“Not for Anto there’s not. All right, I’ll give you a chance. You tell me honest, maybe we won’t go to the waterboard. It’ll just be a quick nine in the ear. That’s a fine bargain, isn’t it? Why should a man like you suffer? You’ve given so much. I know death don’t scare you a bit, you’ll take the bullet like a man eating a piece of toast. But the water in the lungs, the panic it looses in your head, the fear of drowning as deep as any ancient human thought, the joy when the air comes back, and the crushing tragedy when the water comes again. It takes your soul, it takes your dignity, it eats your courage, and it dissolves your nobility. You don’t want to be where it leaves you. Believe me, I’ve seen it. This is how we ran intel in Basra, until the Clara Bartons got on us and ruined our fine game. This is how we became Lord High Death with over a hundred kills in a week. This is how we broke the fucking back of their insurrection and put their leaders facedown in the sand with flies nibbling on the brains all over the wall. I know it, I’ve seen it. Nobody can work the board better than I, and I’ll kill you dead a hundred times and you’ll believe it each time. Ready for a hundred deaths, Bobby Lee Swagger?”
“All right,” said Swagger. “You get an Oscar for the speech. What do you want to know?”
“Who are you working for? What have you told them? What is the state of their intel? What are your callback protocols? How far have you gotten? How far into it are you, and do they believe you or are you here as some kind of prelim, as a way to snatch evidence to convince them? Do they expect a callback by a certain time? Do you have a control in a motel a few miles away? Or is there a team there, a big SWAT thing, ready to jump? What will their next move be?”
“Jesus, you think I’m some kind of FBI undercover, don’t you? You poor fool, you better watch the paranoia. I’m pure freelance on this one. Like you, I’m mercenary. I want the money, the gals in Spain, and the patch, only mine’ll be full of peas, not potatoes.”
Grogan looked at him.
“Do you believe him, Ginger?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Ginger. “Let’s wet him a bit and see how the tune changes.”
“I was asked by the feds to look over their case, because I’m such a smart guy,” said Bob. “I realized whoever done the shooting couldn’t have done it with the scope on Carl’s rifle. I do know someone at the FBI, and I got a chance to look at the evidence. They got me in your school. But I told ’em the bad guys had to be one of your clients and when you gave me the client list-brilliant, someone smarter than you figured it out, right-”
“That was me,” said Ginger.
“Someone around here has to have some brains. Anyhow, they’ve been out wasting time on those names. I knew it was you on the trigger, Anto, when I saw you nail those beachballs. You know how? You hit ’em dead center. That was your mistake, you shot too well.”
“I told you that,” said Ginger.
“Go on,” said Anto. “I’m listening hard.”
“So I realized all the sniper bullshit was camouflage to run a mission on the Strongs. I used a cop connection I had to get into their house and I found evidence that their mood had suddenly gotten real good. They were going to get big money just ahead. It tracked back to the death of a guy named Ozzie Harris. They got something from Ozzie Harris, and as I reasoned and later proved, it gave them leverage over Tom Constable. They thought he was going to move a chunk of dough into their Swiss account and they could live happily ever after in the land of chocolates and ski bunnies. Instead, they got 168ers through the central medulla, courtesy of one Anto Grogan, along with two other poor souls, including the babe Constable once was married to, and her presence emptied tons of irrelevant bullshit into the case so thick you need a pitchfork. I knew that underneath it, under all the crap about movie stars and stand-up comics, all that yellow smoke, there was something, I don’t know what it was, but some little object, maybe a photo or a letter, whatever, that was worth billions to Constable. I thought it had to be here at this ranch, in this house once I saw it. My deal was I’ll crack that place, I’ll recon, I’ll see what I need, for next time. Then I’ll blow and put a team of professionals together. When we come back, we’ll take whatever it was and we’ll leave a yardful of dead Irishmen, payback for Carl and Denny. Then I’ll run the deal with Constable, and because I’m a professional and have been around the block a bit, I won’t end up with my brains on the windshield. My guess was it’s here. So I’m here.”
“Don’t believe him, Anto,” said Ginger. “I smell the constabulary all over him. Them FBI fellas would never have pulled no strings to get him into our tutorial if he weren’t working for them. He’s with them, they’re waiting for a callback, and if he don’t give it to ’em soon, they’ll hit this place and we’ll have a gunfight on our hands, twenty dead garda and the Americans after us till forever turns to cheese.”
“I think Ginger sees through you, Bobby Lee, friend. I don’t for a second believe you’d go for money. Your kind doesn’t need money. Your type gives it all to king and country, no matter who’s king. You’re rotten with honor, that’s you, sniper. You stink of the shit. I always hated your type because the bloody smell of virtue just made you stronger, and the more pain you racked up, the more you loved it.”
“I say, work him hard now,” said Ginger. “Get his callback and get him to use it, and make sure we don’t get the SWAT boys in their little Johnny Ninja outfits tossing them bangers in and trying to be all herolike.”
“That’s good advice,” said feral Raymond. “Anto, Ginger’s got the point. He’ll be tough, but we have to snap him now.”
“Wonder if he’ll go as long as the lieutenant colonel,” said Jimmy, contributing for the first time.
“Good question, Jimbo. Bobby, the lieutenant colonel rode the board for close to three hours. He was a believer, head boy in al-Sadr’s militia. Strong and tough he was, hard inside as he was outside. Lord, the man fought us. Remember, fellas? But in the end, even Lieutenant Colonel Abu Sha-heed broke, and he gave us a coupla caches and we set up upside and dropped them sand niggers for a day and a half before we called in sappers to blow the joints. Got me nineteen in the first hour alone, great sniper shooting it was too.”
Swagger said nothing while the Irishman recalled his day of killing, probably the episode that got him nicknamed Lord High Death.
“All right, sniper,” Anto finally said. “I hate to do this, but I only half believe what you said. I have to know the other half. It’s time for the water.”
38
Constable was precise, organized, immaculate. He left little to chance. He knew what was important: that was his talent. He cut to the core, acted swiftly and decisively, and made endless preparations.
Now the thing was coming to a climax. The forces he had set in motion were brewing and would explode. He had to be at his best, he had to be ready. Two days hence, the Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot, at Cold Water, Colorado, would commence and he would-there was no doubt in his mind-win the Senior Black Powder Duelist Shooter championship.
To that end, he sat at a table in the rear of his gigantic rec-V and tested cartridges. They were.44-40s, for his two Clell Rush-tuned six guns, painstakingly assembled by Custom Cartridges of Roswell, New Mexico, 14.5 grains of Goex FFFg over 250-grain semi-wads from Ten-X. CC was the best in the business, and they’d weighed each and every piece of brass (from Starline), reamed the primer holes, squared the primer pockets, measured the rim thickness, and segregated the two thousand rounds by that thickness into four lots, so that he’d always be shooting cartridges in the same lot together, for continuity of point of impact.
But that wasn’t enough. Constable now sat with the two thousand cartridges and a Wilson.44-40 cartridge gauge-that is, a replica chamber precise to the nanomeasurement-and now he inserted each cartridge into that chamber, making sure that it fit, that it slid in easily, that no rogue burrs or lead smears in any way defiled the circumference of the shells. When he loaded, over the next few days, he’d load fast, and he didn’t want some unseen microscopic chip of metal screwing him up.