The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter

  I pulled the door softly shut, hearing it click locked, and pushed Lon across wood flooring beyond the secretary’s desk. The name on the door to the boss’s office was simple: Mr. Goldberg. It meant nothing to me; nor did the pictures on the wall of a middle-aged fellow who looked to be Jewish, with a wife and three children, all five beaming at the success Mr. Goldberg had made in Dallas, Texas. I slid Lon into the boss’s office, a square, high-ceilinged wood-floored room full of light, with an overhead fan rotating sluggishly with a slight hum. It was dominated by two large windows, and immediately across the way, I could see the upper floor of the Texas Book Depository. I pushed Lon to the window, and as we approached, the angles widened and revealed, in all its detail and seething mass of witnesses along both curbs, the spectacle of Elm Street trending left as it descended the gentlest of inclines, shielded at our end by the canopy of a few oak trees, yielding to the broadness of the plaza, green in bright sun, dotted with last-minute scurriers trying to get into at least the third rank along the curb for maximum proximity to the glamour couple. From our vantage, we could not see the grassy knoll, we could not see the amphitheater, the pillars, the marble benches, all the flourishes of Athens on a good day in 300 B.C., that the Texan city fathers had constructed there. But we could see every square inch of Elm Street once it emerged from the trees.

  Jimmy had assembled the rifle, raised the window a few inches, and laid out a few large swatch books on Mr. Goldberg’s desk for Lon’s lap. I glanced at my watch. It was 12:24.

  When I pushed Lon to the place where he’d determined to shoot from, we had our inevitable crisis. What do they say—no plan survives contact with the enemy?

  The issue was height. In order to assure that minimum noise would escape from the room, Lon told us we had to be as far back from the window as possible, even with the German suppressor jerry-rigged to the muzzle. If it extended beyond the window, it would admit the report to the outer atmosphere and might attract attention, or at least curious eyes. The point was to contain as much of the attenuated report as possible within the confines of the room, where it would be deadened by the noise-absorption qualities of the walls and furnishings and by the buzz of the ceiling fan swishing away overhead. Lon would shoot from his chair but as far back from the window as possible while still having vantage on the target. The problem: at no place in the room would Lon be high enough to get the necessary angle over the sill!

  We stood stupidly. Brilliant Hugh had fouled up again! It never occurred to me, nor had it occurred to Jimmy, why the fifth floor was preferable. It was too late to get down a floor or two, where the angles would have been more welcoming.

  “Can we get you standing, Lon?” I asked.

  “Not without my knee braces, which are in Roanoke.”

  “We have to raise him,” I concluded.

  It was Jimmy who remembered the swatch books originally destined for Lon’s lap. At least three inches deep, they contained fabric samples. He brought four of them over. “We can lift him up on these,” he said.

  He set two down, and we labored to lift the wheelchair’s right tire, not an easy task, though Lon helped by shifting his weight accordingly. Then the other one. Lon plus chair was really heavy, and this lift was no picnic. I could feel my veins bulging with blood as I gave it all my strength, but it was probably Jimmy who did the bulk of the work. Lon was up high enough.

  “Yeah,” he said, “good angle. But it’s crooked. The left one is higher than the right one. I can compensate, but—”

  “I got it,” said Jimmy.

  Quickly, he peeled off his nice new overcoat, folded it into quarters, and bent to the wheel. I did my part, again using all of my muscles, and Jimmy got the coat wedged between the rubber and the book. I saw that the tire had left a black mark where it pressed into the gabardine.

  “Dry cleaning’s on me!” I said.

  “Much better,” Lon said. It brought him to the level where he had the angle above the sill but beneath the bottom of the window. “Lock the brakes.”

  As I bent to do so, we heard a rise in sound; it seemed that the motorcade had hit lower Main a block away, and when the magic Lincoln passed, it unleashed a roar of inchoate human energy, cheers and yells, yes, but also the collective sighs and deep breaths of the enchanted. Their prince had come. I knew that Kennedy was but a minute or so away.

