Time to Hunt (46 page)

“That’s not good enough. I have an oath, as well as a complex set of legal regulations, Bob. And let me point out one other thing. You are not an animal.”

“Well,” said Bob, “actually I am. I am a Homo sapien. But I know you are the best vet in these parts and you have operated on many animals, and most of ’em are still with us today. I remember you nursed Billy Hancock’s paint through two knee operations, and that old boy’s still roaming the range.”

“That was a good horse. It was a pleasure to save that animal.”

“You never even charged him.”

“I charged him plenty. I just never collected. Every few months, Billy sends me ten or fifteen dollars. It should be paid up by the next century.”

“Well, I am a good horse, too. And I have this here problem and that’s why I come to you. If I go to VA, it could take months for the paperwork to clear. If I go to a private MD, I got a passel of questions I have to answer and a big operating room to tie up and weeks to recover, whether I need it or not. I need this thing now. Tonight.”

“Tonight!”

“I need you to go in on local, dig it out, and sew me up.”

“Bob, we are talking about serious, invasive work. It would take any normal man a month to recover, under intensive medical care. You won’t be whole again for a long time.”

“Doc, I been hit before. You know that. I still come back fast. It’s a matter of time. I can’t tell you why, but I’m under the gun on time. I have to find something out so I can go to the FBI. I need a piece of evidence. I need your help.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“I know you did a tour over there. It’s a thing guys like us have in common. We ought to help each other when we can.”

“No one else will, that’s for sure,” said Dr. Lopez.

“You was a combat medic and you probably saw more gunshot wounds and worked on more than any ten MDs. You know what you’re doing.”

“I saw enough of it over there.”

“It’s a nasty thing to fire a bullet into a man,” said Bob. “I was never the same, and now that I am getting old, I feel my back firing up because of the damage it did to my structure. And the VA don’t recognize pain. They just tell you to live with it, and cut your disability ten percent every year. So on I go, and on all of us go with junk in us or limbs missing or whatever.”

“That war was a very bad idea. Nothing good ever came out of it.”

“I copy you there. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have no other choice. I need that bullet.”

“You are a fool if you think what I can offer you is as safe as modern hospital medicine.”

“You dig the bullet out and put in the stitches. If you don’t do it, I’ll have to do it myself and that won’t be pretty.”

“I believe you would, Bob. Well, they say you are one tough son of a bitch. You better be, because you’re going to need every bit of tough to get through the next few days.”

———

B
ob lay on his back, looking at the large mirror above him. The ugliness of the entrance wound was visible; he hated to look at it. The bullet had hit him almost dead on at a slight downward angle, plowed through skin and the tissue of his sheathing
gluteus medius
muscle, then shattered the platelike flange of the hip bone, deflecting off to plunge down the inside of his leg, ripping out muscle as it went. The bullet hole was unfilled: it was that alone and nothing else—a channel, a void, an emptiness in his hip that plunged inward, surrounded by an ugly pucker of ruined flesh.

“No false hip?” said Dr. Lopez, feeling at it, examining it carefully.

“No, sir,” said Bob. “They patched it up with bone grafts from my other shin and screws. On cold days, them screws can light up, let me tell you.”

“Did it break a leg, too?”

“No, sir, it just tore up tissue traveling down the leg.”

The doctor probed Bob’s inner thigh, where a long dead patch described the careening bullet’s terrible passage through flesh. Bob looked up, away, feeling the acute humiliation of it. The doctor’s operating theater was immaculately clean, though out of scale to human bodies, as its most usual patients were horses with leg or eye problems. Except for the two of them, it was deserted.

“Well, you’re lucky,” Dr. Lopez said. “I was afraid it still might be hung up in the mechanics of the hip. If that had happened, you were out of luck. I couldn’t take it out without permanently crippling you.”

“I am lucky,” said Bob.

“Yeah,” the doctor said, “I can feel it here, nested in the thigh, down close to the knee. I know what happened. They had to screw your hip together with transplants; the deep, muscular wound of the bullet didn’t matter to them. They didn’t even bother to look for it. They just sewed it up. They were trying to keep you alive and ambulatory,
not make sure you could get through airport metal detectors.”

“You can get it?”

