“You, outta the car. Jesus Christ, where do you people come from?”
This one, who seemed to have been sleeping, rousted himself and staggered out of the car, utterly befuddled, but wise enough to keep his hands up.
“Okay, you, lie down, go back to sleep, don’t make a peep. You others, get in, start ’er up, and we’ll get the hell out of here”—and, just like that, another car suddenly appeared out of nowhere, this one also carrying three men, and it pulled off the road right at the driveway.
What now? Les thought with exasperation. Next a bus, or maybe a plane will land or a ship will come sailing up the river?
He turned the muzzle on the three new passengers, dangerously near rage, screaming again.
“Get out, get out, goddammit,” and he pulled open the rear door to discover himself staring into the maw of a Thompson submachine gun.
He was dead.
I’m dead, he thought.
But he was not dead, for though the federal’s face broadcast effort and exasperation, no flash announced the release of a bullet stream that would, from this range, cut Les in half.
Les had no reaction, but, faster than a leaping rat, his finger saved his life by jerking hard on the trigger of Mr. Lebman’s machine pistol and it emptied itself in three seconds, kicking out a spew of spent shells as the gun ate its magazine, as it had been designed to, in one gulp.
It felt like he had a rocket by the tail, all whoosh and burn and shudder, bucking and twisting, yet with both his fists locked around the grips, it did not deviate, and its freight hit and devastated the automobile and its passengers, hazing windows with webs, pulling out puffs of horsehair from the upholstery, spreading punctures in a general south-to-north pattern across the exposed metal that comprised the body of the car.
The G-Man never got his trigger pulled but instead reared backwards, dropping the weapon, hands flying to throat and the sudden jets of blood that were gushing his life away, staggered from the car, the Thompson spilling off his lap, and fell to earth. The others beat it too, hit or not, and Les didn’t even see them go, as he was too absorbed in the drama of killing.
When he came back into his real head, he found himself standing alone by the car in a fog of gun smoke amid a pile of spent brass. All other humans had vanished from the earth, as hostages and targets alike had taken off like rabbits and managed to find cover in the dark.
Les jumped in the car, tossing the gun on the seat behind him. The driver hadn’t even killed the engine, so he simply clutched it into gear, pulled onto the road, and sped away.
Ha! he thought. I made it.
Or did he?
After a few miles of forest road, well lit by his headlights, he came to a straightaway, and a quarter mile ahead, two other headlights came onto the same stretch of road, a sedan driven fast, so fast it had to be law people.
Fuck! he thought.
And then he thought, Fuck them!
And then he thought, You boys want to play tough. Let’s see how tough you are.
He foot-stomped the gas pedal and he felt the engine surge in aggression, now swallowing gasoline at full hunger, and around him the forest, the road, the onrushing headlights of the enemy car, all went to blur.
We’ll see who’s got brass balls, Lester J. Gillis, known to press and cop as Baby Face Nelson, thought with a snort, a laugh, and a sudden injection of joy, as he aimed the car straight between the headlights and floored it.
6
LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS
The present, a day later
BETWEEN FIRING RANGES, the differences hardly matter. This one was in a strip mall, contained a retail store of late-modern pistols, not so many hunting rifles as many might have, a fair sampling of assault rifles and shorter-barreled shotguns, and no doubles or over-and-unders. It was not paneled in knotty pine, and no deer heads gazed at eternity through marble eyeballs from its walls; instead, zombies and insane clowns were on display, as well as anatomically revealing silhouettes and competition cardboard. Clearly, its theme was self-defense for the burgeoning concealed-carry market, and at the reception desk of the range proper, which lay in darkness behind thick plexiglass windows, the old Colt excited some comment.
“Wow,” said the range officer, “that’s a nice piece, sir. You sure you want to shoot it? It might have some collector value.”
“I want to run a function-and-accuracy check,” said Bob, “before I strip it down for detail cleaning and put it on the market. It hasn’t been fired since 1934. I need a box of hardball.”
“Yes sir, but, again, we do have 200-grain lead semi-wad reloads. A lot safer, a lot less kick.”