  “Here,” said Jimmy, handing Lon the rifle. It was a long, sleek thing, not like Alek’s piece of battered military junk, not like the dangerous army guns, the carbines and BARs and tommy guns I’d seen in Vietnam, not like the red burp guns, with their ugly, ventilated cooling housings and their Mob-style drums featured in every statue in Russia. I had to say that the rifle had an aristocratic grace, and in some odd way, it seemed appropriate to the young prince’s demise. Lon had told me it was a Winchester Model 70, and I knew that he and his late father had enjoyed a long and mutually satisfying relationship with the company. At one point, Lon’s father had been presented with a rifle called the Tenth Black King, in some awesome caliber, called that because the American walnut of the stock was so bloodred that it looked black in certain lights, and when Winchester wanted to give “Presentation Guns” to some who were prominent in the gun world, they had their custom shop build an edition of ten, all called Black Kings. Both Lon’s father and Lon used that rifle—which turned out to have unusual powers of accuracy—to win or place highly in national rifle competitions.

  This one was not customized, at least not by Winchester. Lon had done some work on it, lightening the trigger, “bedding” the action, which I understand to be coating the interior, where the metal of the action sits in the inlay of the stock, with a kind of fiberglass or epoxy so that the contact between the surfaces is 100 percent even, and no odd stress from irregularities is transferred to the rifle, affecting the accuracy. On the whole, the thing was beautiful, a graceful orchestration of tubes supported in a slice of burnished wood, with a slight streamline that seemed to have it leaning forward, like a thoroughbred at full extension, muscles cut and the entire beast captured in a kind of forward bound.

  A long tube, black and shiny, was secured to the action above the bolt by two stout metal rings, and at a point on the scope’s length between the rings lay an administrative housing, the site of a vertical and a horizontal turret by which the scope could be tuned for maximum accuracy. I was close; I happened to note the white lettering above the horizontal turret, and it read simply J. UNERTL. What distinguished this rifle from any other I’d seen was the German suppressor, the Schalldaempfer Type 3, as Lon called it. It too was tubular, and locked over the muzzle by means of a pivoting lever cranked to the closed position. The genius of German engineering! It was surprisingly stubby, under a foot long, looking like a steel water bottle screwed to the muzzle, and much discolored and tarnished from military use.

  Lon handled the gun with extraordinary ease, I must say. His face deadpan, he accepted it and mounted it to his shoulder, one hand at the comb, the index finger suspended on the stock above the trigger, not touching the trigger. His other flew to the the end of the stock, which he acquired and used as leverage, thrusting the rifle back hard to shoulder, now supported by two elbows. This was the holding position. Because we’d used the swatch books to elevate him, they were not available for lap duty. He’d have to shoot offhand. I thought, For want of a nail, the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe, the horse is lost, for want of a horse, the battle is lost, and imagined the chain of catastrophe that could undo us.

  Nevertheless, he was an elegant construction, slightly canted, the rifle and man solid, immutable, bent forward a bit under muscular tension as if in sprinter’s blocks, the slight vibration of his slow and easy breaths the only sign of life. The rifle was locked in his arms, which were resting on his elbows on his dead legs.

  I positioned myself at the window, immediately adjacent to the opening. Craning to the left, I could see the Houston-Elm intersection as I heard the roar rolling toward us like a
wave. I saw a Dallas police sedan and then . . . nothing. I guessed he was some sort of advance car a half mile or so out. It seemed a minute passed, and then a white sedan came down the street, leading the parade. Three motorcycles followed, then five more in some kind of formation, then another white sedan, and finally, the large black Lincoln, with its cargo of imminent tragedy open to the crowd. It was flanked by motorcycle policemen, and we watched as it pulled wholly into view. It looked more like a black lifeboat than a car, a huge thing, with a driver and guard in the front seat, then behind them, though considerably lower, as if squatting, a male-female couple I took to be Governor and Mrs. Connally, and then Jack Kennedy himself, and next to him, in a pink pillbox hat, his wife.

