David Richards climbed down from the platform and headed towards the large storage building where the used bowling pins were kept. He wanted to see how the supply was holding out, and if he needed to have more brought up from the other facility.

"Here he comes," whispered Theresa as she and Cindy peered outside through the space between the door and the frame. The two women quickly stripped off their shorts, underwear, and T-shirts and threw them under the table in the corner eight feet to the right of the doorway. Cindy jumped up on the table and lay back with her legs spread. Theresa climbed on top of her, facing in the opposite direction, and started giggling.

"Shh!" Cindy hissed. "We don't want him to notice us right away." Theresa bit her lip and fell silent.

David Richards opened the door to the storage building. As he walked into the structure, instinct made him reach for the light switch until his brain registered that he had left the fluorescents on. The boxes of used pins were on pallet racks against the far wall, and so he headed straight towards them without looking to either side. David Richards was just about to pull down one of the boxes when he heard a sharp intake of breath behind him, to his right, and so he turned around.

"Oh!" said Theresa, rising up to a kneeling position and bringing her hand up to her mouth in a gesture of surprise. "Oh, I'm...oh, this is so...listen, I know we shouldn't be in here, but...we weren't going to steal anything, I promise." Like he could possibly think that's what we were doing Cindy thought as she fought to keep from being convulsed with laughter.

"Well, uh..." David Richards stammered, "I-".

"Please, don't get us in trouble, we'll get out of here right away. Listen, I am really sorry, I hope you won't say anything about this to the manager, because-"

"I'm the manager," Richards said in his best 'Here's-some-candy-little-girl' voice. "And who might you be?"

"I'm Theresa, and this is my friend Cindy," the girl said as she hopped off the table. "Cin, we better get dressed." She bent over to look for their clothes, giving David Richards a rear view where he could confirm her lack of tan lines.

"I hope we haven't embarrassed you, Mr. Richards," Cindy said as she sat up. "We meant no harm. We were just...in the mood."

"Oh...sure," Richards said to her, trying to sound as if this sort of thing happened regularly between rounds at the New Lease shoots. 'That's fine. I'm glad the building was unlocked, ha ha. No harm done whatso-" He stopped in mid-sentence as he recognized Cindy's face. "You're... Henry Bowman's girlfriend."

"Well, yeah," Theresa said, "but Cindy knew him first, so..." She shrugged as she left the sentence unfinished. Now we've got him completely confused Cindy Caswell thought with a smile.

"Look, I've got to, uh, get back outside," David Richards said as he backed towards the exit, "so...uh...put something to block the door, and you can...uh...whatever..." He closed the door behind him as he left. The two women hurried to the door after he had closed it and waited for half a minute. Then they peeked through the crack.

"Henry's walking up to him!" Cindy said merrily. "He's asking him about us." Cindy and Theresa watched as Henry Bowman hailed the nervous-looking David Richards.

"Hey, David! Have you seen my girlfriend Theresa? She and Cindy were supposed to meet me back near the ranges, and I can't find either one of them." Henry gave the other man a conspiratorial look. "I think Theresa's up for something other than shooting tonight."

"No, no, I've just been rounding some gear up from storage. Can't help you, got to run," he said quickly, and hurried off. Henry made a show of looking around until David Richards was out of sight. Then he opened the door to the shed.

"Did it work?"

"I think your friend David Richards may be in love, Henry," Cindy Caswell said. Cindy's judgment about people had always been excellent, and this time did not prove to be an exception.

"Shooters ready...guns on the rail...timers ready..."

When Richards fired his blank pistol, the two men with Remington 1100 shotguns raised the muzzles of their weapons and began shooting at the ten bowling pins standing on the long table twenty-five feet away. They worked from opposite ends, which was the way they had practiced for the Unlimited Two-Man event. Both men shot well under pressure and did not rush themselves, and neither missed any targets. The shooter on the left was faster than the one on the right, and so both men's shot strings hit the sixth pin from the left at virtually the same time with their last shots. This bowling pin was driven violently off the table and came to rest some twenty feet back, in the grass.

"Three point eight."