“I reckon I can get through the hardball,” said Bob. “If my granddad could, I could. It was built by Hartford to play the hardball game. That was the only game in town in ’34, but you know that.”
“If I did, I forgot,” said the man, who had the face of a Roman legionary behind glasses that had last been fashionable in the ’70s.
Bob accepted the white box of fifty generic Winchester 230-grain full metal jackets, the man-stopping load the government had issued for seventy-three years under the designation “.45 caliber ball,” thus earning it the nickname hardball forever. Then he put on the mandatory safety glasses and earmuffs and pushed through the double doors. As he entered, the officer turned on the lights, illuminating a cavern with eight shooting booths, each with an electric pulley setup to run targets out to the twenty-five-yard line. Bob went to his assigned booth, put the briefcase on the shelf, and pinched an NRA bull’s-eye target, a simple black circle on an otherwise blank sheet, into the clamp. He turned, found the toggle switch, which sent the target downrange twenty-five yards until it bumped the far wall.
Then, quickly and without ceremony, he removed the gun from its case, popped open the white box, poured the ammo onto the shelf, where it clicked and rolled with heavy authority, then locked the slide back and pressed the button to remove the mag.
He threaded seven in, for Charles Swagger would have carried it that way, or perhaps he cranked one into the chamber, put the safety on, removed the magazine, and inserted one more against the tightness of the compressed spring. An old gunfighter’s trick, it would give him one more round in a fight where one round might be the difference.
Charles would have shot one-handed too, for in those days the concept called modern technique, which counsels a two-handed, bone-tightened isosceles grip in all applications, hadn’t been invented, and wouldn’t be till the late ’50s. Everybody saw a pistol as a one-handed implement, as all the old pictures showed, which may be why they missed so much in those days.
But Bob hadn’t practiced one-handed shooting in years, as it had all but vanished from the earth, and he knew if that was his theme today, he’d get nothing but disappointment. Instead, he bladed himself at forty-five degrees to the far target and commenced locking down, meaning right grip on pistol, locked down hard; left hand wrapped around right hand, locked down hard; right elbow, locked down hard; straight back; left arm, pulling right hand, locked back hard. The point was to go robotic, but when he found the sight, again he marveled at the skill of the first-generation 1911 shooters, for it was only a pinprick, and the embracing rear sights, whose ears were supposed to buttress that pinprick, were miniature too. But he got the front aligned in the rear, as narrow a margin as could be imagined, felt his trigger-finger pad lock flat on the curvature of the trigger, and slowly eased back.
When the pistol fired, it was a surprise break, coming sooner than he anticipated, kicking harder, administering a shot of pain to the webbing between his gripping thumb and index finger because he’d held way up high, as modern technique demanded when there was no oversize safety grip to cushion the shock, so the pistol discharged its energy right smack into the tender spot.
He looked, could see no sign of a hit, thought, Damn, I missed the whole thing
, and went through the drill six more times, holding to the same six-o’clock position on the target. There wasn’t much smoke, but in the little room only eight lanes wide, it collected and drifted back, and would have brought a lifetime of memories to him—hard places, lost men, desperate nights, fear everywhere—if he’d let it. He didn’t.
Glancing toward the target, he saw he’d missed clean.
Out of practice, he thought. So out of practice.
But when he reeled the target in, he was surprised to find a cluster of four in the black, just bisecting the 10 ring, and three more punctures close at hand, the farthest out splitting the 6 and 4 rings.
He reexamined the shooting experience, trying to find nuance against the harshness of the recoil and the pain it had injected into the webbing in his hand. He realized then how smooth the trigger pull had been, smooth without grit or little micropatches of resistance, not a hair trigger but certainly a useful one. Peering intently at the weapon, he noted as well that its front sight was slightly bent to the right by the expert application of a padded hammer, a testament to this particular weapon’s insistence on throwing shots to the left, and its caretaker—his grandfather or some other gentleman?—had made a hairsbreadth adjustment to stay in the black.
