They knew. It was a sullen crew, hostile, not furious but disappointed and ready to fight. No smiles, no eye contact, nothing but sluggish body language, whispers with attitude launching them too loudly into colleagues’ ears, a whole “We’re not impressed” vibration throbbing in the room.
“Folks,” said Nick when the shifting and shuffling and whispering had settled down, “as I’ve told all of you, I wanted to get an outsider’s opinion on our findings, and I asked Mr. Swagger here because he’s a former marine sniper himself. I’m sure he’ll admit that he began with the honest bias to come to a different finding, to exonerate a fellow marine, but I knew that if we convinced him, we were doing pretty good. I guess we haven’t. But I also know that he is the most experienced shooter I’ve ever met, an authentically honorable and dependable man, and I believe he has a certain kind of, uh, ‘gift’ for seeing into shooting dynamics. Not that he’s a court-approved firearms expert, but he’s just got some extra gene for seeing things that other people don’t see. So let’s listen to what he has to say. Bob, why don’t you get started?”
“I should add,” said the director, “and excuse me Nick, I don’t mean to take over your task force, but last year as a consultant to Nick in Tennessee, Mr. Swagger performed with heroic distinction in an undercover capacity. He’s earned the right to muss a few feathers around here, so I expect complete professional respect from everybody. I will be very disappointed if this turns into a yelling match.”
“I won’t do no yelling, I promise,” said Bob. “I can tell there’s disappointment here. I’m not here to criticize or to suggest somebody missed something. I don’t want nobody’s career hurt. I don’t want nothing but the truth. You can also tell from the way I mix them verbs and subjects up, I’m not particularly well educated, and I apologize for that also. If I try to sound like I am, I will just sound even dumber, so generally I won’t make no attempt to speak ‘smart,’ like you’d expect. If I lapse into it and my verbs and subjects start agreeing, give me a kick in the butt.”
That brought a laugh, a respite, however brief, in the hostility.
“But it don’t matter how I talk. I’m here to bring experience none of you has, which is as a sniper, a man who’s taken lives in the field and who’s spent too much time thinking about this sort of thing. So let me thank you in advance for your attention, and let me sum up and put cards on the table. Yeah, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong and that Carl Hitchcock didn’t do nothing. He spent the last week of his life, I’m guessing, in a drug-induced coma, and right away you say, ‘How come there’s no drugs in his bloodstream?’ and the reason is, the drug they used was bourbon. There was plenty of that in there. He was an alcoholic and he was pickled forcefully via an arm drip—okay, I don’t know the medicine, maybe it was just pure alcohol—after he was kidnapped. By who? I can’t give you no name. But when I’m done you’ll have a pretty good picture of who the guy is, where he is, and what it’ll take to catch him. So shall we start?”
A few mumbles seemed to acknowledge reluctant assent.
“I begin with the shooting. You noted the shooter was a fellow of some experience. This boy knew what he was doing. Twice he made brain shots through heavy back window auto glass from what looks to be two-hundred-plus yards out. He drilled the actress between the ribs and into her heart. He shot Mitch Greene through the open mouth from a hundred yards out through glass. Carl Hitchcock clearly had the capacity to make those shots. So did his rifle. So did his ammunition. With that rifle and that ammunition and that skill, y’all are thinking, as I did at first, it’s a piece of cake. Cold-bore kill shot. Yes, you could have made the cold-bore kill shot, Nick could have made the kill shot, I could have made the kill shot. But these shots weren’t no cold-bore kill shots. These weren’t bull’s-eyes. These weren’t center-target hits. These, all four of them, were abnormally perfect shots.”
He let that sink in.
“He didn’t hit the target. He didn’t hit the bull’s-eye. He didn’t hit the center of the bull’s-eye. He didn’t hit the X at the center of the bull’s-eye. Four times running, he hit exactly the spot where the two slashes cross to form the X in the center of the bull’s-eye. He hit the exact mathematical center of the target, and you can verify that by checking the locations as figured by the coroners who measured. All four shots are centered right on the goddamned button by measurement.”