"Three point eight."

"Three point seven."

"Three point eight."

"Okay, good job, timers, score is three point eight, scorer," David Richards called out as the pinsetters hurried to put up ten more targets. "Looks like right now, that's the time to beat. Next shooter," he called out. Then David Richards started laughing when he saw Henry Bowman step up to the line.

"Well, it looks like either we're going to need five watches on this one, or just a sundial. Where's your partner, Henry?"

"Cindy, come on up." Henry turned to his rotund friend on the announcer's platform. "Rules don't say both shooters have to have guns. Got your ears and glasses on?" he asked the young woman. "This brake throws a lot of shit out the sides." Cindy Caswell nodded and moved over to the side, then took a step back. "Perfect," Henry told her.

The gun Henry Bowman carried was an FN Model D, the final refinement of John Browning's BAR and Henry Bowman's all-time favorite machine gun. The particular one in his hands was the last variant made before the full-auto-only Model D had been completely superseded by lighter, less-expensive machine rifles. It had been made in the 1950s for Israel, and unlike earlier versions, it was barreled in 7.62 NATO caliber and used FAL magazines.

Henry Bowman had removed the weapon's bipod, and in its place on the front of the gas tube had attached a sling swivel originally designed for a shotgun. He had also installed a sling swivel on top of the buttstock just in front of the steel buttplate. Attached to the two sling swivels was a long, padded M60 sling made of black nylon. The sling went around Henry's shoulder and neck, and put the gun at waist level. Screwed onto the weapon's muzzle was a stainless steel muzzle brake designed by Henry's friend Bruce McArthur who was also friends with David Richards.

Henry snapped a loaded magazine in place, gripped the gun for firing from the hip, and pushed with his arms to put tension on the sling. He was settling in with the weapon, making his concentration absolute. "Point shooting, huh?" Richards asked. "You might do it. Six watches to the timing stand," he yelled. David Richards had grown up point-shooting an M-l carbine from the hip, and he was very good at it. He knew that with the FN-D on its slow rate of 350 rounds per minute, it was easy to tap off single shots by releasing the trigger, shooting the gun like a semiauto.

"Shooter ready...gun on the rail...timers ready..." Richards called as Henry pressed the Belgian BAR down and forward, putting tension on the sling looped over his shoulder and down his back. Then David Richards fired his blank gun.

At the sound, Henry Bowman raised the muzzle while keeping tension on the sling. He squeezed the trigger and held it down as he swung the Model D in a smooth arc. The 18-pound gun chugged away with almost no recoil and ten bowling pins were swept away one after another, as if a giant invisible hand had brushed them off the table.

"Jesus!" one of the spectators yelled.

"Damn," echoed another.

"One point eight," cried out the six timers almost in unison. Henry removed the half-full magazine, which rendered the open-bolt gun safe.

"Set 'em up again," Henry Bowman yelled cheerfully as he put the magazine away and pulled a fresh one out of his BAR belt. "I've got the range."

The next two sets yielded identical results. The rules called for shooting four tables of pins and discarding the worst time, but Henry declined to shoot his final table.

"No point. Only way to shoot a different time is to miss one. Time's set by the cyclic rate."

"You going to let his time stand?" one of the other competitors in the Two-Man Unlimited class asked. "With a machine gun?" David Richards gave out guns for prizes to most of the top finishers in the various classes, which in part accounted for the heated competition.

"The official judge will take it under advisement," Richards announced imperiously. Henry laughed. He didn't care about prizes and he knew his friend would dream up some way of needling him at the awards ceremony.

"Hey, Henry. How'd you manage that, anyway?" Richards asked.

"I saw Steve McCreary do it with his Thompson in the subgun class a few years ago, and so I practiced a little at my range at home with my Belgian jackhammer here," he said, patting the FN-D. What Henry Bowman did not mention was that it had taken him thirteen thousand rounds of concentrated practice to time the first shot and match his swing to the pin spacing and the gun's cyclic rate.

