8
The gun nut’s name was Clay Ford. A tall, too-thin man with silvery eyes who appeared to be in his early forties, he was wearing a cowboy hat inside his house; otherwise, he was dressed like Virgil: T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. He lived three blocks over from Martin, and when he saw Virgil standing on his porch, he said, “I didn’t do it. If I had done it, I’d have done it better.”
“Well, you don’t know that,” Virgil said through the screen door. “’Cause if you didn’t do it, you probably don’t know what he was doing. He shot two people and he did it under the pressure of shooting another human being and then having to get away with it. And he probably did it from four or five hundred yards away. Maybe farther, because nobody heard the shots.”
Ford scratched his chin, and said, “Everybody in town knows that Glen Andorra’s been killed and that you think it goes together with the people shot downtown. Why would he murder Glen and then shoot two people to wound? Why not murder them, too? Won’t make any difference if he’s caught. And if he’s trying for a public relations disaster, murder is better than dinging somebody up.”
Virgil said, “Maybe because he had to kill Glen to get the gun, but he didn’t have to kill the others, so he didn’t?”
“That’s a goddamn generous way of looking at it,” Ford said. “If he’d killed Glen, I don’t think he’d much care about the others, especially if they were out-of-towners. I could be wrong.” He pushed the door open. “You better come in. I’ll show you my guns.”
“You obviously know who I am,” Virgil said, as he followed him inside.
“Everybody in town knows who you are,” Ford said over his shoulder. “Danny Visser put up a story on the town blog and links to some newpaper stories about you. I liked the one where all those school board members were arrested for murder. You ought to arrest more government people, IMHO.” He said the letters as words: “Eye Em Aich Oh.”
Virgil was mildly annoyed that Visser had put up newspaper stories about him but said nothing as he followed Ford through his neatly kept house to what once had been the master bedroom. Ford had covered the windows with slabs of heavy sheet plywood, “to defeat possible burglaries,” he said. “I don’t want to arm any criminals.”
He had a gun workbench against one wall and eight high-end gun safes, which he said were anchored to the house’s concrete slab. He used a magnetic card to open the safes; he had forty guns.
“I divide them into three groups,” he said, pointing at them as he read them off. “My carry guns, all pistols, nine-millimeter or .45. And my rifles: .22, .223, .243, .308. And if that won’t do it, one Barrett .50 cal.”
“Why so many?” Virgil asked.
“There’s a day coming in this country when you’re gonna need a gun to survive,” Ford said. “That’s why I’m living here in Wheatfield. It’ll take the dictator’s men a while to get here, and that’ll give us time to organize.”
He was completely unself-conscious about it. Virgil said, “Okay.”
Ford was just getting warmed up. He waved an arm at the gun safes, and said, “That’s why I have all these different calibers. What do you notice about them?”
Virgil shrugged. “I don’t know . . . Maybe they’re all pretty accurate?”
“Of course they’re that. They’re my guns, and I won’t have an inaccurate gun in the house,” Ford said. “But they’re common, that’s the main thing. Every one of them, except the .50. There’s no more common pistol ammo than nine-millimeter or .45 ACP, except maybe .22, which would be worthless as an anti-personnel round in a SHTF situation.” He pronounced the letters individually again: “Ess Aich Tee Eff.” “The grid goes down, people can’t get food or gasoline, transportation falls apart . . . You won’t fight off the incoming with a .22. The only thing a .22 will be good for is hunting. I got ten thousand rounds, which is a lot of rabbit. Along with thousands of square miles of corn, to eat and feed the animals with, we got a chance of making it. I got fifteen semiauto .223s in there, and I got fifteen thousand rounds of ammo—enough to set up my own platoon, to defend us. I got six .308s for sniper teams, along with the Barrett. Of course, to use them right, we’d have to have time to train. Nobody wants to train. They think I’m goofy.”
Virgil understood “SHTF” to mean a “Shit Hits The Fan” situation.