Instantly, a hand shot up.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said the New York State Police detective, “but that isn’t what I see at all. What I see is a hole in the ribs to the left of the left breast, a hole in the center of the back of the skull, a hole in the left side of the head two inches above and a little ahead of the left ear, and a hole in the back of the mouth. I give you, maybe, the hole in the center of the back of the head and the mouth shot, possibly, but the other two are way off-center. They’re not bull’s-eyes at all.”
“Good point. However, you’re thinking of the targets as if they’s lying still. You’re thinking of them as two dimensions on a mount and looking for equal measurements top and bottom, right and left. But these was human and they’s in motion. They are dead center, dead bang Fourth of July center, to the body at the angle it was at the time of the shooting. It’s easiest to see on Reilly. Her husband got blasted, right next to her. She turns her head to look at it, pivoting to the left. As she turns longitudinally, her head gets longer. The shooter shoots exactly for the center of the head and at that angle, with the head cranked around forty-five or so degrees to the left, the exact mathematical center is four inches up and one inch in front of the left ear.”
He looked at his notes.
“At a forty-five-degree angle, her head would have been 425 millimeters wide. I called a fellow to run it through the computer. Our asshole put the bullet exactly at 212 millimeters from the extreme furthest point of the skull and 132 millimeters from the crown and 132 millimeters from the jawline. Do you need the figures on Flanders? It’s the same. Dead center side to side and top to bottom, given the angle of the bullet to the target. If he were shooting groups, he would have put those four bullets from varying distances in varying conditions into one hole of about .312 inches. Moreover, the group size, measured from center to center of the four bullet holes, would have been less than one-tenth of an inch. Ain’t no man alive can shoot like that. Only God could.”
He tried to let it sink in but in most cases saw confusion.
“How did he do it?”
He waited for an answer.
“Here’s the funny thing. If you asked him, he wouldn’t know. He wasn’t trying to do it. It was a mistake. If he’d figured it out in advance, he’d have shot less well, just for kills, not for the center of the center. He actually did it by mistake. How?”
No answer.
“The answer is the scope. Don’t you see? Carl had—and the rifle was found with—a Leupold 2.5–10x Mark 4 mil-dot sight, state of the art to the year he had his rifle built, which was 2005. It could hit head, heart, mouth, sure, but it would put its bullets in a random pattern across a couple of inches over three hundred yards. The group is maybe an inch per hundred, two inches for two hundred, three for three, called ‘minute of angle.’ It ain’t refined enough, no way is it refined enough to make shots that accurate into a group less than a quarter of an inch. The killer did it because that’s what the scope let him do.”
“He used a target scope?” somebody asked.
“No sir. The wars have pushed the technology of scopes hard since 2005. There’s military money in it now, because we’re fighting in sniper campaigns, we have to tag people way out there before they can tag us. Our shooter had access to this stuff. Our guy used some new generation software-driven piece of equipment that allows amazing cold-bore first shot accuracy. The manufacturers are Horus, Holland through Leupold, Tubb through Schmidt & Bender, Nightforce, the BORS system from Barrett, and an outfit calling itself iSniper. Whoever did this job took Carl’s scope off, mounted
one of these babies, did the shooting, then replaced the Leupold Mark 4. He sat there in the dark in that truck, he figured the distance, the temperature, the wind, all went into an equation, which he then ran through the software program preinstalled and precalibrated to bullet weight, powder amount, primer influence, and his little baby computer give him a solution. It said something like seven down, four-three to the right. He looked in the scope, and instead of one crosshair like you think you know, it has a kind of Christmas tree of points of aim—reticles, in the trade—descending from the scope center, and he found the one that was seven down and four point three to the right and pressed the trigger. Instant super bull’s-eye. Okay, let me tell you, first thing, Carl was an old guy, and there was no way that technology meant a goddamned thing to him. He couldn’t have begun to have used that thing to make those shots. I doubt he used a cell. I called seven folks who knew him to verify that.”
