Point Of Impact

Nick held his breath, wondering if the old goat had come up with just the faintest opening.

“What’s going on?” whispered Sally.

“See,” Nick explained, “because there was no ballistic signature on the murder bullet, they couldn’t shoot it, because they didn’t want to have to say in court they failed to get a match. They just passed on the test altogether. I don’t know where this is leading.”

Jacobs held his ground.

“Sir, I’ve examined thousands of rifles in my time, and I examined that one minutely, including taking it completely apart and examining it for function and reliability, and I can say – I can guarantee you – that everything in that rifle is consistent with a weapon of extreme accuracy. There was no point in shooting the rifle, as we had no sample of its rifling to test.”

“Or maybe you did test it and it didn’t match,” said Sam Vincent.

Kelso was on his feet screaming.

“I object,” he yelled. “Counsel is impugning the integrity of the FBI’s ballistic laboratories, an institution with a worldwide reputation for integrity.”

“Or maybe the FBI tampered with the rif – ” Sam started.

“That’ll be quite enough, Mr. Vincent,” said the judge. “Objection sustained. There’s no evidence to suggest tampering.”

“Sir,” said Jacobs, “may I make a statement?”

“Go ahead,” said the judge.

“Sir, I’ve been testifying in cases for over ten years and nobody has ever suggested that our lab would tamper with evidence. On my word of honor, I guarantee that that rifle is exactly, precisely the way we found it, except for disassembly and the barrel swatching process I’ve already described. It has not been altered in any way at all.”

“Seems to me he has you, Mr. Vincent,” said Judge Hughes.

“No further questions, Your Honor,” said the old man, and limped back to his chair.

“Your Honor,” said Kelso, springing up, as Jacobs left the stand. “That finishes the state’s case. I believe I’ve delivered on my promise, Your Honor. Now, the defense insisted on a preliminary, to discredit my evidence, and if you’ll allow me to point it out, he hasn’t scratched it. He hasn’t dented it. Your Honor, isn’t it time to declare this farce over and set a trial date?”

It was the contempt in his voice, as much as the triumph, that made Nick hate him.

“Mr. Vincent?”

“Your Honor.” The old man had bestirred himself. “Your Honor, I confess my best shot didn’t pay off. I’d hoped to prove that the FBI’s failure to test-fire the rifle proved the case couldn’t be made, but I just couldn’t budge that smart young feller over there.”

He had a sad moment; it was solemn in the courtroom.

Sally nudged him.

“What?”

“He’s staring at you.”

“Who?”

“Your friend.”

And so Bob was. And when their eyes met, Bob’s face suddenly lit into a big grin. Then he winked.

“What’s going on?” Sally asked.

“I think Bob the Nailer’s about to blow some smart boys to hell and gone,” Nick whispered, his breath suddenly hard to find in his chest.

“But,” said the old man, “the government has proven completely that this here rifle” – and he moved with surprising swiftness, the palsy gone from his limbs, his gut sucked in, his glasses gone – “this death rifle shot and killed Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez on March first of this year. That’s their whole damn case and damned if it ain’t airtight. A cat couldn’t get out of that damned bag!”

With a swift hand he picked up the rifle from the prosecutor’s table and flicked open the bolt. “Yep,” he said, booming, “Bob took a bullet, a cartridge, just like this one” – and from his pocket he pulled out a gleaming brass cartridge – “just like this Winchester Ranger 168-grain.308 hollowpoint – ”

It suddenly occurred to the judge that the cartridge was live.

“Mr. Vincent, that bullet is not to be inserted in – ”

But Sam slapped the cartridge into the chamber and drove the bolt home. The sudden overwhelming power of the loaded rifle, that utterly transforming alchemy by which a mute piece of equipment, after insertion of the little missile of brass and powder and lead, becomes an almost living presence, filled the courtroom.

Kelso didn’t even bother to object. Two bailiffs quietly put their hands on their revolvers.

“Mr. Vincent,” said the judge, “you now have a loaded weapon in your hand. I formally order you to unload it quickly, and no nonsense about it, or, sir, I will find you in contempt and lock you up for the rest of your life. Bailiff, if Mr. Vincent doesn’t comply – ”

“Your Honor, Your Honor,” said Old Sam. “I have no intention of firing this here murder gun that the FBI and the prosecution have proven Bob Lee Swagger killed the Archbishop Robert Lopez with, no sir.”

He held the rifle aloft, its muzzle skyward.

“No, sir,” he said, “no, sir, I have no intention of firing it.” Then he smiled. “On the other hand,” he said, “I didn’t say nothing about pulling the trigger.”

He pulled the trigger.

In years that followed, Nick would recollect that the loudest shot in the long and violent story of Bob Lee Swagger was also the quietest. But at the time, he had no way of knowing that. Like everybody else in the room, he watched the old man’s finger constrict on the trigger and, anticipating the hugeness of the explosion caused by the crazy old man in the constricted space, he felt his face crack into a flinch.

Click, went the rifle, no louder than a pencil dropping on the floor.

Silence. Then chaos.

“Order, order,” shouted the judge.

“Your Honor,” shouted Kelso, “I object, I don’t know what the point of inserting a dummy cartridge into – ” And then he shut up himself, and shot a look at Howard.

“Your Honor,” said Sam, “it wasn’t no dummy. I could point out the dummies in here, but this cartridge isn’t one of them. You could feed a thousand, a million live cartridges through this rifle. Because it does everything the FBI says it does, except one. It don’t shoot.”

Quickly, he ejected the cartridge to the floor, then pushed the bolt-retaining lever in front of the trigger and released the bolt. He set the rifle down on the prosecution table, and held the bolt up. Then he pressed the bolt against the tabletop to release the spring mechanism and in five expert seconds broke the bolt down to its components, one of which he held aloft.

“The firing pin, Your Honor,” he said. “As the young man pointed out, it’s a titanium firing pin, for faster lock time. What he didn’t point out, because he didn’t notice, was that it ain’t four point five-six-five inches long, as the Remington specs call for. No, sir, it’s four point four-six-five inches long. Ain’t no way it’s long enough to reach the primer. Now if you looked real careful, you’d see that a man who knew all about rifles took this little sucker and cut it in two with a file. Then he removed just one tenth of an inch of metal from the pin shaft. Then he welded it together again, and you’d have to measure it with a set of Jap calipers to tell the difference, but the one thing sure as death is that it ain’t long enough to reach the primer. Just by a hair, but close don’t count. It don’t shoot. It don’t go bang. Now why would he do that? If Bob Lee Swagger were a sly man, you might say that at some time in his past when he was shooting for some people, he noticed that somebody had removed one of the spent casings on his handloads and replaced it with another. It bothered him. A small thing, ten cents’ worth of brass, that’s all. But it bothered him. And so later he took out the firing pin and he performed that surgery and then he put it back, because he suspected something strange was going on in his life. And maybe all these months he’s known he had absolute physical proof that he could not have shot the archbishop and the FBI and the government didn’t know diddly. And maybe he used that time to find out who those men are, and what dark deeds they’d done in the past. Your Honor, you may have noticed that on the first day of deer season last month in Arkansas, there was an astonishing number of accidents. Three men killed on one day? Amazing, what with hunting accidents way down these days on account of blaze orange. But you know, Your Honor, sometimes justice happens in strange ways that men and courts can’t quite understand.