“Interesting,” he said. He bobbed his head, and said, in his best gun nut voice, “I would have put in a couple of twelve-gauge shotguns. They’re good threat guns when you don’t want to shoot anyone but might have to. They’d also be good for pheasant, in a SHTF case.”
Ford regarded him levelly for five seconds or so, then said, “Now you’re fuckin’ with me. You think I’m goofy, too. I admit, it could turn out that way. New generation—could be all sweetness and light. That’s not the way I see it, though. A rising tide of mean little fascist rats, is what I see.”
Virgil swerved away from the argument: “Who do you think might have done the shooting in town?”
Ford tilted his head back, his eyes going to the ceiling. “I don’t have a candidate right now. If you’d asked me before yesterday who was the best shot in town, I wouldn’t have hesitated: me. But now you bring up some interesting points . . . If he shot them from far enough away that nobody heard the shots, and he wasn’t shooting to kill, then he’s got to be good. On the other hand, I suspect he hadn’t figured out the drop over the distance he was shooting and underestimated it. He hits that first man in the leg, then the woman up higher. Next one will get it in the heart. If that’s what happens, we’ll all know he was using live targets to sight his rifle. Seems like he might be a guy who knows how to hold on target but has only shot some other rifle before, like a little .22, and doesn’t know about ballistics. About the sound thing—nobody hearing the shot—that could mean he’s got a suppressor.”
“He’s maybe using a CZ .223 Varmint that he took from Glen Andorra,” Virgil said. “Did Andorra have a suppressor?”
“Not that I ever saw,” Ford said. “I was out there a lot, too. I even shot that particular gun a couple of times, if it’s the same one the killer is using. It’s decent; if you gave it to me, I’d want to tune it, but it’s decent as is. It wasn’t threaded for a suppressor, or, at least, it wasn’t when I fired it, which was probably a year ago or more. Didn’t have a muzzle brake, either. You need a muzzle brake if you go the quick-attach route for your suppressor. If he bought a suppressor on his own, he had to get a federal permit for it. You could check that.”
Like most hunters, Virgil liked to talk guns from time to time, but he was out of his depth with Ford. “You don’t know anybody who can shoot up to your standard?”
“Not in town. There are some good shots, by any regular standard, guys who can keep it inside a minute of angle, as long as they’ve got the time and are shooting with a support. You can see them every day out at Glen’s. I’ve never seen Wardell Holland shoot, but he was infantry in Afghanistan, or Iraq, so he’s probably an okay shot . . . I kinda asked around about him, and he was in his store, with people talking to him, when the shootings happened, so he’s out. Old Man Martin, he’s a local gunsmith; his eyes are so bad, he couldn’t hit the side of a barn from the inside. Glen was a hunter-level rifle shot, and a better pistol shot, bordering on good, with his .45, but, of course, he’s dead. No, I can’t think of anyone in town who’d be good enough to make those shots from way out on purpose. You gotta consider the possibility that the placement of the shots was accidental.”
“Where were you when those people got shot, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Surprised it took you this long to ask,” Ford said, with a thin grin. He’d taken a .223 black rifle from one of the safes and was handling it, turning it, as easily as a drum major twirling a baton. “I got my own business doing computer maintenance and WiFi installations, and also solar panel sales; I got an associate who does the installation on the solar panels. With that first shooting, I was at the Creighton house over in Fairmont. It’s new construction, big house, they want WiFi in every room and solar on the roof. George and Elizabeth Creighton—they were both there the whole time I was. The second shooting, I was sitting in Elmer’s Tap, off the Interstate, eating a hamburger and watching some guys shoot pool. I can give you names and all.”
Virgil took a card from his pocket, wrote his BCA email address on the back, and said, “I believe you, but this is murder, so I gotta check. Email me the names.”
“I’ll do that soon as you’re out the door,” Ford said.
“What about the Nazis?”
Ford made a farting sound with his mouth. “Those guys are an embarrassment to the whole county. When the SHTF, they’ll probably get eaten first.” He hesitated, then added, “I’ll tell you, though, they got one little woman out there, name of Rose, if she wanted to move in with me . . . I’d say yes in a New York minute. She’s got a sense of humor, and she’s not a bad shot, either. She’s a little wild, but maybe you need somebody like that when the SHTF.”
