dead watch international edition john sandford

He sat down at a table, arranged a pile of sandbags on the table in front of him, took the rifle out of its case, pressed three rounds into the magazine, and jacked one into the chamber. He’d be shooting down an underground tunnel at fifty yards-not long, but long enough to get an idea of where the gun was. He walked past two fat guys shooting revolvers and one in-shape military-looking guy shooting a Beretta, down a short flight of stairs, to lanes nine, ten, and eleven. The first eight lanes were for pistols, the last three lanes for rifles, with shooting tables.

Jake paid him, took his earmuffs out of his pocket, put them on, and pushed through the door into the range. He took two boxes of 100-grain Federal off the shelf and two target faces from under the counter, and passed them over. “And two boxes of that Federal Vital-Shok, the one-hundred-grain Sierra, if you’ve got it, and two targets.” 243.” He handed over his car keys and Haines hung them on a Peg-Board and said, “Lane nine.” Haines nodded at Jake, who was a seasonal regular, and asked, “How’s it going?” Jake nodded back and said, “I need to tune up the. Merle Haines was leaning on the counter, paging through a copy of American Rifleman, while Jerry Jeff Walker sang “I Feel Like Hank Williams Tonight” from a buzzing speaker mounted in the ceiling. You could still hear the gunfire, but distantly. The shooting lanes took up the back of the building the first fifteen feet in the front was the salesroom, isolated from the shooting lanes by a double concrete wall, with panes of double vacuum-glass on both walls. Jake parked, carried the rifle around to the front door, pushed in, was hit in the face by the not-unpleasant tang of burned gunpowder. The sign outside, an unlit wooden rectangle, said, MERLE’S, and nothing else, in fading red paint.

Merle’s was a long, low concrete-block building painted an anonymous cream, buried in a block of warehouses in the flight path of Dulles International.

They won’t be naming a new guy until after Landers is gone, and that’ll take a while. “The Post, the Times, three or four TV channels. It’ll take the story away from Bell and those other fuckups, no matter what they did.” If we can get that out there tomorrow, it’ll make suicide more reasonable. “If we can get that out for tomorrow-even if the feds equivocate-we’re in good shape.

Dead watch international edition john sandford