Stephen Hunter: I, Sniper

But then he thought, I rode this far with the gunman. Might as well go all the way.

“Okay,” he said, “use your best judgment. If you think following them is the way to go, then-”

“You better give me some kind of verbal authorization to shoot damn quick, ’cause they’s a hundred feet away and coming toward me.”

He heard Nick whisper to others, “Witness this and record it,” then he said loudly, “Do it. Take him down.”

It took a second for the situation to dawn on the crowd, but then they all seemed to get it at once. Two gunslingers facing each other in a western town under a blaze of sun, shooting for blood. They backed off-not away, but off, cordoning themselves along the streets of Cold Water, witnesses to that which had not been seen for real in a century. Nobody was going to get them to look away.

“Kill him,” said Texas Red to his bodyguard.

“Sir,” said the man, “I am a bonded employee of Graywolf Security, and I am not empowered to open fire unless fired upon. I cannot engage unknown civilians, particularly in a crowded area. I have no idea who this guy is.”

“Who are you?” yelled Red.

He saw the man start to answer, but someone else from the crowd yelled, “He’s an Arizona Ranger,” for some odd reason.

A moment of silence creaked by, then the bodyguard said, “Possible law enforcement agent. Cannot engage. Graywolf rules.” He stepped away from Texas Red and led his colleagues to the sidelines. They wanted to watch too. That left Clell Rush.

“Don’t do this, Red,” Clell said quietly. “He’s got a big iron on his hip.”

Red looked, recognized from the top view exactly what he himself was carrying, only his Colt wore the gunfighter’s 4¾ inch barrel, while the Arizona Ranger’s iron was indeed big; it was the 7½ inch model, which gave him a lot of metal to clear from leather.

In an instant, something ticked off in Red, or was he back to being Tom? Whatever, something flashed vaingloriously before his eyes. He imagined himself killing this “Arizona Ranger” in a fair gunfight-who, after all, could stay up with him?-then making the getaway. He knew that by the twisted currents loose in

American culture, such an act would make him not merely famous but legendary. It would take away the onus of the murders he’d committed or ordered, all of which could be called cowardly.

Facing and slaying an enemy old-style, in the oldest of Old West styles, as captured on a thousand cell phone videos, would make him perversely admired. He was a bastard, but he was a brave bastard, they’d say.

“I warn you,” he called to the Ranger, “these guns are loaded.”

His adversary cracked a dry smile.

“Mine too,” he said. “Never saw no use for an unloaded gun.”

It was quiet. How could it not be? Of all the audiences in the world, this was the one that appreciated the ceremony of the gunfight more than any other and had worshipped its warriors like the old gods. And all were in the garb, some slightly theatricalized, of the 1880s, so as a tableau, it looked as if it belonged captured in the sepia of the best photo Matthew Brady ever took or in Remington’s or Russell’s brushstrokes. Everyone understood the dynamism, the thunder, the flash and pain that was about to be released for real.

The two men began the slow walk toward each other, by now oblivious to crowd and setting. Their boots sloughed dust; their neckerchiefs were tight. One wore red and one wore blue. Texas Red slipped out of the stylish black leather vest he was wearing, in case its tightness proved an impediment. He set his white hat lower on his eyes, to shade the sun.

The stranger wore jeans and a denim shirt; he was a rhapsody in worn blue. His handkerchief was black; his hat was crushed and bent, and you’d have thought it was one of those ridiculous Richard Petty imitation hats that gas stations sold, but of course a man so elegant and brave would never wear such a thing. His gun was in a Galco Texas Ranger rig, heavily figured with floral motifs, on an equally figured belt, which also supported a row of twenty more robin’s-egg-big.44 cartridges. But all present, having seen Red shoot, thought this handsome stranger was about to meet his death.

There was forty feet between them when they came to make their play. No words, no smiles, just dead-faced gunfighter’s harshly focused concentration, eyes slitted, mouths tight and grim, no visible breathing, no visible emotion, and as if on silent agreement they went to leather.

Red was fast and loose and strong, and the truckload of adrenaline in his bloodstream turned his gunhand into a blur as it flew to grip, thumb to hammer, driven by an ideal unspooling in his mind, as if from the myth-pure western that no man had made, the one where the hands flash and the guns jackhammer a bolt of flame and a blast of smoke and it’s the other man who’s spavined to the ground, oozing blood and sorrow. That did not happen.

The Ranger’s hand abandoned time and physics as it seemed to pass into invisibility, and in the next nanosecond, when it returned to the known universe, it had somehow already oriented the old revolver, cocked it, busted cap with spurt of muzzle flame and white cannonade of rocketing gas, and launched a fat.44 on its track across space.

Red had not cleared leather before the bullet fairly ripped, hit, mutilated, and exited. He went down hard, kicking up a puff of dust, which the wind took, just as it took the gunsmoke of the Ranger’s speedier Colt. Red curled as he fell, gun flying away in a twisted angle, the sound of the shot lost to all, so intent were all in the essence of the age-old drama.

The moment was utter antique. Not a single thing spoke of later times that any man or woman or child could see. The white smoke and dust, teased to action by the relentless wind, seemed to lie over all for just a second, glazing and blurring all surfaces, suggesting again that this was ancient times.

But then the applause broke out. Well, who could blame them? And the chants, “Ran-ger, Ran-ger, Ran-ger!”

One might think, how terrible to cheer a mankilling, no matter the circumstances. However, it became instantly clear that Texas Red may have been fairly ripped by the bullet’s progress, but he was not dead by a long shot. Instead the Ranger had brought off that trope of fifties cowboy TV-shooting the gun out of the hand, as Gene and Roy and Hoppy had done countless times, so that the bad guys gripped their sore mitts and shook them as if experiencing something akin to bees in the bat.

Red rolled, screaming for help, and it then became obvious what was different about this particular variation on the theme: the Ranger had not quite shot the gun out of his hand but had shot the hand out from his gun. The bullet had struck him in the wrist bone and deflected downward, knocking the gun this way and three fingers of his right hand that way. The mangled paw now spurted a crimson jet unseen in fifties tube time.

The Ranger slipped his gun back into its holster and walked to the fallen man. Texas Red gripped his destroyed hand as if with finger pressure he could stop the blood flow, but as his eyes came up to his victor, he tried to slither backward, caught in a vise of fear. The man waited until at last eye contact was made.

“I don’t know who you are,” Red said, squinting into a sun that turned his opponent to a black silhouette.

“Oh yes you do. I am the sniper.”

Then he turned and walked clear, hearing someone scream, “Get him a doctor,” but before that was accomplished, the whole nineteenth-century illusion was devastated by an updraft of dust, a sudden density of shadow that announced a helicopter was settling out of the sky, right there in Cold Water. It was the FBI apprehension team, and as the bird settled, its rotors beat up a mighty wind, filling the air with a hurricane of dust, driving folks this way and that. The Arizona Ranger seemed to disappear in the drifting grit just as mysteriously as he had arrived.