“Speaking of women, if you read Danny Visser’s blog today, you’ll know that we’re looking for a woman who might have been having a relationship with Glen Andorra,” Virgil said. “Any idea of who that might be?”
“Nope. But I suspected something was going on. I even kidded Glen about it. I was over there once, and there were some dirty dishes on the kitchen table, set for two. I even kinda thought the woman might still be in the house because I could smell something feminine—perfume, or deodorant, something that sure wasn’t Glen. He got kinda flustered, and pushed me right out the door. I’d stopped by to give him a check for my range dues, and he didn’t even want me to take the time to write it out. Said he’d get it later. That was not like Glen. Not a bad guy, but he did like his cash money.”
“No idea who she might have been?”
“No, because—you know what?—she wanted it kept a secret, which made me think she might be married.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“There was no car in the driveway. If she was still there, either her car was in the garage or Glen picked her up somewhere,” Ford said. “Why hide it if she wasn’t married? If she was single, nobody would care. In fact, everybody would have thought Glen getting together with a woman, that’d be great. He’d been divorced for quite a while.”
“Huh.” Virgil thought about that, then grinned at Ford, and asked, “So, you like guns a lot. If you had to give up guns or women, which would you do?”
Ford peered at Virgil, then said, “Fake question. You wouldn’t have to give up women unless they all died off, and that ain’t gonna happen. On the other hand, when the government starts kicking in the repressive measures—and that’s just a matter of time—IMHO, you’re gonna need the guns. I’d say, sure, women are important, but guns are fundamental. You know, our Constitution doesn’t even mention women, but it does mention our right to bear arms.”
“Okay. Well, I’ll be going out there to visit the Nazis,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell Rose you could be interested.”
Ford actually blushed and rubbed his nose, and said, “Well . . .” And a few seconds later, “She’s got dark hair. There are two dark-haired ones out there. She’s the one who doesn’t have swastikas tattooed on her earlobes.”
“One of them has swastikas tattooed on her earlobes?”
“Saw it myself,” Ford said. “The whole bunch of them were down at Skinner and Holland’s.”
Virgil said, “Fuckin’ Nazis.”
“You know what? They don’t know anything about being Nazis. They don’t know anything about history, about Jews and all of that. In fact, they don’t know shit about shit,” Ford said. “What they know is, Nazis are badasses who get on TV. That’s it. They want people to think that they’re badasses and they want to get on TV.”
Virgil said, “Terrific . . . Listen, if you don’t mind, I’m going to come back and talk to you if I need more information about guns. I hunt, but I’m not a gun guy like you are.”
“Happy to do it. That’s one fella we need to get off the streets, and in a hurry. I’m living here because of the food and water supply, because we’re big enough that we’d be a tough nut to crack for armed refugees from the Cities but small enough to be obscure. Can’t even see us from the Interstate,” Ford said. “We do need to start providing our own electrical service, and I’m trying to talk the city into buying some solar panels, but they never had the money. Now, if housing values go up, they might. I’d get the panels at cost; I’d even set the solar field up for them, no charge. But they’re dragging their feet. In the meantime, I’ve already got panels on my roof. You might have noticed.”
“I’ll take a look on my way out,” Virgil said.
Virgil took a look at the solar panels, but they resembled all the other solar panels he’d seen in his life so he didn’t linger more than three seconds. He was five or six blocks from the Vissers’, where he’d left his car, and was walking out toward the street when Ford stepped outside and called to him.
“I thought of something,” Ford said. “As everybody knows, that CZ has a twist rate of one in nine, which is not what you’d want for the best accuracy with a solid boattail bullet like you’d use in the military or with a target. That gun’s made for shooting varmints with light, high-speed bullets. If you’re shooting that big boattail at longer distances, you’d want a faster twist—you’d want a 1:8, or even a 1:6, to stabilize the bullet, especially if there’s any crosswind at all.”
