“Is this Mo’s?” I glanced down the table of contents. “‘Liberty Valance,’ ‘High Noon’…this is all good stuff.”
Arnett’s laugh was immediate and disgusted. “Hell no. If you can understand the words, it ain’t his. Borrow it if you want.” I put the CD back, making a mental note that such wonderful things existed and that I should own a copy. Arnett reached up to the top of a door frame at the far end of the room and found a key-one of those magical hiding places that no one could possibly discover-and unlocked both knob and deadbolt.
When he snapped on the light, I saw a neat room about a dozen feet square, with a large safe in one corner. The safe was concreted in place, sunken up to its ankles, not about to be hauled away by some ambitious burglar. It must have taken Mark Arnett and a crew of friends a lot of sweat and several cases of beer to install the unit.
Twisting at the waist, I took the opportunity to scan the room, fascinated. Arnett’s inventory of ammunition reloading components was neatly organized on shelves above the work bench, and revealed a significant investment in this hobby. A series of reloading presses were bolted to a three-inch thick laminated table top, and on the opposite side of the room, three steel wall cabinets were mounted at a convenient height.
I bent slightly and examined a wooden loading block on the bench that held a hundred cartridge cases, little pudgy bodies that necked down sharply to a small caliber bullet. Of the hundred cartridges, thirty were finished. Bob Torrez glanced at them and knew exactly what he was looking at. I looked at the ammo, not recognizing a damn thing.
“I have a bench rest match next week,” Arnett explained. “Up in Ratón.” He saw the puzzlement on my face. “Those are six millimeter PPC’s. That ain’t what you got from Zipoli.” He reached past me. “This is what you want to see.” The unopened red box of Mountain States bullets that he slipped off the shelf featured a fifty-six dollar price tag from George Payton’s shop. He split the tape and opened the box, setting it down on the counter. I lifted the slip of paper that covered the bullets and regarded the shiny array of brass-jacketed slugs, each with a crisp lead tip. “Just like you got there, sheriff. 170-grain flat point, 308 caliber.”
I picked one out of the box, fumbling, then caught it before the slippery little thing skittered across the counter.
“Moly coated,” Arnett explained. “Fancy stuff.”
I nestled the brand new bullet on the plastic bag that contained the recovered slug. A microscope might disagree, but to my eye they were identical-or had been before glass, bone and brain ruined the one’s aerodynamic shape.
“Three Ten, PCS on channel three.” The damn radio was so loud it startled me. I hauled it off my belt.
“Three ten.”
“Deputy Reyes has an urgent phone call. Ten-nineteen.”
I glanced across at the young lady and saw the excitement in her eyes. This wasn’t the time or place to ask how many other roads she was planning to investigate all by herself, the ink of her contract barely dry on the dotted line.
“Ten four. It’ll be a few minutes.”
I heard a jingle of keys, and turned in time to see Deputy Torrez extending his hand toward Estelle. “Take my unit,” he said. I nodded agreement. Maybe she understood my expression as permission, but in fact it was amusement at the image of this slip of a girl behind the wheel of Torrez’s rusted, battered heap. She left the basement.
“You thought some about the gun involved in this shit?” Arnett watched Estelle’s backside as she ascended the stairs, but his question was clearly directed at Deputy Torrez.
“Some.” The deputy’s voice wasn’t much more than a whisper, and I guessed that his reticence was an issue of rank. We hadn’t had time to discuss who was going to say what to potential witnesses, so his natural inclination was to let me spill as many beans as I saw fit.
“You got the shell casing?” Arnett pressed.
I didn’t hedge my answer. “No, we don’t have it. But I can’t see why the rifle would be anything other than something with a tubular magazine. Winchester, Marlin…some lever action like that? I mean, what would be the point of using flat-nosed bullets like these,” and I patted the red box of Mountain States slugs, “in something other than a gun with a tubular magazine?”
