Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

“No, but it’s locked in a vault that guarded my mother’s diamonds and my father’s rare guns for sixty years without a problem.”

“Okay,” he said. “This could be big. This could be it. We have to proceed carefully now.”

“I agree.”

“I think you should hire a security company to patrol your house. Or move it to some highly protected site.”

“Jack, I’m in the middle of nowhere. And nobody knows a thing except the two of us. No one is going to steal it, I guarantee.”

Swagger nodded. “You’re right. I do get paranoid.”

“Understandable. This is exciting.”

“I have to see it. I just have to look at it, to have a sense of it, so it’s settled in my own mind that it’s there. Oh, wait. Let’s get a handle on all this. Have you examined the provenance? Can we determine that the gun itself is linked to Lon outside of the case?”

“Doesn’t his name on the case make that point rather eloquently?”

“Yes, but if we could link the gun going to Lon, Lon possessing it, via an outside confirmation, the argument is so much stronger. Any idea where Lon got it?”

“This is the sort of practical detail I never think of. No, it didn’t occur to me. I’ve just kept it, trying to figure out my next step.”

“Aren’t the Winchester records all at the Cody Firearms Museum?” asked Bob.

“Yes, but no. There was a fire in the Winchester plant, and all the modern records were burned – among the casualties, all those on the Model 70. But Lon didn’t get his rifles directly from Winchester. He got them from the Abercrombie and Fitch gun room on Madison Avenue in New York City, where all the American swells got theirs. Teddy Roosevelt and his sons, Richard Byrd, Charles Lindbergh, Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, probably through Lyndon Johnson, all the fancy big game hunters who went to Africa for short happy lives in the fifties. Abercrombie was purveyor to the aristocrats, the celebs, the nabobs, the millionaires for nearly a century. They went bankrupt in ’77, and the current outfit just has the brand name.” Marty snorted. “Now it’s a mall clothing company for twenty-year-olds with actual abdominals.”

“But the firearms records?” asked Bob. “Were they destroyed?”

“No,” said Marty. “Now that you mention it, they’re in a warehouse in Rutherford, New Jersey. Too valuable to throw out, I suppose, yet not valuable enough to catalog, index, and display.”

“Can we get in?”

“I do happen to know Tom Browner, who was the last manager of the room. Though he’s old and retired, I know he has some sway still. But Jack, it’s not like you can give a name to a clerk and he comes back with the files ten minutes later. It’s a bloody mess, years dumped into other years, shipping documents spread everywhere, correspondence half there and half not. Finding Lon in that mess would be like cleaning the stables.”

“I have cleaned some stables in my time,” said Swagger.

“I see it would make you happier to try. Maybe you’ll succeed. All right, I’ll call Tom Browner tomorrow and see what he has to say. When will you go?”

“Ah, better leave it open. Sometime soon. Early next week, say. Rutherford, New Jersey. Anyhow, when I get back, I’ll call you.”

“Do you want to make it one trip and go from–”

“No, New Jersey will wreck me for a week. I’ll need recovery, believe me. So we should set up a date for me to see the case in a couple of weeks.”

“Excellent,” said Marty.

“It was your idea to go to New Jersey?” asked Nick, in Seattle’s Best number eight, this one in Oak Cliff.

“Yeah,” said Swagger. “But it could easily be anticipated. It would have to be done sooner or later. You’d think Marty, with his connections up there already, would want to do it. But he let me come up with it and volunteer to do it, because he wants me to believe in the authenticity of the thing on my own. If I find anything in the Abercrombie files, that nails it.”

“On the other hand, it commits you to a known place and time, and if this is a setup, that’s where it could go down. Jack Brophy walks out of the warehouse into four guns, and that’s the end of Jack Brophy.”

“Sure. But my call is that neither Marty nor Richard have the stone cojones to get involved in a hit. Not their part of the forest. I don’t think they could hold it together mentally, setting something like that up. There’d be tells all the way through. Marty’d be sweating like a pig, and Richard couldn’t stop swallowing, licking his lips, avoiding eye contact. They’re not suited for the violent end of the game.”

“Maybe they don’t know. Maybe whoever’s pulling the string is lying to them, telling them it’s some other kind of scam; maybe they’re expendable to this guy, who, after all, is fighting for his life, his legacy, his family name, if he’s who you think he is and has done what you think he’s done.”

“But how can I not go? If I’m who I say I am, I have to go, or the whole deception falls apart and we’re left with nothing and I have to sit around and wait for Hugh to find me.”

“You tell me what to do.”

“I have no suggestions. Pray for luck, how’s that?”

“Okay, then I’ll make a suggestion. You set up your appointment. On that day, I’ll have a team from New York in the parking lot. No big deal, plainclothes, but with enough signs of serious operators on-site. Overcoats concealing long guns, vests under the coats, snail-cord earpieces, tactical shades, bloused boots, that sort of thing. If Hugh has people, the last thing he’ll want is a gunfight in the parking lot. They’ll take a powder fast, and there won’t be any action.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “It sounds good. You can pay for that?”

“It’s under the James Aptapton investigation and the Sergei Bodonski investigation. Capping Bodonski wasn’t enough; we have to find out who let the contract. It’s legit law enforcement initiative.”

“Great,” said Swagger. “I’m appreciative.”

“If we can take down the contract taker and he’s someone big, maybe even a once-dead Hugh Meachum, then we don’t have to go to JFK up front. And once we bag him, we can work for proof, and eventually, it gets out.”

“Not bad,” said Swagger. “There would be your career finisher. Your – what do they call it? Your capstone.”

“Just,” said Nick, “so it’s not your – what do they call it? Oh, yeah. Your tombstone.”

Like many Americans, I’m not sure if I saw Alek get his in real time, live on the network, or if I saw it a few minutes later, when the other networks ran the tape. I suppose it doesn’t matter.

I’d missed his brief encounter with the press Friday night, since I’d been ingloriously passed out. But I’d seen it on tape, as they had to fill the time when nothing was happening, and what I’d seen had seemed classical Alek. He was scruffy, as usual, hair a mess, and the shiner from the punch in the eye he’d taken earlier that day from a Dallas cop hadn’t subsided. He was surly, squint-eyed, radiating animus. The cops shoved him up on a riser, and immediately, a surge of newspeople surrounded him, shoving mikes in his face, yelling questions. Bulbs flashed; he winced and got to speak only a few words before the cops hauled him up to Homicide.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, or words to that effect, and I suppose to him, it made perfect sense. He had to know he hadn’t fired the fatal shot. It would be a while before I worked out what had happened to him up there, but he must have seen the president’s head take its hit, and he knew in his feral way that there was a game going on, that he’d been played for a sucker and was now somebody’s prey, and off he went.