of offer so good he had to take it and sell out everything he had. They set up a grocery store job guaranteed to make Jimmy famous, even to the little bit about him stopping for a hamburger! They moved him downstate; he got in contact with Daddy to surrender. They had access to a state-of-the-art piece of hardware and a military shooter who knew what the hell he was doing, just in case. Thorough, professional, very well thought out, all contingencies covered. All to kill one little state trooper sergeant in rural Arkansas in a way that would appear to be open-and-shut. Put the body in the grave, say the prayers and walk away from it.”
Russ said, “And it’s still going on. The exchanged headstones. Duane Peck.”
“Yes, it is.”
He nodded.
“Only the snake knew,” repeated Bob. “It was hunting the sniper. Now I am.”
It came down to a telephone. There was no telephone at Bob’s trailer so after he and Russ ate and changed and Bob locked the Ruger and its ammunition in the Tuf-Box bolted across the back of his truck, they got in and headed not into town but to the Days Inn, where Bob rented a room—for its phone and its privacy.
Jorge, leading a convoy of hitters, got to Bob’s trailer forty minutes after they left. The truck was not in sight.
“Goddamn,” he said.