“Or in a smooth bore. No point. No point all.” Mark’s reply was immediate and emphatic. “That’s the weakness for lever action rifles, sheriff. I’m sure Bobby told you all about that. ‘Cause the cartridges sit nose to tail in the magazine tube, the tips of the bullet need to be flat so they don’t strike the primer of the bullet ahead during recoil.”
“That could ruin your whole day.”
“Damn straight. But that flat nose also means the long-range ballistics aren’t worth a shit-like pushin’ a brick through the air.”
“So we’re left with a major conundrum,” I said. Mark Arnett didn’t know about Bob Torrez’s extensive session out in the gravel pit, or the conclusions we had already reached. “Why no rifling marks? How does that happen?”
“Beats the shit out of me.” He turned to the safe, punched in numbers and twisted the handle. The door opened to reveal a neat row of a dozen long guns, with a half dozen handguns hanging by their trigger guards from rubber-jacketed hooks.
He selected a rifle and hefted it out of the safe. “My dad bought this at a Sears store in Cruces in 1939.” He jacked the lever open and peered into the empty chamber, then held the rifle out to me. “First rifle he ever bought.”
“A Winchester,” I said.
“Just a plain old Model ’94,” he said. “There’s millions of ’em on the planet, but this one means a lot to me.”
Holding the rifle gingerly by the butt plate and the barrel just shy of the muzzle, I turned the Winchester to read the caliber stamped on the barrel just forward of the receiver. “.30–30,” I said. Arnett snapped on a bore light and held the curved tip of the little flashlight into the rifle’s open chamber.
I angled the rifle so that I could peer down the bore. The sharply-cut spiral grooves of rifling winked in the bright light. They’d slice nice crisp tracks in any bullet headed outbound. “Sweet,” I said, the old gunnery sergeant genes tweaked by seeing a nice clean weapon. Shifting my grip on the rifle, I took the bore light from him and turned it this way and that, examining the bore more carefully. “Not a speck, soldier. Outstanding.”
“That Winchester has won a bunch of matches for me,” Arnett said. “Sixty years old, and look at that rifling-still crisp and sharp.”
I stood silently, holding the rifle, enjoying its classic lines. Every movie goer who ever enjoyed a western had seen some version of this gun. After a moment, I eased the lever closed, pulled the trigger and lowered the hammer with my thumb. I wasn’t looking closely at the rifle, though. My gaze was locked on the open safe behind Arnett. The row of rifles, all good soldiers standing in line, included a couple of semiautomatics, and at least four bolt-actions. Four other lever actions, three of them short enough to be carbines, rounded out the row.
“The other levers?” I asked.
Before answering, Arnett accepted the.30–30 Winchester and put it back in the rack. He put a finger on the muzzle of one rifle and tipped it forward a little, not offering it to me. “Marlin.45–70. I bought this big old bad boy for an elk hunt up north in Montana.” Shifting his finger to the muzzle of what was obviously another Winchester, he explained, “This one is a later model ’94 carbine in.32 Winchester Special. I use it during the long range portion of the three-gun matches. That and this little jewel for the twenty-two event.” He tapped the muzzle of a slender lever action.22 caliber rifle, then moved on to a fancy little number that showed a lot of brass and an octagon barrel. “I picked this up just this summer.” He hefted it out of the safe, but by then my attention was elsewhere. I knew the rifle that he held was a more-or-less repro of a ’66 Winchester, a gun that wouldn’t come close to accepting the cartridge size we were interested in.
He held the re
plica long enough that he could see I wasn’t much interested. “What?” he prompted.
“Tell me about the.32,” I said.
“Yeah, so?” He slid the replica back into place, and reached for the.32 Special, picking it out of the safe rack with a one-handed grip on the fore-end wood. “A late one. 1959,” he offered. “It’s a good solid gun. George Payton had that in his shop, and I couldn’t pass it up.”
“Ah, George,” I said. My fingers were tingling.
“He’s got another one right now,” Arnett said. “Priced out of my league, but he’s got it. Made before World War II.”
