One Perfect Shot pc-18

by Steven F Havill

  I left Deputy Scott Baker at one end of Highland Street with village part-timer J. J. Murton at the other. I promised Baker that he’d have relief, but Murton could sit there all night as far as I was concerned, a job just about perfectly matched to his skill levels.

  While Mears processed film, Bob Torrez hung over Dr. Clark’s shoulder waiting for the rifle slug to be removed, and Deputy Howard Bishop led Evie Truman through her formal deposition, Sheriff Salcido and I cruised the neighborhoods off Hutton that evening, doing what both of us did best.

  Only four houses graced Hutton on the outer fringes of the village, and of the four, only one resident had been home. Julie Sanchez worked the night shift at the Posadas Inn down by the interstate, and she rented the little bungalow on Hutton because it was cheap and far from the roar of interstate truck traffic. She hadn’t even noticed the road grader, hadn’t heard its gutteral diesel, hadn’t heard a gunshot. Loud as either might have been, a radio or television on inside the house would blanket the sound. Our luck didn’t improve, even when we scouted through the modest little homes east of Hutton, or south toward Twelfth Street. That left all the neighborhoods to the south, to Blaine and beyond.

  “You know how much noise a high powered rifle makes?” Salcido asked rhetorically. “And por díos, not a soul hears it.” He shook his head in wonder and popped his seat belt off so he could stretch his burly torso. He preferred to ride, and I didn’t mind being chauffeur. As we drove south on Twelfth, he nodded at the parking lot of the Don Juan de Oñate restaurant.

  “I’ll buy dinner,” he said. “You got to take advantage of that.” The offer wasn’t unusual. One of Eduardo’s favorite management techniques was taking his people out to dinner or lunch. One on one with a deputy was good strategy. “You’re the one I really want to talk to,” was the obvious message. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

  “You’re standing Maria up again?”

  “She’s in Cruces with our oldest daughter. Another baby, you know. I’m a grandfather again.” He shook his head in wonder. “That’s number six for those two.” He looked across at me. “Like rabbits. You think they’d figure out what causes that condition.” He accented each syllable of the word in the most Mexican way and then laughed gently. “Six, now. Bautizos, birthdays, Christmas…Jefito, they’re going to break me.”

  Not many folks shared our enthusiasm for such a late dinner, and the restaurant was nearly deserted. The booth’s bench suspension was comfortably broken down, and we settled in with the mammoth basket of chips and salsa that Arlene Aragon presented.

  “You two are out on the town?” she quipped, and the sheriff wagged an eyebrow at her.

  “What time do you get off?” He tried to sound lecherous but managed instead to sound more like a concerned grandfather.

  “Midnight,” Arlene laughed. “That’s way past your bed time, viejo.” All she needed was a nod from us both to take the order. Years before, it was Eduardo Salcido who had introduced me to the Don Juan’s flagship offering, the Burrito Grande, one of those nonsensically-named dishes that could put you right under the table if not approached carefully. The “big little burro” had been my favorite ever since. It helped me think, and if I hadn’t been such a damn insomniac, it might even have helped me sleep. It had certainly padded my waistline.

  Salcido regarded a chip critically. He nibbled off one corner so he could dip it in the salsa without breaking it. “Me and Tony spent half an hour over there with Marilyn. She’s having a hard time.”

  “I would think so.”

  “She couldn’t give me a single idea about what happened. She said Larry hadn’t argued with anybody…nothing.”

  I didn’t reply, and Salcido added, “They have four grown kids, you know. All over the place. Just like you.”

  “They’ll be able to come home to be with her?”

  “I think so. Her youngest daughter was coming in from Albuquerque tonight.”

  “And not a thing that she could think of, eh? Larry had anything going on in his life that she knew about? You said no arguments, but Christ, everybody has something in their life that’s rubbing ’em the wrong way.”

  Salcido made a face. Maybe the salsa wasn’t hot enough. My forehead was popping out in beads of sweat, but the sheriff seemed immune to the potent chile.

