I picked one out of the box, fumbling, then caught it before the slippery little thing skittered across the counter.
“Moly coated,” Arnett explained. “Fancy stuff.”
I nestled the brand new bullet on the plastic bag that contained the recovered slug. A microscope might disagree, but to my eye they were identical-or had been before glass, bone and brain ruined the one’s aerodynamic shape.
“Three Ten, PCS on channel three.” The damn radio was so loud it startled me. I hauled it off my belt.
“Three ten.”
“Deputy Reyes has an urgent phone call. Ten-nineteen.”
I glanced across at the young lady and saw the excitement in her eyes. This wasn’t the time or place to ask how many other roads she was planning to investigate all by herself, the ink of her contract barely dry on the dotted line.
“Ten four. It’ll be a few minutes.”
I heard a jingle of keys, and turned in time to see Deputy Torrez extending his hand toward Estelle. “Take my unit,” he said. I nodded agreement. Maybe she understood my expression as permission, but in fact it was amusement at the image of this slip of a girl behind the wheel of Torrez’s rusted, battered heap. She left the basement.
“You thought some about the gun involved in this shit?” Arnett watched Estelle’s backside as she ascended the stairs, but his question was clearly directed at Deputy Torrez.
“Some.” The deputy’s voice wasn’t much more than a whisper, and I guessed that his reticence was an issue of rank. We hadn’t had time to discuss who was going to say what to potential witnesses, so his natural inclination was to let me spill as many beans as I saw fit.
“You got the shell casing?” Arnett pressed.
I didn’t hedge my answer. “No, we don’t have it. But I can’t see why the rifle would be anything other than something with a tubular magazine. Winchester, Marlin…some lever action like that? I mean, what would be the point of using flat-nosed bullets like these,” and I patted the red box of Mountain States slugs, “in something other than a gun with a tubular magazine?”
“Or in a smooth bore. No point. No point all.” Mark’s reply was immediate and emphatic. “That’s the weakness for lever action rifles, sheriff. I’m sure Bobby told you all about that. ‘Cause the cartridges sit nose to tail in the magazine tube, the tips of the bullet need to be flat so they don’t strike the primer of the bullet ahead during recoil.”
“That could ruin your whole day.”
“Damn straight. But that flat nose also means the long-range ballistics aren’t worth a shit-like pushin’ a brick through the air.”
“So we’re left with a major conundrum,” I said. Mark Arnett didn’t know about Bob Torrez’s extensive session out in the gravel pit, or the conclusions we had already reached. “Why no rifling marks? How does that happen?”
“Beats the shit out of me.” He turned to the safe, punched in numbers and twisted the handle. The door opened to reveal a neat row of a dozen long guns, with a half dozen handguns hanging by their trigger guards from rubber-jacketed hooks.
He selected a rifle and hefted it out of the safe. “My dad bought this at a Sears store in Cruces in 1939.” He jacked the lever open and peered into the empty chamber, then held the rifle out to me. “First rifle he ever bought.”
“A Winchester,” I said.
“Just a plain old Model ’94,” he said. “There’s millions of ’em on the planet, but this one means a lot to me.”
Holding the rifle gingerly by the butt plate and the barrel just shy of the muzzle, I turned the Winchester to read the caliber stamped on the barrel just forward of the receiver. “.30–30,” I said. Arnett snapped on a bore light and held the curved tip of the little flashlight into the rifle’s open chamber.
I angled the rifle so that I could peer down the bore. The sharply-cut spiral grooves of rifling winked in the bright light. They’d slice nice crisp tracks in any bullet headed outbound. “Sweet,” I said, the old gunnery sergeant genes tweaked by seeing a nice clean weapon. Shifting my grip on the rifle, I took the bore light from him and turned it this way and that, examining the bore more carefully. “Not a speck, soldier. Outstanding.”
“That Winchester has won a bunch of matches for me,” Arnett said. “Sixty years old, and look at that rifling-still crisp and sharp.”
I stood silently, holding the rifle, enjoying its classic lines. Every movie goer who ever enjoyed a western had seen some version of this gun. After a moment, I eased the lever closed, pulled the trigger and lowered the hammer with my thumb. I wasn’t looking closely at the rifle, though. My gaze was locked on the open safe behind Arnett. The row of rifles, all good soldiers standing in line, included a couple of semiautomatics, and at least four bolt-actions. Four other lever actions, three of them short enough to be carbines, rounded out the row.
“The other levers?” I asked.
Before answering, Arnett accepted the.30–30 Winchester and put it back in the rack. He put a finger on the muzzle of one rifle and tipped it forward a little, not offering it to me. “Marlin.45–70. I bought this big old bad boy for an elk hunt up north in Montana.” Shifting his finger to the muzzle of what was obviously another Winchester, he explained, “This one is a later model ’94 carbine in.32 Winchester Special. I use it during the long range portion of the three-gun matches. That and this little jewel for the twenty-two event.” He tapped the muzzle of a slender lever action.22 caliber rifle, then moved on to a fancy little number that showed a lot of brass and an octagon barrel. “I picked this up just this summer.” He hefted it out of the safe, but by then my attention was elsewhere. I knew the rifle that he held was a more-or-less repro of a ’66 Winchester, a gun that wouldn’t come close to accepting the cartridge size we were interested in.
He held the replica long enough that he could see I wasn’t much interested. “What?” he prompted.
“Tell me about the.32,” I said.
“Yeah, so?” He slid the replica back into place, and reached for the.32 Special, picking it out of the safe rack with a one-handed grip on the fore-end wood. “A late one. 1959,” he offered. “It’s a good solid gun. George Payton had that in his shop, and I couldn’t pass it up.”
“Ah, George,” I said. My fingers were tingling.
“He’s got another one right now,” Arnett said. “Priced out of my league, but he’s got it. Made before World War II.”
I didn’t mention that the specimen from Georgie Payton’s inventory had been in Deputy Torrez’s possession out at the gravel pit, blasting the wrong sized bullets down range. At the moment, we were far inside without a warrant, and Mark Arnett had been the proud owner, enjoying showing some friends his collection. That might change in a heartbeat. But what the hell. I drew the slender ballpoint pen out of my pocket, reached out and slid it down the barrel of the.32.
“Mind?” I said, and again, with one hand on the butt plate and the other using the pen as a handle, I hefted the rifle, not adding my finger prints to the rifle’s collection. Torrez was on the same page. He snapped on a pair of surgical gloves, and that earned a frown from Arnett.
“I got the lever,” the deputy said to me, and as I held the rifle, he opened the action.
“Shit,” Mark Arnett said, and I could imagine how he felt. We weren’t old friends any longer, enjoying a collection. If he was smart, he’d stop the whole show now and tell us not to let the door hit us in the ass on the way out. If he was smart, he’d tell us to fetch a warrant and in the next breath, he’d call his attorney. But he knew us, and I could flatter myself that he trusted us. So he did none of those things. “You want the bore light?”