Shooter Galloway Read online

  Shooter figured that his uncle had settled down as intended and could look forward to a comfortable, interesting, and secure life guiding, hunting, and exploring in Montana’s primitive wildernesses.

  Attorney Dan Grouse had Gabriel Galloway’s picture on his office wall. Shooter was in field uniform, body armor, helmet, ammo, and M16A2 rifle. There was a newspaper clipping in the frame. It told the story of LCPL Galloway’s attack on the Iraqi ambushers. The write up had come from the Camp Lejeune Globe newspaper, and Shooter had said that it was reasonably accurate.

  Grouse was as proud of Gabriel as if he had been a son, and he too approved of cutting out The Notch before the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania could snatch it.

  Dan Grouse was hungry to invest money for Shooter. It looked to him as though Republicans might take over Congress this time around, and if they did, stock markets would roar.

  Investing the kind of money Shooter would receive, and leaving it alone for years, would turn some powerful profits, Grouse believed. Dan had his own funds organized to make quick moves when conditions were right, and he wanted Gabriel to take the expected economic ride beside him.

  +++

  The County

  Two months later

  As they entered The Notch, Shooter’s eyes automatically sought the cliff edge where a few shards of the Elders’ porch still clung. Nothing moved up there, and Gabriel did not expect that it would.

  According to the Showalters and Sheriff Sonny Brunner, who visited often, The Elder boys had pretty well deserted the county. They still owned their homestead atop the ridge, but the family had sold off about everything else. They lived out of the county now, down hear Steelton someone had said.

  Shooter planned on thinking about the four surviving Elders, but that would have to be later. Today, The Notch occupied his thoughts.

  There were three of them this time, Shooter, Mop, and the fine wood purchaser whose commonly used nickname was “Woodman.”

  The wood buyer had surveyed all of The Notch weeks earlier. He had marked each tree he proposed cutting. Now he had to adequately explain his reasoning to the youthful landowner and his rather stern looking uncle. The Woodman expected that Mop—what an odd name—had a suspicious nature, but the deal was straight-forward and fair.

  The man cleared his throat and began.

  “There are two practical ways to log a woods. Most take out all of the marketable trees they can get. That’s good for the owner, but bad for the forest.

  “We won’t go that route here. We will thin these marvelous acres to gain what is best for the woods with the owner’s profit coming in second.”

  Shooter nodded, and Mop grunted—approval, Woodman hoped.

  “We will come in as gently as it can be done. We will lower trees in sections, not drop them as single logs.” He explained, “Wood can shatter and split along grains when trees are dropped as logs, and valuable wood always get bruised.

  “Thick and heavy trees, such as this perfect timber, are more prone to injury than slender trunks because of their great weight and the momentum built when they fall.

  “Clumsy logging can waste extremely valuable timber. As our financial agreement has been struck, you can accept that I will be especially careful to preserve every board foot taken from this land.

  “We will cut the stumps below ground level, as you have demanded and as we prefer. When we find them useful, we will remove some of the best roots. Each removal area will be re-covered with normal forest humus. Within a year, the spots will be hard to detect.

  “We will remove every limb and branch we take down and take them to the area you have designated just down the hard road.

  “We will leave no recognizable roads in here, except the absolutely straight and flat one you have requested along the far edge of the bottom. That lane will be seven hundred yards long, and we will level and berm it. The road will be all weather, twenty-five feet wide, and at the far end we will raise a twenty foot earth berm, also as you have requested.”

  Mop frowned, “What is that for, Shooter?”

  Gabriel’s answer was short.

  “A rifle range, Uncle Mop. I had to stop at seven hundred because the ground rises too steeply beyond there. I’d like to have a thousand yards, but this will have to do.”

  Mop said, “Holy hell!”

  Unperturbed, Woodman continued.

  “We will stack all of the usable logs from that great pile there under the cliff and cover them with tarpaulin.”

  Mop snickered, and Gabriel laughed aloud.

  “What’s left of the Elders’ big house will make a really nice shop, Uncle Mop. I’ll place it at the road end where I can fire out of a window.”

  “Nice, Shooter. Really nice.”

  Woodman ended the interruption.

  “We will do our best to avoid leaving lanes within the forest, Mister Galloway, and we will work at saving small growth, but moving big timber like this leaves marks. You will know we have been in here.”

  They had come to a stop below the giant walnut tree that sprouted stainless steel spikes most of its length. Woodman pulled at his cap brim.

  “Whoever ruined that magnificent tree should be shot. The tree appears as healthy as if it were young, and I have never seen a longer or straighter trunk. We measured its diameter as five feet. What a waste.”

  Shooter kept his features open, but behind the wood buyer Mop was grinning ear to ear.

  Mop said, “Yeah, we suspect those eco-nuts who sneak in here and talk to the trees when they aren’t hugging them.”

