Steven Havill: One Perfect Shot

“You two are out on the town?” she quipped, and the sheriff wagged an eyebrow at her.

“What time do you get off?” He tried to sound lecherous but managed instead to sound more like a concerned grandfather.

“Midnight,” Arlene laughed. “That’s way past your bed time, viejo.” All she needed was a nod from us both to take the order. Years before, it was Eduardo Salcido who had introduced me to the Don Juan’s flagship offering, the Burrito Grande, one of those nonsensically-named dishes that could put you right under the table if not approached carefully. The “big little burro” had been my favorite ever since. It helped me think, and if I hadn’t been such a damn insomniac, it might even have helped me sleep. It had certainly padded my waistline.

Salcido regarded a chip critically. He nibbled off one corner so he could dip it in the salsa without breaking it. “Me and Tony spent half an hour over there with Marilyn. She’s having a hard time.”

“I would think so.”

“She couldn’t give me a single idea about what happened. She said Larry hadn’t argued with anybody…nothing.”

I didn’t reply, and Salcido added, “They have four grown kids, you know. All over the place. Just like you.”

“They’ll be able to come home to be with her?”

“I think so. Her youngest daughter was coming in from Albuquerque tonight.”

“And not a thing that she could think of, eh? Larry had anything going on in his life that she knew about? You said no arguments, but Christ, everybody has something in their life that’s rubbing ’em the wrong way.”

Salcido made a face. Maybe the salsa wasn’t hot enough. My forehead was popping out in beads of sweat, but the sheriff seemed immune to the potent chile.

“She’s not in condition to even think about it right now,” Salcido said. “This thing really came out of left field, Bill. That’s my impression .” The sheriff loved to linger his tongue around those syllables.

“A random potshot.”

“Hell of a potshot, jefito. Somebody that would do a thing like this…they’re sick in the head. “ Arlene Aragon reappeared, but not with our dinner. She held spread fingers up to her ear to indicate telephone, and then pointed at me.

“We’ve been found,” I groaned, and slid out of the booth.

“Over under the register,” Arlene instructed. She didn’t tell me who it was. Neither the sheriff nor I had told dispatch where we were, one of those liberties you take when you’re the stud duck. But anyone with half a brain would know.

I picked up the receiver. “Gastner.”

“Sir, we got something kind of interesting goin’ on.” Bob Torrez’s quiet voice prompted me to shift the phone a little so I could hear him. “When you’re finished up there, were you planning to stop back here for a few minutes?”

“ Here being the office? Yes, I was. The sheriff and I are feeding our faces.”

“No rush. We’ll be here.”

“What did you find?”

“We got the bullet, sir. It penetrated the victim’s skull for about seven inches. Didn’t touch the bone at the back. It’s.308 caliber and used to be a flat-nose 170 grainer. That last is kind of a guess, but that’s what I think it was.”

“All right. That’s common enough, unfortunately.” The.308 diameter included a vast gamut of rifle cartridges, from the ubiquitous.30–30 on up through all the.308’s, 30–06’s, and the plethora of.30 caliber magnum cartridges. Dozens of the pesky things. Life was never simple.

“Not like this one, sir. We got a slug that doesn’t show rifling marks. Not a lick. And it was yawing like crazy.”

“Yawing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How would that happen?”

“Don’t know.”

“Old and worn rifling, I suppose?”

“That was my first thought. But this one has no rifling tracks on it. Like it was fired from a smooth-bore. Like a shotgun.”

“Really. You know of such a thing?” A blizzard of questions fogged my brain, but a public phone in the restaurant wasn’t the appropriate place to pursue them.

“Nope. I’m workin’ on the possibilities.”

“Good enough. Give us a few minutes.”

It’s possible to gobble down a burrito grande in “a few minutes,” but the results wouldn’t be pretty. The sheriff and I made good use of the time and the calories to mull every possibility we could think of. Nothing made sense.

A chunk of misshapen brass and lead lay under the old stereoscopic microscope. I’d picked up the microscope during a garage sale of surplus junk over at the high school years before. Why the microscope was no longer adequate for ninth graders to spy on the critters in swamp water, I didn’t know, but it was just what we needed at times like this.

I fiddled with the sloppy adjustment knob until I had a clear picture. “For sure a jacketed rifle bullet.” The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I realized how dumb that sounded. “As opposed to a handgun of some sort.” I looked some more. “And I can see how the forward portion is mushroomed backward.” With a pencil point, I nudged the slug this way and that under the objective. “I can’t see that it was a flat-nosed bullet. But that’s what you’re guessing, right? Tell me why.”

For a moment Bob Torrez didn’t reply, and I glanced up from the microscope.

“Just a guess.” He looked uncomfortable. “There’s a little bit that isn’t so badly deformed, like it was already yawing a little bit when it hit the glass.”

“Keyholing, they call it?”

“Yes, sir. Not a lot, but some. And the bullet does have a cannalure around it, but that don’t mean shit one way or another. Some manufacturers press crimping cannalures into just about every bullet they make, others just cannalure the bullets meant for tube feeders, where the cartridges have to sit nose to tail.”

“So tell me what we do know,” I said. “What’s this fragment weigh now?”

“Right at 163 grains.”

“That’s where you came up with the 170 figure for the original, then. It could have been 165, maybe 168.”

“Could.”

I sighed and looked at the nasty little chunk some more. “Through glass that already had plenty of age cracks in it, then through a tough part of the skull and a few inches of soft brain. And then comes to a stop. Interesting.”

“What we want is something that narrows this down,” Eduardo said. He’d commanded one of the lab stools-also a reject from the high school-and sat with boots on the bottom rung, arms folded over his gut. He’d taken his turn at the microscope, and had only a shrug to offer.

“The unusual thing is the lack of rifling marks,” Torrez said. “I don’t get it.”

I turned and gazed at him, waiting to see if he intended to elaborate. If there was something about guns and ballistics that Bobby Torrez didn’t get, I hadn’t run across it-at least until now. I looked through the microscope again. The base of the bullet was undamaged, and offered a brass palette for marks, even the most faint. For a quarter of an inch forward from the base, the brass was clean and unblemished, other than some of the straight line scuffing normally expected when a new bullet was pressed down into the shell casing during the manufacturing process, or blown back out of it when the powder ignited. I saw nothing that I would guess to be a sharp rifling cut-certainly not a mark that we could imagine was a spiral track.

Just behind the cannalure, that belt-like grove pressed into the slug’s carcass to give the brass casing something to grip, a scuff mark marred the bullet’s brass surface. Forward of that, the rough mushrooming impact damage began, more on one side than the other.