Before going to Andorra’s, he drove over the ridge and down to the shooting area, which was a series of ranges based around a parking lot in the middle of a deep bowl, with a creek oxbowing at the bottom of the lot. The ranges weren’t fancy, mostly defined by a row of picnic-style tables and benches, with a roof overhead for shelter. The rifle range was in the deeper part of the bowl, and shooters fired at a series of bulldozer-built berms. To Virgil’s eye, the berms appeared to have been set at fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty, and two hundred yards, and then four more berms out to six hundred yards. A narrow dirt two-track ran down the length of the range, so shooters could drive down to check out their targets.

The shooting end of the range featured four benches with picnic table seats and a flagpole atop which a red flag fluttered in the breeze to make newcomers aware that shooting was going on.

Two men were sitting at one of the benches, one of them with a rifle snuggled on top of Army-green sandbags, the other looking downrange through a scope, his rifle lying on a case off to the side. The aimed rifle went boom, the shooter jerked with the recoil, and the scope man said something to him. Virgil got out of the truck, and called to them: “Hey! Excuse me.”

They were both wearing electronic earmuffs, which cut the sound of a muzzle blast but allowed them to hear normal speech. They both turned to look, and Virgil walked down and identified himself.

“I’m looking at the shootings up in Wheatfield,” he said. “I’d be interested in anyone shooting a .223 at longer ranges—four hundred to five hundred yards, or so—maybe with a scoped bolt-action.”

The two men looked at each other and then simultaneously shook their heads. The shooter said, “There are a couple of Nazis on the county line over toward Blue Earth, they got .223s, but Glen kicked them out when they announced they were Nazis. Only one of them had a card anyway; he’d bring the other one in with him.”

“Is that common?” Virgil asked.

“Hell, no,” the man said. “Membership costs fifty bucks a year. Me’n Bill are shooting up a box of .300 Winchester Magnums, goes for forty bucks a box. A year out here costs less than a box and a half of ammo. A heck of a bargain, and they wouldn’t even pay that. Pissed some of us off even before they were Nazis.”

The scope man said, “It wasn’t the Nazis that shot those people in town, though. They had about the cheapest guns that would actually work and thirty-dollar scopes. They had trouble keeping their shots on the paper at a hundred yards, never mind for four or five blocks.”