Something Borrowed, Something Black

by Loren D. Estleman

  Three walls featured small built-in drawers to waist height, like the ones that contained screws and bolts in hardware stores. Each was labeled with the caliber of the cartridges it contained. The room itself was no larger than an ordinary living room, but it appeared to be a Home Depot of modern weaponry.

  “We’re a full-service gun club,” said the man who shared the room with Macklin. “Which in Texas means we could arm a small revolution. Not too small. Which is why I have to ask if your interest is the overthrow of the Republic of the United States of America.”

  Red Cotton—if he was the man Edison had told him to ask for at Goliad—was a smallish man in his late sixties, with a belt of white hair stretched across his scalp from one ear to the other. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and a leather apron over a plain white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. Whatever else he wore was hidden behind a workbench with a battered zinc top, to which was bolted a vise with the frame and barrel of a Smith & Wesson Russian revolver—possibly a reproduction—clamped inside it. The barrel had been engraved with an oak-leaf design to within two inches of the muzzle. The man was holding an electric engraving tool. There was a sharp odor of scorched metal, and the last wisp of what had probably been a lot of blue smoke was coiling into a square vent in the ceiling above his head.

  What if it is? Macklin thought of asking, but did not. The man looked as if he had even less sense of humor than he. His bald dome and old-fashioned glasses made him resemble a Swiss watchmaker, or what Macklin imagined a Swiss watchmaker would look like in a world of French headwaiters, Italian barbers, and Irish cops. He certainly didn’t look like a man named Red.

  “I’m not interested in overthrowing anything,” Macklin said.

  “Didn’t think so, but I had to ask. Last year I held two members of the Lone Star Militia here with that Mannlicher for an hour and a half until the Rangers showed up. They were asking about MAC-10s by the case, and things I don’t carry, tear-gas canisters and fragmentary grenades. They said in their statements they wanted to hit the Cattleman’s Bank in Houston and finance an insurrection. My father died on Iwo Jima. I served three weeks in the marines before they discharged me because of asthma. I pay my taxes and I don’t do business with treasonous scum.”

  “How’d they get this far?” Macklin wasn’t curious, but the man seemed to want to make conversation. It probably had to do with spending all day locked in a room with nothing to talk to but recoil springs and hollow-points.

  “One of them used someone’s name, like you. I’m Red Cotton. I never had red hair, they just started calling me that to tick me off because I hate communists. Only I don’t mind it. It has dash, which is more than I can say for my real name. I won’t ask yours and don’t tell me. If I sell you a weapon I don’t care what you do with it as long as you don’t use it on an American soldier in uniform or the governor of Texas or the president of the United States. Senators and congressmen are okay, if they’re crooked. If you shoot them for their ideology, you’d better not come back here.” He tilted his head a fraction of an inch in the direction of the elephant gun.

  “I don’t even vote.”

  “Now, you were better off not telling me that. Travis didn’t die at the Alamo so you could sit on your dead ass and let a bunch of wetbacks decide who sits in the White House.”

  “He wasn’t doing it for the United States.”

  “Patrick Henry, then. The point’s the same.”

  “I mean I can’t vote. I’ve got a felony conviction on my record.”

  “That’s different. What’s your preference?”

  “Thirty-eight revolver. Smith and Wesson, if you’ve got it. Charter Arms and Dan Wesson are okay, too.”

  “Buy-American man. Not an automatic?”

  “I don’t use automatics.”

  “Smart. No loose shell casings.”

  Macklin said nothing.

  “What about a magnum?” Cotton asked. “Three-fifty-seven’s the same caliber but it’s got more muscle.”

  “Too much. I like a bullet to stay where I put it, not pass on through.”

  “If it’s stopping you want, you’d do better with a forty-four or-five. I’ve got one of the new fifties. I don’t know what your budget is.”

  “Too big a kick. Have you got what I want or not?”

  Cotton crouched behind the workbench. There was a sliding sound, and Macklin stepped back instinctively, but the other man merely stood and rested a pull-out tray on top of the bench.

  It was lined with gray felt and blue steel. Among the half-dozen handguns nestled in molded depressions were a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special with a two-inch barrel and two other Smiths, a Model 15 Combat Masterpiece and a Model 28, called the Highway Patrolman, with four-and six-inch barrels, respectively. Macklin ignored the snubnose Chief, hesitated over the long-barreled Highway Patrolman, then grasped the Combat Masterpiece by its walnut handle. He swung out the cylinder, confirmed the chambers were empty, snapped it back into the frame with a twist of his wrist, and rotated it with his free palm while holding the hammer back with his thumb. It turned freely, without wobbling. The hammer was a little stiff, affecting the trigger pull, but he distrusted hair triggers. The gun balanced well.

  “It hasn’t been test-fired,” Cotton said. “The hammer’ll loosen up after it’s been fired around a couple of times. It’s straight from the factory, a virgin piece. That’ll cost you. I’ve got another one all broke in; you’ll save a couple of hundred, but it was used once, to make a point. Someone put a slug in a ceiling.”

  “Not interested, unless he took it with him. What about the serial number?” He ran his thumb over the embossed digits.