  Woodman accepted the logic of the suspicion. “Those people spike trees all over the west. Sometimes, they do not mark their spikes, and loggers ruin saws and are occasionally hurt by broken saw chains.

  “Well, you can enjoy the beauty of the great tree for many more years, I would judge.” He sighed. “Walnut wood of that size and quality just isn’t available anymore. Even the roots would provide a year’s income for a family. Marvelously grained and colored rifle and shotgun stocks have come from walnut roots as well as the finest of figured veneers.”

  He hastily added, “But we must not take the tree down for its roots. Let it live until it dies naturally, Mister Galloway.”

  Shooter acted convinced, and Woodman was pleased that Mop Galloway apparently agreed.

  The price for the wood, removed hauled away, and the forest floor reclaimed had been agreed upon. The agreement had been signed and further sealed with handshakes.

  Woodman said, “My men and our equipment will arrive tomorrow, Mister Galloway. We understand your need for haste.” His headshake was vehement. “Militant environmentalists can strike without warning, and they know which judges to plead before. It will be best if we are finished before they notice.”

  Woodman had the final words.

  “My check for one million, three hundred thousand, and twenty-five dollars will be in Mister Grouse’s possession two days after we begin.

  “We will be working here for many days, Mister Galloway because wood such as this must be treated with care, and we will not damage trees we do not cut. We take pride in our work and our wood products. I am sure that Mister Grouse considered that important when he chose us.”

  Woodman paused in admiration. “I have never seen or heard of as fine a wood lot as yours. Your forebearers were wise, Mister Galloway.”

  When he was gone, Mop said, “Holy Hell. A million and three hundred thousand in the sock.”

  Shooter was still numbed by the sum, but he heartily agreed.

  Chapter 16

  At twenty-two, Gabriel Galloway stood just under six feet. He weighed about one hundred and seventy pounds, and he was in good physical shape.

  Those were Sheriff Sonny Brunner’s observations. Sonny made similar evaluations of almost everyone he encountered. It was part of his law enforcement training—or so he claimed.

  If that were the case, Sonny had trained himself, because his formal law enforcement education
had consisted only of attending a number of “How to be Sheriff” courses that explained basic law and how to do a lot of paperwork.

  Sonny had always wished he had chosen the State Police rather than the political track of repeatedly running for sheriff. Brunner hungered to investigate mysteries and to crack cases.

  Occasionally, Sonny answered domestic disturbance calls, but those almost invariably involved angry assaults by drunken spouses who later regretted their actions and who were often reclaimed by their families without charges being filed. His county was not a hotbed of violent or drug-induced criminality, and Brunner never filed a charge unless the abused party demanded it.

  Still, Sheriff Brunner kept trying to be an active lawman. He stayed alert, and he did not forget. The unsolved Elder murders remained at the top of his unscratched itches.

  Sonny really liked Shooter Galloway. In the Corps, Gabriel had distinguished himself, and Sonny had thought that Gabriel might make the Marines a career, but here he was, back home with announced intentions of resuming his education and eventually teaching school in their community.

  Yet, every time the Elder killings came to Brunner’s mind, Shooter Galloway’s name surfaced alongside. Sonny supposed his unvoiced suspicions were ludicrous, but there had never been a hint of another possibility.

  Murderers almost always talked. Often they could not be apprehended because the only evidence was hearsay or passed on rumor, but they were known. With the Elders, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  Which raised the question that, if the very young Gabriel Galloway had shot Boxer Elder and years later shot Sam Elder, why hadn’t he spoken to someone who would have carried the tale?

  Perhaps because it had begun when Gabriel was so young? The boy might not have trusted anyone. Having managed to live with the first, he might have kept quiet about the second. Brunner was unsure of his psychology’s validity.

  The sheriff occasionally wondered what he would do if he discovered Gabriel had nailed both Elders? If there were proof, he would act. It would be his duty, but how about someone reasonably reliable stepping up and claiming that Gabriel said he had done the shootings?

  Brunner hoped that did not happen, but he could not let the murders go, and he stopped often to visit with the Showalters and enjoy their proud stories of Gabriel’s accomplishments in the Marine Corps.

  The visiting really was just friendly attention—a neighbor interested in his neighbors, but Sonny recognized that if the Elder mystery (and his unvoiced suspicions that Gabriel was involved) did not exist, he would not have stopped at The Notch as often.

  Despite unwhispered suspicions, Sonny Brunner could not see how Gabriel Galloway could have committed any of the crimes. To believe that he had killed twice and bulldozed a house relied primarily on the fact that no one else probable had turned up.

  The idea that an eleven-year-old Gabriel had miraculously discovered what happened, got a gun that had never been found, and shot Boxer Elder within an hour or two of Bob Galloway’s death seemed extremely farfetched.

  Thin gruel, at best. Even Brunner’s suspicious mind did not believe it.