He quickly ran through the remaining forty-three rounds, and found that at twenty-five feet, for example, he could stay within an inch without hardly trying, even after adjusting his grip so that flesh wasn’t jabbed by the fulcrum of the safety grip. He shook it, heard no rattles, signifying that the gun was tighter by far than most government-issue .45s, which were built loose so that even clogged up with Flanders’s mud, Iwo’s ash, or Da Nang’s grit, they’d function long, hard, and hot.
When he was done and reentered the shop through the double doors, the range officer said, “Say, I watched you, I’d say you done a peck of shooting before. Most people here can’t hold in the black at twenty-five yards. That’s why they shoot at zombies.”
“I shot a lot of practical many years ago,” he said. “Is there any chance you could take it to your gun-cleaning station and break it down so we’d get a good look at the parts? I need to get a sense of what’s been done to it.”
“Sure, be damned interesting,” said the officer, who was turning out to be one of those immediately likable men who was probably half the reason this place stayed open in a bad economy.
They went to the bench that was mounted against a wall where rental guns were cleaned when too much crud jammed them up. The range officer took the pistol and broke it down expertly.
“You’ve done that a few times, I’d say,” said Bob.
“Army. ’Nam. ’Sixty-nine, ’seventy. Did twenty years, got out with eight stripes.”
Bob laughed.
“You beat me, Top,” the universal term for a first sergeant, “I only managed six before they kicked me out.”
“Army?”
“Marines. ’Nam too. Pretty interesting.”
“Wasn’t it, though?” said the sergeant. “Anyhow, let’s see what we got here.”
The two men took turns closely examining the thirty-seven parts that Colt Commercial Model, serial number 157345C, disassembled to.
“Clearly,” said the Top, “someone who knew what he was doing did a once-over. Look how all the sharp edges of the trigger surfaces have been filed with a very soft hand, just to break the ninety-degree angles a bit, and smooth up the trigger, without cutting out any loops of the spring.”
Bob squinted, eyes not what they once were.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I also notice he took a ball-peen hammer to the slide rails, very carefully tattooed them, very skillfully widened them just a hair, so they hold the slide much more tightly. Then he polished both surfaces, both the top of the rail and the groove in the slide. Nice tight, smooth fit, sure helps accuracy.”
“I see that,” said Bob, who’d noticed—and felt—the same.
“He’s also polished the feed ramp and broken the ninety-degree angle there where it fits against the frame. The cartridges will never hang up, just extra reliability insurance. With hardball, these things hardly ever jam, but that wasn’t good enough for him, he had to change ‘hardly ever’ to ‘never, ever.’”
“Good catch,” said Bob. “I missed that.”
“Basically, he’s given a sloppy combat gun all kinds of accuracy and reliability enhancements. He knew what he was doing.”
“Finally,” said Bob, pointing to a subtle linear variation in the pistol’s black sheen that ran around the front of the grip just under the trigger guard, “you got any idea what this is?”
“Never seen that before,” said the Top. “Looked at a lot of .45s, that one’s new to me.”
“You didn’t look in the right place, which would be the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco. The Rangers used to tie a rawhide strip around the grip to hold the grip safety in—that is, off. In case they had to go to gun fast, and I guess a lot of them did, they didn’t want to miss the grip safety in their hurry and come up with a click instead of a bang. So this one had rawhide tying down the grip safety, and over the months it rubbed a strip of finish off. That’s what you’re seeing. Some of ’em were so sure they’d have to go to gun quick-time, they milled off the trigger guard. Have to be plenty serious kind of situation before I’d do anything like that.”
“If I tried to holster a 1911 with no trigger guard and the grip safety tied down, I know I’d blow my own knee off by the third day.”
Bob laughed.
“But seriously,” said the Top, “if you could prove Texas Ranger provenance, you’d double, maybe triple, the value for certain collectors. Lots of Texas Ranger fans out there.”
“I bet the owner of this gun knew Texas Rangers, had seen how they operated, and picked up a few tricks from them. I don’t know that he was a Ranger himself.”
