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. Good-bye, 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
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.
Tokarev Military TU-90. Free Ammo. $119 each.
Banger’s Distribution, America’s Best Colt Distributor, Offers You the Colt Gold Cup Ten – $669.99 each/2 or more $649.99 ea.
Subscribe Now to Machine Gun News – Special Introductory Price.
Paragon Makes It Easy to Buy Ammo.
Maryland/Howard County Weapons Fair, November 10-11.
The Gun Cellar – Prices Are Lower in the Cellar.
Machine Gun Conversion Videos.
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.