“But how many people know as much about it as you do? I mean, he steals the gun, sees a box that says ‘Bullets,’ they fit the gun, and that’s it. He doesn’t know about boattails and twist rates,” Virgil said. “He’s shooting what Glen Andorra shot.”
Ford considered, then nodded. “I give you that one. But it baffles me. Guns are some of the most common tools in America, and most people don’t know any more about them than point and shoot.”
“They manage to kill their wives and kids at a pretty ferocious rate,” Virgil said.
“That’s unfair, but I won’t argue with you. Maybe we’ll get a beer someday. In the meantime, I’m gonna go by the church and take a look. There are all those trees along Main, he’s gotta be shooting through them or under them . . . It’s an interesting problem, shooting-wise.”
“Do that. I’ll tell Skinner or Holland to go with you so people won’t wonder why the best shot in town is lining up positions at the church,” Virgil said.
Ford nodded again, and said, “I’ll talk to Wardell. And if you see Rose . . . I saw her win a women’s turkey shoot up at Madelia.”
Virgil said, “Got it.”
The Vissers’ place wasn’t far, but a detour over to Skinner & Holland would only take five minutes. Virgil thought about the ice-cream cone that the priest, George Brice, had been eating that morning, realized he was hungry, and decided to stop.
On the way over, he called Sheriff Zimmer and told him he was going to visit the Nazis. “I ought to be there about one o’clock,” Virgil said.
“You know your way around out there?” Zimmer asked.
“More or less.”
“More or less won’t work—they’re back in the sticks,” Zimmer said. “I’ll have a guy out at the Wheatfield interchange on I-90 at one. You can follow him out.”
“Excellent.”
When he got to the store, a heavyset, sixtyish woman who had a strawberry beret perched atop her iron-gray hair was shouting at Skinner and Holland, who were standing behind the cash register. Three embarrassed patrons, including a nun in a black habit, were standing behind her at the counter, holding individual serving sacks of fried crap. As Virgil walked in, one of them wandered off, apparently to hide at the back of the store.
The woman turned away from Skinner and Holland, stormed toward the exit, where Virgil was standing. She snapped, “Out of the way, bum,” and steamed on past. Holland gave her the finger, which she didn’t see.
“What the heck was that?” Virgil asked Skinner.
“Holland’s mom,” Skinner said. “She told all her friends that they could come in and shoplift, and Wardell started asking them if they could pay for the stuff. A sack of Fritos here, a sack of Cheetos there—it adds up.”
“She told them they could shoplift?”
“Not exactly,” Holland said over Skinner’s shoulder. “She told them that her friends could eat free and that it was all right with me. It isn’t. She thinks it’s all right because she loaned us the money to buy the store.”
“Okay. Not saying I agree with her, but I can see her thinking,” Virgil said. “She does you a favor, you do her a favor.”
“She got us for nine percent interest,” Skinner said.
“Nine percent. So, basically, fuck her,” Holland said. His eyes flicked over to the nun. “Excuse the language, Sister.”
The nun said, “I can forgive the language. I’m not sure I can forgive your making an obscene gesture at your mother.”
“Ya gotta know her,” Holland said. “If you knew her, you’d give her the finger, too. Let me get those Fritos for you.”
As the nun’s Fritos were being rung up, Virgil asked, “If I buy a chicken potpie, can I use your microwave to heat it up?”
“Sure, go ahead,” Skinner said.
The nun, looking at her Fritos, said, “You’re lucky.”
Virgil got the chicken potpie from the freezer, paid for it, went in the back room, popped it in the microwave, and was waiting for it to heat up, when Holland came in. “Plastic forks and spoons in the drawer under the sink. You figure anything out?”
“Not much, except that your mom’s cafe sells sugar water as syrup.”
“She puts sugar in it now?”
“Okay, I couldn’t go to court and swear to it.” Virgil told him that Ford might drop by and ask for an escort down to the church, and Holland said he’d do it or get Skinner on the case.
“What’s next?” Holland asked.
“Nazis,” Virgil said.