They weren't bad glasses, but they weren't strong enough to really distinguish bullet holes at that range; and I was more interested in watching the girl, anyway.
The sun was bright on her short-cut hair as she lay there, firing steadily. I could remember when it had been even shorter, hacked and ragged. Well, that had nothing to do with sighting in a rifle, or with her marksmanship in general. What was important was that she seemed to know that she was doing. They all get rifle training, but it doesn't always take. After she'd finished, we went down to inspect the targets. I put my pocket ruler across the best group.
"Four and a quarter inches with the 150-grain load," I said. "A bolt-action rifle that won't group within two inches at a hundred yards isn't worth having, and we ought to get one and a half even with factory ammunition. Is that as close as you can hold?"
"They all felt good," she said. "They should all have been right together."
"You don't mind if I check you?'
"No," she said stiffly. "No, of course I don't mind."
"Don't get mad, Skinny," I said. "I've got to know if it's you or the gun that's spreading them out like that. Just because you're swell in bed doesn't necessarily mean you're hell on the rifle range, too."
She stared at me, startled and indignant; then she laughed.
We went back to a hundred yards and I fired five. It was no fun at all. The burn was in exactly the wrong place. My group beat hers by only a quarter of an inch, good enough for the male ego but no prize in the accuracy department.
After checking, and putting up fresh targets, I got out the tools and took the gun apart. She sat on the ground beside me to watch.
"I think the stock has warped a little," I said. "They often do on these light rifles. It's supposed to be a free-floating barrel without any wood contact, but I think we're getting some pressure here that's throwing it off. We'll just ream out the barrel channel a bit and put in a few cardboard shims to free things up around the action. The magazine isn't supposed to bind like this, either." 1 glanced at her. "They didn't teach you anything about this, did they?"
"No," she said. "All they did was make us shoot."
"As a matter of fact, I picked it up as a kid," I said. "I always used to be crazy about guns. And knives and swords and all the rest of the stuff that tickles a kid's bloodthirsty imagination. That was before World War II, of course. They picked me out of the Army after a couple of months of that and put me into this outfit. We had us quite a war."
"And afterward?" she asked.
"I said the hell with it and got married, but it didn't take. Well, that isn't quite right. I wasn't allowed to tell the girl my wartime experiences, and everything was swell for a good many years, until one day she discovered what kind of a monster was sharing the master bedroom with her. She's out in Nevada now, married to a rancher."
"She must be a fool," Sheila said.
I looked up and grinned. 'Watch that transference, Skinny." I shook my head. "It wasn't a question of brains but of stomach. Beth's a bright enough girl. She's just allergic to gore, is all. I guess she felt, too, that I'd been holding out on her, and of course I had, under orders." I started putting the rifle back together. "Well, that ought to improve things slightly."
"Yes," I said.
Sheila's voice was low. "Have you ever thought of marrying again? Somebody… somebody who knows all about you and doesn't care?"
I looked at her sitting in the sunshine with a lot of desert behind her. "Don't go off half-cocked," I said. "It's a simple psychological phenomenon. You'll get over it. You said so yourself."
She hesitated. "Have you… have you got a girl?"
"There's a nice lady in Texas. Pretty, too. We sometimes get together when I'm on leave."
"Does she know the kind of work you do?'
I said, "I met her on a job. She was kind of accidentally involved. She knows. But she's had four husbands and isn't looking for a fifth, if that's what you're driving at."
"Is she… really good-looking?"
"And young. And rich," I said. "She's also a pretty swell person, in a cool, sophisticated sort of way. What do you want me to say, that I go around with a real creep?"
Sheila laughed and stopped laughing. "Do you love her?" she asked.
I said, "Hold this while I try to match up… Hold it steady. Thanks. I thought we weren't going to talk any nonsense about love."
Sheila said, "Don't keep throwing my words back at me. I had a husband once. He was a beast. A louse. Any word you can think of. I mean, really a beast, physically, mentally, and morally, only it didn't show up until after we were married, or maybe I was just too damn innocent to know the symptoms. I mean the kind of man that… that makes you want to wipe all men off the face of the earth, if you're a woman. So I divorced him and joined this organization, hoping they could give me some work along those lines. Extermination was for me. I'd been very much in love, you understand. I was terribly disillusioned and very bitter."
I said, "Dr. Tommy has a theory about you that goes something like that. Of course, he's got a fancy sexual angle, like all headshrinkers. They're afraid Papa Freud will disown them if they don't."
She glanced at me warily. "What did Dr. Stern tell you about me?"
"Well, there was something about a childhood trauma- of a sexual nature, of course. Tommy apparently didn't have it treed yet, but he was baying on the trail. He thinks it's the secret key to all your personality difficulties."
She laughed. "I had a perfectly normal childhood, thanks. I was never followed through the park by a scary man who exposed himself, or molested in the stairwell by the janitor. Honest."
"You'll break Tommy's heart," I said. "Then there was your unsatisfactory marriage. He says it broke up with charges of brutality on one side and frigidity on the other."
She grimaced. "Don't you know that any time a man wants to hurt a woman publicly, he calls her frigid? How does Dr. Stem reconcile my supposed frigidity with the fact that I went down to Costa Verde deliberately to… to seduce a bearded bandit I'd never seen?"
"You were trying to prove something by putting yourself on a spot, says Tommy. You wanted to demonstrate, to yourself and everybody else, that your husband was a damn liar. And Dr. Tommy's theory is that you proved something, all right: the wrong thing. He thinks that what happened is that you panicked when El Fuerte started making amorous advances and gave yourself and the show away."
Sheila didn't look at me. "And what do you think?"
I said, "Don't be silly. This is Mr. Henry Evans, honey, the guy you spent the night with, remember? We'll consider the frigidity theory disproved. But that still leaves the question of just what happened down there to trip you up."
"Why, I simply goofed," she said, frankly. "Maybe I was a little scared. Not of El Fuerte's amorous advances. Just of being caught and killed."
"It's normal," I said. "What was the goof?'
"I got the gun, all right," she said. "His gun. After inviting me into his hut as we'd planned for him to do, he'd chivalrously taken off his belt and holster so I wouldn't get bruised by all the buckles and hardware. I got the pistol, all right, but you know the grip safety on that big.45 automatic. If you don't hold the gun just right, that spring-loaded gizmo doesn't release, and nothing happens when you pull the trigger even though the thumb-safety is off. I have a small hand and, as I say, maybe I was a little nervous. And he was fast, faster than you'd expect such a big man to be. After that initial delay, I never had a chance."
It was a good story, a plausible story. There isn't anybody working with firearms who hasn't, at some time in his career, fumbled a safety device and missed a shot. The only trouble was that I'd heard a lot of good, plausible stories: