Стивен Хантер - G-Man

But Bob hadn’t practiced one-handed shooting in years, as it had all but vanished from the earth, and he knew if that was his theme today, he’d get nothing but disappointment. Instead, he bladed himself at forty-five degrees to the far target and commenced locking down, meaning right grip on pistol, locked down hard; left hand wrapped around right hand, locked down hard; right elbow, locked down hard; straight back; left arm, pulling right hand, locked back hard. The point was to go robotic, but when he found the sight, again he marveled at the skill of the first-generation 1911 shooters, for it was only a pinprick, and the embracing rear sights, whose ears were supposed to buttress that pinprick, were miniature too. But he got the front aligned in the rear, as narrow a margin as could be imagined, felt his trigger-finger pad lock flat on the curvature of the trigger, and slowly eased back.

When the pistol fired, it was a surprise break, coming sooner than he anticipated, kicking harder, administering a shot of pain to the webbing between his gripping thumb and index finger because he’d held way up high, as modern technique demanded when there was no oversize safety grip to cushion the shock, so the pistol discharged its energy right smack into the tender spot.

He looked, could see no sign of a hit, thought, Damn, I missed the whole thing, and went through the drill six more times, holding to the same six-o’clock position on the target. There wasn’t much smoke, but in the little room only eight lanes wide, it collected and drifted back, and would have brought a lifetime of memories to him — hard places, lost men, desperate nights, fear everywhere — if he’d let it. He didn’t.

Glancing toward the target, he saw he’d missed clean.

Out of practice, he thought. So out of practice.

But when he reeled the target in, he was surprised to find a cluster of four in the black, just bisecting the 10 ring, and three more punctures close at hand, the farthest out splitting the 6 and 4 rings.

He reexamined the shooting experience, trying to find nuance against the harshness of the recoil and the pain it had injected into the webbing in his hand. He realized then how smooth the trigger pull had been, smooth without grit or little micropatches of resistance, not a hair trigger but certainly a useful one. Peering intently at the weapon, he noted as well that its front sight was slightly bent to the right by the expert application of a padded hammer, a testament to this particular weapon’s insistence on throwing shots to the left, and its caretaker — his grandfather or some other gentleman? — had made a hairsbreadth adjustment to stay in the black.

He quickly ran through the remaining forty-three rounds, and found that at twenty-five feet, for example, he could stay within an inch without hardly trying, even after adjusting his grip so that flesh wasn’t jabbed by the fulcrum of the safety grip. He shook it, heard no rattles, signifying that the gun was tighter by far than most government-issue .45s, which were built loose so that even clogged up with Flanders’s mud, Iwo’s ash, or Da Nang’s grit, they’d function long, hard, and hot.

When he was done and reentered the shop through the double doors, the range officer said, “Say, I watched you, I’d say you done a peck of shooting before. Most people here can’t hold in the black at twenty-five yards. That’s why they shoot at zombies.”

“I shot a lot of practical many years ago,” he said. “Is there any chance you could take it to your gun-cleaning station and break it down so we’d get a good look at the parts? I need to get a sense of what’s been done to it.”

“Sure, be damned interesting,” said the officer, who was turning out to be one of those immediately likable men who was probably half the reason this place stayed open in a bad economy.

They went to the bench that was mounted against a wall where rental guns were cleaned when too much crud jammed them up. The range officer took the pistol and broke it down expertly.

“You’ve done that a few times, I’d say,” said Bob.

“Army. ’Nam. ’Sixty-nine, ’seventy. Did twenty years, got out with eight stripes.”

Bob laughed.

“You beat me, Top,” the universal term for a first sergeant, “I only managed six before they kicked me out.”

“Army?”

“Marines. ’Nam too. Pretty interesting.”

“Wasn’t it, though?” said the sergeant. “Anyhow, let’s see what we got here.”

The two men took turns closely examining the thirty-seven parts that Colt Commercial Model, serial number 157345C, disassembled to.

“Clearly,” said the Top, “someone who knew what he was doing did a once-over. Look how all the sharp edges of the trigger surfaces have been filed with a very soft hand, just to break the ninety-degree angles a bit, and smooth up the trigger, without cutting out any loops of the spring.”

Bob squinted, eyes not what they once were.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I also notice he took a ball-peen hammer to the slide rails, very carefully tattooed them, very skillfully widened them just a hair, so they hold the slide much more tightly. Then he polished both surfaces, both the top of the rail and the groove in the slide. Nice tight, smooth fit, sure helps accuracy.”

“I see that,” said Bob, who’d noticed — and felt — the same.

“He’s also polished the feed ramp and broken the ninety-degree angle there where it fits against the frame. The cartridges will never hang up, just extra reliability insurance. With hardball, these things hardly ever jam, but that wasn’t good enough for him, he had to change ‘hardly ever’ to ‘never, ever.’”

“Good catch,” said Bob. “I missed that.”

“Basically, he’s given a sloppy combat gun all kinds of accuracy and reliability enhancements. He knew what he was doing.”

“Finally,” said Bob, pointing to a subtle linear variation in the pistol’s black sheen that ran around the front of the grip just under the trigger guard, “you got any idea what this is?”

“Never seen that before,” said the Top. “Looked at a lot of .45s, that one’s new to me.”

“You didn’t look in the right place, which would be the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco. The Rangers used to tie a rawhide strip around the grip to hold the grip safety in — that is, off. In case they had to go to gun fast, and I guess a lot of them did, they didn’t want to miss the grip safety in their hurry and come up with a click instead of a bang. So this one had rawhide tying down the grip safety, and over the months it rubbed a strip of finish off. That’s what you’re seeing. Some of ’em were so sure they’d have to go to gun quick-time, they milled off the trigger guard. Have to be plenty serious kind of situation before I’d do anything like that.”

“If I tried to holster a 1911 with no trigger guard and the grip safety tied down, I know I’d blow my own knee off by the third day.”

Bob laughed.

“But seriously,” said the Top, “if you could prove Texas Ranger provenance, you’d double, maybe triple, the value for certain collectors. Lots of Texas Ranger fans out there.”

“I bet the owner of this gun knew Texas Rangers, had seen how they operated, and picked up a few tricks from them. I don’t know that he was a Ranger himself.”

“But if he was going to some kind of war, he’d give himself every advantage,” said the Top. “It figures.”

“This has been a great help,” Bob said. “Can I pay you for your expertise?”

“If you did ’Nam, brother, no payment at all. You already paid up in full.”

At the hotel, he found a FedEx envelope on the floor of his room, slipped under the door, and he knew exactly what it was. He called his wife.