  “She’s not in condition to even think about it right now,” Salcido said. “This thing really came out of left field, Bill. That’s my impression.” The sheriff loved to linger his tongue around those syllables.

  “A random potshot.”

  “Hell of a potshot, jefito. Somebody that would do a thing like this…they’re sick in the head. “ Arlene Aragon reappeared, but not with our dinner. She held spread fingers up to her ear to indicate telephone, and then pointed at me.

  “We’ve been found,” I groaned, and slid out of the booth.

  “Over under the register,” Arlene instructed. She didn’t tell me who it was. Neither the sheriff nor I had told dispatch where we were, one of those liberties you take when you’re the stud duck. But anyone with half a brain would know.

  I picked up the receiver. “Gastner.”

  “Sir, we got something kind of interesting goin’ on.” Bob Torrez’s quiet voice prompted me to shift the phone a little so I could hear him. “When you’re finished up there, were you planning to stop back here for a few minutes?”

  “Here being the office? Yes, I was. The sheriff and I are feeding our faces.”

  “No rush. We’ll be here.”

  “What did you find?”

  “We got the bullet, sir. It penetrated the victim’s skull for about seven inches. Didn’t touch the bone at the back. It’s.308 caliber and used to be a flat-nose 170 grainer. That last is kind of a guess, but that’s what I think it was.”

  “All right. That’s common enough, unfortunately.” The.308 diameter included a vast gamut of rifle cartridges, from the ubiquitous.30–30 on up through all the.308’s, 30–06’s, and the plethora of.30 caliber magnum cartridges. Dozens of the pesky things. Life was never simple.

  “Not like this one, sir. We got a slug that doesn’t show rifling marks. Not a lick. And it was yawing like crazy.”

  “Yawing?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How would that happen?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Old and worn rifling, I suppose?”

  “That was my first thought. But this one has no rifling tracks on it. Like it was fired from a smooth-bore. Like a shotgun.”

  “Really. You know of such a thing?” A blizzard of questions fogged my brain, but a public phone in the restaurant wasn’t the appropriate place to pursue them.

  “Nope. I’m workin’ on the possibilities.”

  “Good enough. Give us a few minutes.”

  It’s possible to gobble down a burrito grande in “a few minutes,” but the results wouldn’t be pretty. The sheriff and I made good use of the time and the calories to mull every possibility we could think of. Nothing made sense.

  Chapter Five

  A chunk of misshapen brass and lead lay under the old stereoscopic microscope. I’d picked up the microscope during a garage sale of surplus junk over at the high school years before. Why the microscope was no longer adequate for ninth graders to spy on the critters in swamp water, I didn’t know, but it was just what we needed at times like this.

  I fiddled with the sloppy adjustment knob until I had a clear picture. “For sure a jacketed rifle bullet.” The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I realized how dumb that sounded. “As opposed to a handgun of some sort.” I looked some more. “And I can see how the forward portion is mushroomed backward.” With a pencil point, I nudged the slug this way and that under the objective. “I can’t see that it was a flat-nosed bullet. But that’s what you’re guessing, right? Tell me why.”

  For a moment Bob Torrez didn’t reply, and I glanced up from the microscope.

  “Just a guess.” He looked uncomf
ortable. “There’s a little bit that isn’t so badly deformed, like it was already yawing a little bit when it hit the glass.”

  “Keyholing, they call it?”

  “Yes, sir. Not a lot, but some. And the bullet does have a cannalure around it, but that don’t mean shit one way or another. Some manufacturers press crimping cannalures into just about every bullet they make, others just cannalure the bullets meant for tube feeders, where the cartridges have to sit nose to tail.”

  “So tell me what we do know,” I said. “What’s this fragment weigh now?”

  “Right at 163 grains.”

  “That’s where you came up with the 170 figure for the original, then. It could have been 165, maybe 168.”

  “Could.”

  I sighed and looked at the nasty little chunk some more. “Through glass that already had plenty of age cracks in it, then through a tough part of the skull and a few inches of soft brain. And then comes to a stop. Interesting.”

