A very atypical New Yorker story

Are we serious, am I really reading Tree Line, Kansas, 1934 (David Means?) in the New Yorker? I mean there's nothing wrong with this story, except that it reads like a few pages from a screenplay for a movie that might have been edgy in about 1960. Two feds on a stakeout watching an isolated Kansas farmhouse waiting to see if the gunman will return to search for the loot, one is a young guy steeped in theory and always talking and the other an older guy, who it seems looks back on this event from a later stage in his life, so we obviously know he survived and the young guy did not - and as we learn the young guy did not because of his own carelessness, and - so what? Are we to make anything of this story? It's very well told, well crafted, I can see the evident skill. But the whole point of it seems to be, or should be (in my view), how this moment of carelessness affected the life of the survivor, forever. And that's all just glossed over - we don't know, aren't told, what became of him. Maybe it's because the shooting death of one (but not the other) is not at all explained - how did the older guy avoid the bullets? Moreover, what would I say if I came on this story in a writers' group? Build into it some causality: don't just have the young guy randomly shot but have it happen because there's a flaw in his theory or because the older guy does something wrong and fateful and survives but feels guilt about it. My advice. Maybe this story is a part of a longer project? Maybe I'm just a bit stunned because this story is so atypical of the New Yorker - and I really don't object to that, I like to see some variety in the selections. But it doesn't feel like a complete and whole work of art - just a fragment.