The Third Bullet (56 page)

As Marty had promised, the files had more or less imploded, collapsing into themselves like one of those buildings brought down with a minimum of strategically planted explosives so that it seems to disappear into a hole full of rubble. The bound books of firearms sales, required by the ATF since 1938, were casually distributed through the mess. Some of the shipping invoices were filed in boxes, some of which were labeled by years, some of which weren’t; other clumps of invoices lay here and there on the damp cement floor of the corrugated tin structure that from the outside was just another cottage-industry headquarters and manufacturing joint in a seemingly endless complex out by I-95. No one was on-site; Swagger had to pick the keys up at the real estate management company in downtown Rutherford after instructions and permission from corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City, under Marty’s good auspices through the intervention of Tom Browner, whoever he was. Swagger had been smart enough to bring a can of Kroil to lube locks that had grown stiff and unaccustomed to the penetration of keys. Now he crouched on sore knees, trolling in the disaster under bad light, in the acrid odor of metal that corrugated tin gives off.

It unfolded before him, a cavalcade of American high-end sporting rifle and shotgun life. Big-game guns, elegant British shotguns for upland birds, the occasional accidental invoice for a rare, expensive
sort of fishing tackle (fishing tackle had dominated the firm’s eighth floor, a floor above the guns, and on the roof there was an artificial casting pond for the trout-fishing swells to try out their technique). That it was a vanished world meant little to Swagger by this time, though at the early going, he felt a twinge of something when he came across a shipping order for three boxes of Kynoch .470 Nitro Express to an “R. Ruark” of “Honey Badger Farm,” RR 32, Kingston, S.C. Mostly, it was long-forgotten members of the bourgeois moneyed set ordering ammunition, mundane guns for domestic hunting, and the like. Despite the gun room’s fancy clientele and worldwide fame—that was marketing—its bread and butter lay in servicing the nonfamous dentists, lawyers, doctors, auto-dealership owners, and cotter-pin and plastic glass manufacturers of the unphotographed, unsentimentalized American small-town elite, many from the South and the West.

There was no other way to proceed than this straight-ahead plunge through stuff. Chronology, compartmentalization, geography, brand-name, all the retail categories by which a large mass of documents could be organized were pretty much shot. So many had gone through, grabbed their treasure, and left without repacking the boxes, much less resetting them on the shelves, that methodology seemed useless. He’d spent three hours going through the boxes tipped sideways on the floor, to no effect. He’d examined clumps aisle by aisle, trying to find such elemental regulators as year, manufacturer, destination. No effect. It was a maze of random paperwork, abandoned, most of it facedown, goddammit, on the cold concrete floor. He’d moved on to the boxes on the shelves. So far, to no effect. Just to make it more unendurable, the fluorescent light in this sector of the warehouse flickered on and off, making visibility more difficult. Why hadn’t he brought a flashlight? Or better yet, to free up both hands, one of those lights you wore on your head, so he could see clearly what was before him.

It bothered him immensely that outside, four really good FBI
operators lounged, going on coffee and doughnut energy, as his bodyguard team in the crowded parking lot, putting out the message to all observers, Do not fuck around here. Didn’t these highly trained guys have better things to do than guard him and suck down caffeine and calories? Shouldn’t they be busting cribs in lower Manhattan, freeing sex slaves in Chinatown brothels, or serving high-risk warrants on button men on the Lower East Side? Nah. They just lounged in their Cherokee, joking and smoking and talking sports.

Finally, he was finished, six hours and two bruised knees and an oncoming cold later. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. It was like synesthesia all over again. Under better circumstances, he could have brought a team, they could have indexed and sorted as they went along, and when they were finished, they would have bucked up the mess considerably and restored some sense of coherency to the chaos. Not this time, which had represented a once-over-lightly approach, in hopes that something would turn up on the surface. It hadn’t. Time to let the feds get back to busting chops and him to his life on the assassination beat.