  “What we want is something that narrows this down,” Eduardo said. He’d commanded one of the lab stools-also a reject from the high school-and sat with boots on the bottom rung, arms folded over his gut. He’d taken his turn at the microscope, and had only a shrug to offer.

  “The unusual thing is the lack of rifling marks,” Torrez said. “I don’t get it.”

  I turned and gazed at him, waiting to see if he intended to elaborate. If there was something about guns and ballistics that Bobby Torrez didn’t get, I hadn’t run across it-at least until now. I looked through the microscope again. The base of the bullet was undamaged, and offered a brass palette for marks, even the most faint. For a quarter of an inch forward from the base, the brass was clean and unblemished, other than some of the straight line scuffing normally expected when a new bullet was pressed down into the shell casing during the manufacturing process, or blown back out of it when the powder ignited. I saw nothing that I would guess to be a sharp rifling cut-certainly not a mark that we could imagine was a spiral track.

  Just behind the cannalure, that belt-like grove pressed into the slug’s carcass to give the brass casing something to grip, a scuff mark marred the bullet’s brass surface. Forward of that, the rough mushrooming impact damage began, more on one side than the other.

  “How much would smacking through the glass upset the bullet?”

  “Don’t know,” Torrez said after a pause. “If the bullet hit at an angle, we could expect a bit of deflection, slow as this was goin’. If it was startin’ to yaw, there’s just no way to predict. The entrance wound in Zipoli’s skull?” I nodded and waited. “It wasn’t regular by any means. Almost twice as long as it was wide, so that bullet was kicked over to one side pretty good.” He held out his hand, then cocked it sharply at the wrist.

  “How do you know slow?”

  “’Cause if it wasn’t goin’ slow, it’d fragment and be all torn up. High velocity bullets sometimes leave brass all along the wound channel, especially if they hit bone. And if it had been truckin’ right along, it would have blown the back of his skull all over the back window…and then gone on through that, too. We wouldn ‘t be lookin’ at it now.”

  “What I guess I meant was how much would the bullet mushroom going through the glass? How soft is that lead up front?”

  Torrez shrugged slowly. “Some, I guess. We’d have to try it.”

  “Do that,” I said. Eduardo nodded silent agreement. “And we need to work on some theories about why there are no rifling marks.” I turned to the sheriff, who was keeping his own counsel, one index finger hooked over his mouth as if he needed to keep the zipper tight. “What do you think, Eduardo?”

  “You know,” he said slowly, “I saw a guy once.” He stopped as if that explained everything, and both Bob and I waited patiently. “I was elk hunting up north, and there’s this big shooting range up there? Just south of Raton. We were camping there, and did some sighting in with our rifles one morning. There was this guy there trying to shoot some targets, and his rifle brass was just blowing up, you know. He’d shoot, and man…” Eduardo’s head shook in wonder. “I looked at the fired casing, and it was split open all along the neck in about five places. Just blown out. You know why?”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” I said.

  “He had a.300 Weatherby Magnum rifle, you know. A nice gun. And you know what he was shooting in it? He had a box of .270 Weatherby Mag ammo. At a hundred yards, he was getting a group like this.” Eduardo held his arms in a circle a yard across. “That was good enough for him.”

  “An idiot,” I said. But Eduardo wasn’t reminiscing just to waste time. “So you’re saying that maybe a.27 caliber bullet skipping out the barrel of a.30 caliber gun wouldn’t be marked up much by the rifling?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. I mean why would it be?” The sheriff’s deep shrug was eloquent. “We didn’t recover the bullets he was shooting, but he used up a whole box. I can’t think why they would be marked, can you?”

  I looked back at our specimen. “So if this passed out a larger barrel-something larger than.308-it wouldn’t be marked. That’s what we’re saying? I have just one problem with that theory. This bullet,” and I jabbed a finger toward the microscope, “shot a really tight one shot group, Eduardo. Damn tight. Right through the middle of the grader’s windshield, and right through Larry Zipoli. One perfect shot. If that’s what the shooter was aiming at, he sure as hell didn’t have a group the size of a bushel basket.”