  His reddish hair glinted in the sunlight. Even from almost eighty yards and without binoculars, I could make out the ruddiness of his skin and could tell that all the lines of his face were pulling his mouth up into a smile, and at that moment it incongruously struck me that he was quite a handsome man. He was waving with one hand but only intermittently, and if I read his body posture in that split second, it was one of relaxation. The man was campaigning and happy.

  The limo reached the hard left turn onto Elm from Houston just below me. At that point, it was out of sight to Lon, but I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against the pane. I watched as the car slowed almost to a halt and began its slow, majestic pivot toward its new direction. I could not breathe. This was Alek’s shot, his moment to enter history and send us all home absolved of any guilt.

  Nothing happened.

  I don’t know what the idiot was doing up there, but it wasn’t shooting. Silence. Obviously, some kind of failure, as per all anticipation. That put us right back on the fulcrum of events, the little creep with his cowardice, his incompetence, his stupidity. Agh!

  The great car turned slowly left and began its descent down Elm, sliding down the slight undulation that led to the triple overpass, which moved it left in Lon’s sights, but gently, not radically. The public feet away on either side, all madly waving and cheering, you could see the excitement, the sparkle or glitter of crowd passion that you see at key moments of big ball games. The car was fully oriented toward Elm but just feet beyond the axis of the turn when Alek managed to fire his first shot.

  We heard the crack! In my peripheral, I saw Lon react, not a jerk or a spasm but a tight, controlled lurch. He kept his discipline, though, and didn’t lose his hold on the rifle, which was still. He seemed calm. I knew he would fire at a specific point, in seconds, waiting for the target to climb into his crosshairs, and would make final mini-corrections before coordinating his shot with Kennedy’s arrival at the point of impact designator.

  I locked my eyes on Kennedy and the car. Nothing stirred, no reaction, no sudden dive for cover, nothing. Had they noticed? I thought: Maybe it’s not Alek, maybe it’s a backfire or firecracker.

  Then a second crack! rang out, and though the car had traveled a good twenty-five yards or so in the interval between shots, I could make out no reaction this time either. Possibly some movement, but nothing radical or reflexive as a bullet impact might have unleashed.

  The fool missed twice. Of course! Idiot! Idiot! A burst of rage knifed through me. The little moron! God, what a fool he was; never did anything right in his life. He was struggling to catch up from the blown easy shot, was rushing, shooting poorly.

  “He missed. Lon—” I said.

  Again I pivoted instinctively, enough to see the fluid grace with which Lon raised the rifle, right elbow locked up for maximum support, canting the living part of his body slightly against the dead part, his head utterly still and locked on the opening in the telescopic sight. He was a portrait of stillness in motion, a discipline acquired over a hundred thousand rifle shots, the ball of his finger exquisitely balanced against the blade of the trigger. The next two, three seconds seemed to hang in eternity, although possibly that’s a conceit I impose from memory, for dramatic purposes, to make the tale more compelling, even if the only soul I’ve ever told it to is myself.

  Feu.

  The rifle leaped, but only slightly, in his hand, while his head stayed immobile to the scope and his trigger finger followed through to pin that lever to the back of the guard. It produced an oddly attenuated report, something like a book being dropped on a wood floor with weird tones of vibration, maybe a poke and a buzz to the inner ear but nothing sharp and percussive like a gunshot. You would expect more, would you not? It was a phenomenon of vibration, this key moment in history, a thrum or cello note extended by a master bowman. Yet in the instantaneous aftermath, I thought I heard Alek’s third shot. Could they have been simultaneous? No, because then I wouldn’t have heard both. It was as if Alek had fired a few hundredths of a second after Lon. We didn’t realize then, but it was the biggest break we were going to get that day.

  Jimmy, unperturbed, was in charge in another second. “All right, fellows,” he crooned, “out you go now, while I tidy up here.”