"Bloody amazing," said a man with curly blond hair and a broad smile. The speaker was standing behind David Richards, and Henry Bowman did not notice him. If he had, he would have stopped to talk. "So, shall we go find our girlfriend?" Cindy asked.

"That's a plan," Henry said easily. David Richards watched them walk away, not listening to what one of his timers was asking him.

"You should have seen his face when he saw us, Henry," Theresa said as she stepped naked out of the motel bathroom, toweling her hair.

"It was a really good 'gotcha'," Cindy agreed, smiling at Henry and stretching out on her side of the kingsize bed. She, too, was naked.

"Do you think we went too far?" Theresa asked as she slid in bed between her two lovers. "I mean, was it rude? He's our host, after all."

"I don't think he minded too much, babe," Henry told Theresa as he molded his body alongside hers and began to massage her bottom.

"No, I think Henry's right," Cindy agreed as she also pressed against the young woman, nuzzling her throat. "Gun people are all pretty easygoing."

June 20,1995 "Anybody do it yet?" Henry asked as he and Cindy approached the mock-up of the 'sniper's nest' of the Texas School Book Depository. It was the last day of the New Lease shoot, and the awards banquet was that evening.

"Nope," one of the competitors answered. "Got three guys out of over a hundred entrants who've made the three hits, but they're all at least a second-and-a-half too slow. Couple of 'em said they'd have a better chance with open sights." The man was referring to the fact that the scope made it very difficult to get back on target quickly after the gun fired and the shooter worked the bolt. "Go on and get in line if you want to give it a try. Take one of those Carcanos and do some dry-fire practice while you wait."

Henry took the man's suggestion. When his turn came up, he was able to score the three hits on the mannequins in the moving convertible in six seconds flat.

"Damn," one of the spectators breathed. "With a borrowed junker."

"I seen that guy shoot before," another said. "He can beat yourn with hisn, and hisn with yourn."

"Looks like you're the second-fastest so far," the scorekeeper told Henry when he finished. "Only one point four too slow. You win a bottle of Coke. That's David's prize for anyone that scores all three hits." Cindy looked puzzled, and Henry explained the joke.

"Two minutes after the shooting, Oswald was seen calmly drinking a Coke five floors down from where they found the rifle. And the rifle was at the opposite corner of the sixth floor from where it was supposedly fired."

"Yeah," another man broke in, "David was going to make the shooters run over, dump the rifle, run down some steps, and put money in a vending machine, but he was afraid someone would have a heart attack and sue him."

"Was it what you expected?" Cindy asked, referring to the results Henry had achieved.

"Pretty much. I mainly just wanted to see if my assessment when I was eleven years old was accurate." "Which was?"

"If Oswald did what the Warren Commission said he did, he was the best man with a bolt action in the whole country. And it's really hard to feature that the fastest bolt man in the entire United States would have a brain tumor."

"You mean because that's the only possible explanation for why he would try to assassinate the President?" "No, I mean because that's the only possible explanation for why he would try to do it with a Carcano."

"In the 9mm Novice class, our top shooter is Cindy Caswell," David Richards announced in his rapid-fire speech pattern. Cindy stood up and went to claim her plaque as the others in the dining room applauded. "Thank you, David," she said, shaking Richards' hand.

"Here, take a number," the host said, holding out a top hat. Cindy reached in and drew out a slip of paper with a number on it. The winners of all the classes drew numbers, which determined the order in which they would choose their prizes from the awards table. There were a number of guns in the $500-$700 range to choose from, many more which were less valuable than that, lots of body armor, and enough shooting accessories for almost everyone who had entered.

"Good job," Henry said when she sat back down at the table. David Richards was announcing the next winner.

"What number did you get?" Theresa asked.

"Eleven."

"Have you looked over the stuff?"

"Yeah. He's got all kinds of good things. I'd like one of the .40-caliber Clocks, if they aren't all taken. Or a Seecamp."

"The Seecamps will go quick, I bet," Henry told her. "There's a long wait from the factory." "Yeah."

"Well, worst case," Henry said with a laugh, "you can get one of his new lightweight women's vests. Use it for one of your outfits on stage, with a cop shirt and hat."