I didn’t mention that the specimen from Georgie Payton’s inventory had been in Deputy Torrez’s possession out at the gravel pit, blasting the wrong sized bullets down range. At the moment, we were far inside without a warrant, and Mark Arnett had been the proud owner, enjoying showing some friends his collection. That might change in a heartbeat. But what the hell. I drew the slender ballpoint pen out of my pocket, reached out and slid it down the barrel of the.32.
“Mind?” I said, and again, with one hand on the butt plate and the other using the pen as a handle, I hefted the rifle, not adding my finger prints to the rifle’s collection. Torrez was on the same page. He snapped on a pair of surgical gloves, and that earned a frown from Arnett.
“I got the lever,” the deputy said to me, and as I held the rifle, he opened the action.
“Shit,” Mark Arnett said, and I could imagine how he felt. We weren’t old friends any longer, enjoying a collection. If he was smart, he’d stop the whole show now and tell us not to let the door hit us in the ass on the way out. If he was smart, he’d tell us to fetch a warrant and in the next breath, he’d call his attorney. But he knew us, and I could flatter myself that he trusted us. So he did none of those things. “You want the bore light?”
I nodded. Arnett held it in the action. With Torrez supporting the rifle with his gloved hands, I removed my pen from the bore and peered inside. For a long time, that crisp, bright bore held my attention. When a cartridge is fired in a rifle, it’s a contained symphony. About forty grains of gun powder ignites in this particular version and burns in a microsecond, creating an incomprehensibly huge cloud of brilliantly hot gasses. Contained in a brass shell casing that is in turn contained in the chrome steel chamber of the rifle, the erupting gas seeks exit. By moving the projectile, the ‘plug’, forward, there’s relief, and the whole mass of gasses propels the bullet down the tube and out the muzzle, on the way to the target…in this case, Larry Zipoli’s forehead.
“Do you always clean your firearms after a session?”
“Absolutely. Sometimes several times during a match.”
“Always?”
“What’s your point, sheriff?”
“I think you can probably guess, Mark.” He knew-far better than I-that even a single round, a single symphony of burning powder and brass projectile hustling down the barrel, would leave its mark on the bright steel. Turning the bore light, I could see the haze of powder residue. I could see a fleck or two of unburned powder just forward of the chamber. Closing my eyes, I bent my head and inhaled slowly and deeply through my nose. Even as a mending smoker days removed from my last cigarette, I could smell the sweet aroma of burned powder.
Chapter Thirty-two
“That rifle was thoroughly cleaned after my last match,” Arnett said, but he sounded distant.
“When was that?”
He glanced across the room at the large wall calendar over the bench. “July eighteenth.”
I tipped the gun toward him. “That smell fresh to you?” I pushed the rifle away when he reached for it. “No touch. Just smell.”
He did so, and stepped back. “It’s been fired.” He reached around to put the bore light in place and examined the bore for himself.
“You recall doing that? Firing it a few times? Maybe to try out a new load?”
“No.” He hesitated for a moment. “I’ve been shooting the same load in that rifle for years. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I gotta tell you, I don’t like the way this is goin’. You’re telling me that somebody used this rifle to shoot Larry Zipoli?”
“I’m telling you that I have questions, Mark. We all have questions. Look, what do you think would happen if you fired a.30–30 round in this rifle?”
I decided at that moment, watching Mark Arnett’s face, that he was a pretty sharp fellow, even though flooded with emotions he didn’t know how to deal with. My question out of left field drew him up short, and his eyes narrowed. It was obvious to me that he wasn’t just pondering an interesting question-he was putting two and two together now. I held up the plastic evidence bag containing the fired slug. “What do you think?”
“I think it wouldn’t shoot for shit,” he said flatly.
“Might not even leave rifling marks on the bullet, would it.”
“There’s about fifteen thou difference in bore diameter,” Arnett said. “So no. The rifling wouldn’t have much to grab on to.” He opened the box of new.30–30 slugs, selected one, and motioned for Torrez to change his grip on the gun. I took the pen out of the muzzle, and he dropped the shiny new bullet down the bore of the.32. With a little clink at the end as it hit the bolt face, it dropped through slick as can be.