Of course, silence. He was beyond them. Then Nick said, “But maybe he just made those shots out of luck. I mean there’s no physical reason he couldn’t have had a very good day. Four times in a row. It happens. Nothing evidentiary sustains your presumption. In other words, there’s just no proof except your reading of the bull’s-eyes, your subjective interpretation.”
“No,” said Ron Fields, ever the bull in the porcelain museum, “I have to agree with him. I shot designated marksman on the St. Louis SWAT team for six years. I got very, very good, but I could never ever shoot like that. I could hit anybody, bring ’em down dead in a second, and thank God I never had to, but my shots were all in what he called minute of angle. This guy is shooting second of angle. Tenth of second of angle.”
“Mr. Director?” asked Nick.
“Nick, I’m just listening. Go on, Mr. Swagger, do you have anything else?”
“Well, let’s think about who’d use a sight like this. There’s basically two sniping communities, military and police, with some interchange. But for a fact, most police teams never shoot beyond a hundred yards.”
“That’s right,” said someone. “Our Quantico people put out a report last year that found the average police marksman shot takes place at seventy-seven yards.”
“It’s only the military that needs to take people out way beyond a hundred yards. That’s what they’re doing in the sandbox right now with calibers like .338 Lapua Mag, .300 Winchester Magnum, .408 CheyTac, .416 Barrett, and of course the .50 BMG. They’re dumping bad actors out to a mile, maybe even farther.”
“So he’s military. Carl was military. That seems to prove our point, not yours,” Ron said.
“No sir. Carl started military, Carl was great military, one of the best marines that ever lived, but in the last twenty years, Carl has been putting on seminars for police all over the country.”
“That’s how Chandler found him,” said Nick.
Chandler seemed to be the young woman taking notes; she smiled but didn’t look up.
“So Carl had to learn the ins and outs of your kind of shooting as well as his own. That’s why he didn’t have no .408 CheyTac, ’cause he wasn’t working with young snipers headed out to the sand to pop ragheads at fifteen hundred long ones, he was working with police sergeants who might have to take down a crazy husband who has a knife to his baby’s head. That’s why he stayed with the .308. Y’all go through his logbook and see that he’s been working almost entirely in a police environment for about ten years now. That’s another reason why he wouldn’t know and couldn’t have learned fast enough to master that high-tech, software-driven thing. But there’s another thing. You, sir, you were a police marksman. You were called out, I’m guessing, even if you never pulled down on anyone. You recall lying there in the dark, worrying. What were you worrying about? What was your biggest problem?”
“Well,” Ron started, his eyes going troublesomely vague as he looked back through hazy memory, “as I recall it was . . . well, glass.”
“That’s it,” said Bob. “What’s the situation of a man with a knife at a baby’s throat? What’s the situation of a bank robber with hostages? What’s the situation of a gangbanger who won’t come out? What’s the situation of a kidnapper with a gun to his victim’s head after a car chase? The answer ain’t ‘indoors.’ The answer is ‘behind glass.’ ”
Again, the pause.
“That’s something Carl had to know if he was going to help law enforcement boys with their rifle shooting. That’s something that military snipers pay no attention to. They’re almost always dropping people outdoors. They never have hostage situations. They scan, they locate, they calculate, they drop, and if it’s in town, most of the windows have been blown out, if they was there at all. The guy with the AK or the RPG. The guy with the cell phone, whatever. Glass ain’t in their plans. Sir, how do you shoot through glass?”
Ron nodded. It was as if he was conceding a clever checkmate that he hadn’t seen coming.
“Yeah,” he said, “I get it. To shoot through glass, every police marksman knows, you don’t shoot that Federal 168-grain match hollow point. You shoot a hunting round, a 165-grain Federal Trophy Bear Claw, it’s called. It’s a much stronger bullet structurally, which means it won’t break, shatter, or deviate on glass, particularly the heavy glass in an automobile. But this guy didn’t know that.”
