“It’s a Winchester, all right. Model 70, 308 caliber, two or three years old. A real hot rod. The new barrel’s a Douglas Premium, floats free for maximum accuracy. Fires a 173-grain, boat-tail bullet in a metal jacket that the ballistics boys tell me can travel at close to 2,250 feet per second.”
“Not the kind of thing you pick up at your local Sears.”
“Not hardly.”
“And it’s the gun used in the shootings?”
“Probably so. They’re still playing with it. And trying to track down sources. Where the Winchester came from, the barrel, scope. But usually we don’t have much luck with this kind of thing. Lot of it’s strictly underground.”
“What about the ammunition?”
“We know where that came from: Lake City, Missouri. There’s no other source. But when we go looking it’ll have passed through eighteen hands and a couple of blinds and there won’t be any way in hell we can trace it.”
“So what do we do?”
“Hope we get lucky. That’s mostly what cops do.”
“You’ve talked to the good folks at SeCure.”
“And to at least three of their lawyers. The company has no official connection with this alleged shooter, knows nothing of his identity or whereabouts, and perhaps it would be best if we did not return for any further chats without a court order.”
“I almost had him, Don.”
“So did I.”
“Oh yeah? That’s not the way I remember it. But thanks, man. Talk to you soon.”
I hung up the phone, went over and sat at the bar. Place called Bob’s I’d never been before, a few blocks town and lakeside of Tulane and Carrollton. Lots of Bobbie Blue Bland and Jimmy Reed on the jukebox.
The bartender stepped up and looked at me without saying anything. One of those places.
“Bourbon,” I said. “Preferably from a bottle with some kind of label on it.”
He grabbed one out of the well (yes, it had a label) and up-ended it over a shot glass. Put the bottle back with one hand as he set the shot glass before me with the other.
“Been a long walk,” someone said from the open door behind me. “I could do with one of those myself.” I knew it was open because the bar had flooded with light. And since the whole place was maybe ten feet square, I didn’t have to squint too hard to see who it was once I turned around.
“Is there a bar anywhere in New Orleans you don’t frequent?”
“Course there is. Way bars are apt to come and go, sometimes they don’t stay around long enough to become in-co-operated in my i-tinery.”
“Their loss, I’m sure.”
I signaled the bartender for two more bourbons as Doo-Wop took the seat beside me. The bartender could barely restrain himself. The joy of it all.
Doo-Wop drank off the bourbon between breaths.
“Hoping I might run into you, Captain,” Doo-Wop said.
I waited. Finally I waved another drink his way.
“Many thanks.” But he hadn’t touched it yet. “Papa and I had a drink together over on Oak. I don’t know, could of been the Oak Leaf. Papa says there’s a man out there looking for something special. On the loop’s the way he put it. Told me, that captain friend of yours might want to know about this. You want to know about this, Captain?”
“What’s the man looking for, Doo-Wop? You know?”
“You mind if I go ahead and have a taste, Captain? Tongue’s near stuck to the roof of my mouth.”
I told him sure, go ahead.
He put the empty glass down. “Many thanks.” Then: “Man wants a Winchester, model 70. And spare change, Papa says to tell you. That worth something to you, Captain?”
I slapped my last ten on the bar, then picked it up and put down a fifty instead. The fifty I always carried in my shoe, under the insole, back then-to beat vagrancy laws, for bail, whatever. What the hell, I could live a few weeks off that ten. Sure I could.
“Yeah. Papa said it would be.”
Doo-Wop motioned grandiosely, and the bartender loomed up like a ghost ship at the bar’s horizon.
“Double brandy. And one for my friend here-whatever he wants.”
“Where is this man, Doo-Wop?”
“Papa said you’d ask that.”
“Right.”
“Papa says come see him.”