The Threateners Read Free Page A

nowadays.” I laughed. “Last summer around the Fourth of July I drove up that way to visit some friends; it’s only forty miles. Coming into town I passed a big sign at the city limits: FIREWORKS PROHIBITED.The home of the atom bomb, for Christ’s sake, and they won’t let the kids shoot off a few whiz-bangs on Independence Day!” Apparently he didn’t find it amusing; I heard no laughter on the line. Well, his sense of humor isn’t very highly developed. Or maybe it wasn’t really funny. I went on: “So what do I do about this flea circus, sir?”
    “Nothing, until I’ve made an investigation here. You’d better give me the descriptions; but unless they take positive action against you, continue to ignore them.”
    Well, as I said earlier, those had been his original instructions.
Chapter 2
    They gave me a little blue ribbon for my farewell performance in Class B. I’d beaten three other novices who’d made scores of ten, eleven, and thirteen; there was also a first-timer who’d managed a seven, better than I’d done on my initial venture into silhouette competition. Mark had cleaned up in AAA and was top gun for the day with a fairly spectacular score of 32x40.
    At his suggestion, before taking off for our respective homes, we relaxed with a couple of beers from the cooler in his van. It’s not my favorite tipple, but beer lovers are almost as bad as teetotalers for condemning you as a hopeless alcoholic if you indicate your preference for something harder. Anyway, after standing in the bright New Mexico sun for a couple of hours, I didn’t find the idea of beer completely revolting.
    “Hey, you got that new Anschutz hitting pretty good,” Mark said.
    I grinned. “Your antique wasn’t doing too damn badly.”
    What he was using was a home-built rig based on an old Winchester Model 52, no longer in production, but one of the best small bore target rifles ever made. (In target-shooting jargon, “small bore” stands for a .22; all other common calibers are “big bore.”) He’d cut down the barrel—within wide limits, a short gun barrel is just as accurate as a long one; and it isn’t knocked about so badly by the wind on a gusty day, important when you’re shooting offhand. He’d improved the trigger pull, mounted an enormous Leupold target scope, and set the whole thing into a sad-looking lam-mated stock on which he kept whittling and sanding to make it fit him better when he wasn’t adding to it elsewhere with tape and moleskin. When he got it just right, he said, he’d use it as a pattern for a really good-looking stock. As far as I could make out, he’d been getting it just right for at least two years now, the length of time he’d lived here in Santa Fe. Right or wrong, the old patchwork rifle consistently out-shot a lot of new and expensive equipment, including my Anschutz.
    “Well, that is enough of this childish play,” Mark said, draining his Budweiser. "Now I must go home and take care of serious matters, like raking the dead leaves from the yard, or my wife will divorce me. Too much shooting, she says, and not enough work around the house.”
    “I know how it is,” I said, thinking of Jo Beckman, who’d been very nice to have around, and wasn’t around any longer. “Well, thanks for the beer.”
    I whistled for the dog and had a moment of uneasiness when he didn’t appear at once, although instant obedience is not his thing; we run a partnership of sorts, not a master-slave operation. But with Spooky constantly on the horizon I couldn’t help figuring my vulnerabilities. Jo was no longer around to be threatened; that left only Happy. And me, but I’ve lived in a state of threat most of my adult life and so far I’ve managed to cope with it, one way or another.
    Then the pup came bounding over the hill and plunked himself at my feet to catch the junior-grade Milkbone biscuit I tossed him to console him for having to leave his business in deference to mine. Mark’s van