Free Savant by Rex Miller Page B

Manufacturer: USARCO Mfg. Division of Quad Cities Tool and Die, Rock Island, Illinois ." "Tool and Die." He liked that. He always enjoyed saying that to people who asked him what line he was in. "Tool and die," he'd tell them, meaning it.
    The stock and shoulder rest had been custom-molded to fit his face and body, and the finger indentations and palm moldings on the grips in back of the trigger housing and forward of the action had been cast from his hands. Sighting the piece in darkness was as simple as pulling on a pair of comfortable old leather gloves. She fit him perfectly. But the stock hurt him a little when he put his face down close to his main squeeze, and he whispered to her, "Not you, baby. Melissa hurt your daddy." He: fondled her knurled bolt, snicked it, and a big, hard sniper round filled her oily mouth.
    "Anti-Personnel APEX(X) rounds consist of a full steel-jacketed shell containing propellant, A nti- P ersonnel EX ploding projectile ( ex tended range), high explosive, and detonator." He looked down through the calm green of her and clearly saw a man step out of the tavern and into the parking lot. There was no one else in sight. " When a round is fired and the bullet strikes the target a detonator causes the high explosive charge to explode the fragmentation material. This material consists of soft, scored penetrators that fragment like miniature bomb shrapnel, and which are designed to tumble at hypervelocities, mushrooming and disintegrating at the point of impact. This round is particularly effective against human beings and other soft targets . "
    "Corpus Domini nostri—" Bobby Price whispered to the soft target below as he applied the requisite three and a quarter pounds of pressure to his favorite squeeze.
    | Go to Table of Contents |

7
    V ictor Trask was feeling semi-shitty. He'd woken up with a terrible, pounding hangover and since he didn't drink that was not a propitious beginning to the day. Neither did it auger well that he cut himself while trying to shave his face, the right side of which was pockmarked with old acne scars. He knew that others, women particularly, found his face appealing—women used words like "character" and "interesting-looking" when describing him—but he thought he was ugly as sin, with a face like the landscape of the moon. Actually he wasn't half bad-looking. His features were sufficiently chiseled and decently proportioned to give him a craggy profile, and he'd been blessed with a tight cap of hair that never seemed to be in need of a comb. Trask, true to his inner character, tended to see only the worst. He saw the salt and pepper in his prematurely graying hair, the residual complexion of a zit-ridden childhood, and a bulbous "clown nose." Pulling clothes on he briefly examined himself in the door mirror and saw a thirty-six-year-old guy with a body the color of a dead bluegill. Make that carp. He had to get out in the sun one of these days.
    He hated the sun. It was so…sunny. He was a night guy and had nocturnal inner rhythms. It was three in the afternoon, which was like seven A.M. to him, and he had a half an hour of Kansas City traffic to negotiate before he was safely ensconced in the KCM building. The kids were out, which probably meant the traffic would be even worse, if that was possible. He put three Tylenols in his mouth and drank a swallow of tepid water from the tap. Breakfast. He wanted coffee but he would be half an hour late as it was.
    He'd been a news announcer and writer for Z-60 for two years—his tenth and eleventh year in the business—when Chase Kincaid, KCM's program director, and also national P.D. of the Karrash chain, had brought him in to work for a guy who was then managing editor of their Kansas City news department. He did three on-air casts a night, good bucks, and no hassles. It had been like the early days at WNEW in New York, where a buddy of his had done the nine-to-midnight radio news. Three casts a night, and you split,