“And the bullet’s most likely going to keyhole, besides,” Arnett added.
The room fell silent. Arnett looked as if he wanted to say something, then thought better of it. Maybe he was mulling the warrant/attorney suggestion.
“So now you know where we’re at,” I said. “Are you going to let us take this rifle for a little while, or do you want us to get a warrant?”
“Shit, take it,” he said without hesitation. He reached into the corner and hefted a plastic rifle case. “Do what you got to do. You got a shell casing for comparison? I mean, what good, otherwise?” I finished putting the Winchester in the case without upholstering the smooth surface with my fingerprints.
I would be quickly paddling out of my depth if I tried to answer his questions, and I nodded at Bob Torrez. Anything I said would be bullshit, and Mark Arnett would know it. A shrewd guy himself, Deputy Torrez could figure out for himself how much we wanted to reveal.
“There’ll be burned powder residue imbedded in the base of the bullet.” The deputy’s voice was almost a whisper. “That can be chemically matched to the residue in the rifle’s chamber.”
“Horseshit,” Arnett scowled.
“When you crimp the cartridge casing around the brass bullet,” Torrez added, “there are characteristic scuff marks…nothing like rifling cuts, but microscopic marks that we can compare.”
“Do you think this is what happened with all this shit? A.30–30 fired from a.32?”
Torrez nodded. “I tried it.”
Arnett gazed at the young man in disbelief. “You got to be shittin’ me.”
“Nope.”
“Why would anybody do that?”
“Don’t know, Mark.”
“And if you think Mo is involved somehow, you’ve been smokin’ that funny tobacco,” Arnett said.
“We didn’t say that he was involved, Mark,” I said.
“You don’t got to. Look, the last time that rifle was out of this safe…the last time…was when I shot it in a match. You think any other way, it’s bullshit. Look.”
He opened one of the cabinets above the bench. “Look. Here’s a box of.32’s,” he said, and pulled out a large plastic ammo box that hit the counter with an authoritative thud. He fumbled the latch and opened it, revealing a hundred bright cartridges, nose down, the fresh primers facing us. “I got four of these boxes. You want to check all four hundred rounds?”
“We might.”
“Well, then,” and he hauled all the storage boxes out. When he was finished, he said, “Satisfied? And I got five boxes of thirty-thirty.” He hauled one out and opened it. “This one ain’t full, but the others are.” Sure enough, there were forty-nine loaded cartridges, the
ir headstamps bright, announcing the caliber and the manufacturer. In additon, there were thirty-seven fired rounds, with fourteen unoccupied slots. The empties were inserted in the box mouth up, the powder residue obvious around the necks and case mouth.
With bifocals, my vision was pretty good, but not as good as Bob Torrez’s. He could see that the mouth of one fired case was larger than it should be. Arnett, intimately familiar with the reloading process, familiar with measurements and quality control, familiar with what it took to win shooting matches, moved faster than the deputy…perhaps because Mark wasn’t thinking about latent finger prints. Before we could react, he snatched the last empty round out of the box.
He read the headstamp, or tried to. His eyes were blurring. Even I could see the tears forming at the corners-rage, grief, frustration, all of the above. “Ah, come on,” he whispered, and shook his head. He clenched his eyes hard, and the veins on his neck bulged. With a hard snap, he hurled the empty shell casing across the bench. It struck the wall and skittered into a corner.
Without another word, he turned and headed for the door. This time, Bob Torrez was faster. He blocked the passage, but it didn’t appear that Mark had a clear idea where he wanted to go. He turned half a circle and pounded the table with his fist.
“Mark, use some judgment,” I said.
“You won’t even need to talk with that little fat bastard when I finish with him,” he said between clenched teeth. His vitriol took me by surprise.
“Not going to happen, Mark,” I said. “This isn’t about taking the belt to his butt and then grounding the kid for a couple weeks. The boy is scared out of his mind and on the run. That’s what it looks like to me. If he pulled that trigger on Larry Zipoli, then you’re going to need to help us, Mark.”
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