  Eduardo nodded judiciously and shrugged. “I’m just saying…that’s one way to explain why no rifling marks.”

  “I’d like to see that,” I said. “Most of the time, I wouldn’t think the wrong ammunition would even chamber in a gun.”

  “That’s true only some of the time,” Bob Torrez said. “But any cartridges that share the same parent case could.” He shrugged. “A.270 is just a necked down.30–06. The ass end of the cartridge case is common to both. A.270 slips right into an ’06.” He almost smiled, hilarity for Bob Torrez. “Not vice versa, though. You can’t put an ’06 into a.270.”

  “I’d like a list,” I said. “And a list of theories. I mean, there’s something here. Rifles have rifling, don’t they. That’s why they’re called rifles. Smoothbores that are actually meant to shoot jacketed rifle bullets could be counted on one hand, right?”

  “I would think.”

  “I want a list,” I repeated.

  The sheriff looked at his watch and grimaced.

  “And there are some sabots bein’ experimented with,” Torrez offered. He pronounced the word sabeau, and the French sounded odd from a guy for whom slang formed the foundation of his vocabulary. “There’s a nylon sabot that covers the bullet and pulls it out the barrel. That would give you a.25 caliber bullet comin’ out of a.30 caliber gun, or a.22 out of a.30, even. I don’t know anybody who makes one for a.30 caliber bullet out of something bigger, unless it’s something the military is workin’ on.”

  “A sabot. That’s high tech, sort of. Uncommon, anyway.” I sighed. “And something to pursue, then,” I said. “Come day light, we need every set of eyes out on Highland. Right now, we have no witnesses, no definitive tracks, no diddly squat.” I stabbed a finger at the specimen under the microscope. “That’s what we have. One God damn bullet.” I looked at Bob Torrez, expecting him to offer up a simple answer that I would believe. He remained silent.

  Chapter Six

  I had a list of things to do a yard long, but a little Post-it note on my desk blotter drew my attention. Marilyn Zipoli would like you to stop by. Dispatcher Marcus Baker, Deputy Scott Baker’s brother, had taken the message at 7:33 p.m. The sheriff had taken care of family notification earlier, and I had seen no point in duplicating his efforts until I had something definite to tell the grieving widow.

  Eduardo, Bob Torrez, and I had dithered and talked the evening away, and now it was pitch dark and 9:05. I would have gone home, but to do what other than drink too much coffee and wish I had a cigarette, I didn’t know.
I dialed Zipoli’s number and waited for seven rings before a voice answered that sounded as if the young lady was standing ten feet from the phone.

  “Zips…this is Rori.” Zips?

  “Rori, this is Undersheriff Bill Gastner. May I talk with your mother for a moment?”

  “Sure. Just a sec, sir. She’s outside talking to somebody.” The phone clattered on a hard surface before I had a chance to say anything else, and I listened to various background noises for a moment. A door slammed, and I heard footsteps and then a scuffling as the receiver was picked up.

  “This is Marilyn.” She sounded out of breath.

  “Marilyn, Bill Gastner. I know it’s late, but I wanted to get back to you.”

  “Late, my heavens, what does the time matter?” she said. “Unless we can turn the damn clock back.”

  I didn’t know Marilyn Zipoli well, just as a pleasant face and name behind the counter at the bank, doing her part to keep the community moving forward. I was able to remember her well enough to recall the brilliant flash of her smile with which she favored each customer, no matter how cranky we might be. And somehow, she didn’t seem the perfect fit for Larry Zipoli-but who’s to predict chemistry. And the Marilyn I knew wouldn’t talk about a “damn” anything.

  “The sheriff was out to see you earlier,” I said. “I apologize for not coming over myself.”

  “Yes, and I know that was hard for him. Tony came too. I appreciated that.” Something interrupted her. It might have been a tissue to the nose, or a heavy sigh that threatened tears, maybe a little niece pulling at her skirt. “Is there any chance that you can break away from what your doing and come over for a few minutes?”

  “Of course. How about right now?”

  “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”