Том Годвин: Ed McBaines 87th Precinct Mystery Magazine. Volume 1, No. 4. April, 1975

He opened his mouth to say something more to her, then the scowl faded away and a thoughtful expression replaced it. He turned to me, his tone again one of good-natured friendliness.

“It’s too late to get into the high country today, Bill. Suppose I pick some canyons on the way back home. Might have the luck on a beginner, you know.”

“O.K.,” I said. “Lead the way.”

He drove back the way we had come and stopped near the mouth of Box Canyon. “More grass here than any other canyon,” he said, watching it ripple in the wind like a field of grain. “Should be deer up it and if it’s really a box canyon, they can’t get away.”

“It’s a box canyon,” I said. “The upper end is a high, sheer wall.”

He looked pleased. “Then I’m going to try my luck in it, as soon as I get this wrinkle pulled out of my sock.” He began unlacing his boot. “In case I’m wrong, why don’t you and Doris try those other two canyons for deer sign?”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

Which I was, until I got out of sight. Then I circled back to a place where I could see without being seen.

Doris was well on her way to the mouth of a canyon to the north. Jack was just leaving the jeep, looking in all directions.

When he came to the mouth of Box canyon he turned aside a little to go into a thicket of tall, dry brush. When he came out five minutes later he lifted his hand, as though looking at his watch, then continued on up the canyon.

I looked at my own watch and saw that it was 12:30.

I patiently waited and watched. At 3:00 he came walking down the canyon. He went into the same brush thicket and came out a minute later. With a long look in all directions he went over to his jeep and sat down.

He was still sitting there when I saw Doris coming an hour later. I made my own appearance then and got to the jeep shortly after she did.

“I was right, Bill,” Jack said as soon as I walked up. “I saw the tracks of a big buck up there.”

“But no buck?” I asked.

“I didn’t go all the way — an old stomach ailment suddenly hit me. But one of us can get him tomorrow.”

Mom had driven to Mesquite Junction for the mail when we got back so Doris fixed us something to eat, concern in her eyes every time she looked at Jack. I wondered how she could think he was sick when he looked so perfectly normal.

Jack ate part of the meal that Doris had fixed for him, his glance flicking often to her. They were glances in which the satisfaction was not quite hidden; in which the cold anticipation was shining like a rattler’s scales after a rain.

I knew what it meant. Tomorrow Doris was to die.

He went to the back porch and sprawled out on his cot after he ate. Doris following him, to get him an extra pillow. I heard her talking to him and heard him give her short answers, when he answered at all. When she asked him for the second time if they shouldn’t go on back to Phoenix where he could see a doctor, I heard him sit up on the cot and say with the pseudo-politeness that can cut like a little whip:

“I don’t want to seem rude, Doris, but I’m trying to concentrate on certain things I have in mind. I’m sure I will feel much better after I rest a while.”

There was a silence, then I heard her walk away from him. I lit a cigarette and went outside, hoping I would finally get the chance to talk to her alone.

She was standing near their jeep, looking out across the wide desert to the west, all the lines of sadness and disillusionment back on her face.

She looked up at me and tried to smile, as though nothing had happened. “The desert is beautiful at sunset, isn’t it?”

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “How much do you love Jack?”

She recoiled a little, as though I had unexpectedly slapped an old wound. She looked out across the desert again.

“As much as he will let me.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I — so much of the time I don’t understand him. He will act like he’s already tired of me.”

“I’ve noticed that.”

“But at other times” — her eyes lighted up and the life came back into her voice — “at other times he will show he loves me by doing special things for me. Like the rifle he bought for me.”

“Is it a good rifle?” I asked.

“He bought me the best rifle he could find in Phoenix after you promised to go with us — he looked for hours to find just the kind of brand-new, special-made foreign rifle that he wanted me to have.”

“So he had bought her a special kind of rifle after he knew I was going along?”

“Let’s see those rifles,” I said, turning to the jeep.

I looked at Jack’s rifle first. It was an expensive American-made 30:06.

“Jack just bought an ordinary rifle for himself,” Doris said. “But look at the one he got for me.”

She handed it to me. At first glance — or to anyone who did not know guns — it was a beautiful thing; an identical twin to Jack’s rifle except for being even more polished and fancy.

But that was all there was to it — its appearance. It was the very cheapest kind of imitation of the American rifle — it was deadly dangerous gilded gingerbread.

I pulled back the breech bolt and saw that the bolt locking mechanism was a flimsy improvization; made of thin, brittle, cast metal, so weak that any shot might cause the breech bolt to be blown back in the shooter’s face, seriously injuring him if not killing him.

But Jack would want no if’s.

I ejected the cartridges and saw that two of the bullets had a tiny smear of something gray. It looked like cement. I turned the rifle to try to blow down the barrel. It was very, very solidly plugged.

That, then, was the way he had tried to kill her. He had plugged the barrel with cement, just in front of the firing chamber, so that the bullet could not possibly escape and the entire force of the cartridge would go backward, to rip off the breech-bolt and drive it deep into her brain.

“—don’t you think so, Bill?” Doris was asking. “Didn’t he give me something exceptional?”

“Yes,” I said. It was hard to make my voice sound normal while my throat was tight and hot with the surge of hatred for him and the desire to kill him — with the knowing that I was going to kill him, somehow, for what he had tried to do to her. “Yes, it’s an exceptional gun, Doris.”

I turned my back to her and dropped all the cartridges into my shirt pocket as I pretended to reload the rifle.

My own role in Jack’s scheme was obvious, of course. He had already played me up to Mom as psychotically resentful toward Doris and moodily brooding.

Who else but Bill Jones could the law suspect as her murderer?

Mom came driving up then and we went into the house. Jack came in, to bravely belittle his illness. “It’s just something I used to get quite often in Viet Nam,” he said. “I’m usually better the next day.”

I found this explanation interesting since I knew the closest he ever got to Viet Nam was when he was blowing Doris’s money in Las Vegas.

Mom started relating the latest gossip from Mesquite Junction while Jack pretended to listen. Doris went to sit beside him and he laid his hand on her shoulder; a gesture of affection that was not reflected by the musing, coldly-satisfied expression on his face.

At dark I went back out to my cot. I wanted to do some thinking. My mind isn’t very sharp but it can sometimes blunder onto the right answers when I strain it long enough.

I was sure that Jack had already abandoned his former method of killing Doris. The absence of deer would give her no reason to fire the rifle. He now had some other plan, one which he was certain could not fail.

What?