  +++

  Sonny had seen Galloway, and Col Butler from the academy, going into the restaurant. Brunner waited a courteous few minutes before wandering over to the restaurant himself.

  Shooter was often about since the logging of The Notch. Gabriel Galloway, now recognized as a millionaire, found himself embroiled in conversations with men he barely knew, and there seemed no end to the papers Galloway had to sign at the courthouse. There had been infuriated environmentalists to fend off plus a number of meetings with Dan Grouse to properly invest Gabriel’s newfound wealth in profitable stocks and a few enterprises.

  The sheriff chose a chair at Gabriel’s table facing the door and a window. He liked to keep track of who came and went.

  The military men were deep into a shooting conversation, and after greeting the sheriff, they quickly returned to it. Sonny Brunner hunted and owned a few rifles as well as his official Smith and Wesson .38 Special revolver, but the discussions these two preferred were beyond his limited expertise. Brunner filed his evaluation of Gabriel Galloway’s physical proportions and abilities, and settled in to listen.

  Butler questioned, “The Unertl ten power scopes have been in use by Marine snipers for more than twenty years, and most law enforcement departments would like to get them. The Army has used Leupold fixed power scopes since about 1984. Now, all of a sudden they aren’t good enough?

  “You were in a desert, Shooter. The ranges had to be long. You should have been able to use every extra dollop of magnification you could get.”

  “All true, Colonel, but at least a third of every twenty-four hours is dark. What can you see at night with a ten-power scope?

  “The answer is nothing—while some Raghead is out there looking at you pretty clearly through his thirty year old three or four power scope.”

  Shooter was not finished. “Then there is the problem of an enemy just popping up almost in your lap. You’ve got to shoot fast, but with ten-power, the magnification is so great and the field of view is so small you can’t tell what you are holding on.”

  Gabriel turned to include Sonny. “It’s just like deer hunting, sheriff. If you’ve got too much scope power in close you can’t get on a moving target or probably find a still one. Even if you do put the crosshairs on something, you usually wonder what part of the deer you are holding on.

  “It’s the same on an enemy.”

  Butler shook his head. “You nor anyone else will get the military to change, Gabriel. It’s like the .308 Winchester cartridge. No one who knows sniping would claim the .308 is the best sniper round, but that cartridge is burned into our military’s tradition. Contracts have been signed, our armories are tooled, and our troops are trained for .308. The military knows nothing else, and that will be standard forever.”

  Butler grinned. “I can hear an Advanced Marksmanship Unit preaching, ‘The Unertl fixed ten-power telescopic sight is the finest sniper sight ever designed for military use.’”

  Shooter laughed, “And every Drill Sergeant in either service will parrot the words as if they were handed down from Mount Sinai.

  “You win the argument, Colonel.”

  Brunner asked, “That’s what you used on that Iraqi sniper wasn’t it, Shooter?”

  “Yep, standard brand, USMC M40A1 sniper rifle as built by Quantico. Still the best in the service, but not the best it could and should be.

  Remington M40A1

  “That Iraq shooting was in bright sunlight, Sheriff, and at hundreds of yards in daylight a 10X is hard to fault. Unfortunately, not all sniping is like that.”

  “So, what should they have?” Brunner asked.

  “Snipers should have a 1 1/2X to about 10X variable power scope. The scope should be carried on its lowest power until magnification is needed, and after any long shots are fired the power should be cranked back down to one and a half. That way, if something jumps right under a sniper’s nose, he can handle it with a fifty-foot wide field of view rather than the ten-foot field that ten power would leave him.

  “If another long shot appears, he will most likely have time to crank up without being in immediate danger.”

  Shooter stayed serious as he added, “If a sniper got a distant target and did not have time to crank on magnification, he could shoot without it. A nice clear crosshair can make shooting out to about six hundred yards practical without any magnification.”

  Brunner nodded. “That sounds sensible to me, but I haven’t been there to see it firsthand.”

  Shooter snorted, “Not many have, and those of us who were there, and who taught it at the sniper schools might as well have been speaking Russian.

  “Nobody will act, and my guess is that when we have another war, we will still be peering through ancient old Unertls that were obsolete in 1977 when the Corps adopted them.”

  Warmed to his subject, the former Marine
sniper added, “The Unertl is so old it dates before “O” ring technology was invented. The Unertls use bees’ wax to make seals, for God’s sake.”

  It was heady stuff, but Colonel Butler had business on the hill, and the sheriff headed for the men’s room with stops en route to speak with acquaintances perched on stools at the lunch counter.

  A grossly fat man with a full and bushy beard sat at the counter, and Brunner did not address him in passing. Shooter noticed because he kept catching the man’s eyes on him. The mostly hidden features were not familiar, and Galloway did not recall any super-obese acquaintances local or otherwise.