I, Sniper

The stranger wore jeans and a denim shirt; he was a rhapsody in worn blue. His handkerchief was black; his hat was crushed and bent, and you’d have thought it was one of those ridiculous Richard Petty imitation hats that gas stations sold, but of course a man so elegant and brave would never wear such a thing. His gun was in a Galco Texas Ranger rig, heavily figured with floral motifs, on an equally figured belt, which also supported a row of twenty more robin’s-egg-big.44 cartridges. But all present, having seen Red shoot, thought this handsome stranger was about to meet his death.

There was forty feet between them when they came to make their play. No words, no smiles, just dead-faced gunfighter’s harshly focused concentration, eyes slitted, mouths tight and grim, no visible breathing, no visible emotion, and as if on silent agreement they went to leather.

Red was fast and loose and strong, and the truckload of adrenaline in his bloodstream turned his gunhand into a blur as it flew to grip, thumb to hammer, driven by an ideal unspooling in his mind, as if from the myth-pure western that no man had made, the one where the hands flash and the guns jackhammer a bolt of flame and a blast of smoke and it’s the other man who’s spavined to the ground, oozing blood and sorrow. That did not happen.

The Ranger’s hand abandoned time and physics as it seemed to pass into invisibility, and in the next nanosecond, when it returned to the known universe, it had somehow already oriented the old revolver, cocked it, busted cap with spurt of muzzle flame and white ca

Red had not cleared leather before the bullet fairly ripped, hit, mutilated, and exited. He went down hard, kicking up a puff of dust, which the wind took, just as it took the gunsmoke of the Ranger’s speedier Colt. Red curled as he fell, gun flying away in a twisted angle, the sound of the shot lost to all, so intent were all in the essence of the age-old drama.

The moment was utter antique. Not a single thing spoke of later times that any man or woman or child could see. The white smoke and dust, teased to action by the relentless wind, seemed to lie over all for just a second, glazing and blurring all surfaces, suggesting again that this was ancient times.

But then the applause broke out. Well, who could blame them? And the chants, “Ran-ger, Ran-ger, Ran-ger!”

One might think, how terrible to cheer a mankilling, no matter the circumstances. However, it became instantly clear that Texas Red may have been fairly ripped by the bullet’s progress, but he was not dead by a long shot. Instead the Ranger had brought off that trope of fifties cowboy TV-shooting the gun out of the hand, as Gene and Roy and Hoppy had done countless times, so that the bad guys gripped their sore mitts and shook them as if experiencing something akin to bees in the bat.

Red rolled, screaming for help, and it then became obvious what was different about this particular variation on the theme: the Ranger had not quite shot the gun out of his hand but had shot the hand out from his gun. The bullet had struck him in the wrist bone and deflected downward, knocking the gun this way and three fingers of his right hand that way. The mangled paw now spurted a crimson jet unseen in fifties tube time.

The Ranger slipped his gun back into its holster and walked to the fallen man. Texas Red gripped his destroyed hand as if with finger pressure he could stop the blood flow, but as his eyes came up to his victor, he tried to slither backward, caught in a vise of fear. The man waited until at last eye contact was made.

“I don’t know who you are,” Red said, squinting into a sun that turned his opponent to a black silhouette.

“Oh yes you do. I am the sniper.”

Then he turned and walked clear, hearing someone scream, “Get him a doctor,” but before that was accomplished, the whole nineteenth-century illusion was devastated by an updraft of dust, a sudden density of shadow that a

56

The Constable revelations rocked the nation, as might be imagined, and the story of the trials and the sentencing, the appeals, the retrials, and an account of the whole surrealistic Fellini movie that came in its wake-the television shows, the circus of sensational journalism, blogism, essayism, talking headism, and schadenfreudeism-is best left for elsewhere.

For those involved, however, the trials and interviews and think pieces et al were really signifiers of nothing. It was just the assholes in the world catching up to what the people on the point of the spear had already done in their names. All that media crap wasn’t much for real endings. But there were real endings, possibly too many to choose from.

One came after the first trial and halfway through the second, when in all the ruckus, Nick Memphis found Special Agent Ron Fields sitting in the Nyackett, Massachusetts, courthouse cafeteria, waiting to testify. He had not been able to catch the fellow alone since the day it all went down.

“Hi ya,” he said, slipping in across from the big guy.

“Hi, Nick,” Fields said. “You got my note. Thanks for the commendation. It looks like I will get the sniper program,” Fields said.

“I hope so,” said Nick. “You deserve it.”

“Ah, Nick,” said Fields with his sloppy grin, “I’m just a dumbbell gunfighter and gofer. I’m best suited for Quantico and teaching SWAT. That Starling, she’s the bright one. She’ll be a star.”

“I bet you’re right on that one,” Nick said. “I wrote her up too.”

“Great.”

“But I’m glad you mentioned her. I wanted to ask you something.”

“Sure, Nick. But don’t expect subtlety. I’m the grind-it-up type.”

“You know what they’re saying?”

“Hmm,” said Fields. “Well, I’ve heard some stuff.”

“As I understand the story, it goes something like this. There’s this young special agent who’s pissed at the hosing her boss is getting in the press. And guess what, the fiancé of this young agent happens to work for a certain outfit located in Langley, V-A. He’s in photo intelligence. Anyhow, when this agent’s boss is in trouble and everyone’s calling him a crook, she and boyfriend come to the rescue. Boyfriend uses agency tech to dummy up a photo; this is, of course, after both put their heads together and figure out what a certain great newspaper knows nothing about. But first, they snitch a document out of an unguarded file, retype it on their own processor and replace it. Then they pass a reporter a document typed on the same word processor, and for a while, it looks as if the reporter has got a real scoop on his hands. Well, I’m telling the story all wrong, out of sequence, but you can figure it out, I’ll bet. The famous newspaper goes to press with its picture and gets slaughtered. Just gets massacred. Pretty damn fu

“I’ve heard that story, yeah,” said Fields. “As I said, she’s a smart one. And that reputation should help her in her career. People look at her and say, don’t mess with Starling. It’s a ticket up.”

“It is. And try as I might, I can’t see that a crime has been committed. I mean other than misuse of government resources, but that’s not my bailiwick. If someone chooses to play a prank on a newspaper, what crime has been committed?”