It wasn’t the last unit of shelving, but nearly so. Three boxes lay on their sides, placed knee-high on the second-to-last unit. They’d been ripped open, some material removed, some stuffed back in, some left on the floor. He bent and brought his eyes up close to examine the labels on the boxes.

Whoa, mama.

What have we here?

One read:

MANAGER’S CORRESPONDENCE

June 1958–August 1969 (Harris)

He moved the box to the best light, pulled the lid off, and found himself looking at approximately three hundred carbons, stuffed in indiscriminately, clearly having been looted for Hemingwayania
and restored haphazardly. They were roughly chronological, though when a clump had been pulled out, it had been stuffed back in at the easiest point, which was toward the end of the carton. It was so tight, each piece had to be pulled out delicately one at a time.

He glanced at his watch—4:15. Too much time already wasted.

Do it, he ordered himself.

He found it at 5:18.

July 23, 1960

Lon Scott

Scott’s Run

RR 224

Clintonsburg, Va.

Dear Lon,

Hope this finds you in good health. The last time I saw you, you still looked like you could crack the Harvard line for a first down just about any time you wanted. Hope you’re as chipper now.

Anyhow, you’ll be getting three packages from us in the upcoming weeks. Or if not from us, at least under our power of suggestion. You’ve probably heard that New Haven is introducing a new model in a new caliber in the fall. The rifle is called “The Westerner,” and it’s in the new belted .264 Winchester Magnum. The cartridge was developed with a lot of conversation from retail—rare for New Haven, I know!—and has terrific potential. It’s designed as a flat-shooting plains cartridge, perfect antelope or mulie medicine, meant for those long tries over the flat prairies or across the valley. It delivers about 1,680 pounds of muzzle energy at 300 yards, off an estimated drop of only 7 inches (200-yard zero). Muzzle velocity, in the factory load, will be about 3,000 feet per second. We heard from too many hunters who failed to connect at over 250 yards because they underestimated the drop in their .270 or .30-06s and hit nothing but dirt 50 feet in front of the target. Dirt, as you know, makes a pretty poor trophy.

Put a nice Unertl or Bausch & Lomb tube up top, and you’ve got a super hunting machine! To us, at least, it looks like a real winner, and believe me, the industry needs a winner! It fills a definite niche.

You’ll get one of the first .264 Westerners off the production line. I’ve asked them to select a nice piece of wood. Hard to believe anything coming from Big W with figure in the wood, but miracles do happen! Play with it as long as you want. If you want to return it, no problem; if you want to keep it, I’ll get you a wholesale invoice, and you can send a check at your leisure.

That’s the first surprise. The second two are also as per our suggestion, with New Haven’s heavy hand behind the tiller, so to speak. Roy Huntington will be sending you a set of his new .264 Winchester Magnum dies, and Bruce Hodgdon will be sending you a five-pound canister of their H4831, which looks like it should get even more range, velocity, and muzzle energy and less falloff when fully developed.

Naturally, what we’re looking for somewhere down the road is a column in your
Guns & Ammo
“Reloading” column, on finding the full potential in the new offering. I think if you play with loads and the Sierra or Nosler Partition .264 140-grain bullet, you’ll be impressed with what can be done.

By the way, Lon, this is a definite exclusive. We’re not sending similar kits to Warren or Jack. It’s yours and yours alone, because we know that Lon Scott has the market clout to launch a major success, where the others don’t. You can’t get Jack to shut up about his pet .270 anyway!

Sorry to send you off to the railway station for so many pickups, but I think you’ll find it was worth the effort.

Best,

Charlie

Charles Harris

Manager, Gun Department

Abercrombie & Fitch

Madison Avenue

New York, N.Y.

CWH: mlb

“Maybe we ought to switch to Starbucks,” said Nick. “This stuff is beginning to taste like swamp water.”