“Carl would have. But this guy didn’t,” said Bob. “But he wasn’t no dummy. He had an uninformed idea on glass and his solution was improvised, as a military sniper would impro out in bad-guy land. His solution was to minimize the angle of deflection by actually moving the gun in the Reilly shooting. He was, what, over two-hundred-odd yards out, the next block over, and he knew that he didn’t want to try and go through the back window of that Volvo at an angle, because there’s no predicting how the bullet would deviate. It might not even penetrate, it might skid off. So he—he had to have help, I’m guessing—he just pushed his sandbags or shooting pedestal eighteen inches to the right so his angle to the glass would be zero degrees. That’s why there was no beveling on the second shot. Both were straight-throughs.”
The room was quiet.
Bob finally said, “A sophisticated team set this up. They watched Carl, they knew Carl’s weaknesses, his strengths, his tendencies. One night, when they had their intelligence set up, they took Carl down, injected him with something strong; he probably never came awake again, as they kept him stewed under a fast alcohol drip for the next week. They had someone who resembled him in some vague way take over his identity, buy the van, rent the rooms, establish his bona fides, drive to the shooting site. Their shooter did the killing, while some people rigged that room in his house. When the ID was made, they hauled poor Carl to that room and blew his brains out. Then they vanished. It was set up so you couldn’t help but think it was Carl. They’s running a game on you and they almost got away with it. Only thing is, their sniper didn’t think rigorously about the hits he was making. Too bad for him.”
“So who are we looking for?” Nick asked.
“Lots of military experience, no civilian experience. Superb technician. He’s got to be a grad of some service sniper school, lots of kills in the war. Thinks he’s pretty damn good.”
“What do you recommend we do now, Mr. Swagger?”
“Just one thing: you want to catch a sniper, there’s only one way. Get another sniper.”
11
In the town of Cold Water, there lived an outlaw by the name of Texas Red. He kicked open the swinging slatted door to the Spotted Dog saloon and slid through as it rode its hinges back and forth. The piano man stopped his tinkling, and cowboys cleared away from the bar. He stood, tense, as the crowd cleared, leaving but three, who seemed not in the least perturbed.
They were the Mendoza brothers, Mexicans. They had greasy mustaches, bandoliers crossed on their chest, guns worn low, gunfighter style.
Red appraised them. He was thin and wiry with a straw mustache. He had hard black eyes. He wore a tall, round-topped Stetson, pale gray, a lot of hat. He wore a f
aded red placket shirt, a pair of suspenders to sustain the weight of his tight wheat-colored jeans, a pair of well-beaten boots with silver, jingly spurs. Across his waist, in a Mexican flap holster, engraved beautifully in a floral motif by the folks in El Paso after the artist-gunman Bob Meldrum, he wore a first-generation Colt Peacemaker in .44-40 with yellowed, ancient ivory grips. It contained five cartridges because he had carefully loaded by pattern so that the hammer of the old revolver, with its fierce prong of firing pin, now rested on an empty cylinder. It was a safety measure. You wouldn’t think at nut-cutting time with the Mendozas a fella would think about gun safety. But Red had.
“Bastards,” said Red under his breath.
The Mendozas said nothing, not because they were tongue-tied but because they were black metal plates.
He heard the buzz of a timer, signifying go!
Texas Red drew, and he was smooth and that meant he was fast, and he cocked as the gun came up, fired from instinct honed on practice, and sent a wad of lead to bang hard off and knock down José Mendoza’s black-plate chest, another to gut the black-plate belly of Frank Mendoza, and—dammit—a third which just missed Jimmy Mendoza in the black plate. Then Texas Red thumbed back the hammer fast—this had taken months to learn—and in the same motion tried to ride the gun up to his eyes and fired a fourth time, hitting Jimmy in the center of the black plate. The black plate fell. Cottony swirls of old-time black powder smoke rolled in the air.
“Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn, goddamn.”
“I think Jimmy might have toasted you, Mr. Constable,” said Clell Rush, the legendary Hollywood gun coach. “I saw you go to sights on the fourth shot. Because you missed the third shot. And the reason you missed the third shot was the gun didn’t set up in your hand correctly on the recoil after the second shot. And the reason that happened is that after each shot, the gun was a little higher in your hand. The first two shots were good, though. But if you go to sights, you’re thinking, and all the time you’re thinking, that black plate is shooting back.”