The Third Bullet - Страница 77

The vast room of ruin and confusion afforded one pleasure to Swagger, and that was escape from the enigma that was synesthesia, which he had learned was a freakish affliction-ability? gift? curse? — in the brain by which cues mix and produce something called “responses in differing modalities.” Most commonly, it meant that a letter or a number, for some odd reason, appeared not as it was objectively but in a peculiar color. So to Niles Gardner, the number 9 was red, the number 4 was blue, the number 6 was green. If he saw a headline in a newspaper, “Most pro careers last 9 years, study finds,” he would see the numeral in the color his mind told him was there, not the smudgy black of newsrag ink.

Swagger had made one further connection, but not to Hugh; it went down in the chain of linkages, not up, and anyway, what the fuck did this have to do with anything? No idea. Not even a whisper. It seemed another dead end, and the discomfort of it, like an undigested clot of food in his stomach, created great anxiety.

So the files, in their chaos, represented relief from that anguish. They were real, occupied space, could be manipulated, and were on a medium with which he was familiar, that is, paper. He happily confronted them.

Many other researchers had already pillaged the room, notably, Hemingway and Roosevelt biographers. That perhaps was why Bob found no documents for the great writer or president: all filched, sitting in files in Princeton or the University of Illinois or someplace. There were few pickings for other great men, though Bob did find an invoice for the.38 Colt Detective Special that Charles Lindbergh carried through every day of the Bruno Hauptmann trial. But that was a random, rare find.

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 amp; 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.