“But if he was going to some kind of war, he’d give himself every advantage,” said the Top. “It figures.”
“This has been a great help,” Bob said. “Can I pay you for your expertise?”
“If you did ’Nam, brother, no payment at all. You already paid up in full.”
—
AT THE HOTEL, he found a FedEx envelope on the floor of his room, slipped under the door, and he knew exactly what it was. He called his wife.
“Hi, it came, thanks.”
“I hope it helps,” she said.
“Well, you never know, I might pick something up, even if the chance is small.”
“How much longer in Little Rock?”
“I’m done now. Heading to Blue Eye tomorrow, Andy Vincent is going to meet me. I told him I want to keep it discreet, no conquering-hero-returns-home kind of thing, and, again, I doubt if much is left of the old man. Hell, there wasn’t much left of my father, I don’t expect anything from a generation earlier.”
“All right.”
“And then to D.C. to see if Nick’s fished anything out of the files. I should be home in three or four days.”
“I’ve heard that before,” she said.
At last he turned to the envelope. He opened it and took out a single four-by-six-inch sheet of ancient paper and, turning it over, looked into the harsh face and unforgiving eyes of Charles Fitzpatrick Swagger, snapped one fine spring day in 1926. It had been his own father Earl’s only acknowledgment that he had a father, and it had been in a tattered old Buster Brown shoe box with other Earl documents and souvenirs that he’d last looked at twenty years ago. He’d noted the photo but not checked it at all.
Now he stared at the murky sepia, turning it back over to read the inscription, “Daddy 1926,” in what had to be his grandmother’s flowery fountain-pen script.
Charles had a man-killer face, all right, if you believed in such things, and Bob could see both his own and his father’s bone structure in the thinness and le
ngth, the prominence of cheekbones and hollowness of scraped-clean cheeks, the severe and unyielding prows of nose. The mouth looked genetically incapable of cracking a smile; its hard dash might have been rectitude or moral authority or self-belief or just plain cop-tough.
The man leaned against a rural fence on a sunny day and posed for his wife’s Brownie box camera. He was into a cowboy kind of look in 1926, with a lot of hat covering up his hairline, a white Stetson twelve-galloner, with prim, flat brim circling under the bullet-blunt crown. He wore a dark three-piece suit with the insouciance of someone who wore a dark three-piece suit every day of his life and would not think of stepping off the porch without such. The shirt was white, with a round, stiff collar held tight by a collar bar, above which a black tie sprung, which hung down his chest and was swallowed by the tightness of his dark vest. A star-in-circle badge dominated the left lapel, and no one could miss it. Around his waist he’d cinched tight a much-tooled gun belt, its loops displaying a healthy number of .45 Colt big boys, making the statement that no matter how hot and heavy it got, he would not be running low on ammo. On his right hip, revealed by a suit coat dramatically tucked back by a seemingly casual hand in pocket, he displayed from the forward angle the familiar plow curve of the 1873 Model Colt, the Peacemaker, that had decorated every Western or Southern lawman’s belt for close to fifty years, as well as appearing in enough cowboy movies to win its own Oscar. It was probably a ceremonial gun, its lines proclaiming the heritage of the Western lawman, but for real work he’d use the Government .45, which he’d used so well in the trenches. Only the hammer and curve of the butt strap of the Peacemaker and the ivory of its grips were visible above the embrace of the holster, but Bob looked and saw strong, large gunman’s hands that would have been adept at the draw and could probably put lead in any antagonist out to forty yards or so in less than a second, even with a single-action antique—so obsolete in 1926!—like this one.
Bob looked at the face. Born in 1891, Charles would have been thirty-five at the time, Earl would have been nine, Bobbie Lee, Bob’s namesake, not yet conceived. Perhaps little Earl clowned just out of the frame in this frozen moment of long-ago life, and Daddy was going to take him for an Eskimo Pie at the general store in a few minutes. Or perhaps he’d beaten him raw for some infraction of a code only he knew yet enforced with the rigor of a prison guard, and the child languished in a locked cellar room, sore everywhere, but mostly in the mind.
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