  Lon, stone-faced, handed the rifle to Jimmy as I knelt and raised the two brakes. It took another second for Jimmy to single-handedly ease Lon’s chair from the swatch books and pull the coat off, and then I had him turned around and was beelining to the door.

  “Don’t rush, sir,” called Jimmy. “You’ve nothing to hide, remember.”

  I took a quick peek back and saw that Jimmy already had the rifle half disassembled and was working on the third screw. Then the door closed, and I was in the outer office. I sped to that door, and it locked behind me with a click and we were in the hallway. I pushed down it, trying to control my breathing. Finally, I had to ask. “Good hit?”

  “Don’t ask me what I saw through the scope, Hugh. Ever.”

  We reached the elevator, I punched the down button and waited an eternity for it to arrive and the doors to open. I shoved Lon in, hit 1, and listened as the doors closed behind me.

  When the elevator doors opened and I pushed Lon into the lobby of the Dal-Tex Building, it was as if we’d entered a new America. I say that knowing how trite it sounds, and then I worry again that my memory is playing tricks on me and has added a drama that wasn’t there.

  Maybe. I still say it was like a massive change in the weather. I’ll argue till death that the color had been drained from the day and the atmosphere had turned sepia. I’ll claim that all the human specimens we observed were in a state of stunned shock, mouths and faces slack, posture discipline unhinged, a tone of disbelief bleeding toward numbness and shutdown everywhere. It was only about ninety seconds after Lon’s shot, and no one had processed what happened yet, although all knew, almost instantaneously, that something, something horrible, had transpired.

  Then, as we watched, it transformed instantly into panic, buzz, dread, gibbering, stupidity. People couldn’t shut up. An insistent yammer began, a mutter with high notes, inflections, voices piping or breaking or losing steam in a flood of phlegm. The lobby was not crowded, but everyone began yapping at each other, along the lines of “He was shot?”

  “In the head?”

  “Oh my God, is he dead?”

  “Who the hell could have done it?”

  “Was it the Russians? Did the Commies get JFK?”

  “Where did the shots come from?”

  “The Book Depository? Are you kidding? The Book Depository!”

  “Who would do such a terrible thing?”

  Nobody paid the two of us any attention, and I pushed Lon to the door, rotated 180 degrees to back out and pull him through, got that done, and emerged into sunlight, heat, panic, incredible motion, pandemonium everywhere, random, brain-dead movement, and people talking insanely among themselves.

  I saw only one man moving with purpose, a Dallas policeman who raced to the building, almost knocking me down getting by, and bulled his way inside. He was quick, that man, and I don’t know if it was by official directive or his own decision, but he’d understood that if the Book Depository was the probable origin point for the shooting, ot
her buildings with access to Elm Street should be sealed for investigation.

  He’d missed us, or perhaps scanned us from afar and dismissed us because of Lon’s disability. As for Jimmy, still inside, I felt confident that he could outthink and outmaneuver a Dallas policeman any day of his life.

  I gingerly pushed Lon to the edge of the steps and began the ordeal of easing him down into the roiling crowd, which, drawn to tragedy exactly as had been the thousands who’d lined up to see the bullet-riddled corpses of Bonnie and Clyde, surged toward the plaza to see, to know, to feel, to bear witness, to be a part of what all felt was a calamitous day for our country.

  I was trying to figure which way to go, as fighting the crowd with Lon wouldn’t be easy. I’d pretty much decided to get across Elm, divert to Houston, hit Main, and head up until the crowds had thinned, then cut to Commerce to get us back to the hotel.

  Then the left wheelchair tire caught on something on the middle step. I bent awkwardly to see what it was (a chunk of loosened cement that had worked out of the joinery between the stone slabs) and was readjusting the chair by pulling it back a couple of inches when, in my peripheral vision, I saw Alek.

  I happened to be tilted away from him; I was looking down and hunched and twisted to jigger the chair free, and perhaps that is why he didn’t see me. Was that luck? I suppose. The other truth is, he probably wouldn’t have recognized me under the cowboy hat I wore and under the pall of doom he wore.