“I think I saw a snake in mine,” said Bob, putting down his cup of Seattle’s Best. Around them hummed suburban Dallas mall life, all of it at hyper-speed and lubricated by smiles, unction, and beauty in the paneled English Department milieu of the joint, with its fancy frappo, cappo, and whatever-else-cino machines, its pastry cabinets groaning with frilly sugared bombs. Mainly, it was moms in here, with the odd lonely salesguy on break; the servers all looked about twelve.

“Okay,” said Nick. “Let’s get to it. First off, I got a good team into Richard’s while he was having his Friday-night steak. They did the house top to bottom, came up with nothing. These guys can find anything. Plus, I’ve had a wire team on Richard, not every second of every day but enough to get a fair picture. Van parked down the way, different camouflage. Again, goddammit, nothing. No microwave transmissions to satellites, nothing. A little suspicious, if you ask me. He’s too clean.”

“Absence of evidence is not evidence,” Bob said.

“Hmm, where have I heard that before? Okay, that’s from my end. Now tell me about yours.”

Bob didn’t mention synesthesia, Sir Francis Galton, or colored numbers. He didn’t have enough. “I found a letter in New Jersey. It establishes that, yeah, Lon was sent a .264 Win Mag in 1960, first year of production. So the gun in the case could be his. No serial numbers, unfortunately, but it checks out as far as it can.”

“You think it’s legit?”

“That’s my feeling,” said Bob. “I spent another hour there. Obviously, I’m not a scientific document expert. But the paper was the same weight and shade as the others in the file, even accounting for aging. Typewriter was the same font, perfect to the slight darkness in the center of the small ‘e.’ The format was in accordance with other letters from Charlie Harris, including those to Jack O’Connor at
Outdoor Life
and Warren Page at
Field & Stream
. The diction felt right for about 1960. The shipping reference is right; he said ‘trips to the railway station.’ That’s because guns and powder couldn’t be shipped by common carrier in those days, meaning they couldn’t be delivered. You had to go to the Railway Express office at the train station and sign for the packages. And, Charlie Harris
was
the manager of the gun room. I found references to him all through the literature of the time. He sold Hemingway a batch of guns.”

Nick considered. “I don’t like it. All that may be true, but it’s within the reach of professional high-end forgers.”

“Maybe, but because that’s so it doesn’t mean this is forged.”

“Too bad you didn’t bring it with you.”

“I wanted to preserve the box, for comparison purposes. And I thought to go the lab route would take too much time. If and when, we can subpoena for it. I stashed it carefully in that mess.”

“I don’t like it, Bob. If it means you go alone to that estate, out of our swift-response zone, you could be dead and buried before we get choppers in. Help is minutes away when you need it in seconds.”

“I don’t like it either. But it seems to me we have to keep going on this line or cut bait.”

“What about we bust Marty and Richard for attempted fraud and third-degree ’em. As you say, they’re not tough guys; you know they’ll fold. Meanwhile, we give that letter the full nine yards in our doc lab. Marty and Richard roll over, we go to the next link up the chain, and he rolls over. If the letter’s forged, our forgery guys will know who did it, and we round him up and bang his head against the bars. He squeals. That’s how you bring a crime lord down.”

“Yeah, but a crime lord has property, a place in the community, investments, family, all of which make him more or less stuck in place. If Hugh’s alive, he has none of that, that we can find. We have no idea where in the world he is. He can disengage in a second, and he’s clever enough to have designed break-offs in his network so he can disappear from our reach instantly. We pick up Marty and Richard, he’s gone for good. Then next year or the year after, I catch a .338 Lapua in the ear while I’m riding spring fence, and that’s the end of that. We’re close. I know we’re close. Nobody has been this close. I feel him.”

“What are you getting?”

“It has to be Hugh. He’s old, cagey, smart. He’s been in the game a long time. He knows what he’s doing. He’s no psycho; everything is rational, objective-driven. He’s subtle, he’s witty; in a funny way, he’s honorable. We left his kids alone, he’s left my family alone. I don’t know why, but I trust him for that. Like his cousin Lon, he’s a decent man, except for the few seconds when he killed the thirty-fifth president of the United States.”