Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

Now her eyes moved back and forth between the papers on her desk that had been faxed to her moments before and the telephone. She had known essentially what the fax was going to say for fifteen minutes before it arrived because the engineer at the ballistics lab in Maryland had called her and left a message on her voice mail. Then he’d followed up with this fax. The results? They could find nothing wrong with the extractor on the Adirondack rifle she had sent them. Not a thing. And they’d put the weapon through batteries of tests, using different brands of ammunition and test-firing the gun multiple times. Always, however, they had been able to extract both live rounds and spent casings from the chamber with ease. Never once did any round stick.

She’d called Spencer at FERAL a few minutes ago, but he was already in a meeting. She considered telling Keenan the news, but that wasn’t quite fair. Spencer was her client. Not FERAL. Spencer should get the results first.

She guessed she should not have been surprised by the findings, given how little faith she had in John Seton. Fortunately, this disappointment did not derail the lawsuit. In some ways it actually meant the stakes were even higher, because now it wasn’t simply one defective rifle, it was the whole Adirondack thirty-ought-six she was taking on: the model. They were going to sue a brand because there was a fundamental defect with the gun: A round remained in the chamber when a person emptied the magazine, and that-they would argue-was inherently dangerous. The company was putting an irresponsibly lethal weapon into the stream of commerce.

Well, it’s a gun, that little voice of reason kept muttering inside her head. Of course it’s lethal. Hello? She thought of the Shakespeare quote one of the malpractice attorneys in the firm had engraved in bronze on a plaque on his wall:

When sorrows come, they come not single spies,

But in battalions.

Still, this was the information she needed to finalize her theory of liability and compose the complaint. Now, at least, she knew precisely what they were going to argue.

THAT AFTERNOON, Keenan pulled back the bolt on the rifle an intern in Paige’s firm had purchased the day before at a sporting goods store on Long Island. It was the exact same model John Seton owned. Keenan was familiarizing himself with the weapon in his office while Paige watched, and a surprisingly articulate mountain man from some small, smoggy city in northern Pennsylvania patiently explained to them why the chamber and the magazine on a bolt action rifle could not be unloaded simultaneously. Dan Grampbell must have been six and a half feet tall, and Keenan would have been shocked if he tipped the scale at an ounce below three hundred pounds. His eyes were green, his mouth-what Keenan could see of it behind the massive beaver beard that swallowed up cheek and neck-was pink, and his hair, all of it, was the sort of orangish red he’d once seen on poppies at the botanical gardens. He was wearing an ill-fitting blue blazer over a worn flannel shirt.

Yet Grampbell also had a degree in criminal science from Penn State, and he spoke with the soft voice of a poet. Moreover, Dan Grampbell knew about guns. He knew a lot about guns. That was why he was here and why he was being paid an hourly rate commensurate with that received by the associates in Paige’s own firm.

“It’s a two-step process for a reason,” Grampbell was saying quietly. “If Adirondack chooses to settle, it will be because in their opinion settling is less expensive than the cost of a trial or enduring the negative publicity that would surround the case.”

“Let me try unloading it for myself one more time,” Keenan said. He was afraid that his clumsiness with the weapon in front of Paige was unmanly, and he was surprised at himself for giving a damn.

“Fine. It’s now fully loaded,” Grampbell observed. “There is a full magazine and a round in the chamber.”

Paige was grinning mischievously, and she looked to him a bit like a schoolgirl. Twice when he’d been trying to load the weapon he’d fumbled the dummy ammunition, one of the cartridges dinging off the dark oak of his precious mission desk.

“You’re on safety. Correct?” Grampbell asked.

He looked to make sure. “Yes.”

“Now, pull back the bolt-that’s right-and, voilà. The round will pop-”

Sure enough, it popped right into his nose, ejecting like a pilot from a doomed fighter jet. He yelped, and Paige’s pixielike chuckles were turned into a single burst of full-throated laughter. He wasn’t smiling, however, and so she put a cap on her mirth and extended her hands to him, open-armed, as if to say, What did you expect? Really, now, what did you expect?

“The bullet certainly popped,” he murmured to Grampbell. He hoped he sounded liked a good sport.

“Next, you are going to push the magazine release by the trigger guard.”

He pressed the small knob and instantly four cartridges cascaded onto the floor, a pair rolling under the chair in which Paige was sitting, two others disappearing near the credenza. He’d forgotten to place his cupped hand beneath the magazine to catch them, even though Grampbell had warned him earlier that he should.

“You’ve now cleared the magazine. See?”

“I see.”

“A good thing to do at this point might be to close the magazine door.”

He looked at the dangling piece of thin metal. “Ah, yes. Remind me… please.”

“Press it upward straight into the gun. That’s all. It’ll click shut.”

He pushed. Sure enough, it closed.

“That wasn’t difficult, was it?” Grampbell asked, a completely rhetorical question. Keenan could tell that in Grampbell’s worldview, loading and unloading a weapon was child’s play. Any fool could do it-except, apparently, fools who were lawyers.

“What remains unclear to me,” Keenan said, “is why the chamber and the magazine cannot be linked. Why must unloading the rifle be this two-step process?”

Grampbell nodded. “The chamber is, essentially, a combustion chamber. It’s designed to withstand the pressures that come with firing the round. Typically, that pressure is in the neighborhood of fifty thousand pounds per square inch. In order to handle that, the chamber can’t have any slots or breaks in the metal surrounding the bullet. The rifle’s bolt-along with the cartridge casing on the bullet-actually completes the seal in the rear of the chamber.”

“And you need a seal… because…” Paige asked.

“Because without one the hot gases needed to propel the bullet down the barrel would escape to the rear, creating what you would have to consider an extremely hazardous situation for the shooter. The gun might even explode. Now, what this means is that the magazine can be nothing more than a reservoir of extra rounds. That’s all. And that’s why you need a two-step process to unload the weapon.” He shook his head, then continued, “In my opinion, that rifle you have there is still a mighty impressive engineering feat. You may not be able to unload the chamber when you unload the magazine, but I think it’s nevertheless pretty remarkable that when you cycle the used cartridge you simultaneously pull a bullet into the chamber from the reservoir. That’s a nifty little accomplishment, don’t you think?”

“And this two-step process is all the result of an… an immutable law of ballistics?” Paige asked. “There’s no way to design around it?”

“Oh, there’s an exception.”

“And that is?” she asked.

“A rifle with a fixed box magazine. Remington, Springfield, Savage-they all have a model like that. Those rifles have no floor plate like the firearm we have here, meaning the bolt must be opened to empty the rounds in the magazine. You literally cycle the cartridges one by one from the reservoir to the chamber. When you’re done, there can’t possibly be any rounds left in the firearm. The downside to this system, of course, is all that cycling. If not properly done, there is always the risk of an accidental discharge.”