“Bob, this is going to hurt like hell. I have to cut through an inch of muscle, get down close to the femur. I can feel it in there. You will bleed like a dog on the roadway. I will sew you up, but you will need a good long rest. This isn’t a small thing. It isn’t a huge thing, but you ought to spend at least a couple of weeks off your feet.”

“You cut it out tonight. I’ll sleep here and be gone in the morning. You give me a good pain shot and that will be that.”

“You are a hard case,” said the doctor.

“My wife says the same.”

“Your wife and I bet anyone that ever met you. All right, you sit back. I’m going to wash you up, then shave you. Then I’ll go scrub, and we’ll give you a painkiller and we’ll do what’s gotta be done.”

B
ob watched with a numb leg and an odd feeling of dislocation. The doctor had put an inflatable tourniquet around the upper leg to cut down on blood loss. There he’d wrapped his leg in a sterile Ace bandage, and now he cut through it, a horizontal incision with a scalpel an inch deep and three inches long into the lower inside of his right thigh. Bob felt nothing. The blood jetted out in a spurt, as if an artery had been snipped, but it hadn’t, and as the initial jet was soaked up by the bandage, the new blood crept back to seep out of the ugly gash.

He’d seen so much blood, but the blood he remembered was Donny’s blood. Because the bullet had shattered his heart and lungs, it had gotten into his throat fast and he’d gagged it out. There was so much, it overcame his pipes and found new tunnels out of which to surge: i, came from his nose and mouth, as if he’d been punched in the face. Donny’s face was ruined, taken from them all by the black-red delta as it fanned from the center of his face down to his chin.

The doctor tweaked and squeezed the incision, opening it as one would a coin purse; then he took a long probe and inserted it into the wound and began to press and feel.

“Is it there?”

“I don’t have it—yeah, yeah, there it is, I ticked against it. It seems to be encapsulated in some scar-type tissue. I’d guess that’s standard for an old bullet.”

He removed the probe, now sticky with blood, gleaming in the bright light of the operating theater, and set it down. Picking up a new scalpel, he cut more deeply; more blood flowed.

“I’m going to have to irrigate,” he said through his mask. “I can’t see much; all that damn blood.”

“They will do that on you, won’t they?” said Bob.

Lopez merely grunted, squirted a blast of water into the wound, so that it bubbled.

It was so strange: Swagger could feel the water as pressure, not unpleasant, even a little ticklish; he could feel the probe, could almost feel as the pincers tugged at the bullet. The sensations were precise, the doctor tugging at the thing, which was evidently quite disfigured and jammed into some tissue and wouldn’t just pop out as a new bullet would. Bob felt all these details of the operation. He saw the opening in his leg, saw the blood, saw the doctor’s gloved fingers begin to glow with blood, and the blood begin to spot his surgeon’s gown and smock.

But he felt nothing; it could have been happening to someone else. It was unrelated to him.

At last, with a tiny tug, Lopez pulled the bloody pincers out of the wound and held the trophy up for Bob to see: the bullet was crusted in gristle, white and fatty, and the doctor cut it free with his scalpel. It had mangled when it had met his bone, its meplat collapsing into its body, so that it was deformed into a little flattened splat, like a mushroom, oddly askew atop the column of what remained. But it hadn’t broken into pieces; it was all there, an ugly little twist of gilding metal sheathing lead,
and its original aerodynamic sleekness, its missileness, was still evident in the twisted version. He could see striations running down it, where the rifle’s grooves had gripped it as it spun through the barrel so long ago on its journey toward him.

“Can you weigh it?”

“Yeah, right, I’ll
weigh
it and then I’ll
wax
it, and then I’ll
gift-wrap
it while you quietly bleed to death. Just hold your horses, Bob.”

He dropped the bullet into a little porcelain tray, where it tinkled like a penny thrown into a blind man’s cup, then went back to Bob.

“Please weigh it,” said Bob.

“You ought to be committed,” the doctor said. He irrigated the wound again, poured in disinfectant and inserted a little sterile plastic tube, for drainage. Then he quickly and expertly sewed it up with coarse surgical thread. After finishing, he restitched with a finer thread. Then he bandaged the wound, wrapped an inflatable splint around it and blew hard until the splint held the leg stiff, nearly immobile. Then he loosened the Velcro on the tourniquet and tossed it aside.

