Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(14)

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The day was working out, Virgil thought, as he showered. He had some ideas of where the bullets were coming from, a lead to a guy who might know about local shooters—Roy had shown him on a Google satellite photo of the gun range and the house where Glen Andorra lived—and he’d gotten an excellent haircut.

He left the Vissers’ house at 5 o’clock, still with more than three hours until sunset. At five-twenty, he pulled up to the gate that blocked the dirt track to the sportsman’s club. The gate needed a key card for entry, which he didn’t have. He climbed out of the truck to see what he could see, which wasn’t much because the range was behind a low ridge that began just beyond the gate.

He could hear the boom-boom of a heavy rifle being fired slowly. Aimed shots. He was about to turn around and go out to the main road and down to Andorra’s house when a pickup topped the ridge and rolled down toward him. He got back in his truck and, when the gate opened, drove through to the other side and flagged down the pickup.

The driver ran his window down, and asked, “Forget your card?”

“Don’t have one,” Virgil said. “I’m with the state police. I’m looking for Glen Andorra.”

“Haven’t seen him, he’s not out here. Maybe check his house.”

“I’ll do that,” Virgil said.



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—

Before going to Andorra’s, he drove over the ridge and down to the shooting area, which was a series of ranges based around a parking lot in the middle of a deep bowl, with a creek oxbowing at the bottom of the lot. The ranges weren’t fancy, mostly defined by a row of picnic-style tables and benches, with a roof overhead for shelter. The rifle range was in the deeper part of the bowl, and shooters fired at a series of bulldozer-built berms. To Virgil’s eye, the berms appeared to have been set at fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty, and two hundred yards, and then four more berms out to six hundred yards. A narrow dirt two-track ran down the length of the range, so shooters could drive down to check out their targets.

The shooting end of the range featured four benches with picnic table seats and a flagpole atop which a red flag fluttered in the breeze to make newcomers aware that shooting was going on.

Two men were sitting at one of the benches, one of them with a rifle snuggled on top of Army-green sandbags, the other looking downrange through a scope, his rifle lying on a case off to the side. The aimed rifle went boom, the shooter jerked with the recoil, and the scope man said something to him. Virgil got out of the truck, and called to them: “Hey! Excuse me.”

They were both wearing electronic earmuffs, which cut the sound of a muzzle blast but allowed them to hear normal speech. They both turned to look, and Virgil walked down and identified himself.

“I’m looking at the shootings up in Wheatfield,” he said. “I’d be interested in anyone shooting a .223 at longer ranges—four hundred to five hundred yards, or so—maybe with a scoped bolt-action.”

The two men looked at each other and then simultaneously shook their heads. The shooter said, “There are a couple of Nazis on the county line over toward Blue Earth, they got .223s, but Glen kicked them out when they announced they were Nazis. Only one of them had a card anyway; he’d bring the other one in with him.”

“Is that common?” Virgil asked.

“Hell, no,” the man said. “Membership costs fifty bucks a year. Me’n Bill are shooting up a box of .300 Winchester Magnums, goes for forty bucks a box. A year out here costs less than a box and a half of ammo. A heck of a bargain, and they wouldn’t even pay that. Pissed some of us off even before they were Nazis.”

The scope man said, “It wasn’t the Nazis that shot those people in town, though. They had about the cheapest guns that would actually work and thirty-dollar scopes. They had trouble keeping their shots on the paper at a hundred yards, never mind for four or five blocks.”

“All right,” Virgil said. “Have you seen Glen Andorra around today?”

“Haven’t seen him for a while,” the shooter said. “But I’m not out here that much. Can’t afford it.”

“That’s where a .223 would be good, if you could get a bolt-action,” the scope man said to the shooter. “Get more practice with centerfires, don’t get banged up by the recoil. Then, shoot the mag enough to be sure its hittin’ where you want, and don’t go burnin’ whole boxes of million-dollar ammo.”

“What are you usin’ the mag for anyway?” Virgil asked.

“Brother’s got a place out in Colorado with elk on it. Me’n Bill drive out every year,” the shooter said.

“Good deal,” Virgil said.

They talked guns and hunting for a few minutes, and Virgil mentioned his sideline as an outdoors writer. The shooter said, “You oughta do an article on supercheap elk hunts. Everyone thinks they’re superexpensive, but they don’t have to be. You get somebody with a piece of land out in Wyoming or Colorado, bunk on their kitchen floor, you’re only spending three hundred bucks for gas. Plus, you gotta pay for the tags. That’s another six hundred. We shot a big cow elk out there, we took a hundred and eighty pounds of boned meat off her—that’s five bucks a pound for better than anything you’d get out of a supermarket. Don’t have all them chemicals, and so on.”