“Pain?”

“Nothing,” said Bob.

“You’re lying. I felt you begin to tense five minutes ago.”

“Okay, it hurts a bit, yeah.”

Actually, it now hurt like hell. But he didn’t want another shot or anything that would drug him, flatten him, keep him woozy. He had other stuff to do.

“Okay,” said the doctor. “Tomorrow I’ll rebandage it and remove the tube. But it’ll relieve the pressure tonight. Now—”

“Please. I have to know. Weigh it. I have to know.”

Dr. Lopez rolled his eyes, took the porcelain cup to a table where a medical scale was sitting, and fiddled and twisted.

“All right,” said the doctor.

“Go on,” said Bob.

“It’s 167.8 grains.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m very sure.”

“Christ!”

“What’s wrong?”

“This thing just got so twisted it don’t make no sense at all.”

H
e slept dreamlessly for the first time in weeks in one of Doc Lopez’s spare bedrooms; the pain woke him early, and the unbearable stiffness in the leg. The doctor redressed the wound, then replaced the inflatable splint.

“No major damage. You ought to be able to get around a little bit.”

He had some crutches lying around, and advised Bob to seek professional medical help as soon as possible. Bob could not walk or bathe, but he insisted on going to the airport, on the power of ibuprofen and will alone. White-faced and oily with sweat, he was pushed to the ten-fifteen plane in a wheelchair by a stewardess, and used the crutches to get aboard. He got to enter the plane early; it was like being important.

No one was seated next to him, as the flight was only half full. The plane took off, stabilized and eventually coffee was brought. He took four more ibus, washed them down with the coffee, then at last took out his grisly little treasure in its plasticine envelope.

Well, now, ain’t you a problem, brother, he thought, examining the little chunk of metal, mushroomed into the agony of impact, frozen forever in the configuration of the explosion it had caused against his hip bone.

One hundred sixty-eight grains.

Big problem. The only 168-grain bullet in the world in 1972 was American—the Sierra 168-grain MatchKing, the supreme .30-caliber target round then and, pretty much, now. He was expecting a 150-grain Soviet bullet, for the
7.62mm × 54, as fired in either a Dragunov or the old Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle.

No. This boy was working with an American handload, as the 168-grainers weren’t used on manufactured bullets until the services adopted the M852 in the early nineties. Nor was it the 173-grain match American bullet, loaded equally into the M72 .30-06 round or the M118 7.62 NATO round.

No. American handload, tailored, planned, its last wrinkle worked out. A serious professional shooter, at the extended ranges of his craft. That meant this was a total effort, even to somehow obtaining American components in RSVN to get the absolute maximum out of the system. Why?

He tried to think it out.

T. Solaratov has lost his Dragunov. The field-expedient choice would then be an American sniper rifle, presumably available in some degree within the NVA supply system; after all, half their stuff was captured.

Bob bet it was an M1-D, the sniper version of the old Ml Garand rifle that the GIs won World War II with.

The more he thought about it, the more sense it made, up to a point. Yes, that would explain the almost subconscious
familiarity
of the sound signature. In his time, he’d fired thousands of rounds with an M-1. It had been his first Marine rifle, a solid, chunky, robust, brilliantly engineered piece of work that would never let you down.

Every recruit had marched in his underwear around the squad bay some indeterminate number of hours, a ton of unloaded Ml on his shoulder, Parris Island’s sucking bogs out beyond the wire, his dick in his left hand, that primitive rhyme sounding in his ears under the guidance of a drill instructor who seemed like a God, only crueler and tougher and smarter.

Yeah, he thought, he uses a Garand rifle with a scope, he works out the load with the best possible components, he takes me down, he’s the hero.

Looking at the striations imprinted in the copper sheathing of the bullet by its explosive passage up the barrel that day, he guessed closer examination by experts would prove them to be the mark of a rifling system that held to ten twists per inch, not twelve, for that would prove the bullet was fired from a match grade Ml and not an M14. He saw the logic in that, too. It made sense to choose a .30-06 over a .308 because downrange the .30-06, with its longer cartridge case and higher powder capacity, would deliver more energy, particularly beyond a thousand yards. It really
was
a long-range cartridge, as so many deer had found out over the years; the .308 was a mere wannabe.