  “On file at the factory, nowhere else. It’s unregistered. That’s the part that costs.”

  “What about the six-inch?”

  “It’s registered to a dealer in Oklahoma City. He died. Natural causes. Trail ends there.”

  Macklin put down the four-inch and hefted the Highway Patrolman. It was barrel-heavy, but that steadied the aim. The hammer worked smoothly. “I’ll try them both.”

  “Go ahead. I reserved the range for the next hour. No one’ll interrupt you.”

  “No one better.”

  Cotton laid the Combat Masterpiece on the counter and replaced the drawer. He came up with a box of .38 cartridges, but before handing it to Macklin he removed a harness from a peg behind the counter, climbed into it, took a P-38 from the underarm clip, jacked a shell into the chamber, and returned it to the clip. He did all this without flourish and without looking at Macklin. Then he pushed the box across the counter.

  When Macklin was loaded, they went out into the range, where Cotton stood back while Macklin took his place at one of the stands and ran one of the silhouette targets to forty feet. He never risked a working shot at that range except in an emergency, but it would tell him how well the guns were sighted. He ignored the earphones resting on the stand until he’d fired a bullet from each revolver. Some guns were louder than others, and he didn’t want to flinch when it counted because he was unprepared for the volume. Then he put on the earphones and emptied both weapons, pausing from time to time to check his marksmanship and to compare the guns’ performances.

  He removed the earphones. “They’re both a little off.”

  “I can adjust them. Be a minute.”

  “I adjusted myself already. I’ll take the four-inch.”

  “A lot of people prefer the six.”

  “I’m one. But it takes all day to haul out.”

  “Harder to conceal, too.”

  Macklin said nothing to that. “How much?”

  “Thousand. It’s a virgin piece, like I said. Throw in a box of cartridges.”

  “All I’ll need is six in the cylinder.”

  “You might want to keep one empty under the hammer.”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale.”

  “Old wives whose husbands shot their dicks off by mistake.”

  “I’ll dre
ss it in the opposite direction.” Macklin peeled ten one-hundred-dollar bills off the roll he’d been carrying since he left Detroit. From old habit he never used travelers’ checks or ATMs, drawing out what he needed at home, with a cushion for emergencies. If he ran out he could pawn his luggage.

  “Glad to see you don’t haggle.”

  “Would it get me anywhere?”

  “Out that door, without what you came for. I hate skinflints more than traitors.” Cotton recounted the bills and put them in an apron pocket. “I’ll clean it.” He picked up both guns from the stand and turned toward the gun room.

  “I’ll watch,” said Macklin, following.

  FOURTEEN

  At three P.M., Housekeeping rang to ask Mrs. Macklin if they could make up the room. She told them not to worry about it. After she hung up, she realized she should have asked for clean towels, but she didn’t feel like talking to anyone so she didn’t call back.

  She’d had the DO NOT DISTURB sign out since last night, and had asked the operator to hold any calls except from Mr. Macklin. That was habit. She was nearly as terrified to hear from Peter as she was to speak to Abilene.

  Culver City the day before had been a nightmare. Not the place itself. It seemed a pleasant-enough area made up of pretty little houses on steep hills with steps leading up to them for what seemed like hundreds of feet. They would be forty-thousand-dollar cottages back home, but Abilene said they went for a quarter-million and were never on the market for long. They went past the Warner Brothers studios, rows of hangarlike buildings she’d seen many times in aerial shots in documentaries about Hollywood. (“Maverick, my favorite when I was little,” he’d said, pointing out one of the soundstages. “They did all the interiors there. The western town’s still standing on the backlot. Hang a sign on the train station saying ‘Tombstone’ or ‘Dodge City’ or ‘Purgatory,’ one of them made-up names, bingo, you’re in a different town. You seen all them buildings a hundred times if you watch westerns.”) She’d barely looked. He’d insisted on getting out and showing her the steps where Laurel and Hardy kept losing the piano. It looked like all the other flights of steps cut into the hills, and she declined his invitation to climb them.

  Nothing distinguished the place from every other he’d driven her through, and she couldn’t tell when they’d left Los Angeles and were in Burbank or wherever. She was afraid to say that, afraid not to feign interest, afraid of him, afraid of Peter, afraid, afraid, afraid. Cheerful Spanish Modern houses with whitewashed stucco walls and red tile roofs frightened her now the way the long dark hallway on the second floor of her grandfather’s farmhouse had frightened her when she was ten and couldn’t get The Shining out of her head. She didn’t know what she might do or say that might make him hit her or stick her with that ugly knife.

  Back in the room at the end of that long day, she’d been afraid he’d come to her door. She was no innocent, not like the young women in old movies who didn’t know what some men were capable of. She’d been no virgin when she met Peter, and she was pretty sure she’d been raped on a date once, although she’d had too much to drink at the time and knew she would have no satisfactory answer if asked if she’d encouraged the act, and so she hadn’t reported it. The way Abilene looked at her sometimes was the same way the boy had looked at her before he’d taken her home and she’d been foolish enough to say her grandparents were out. If Mr. Major hadn’t told Abilene not to hit her or threaten her, he probably hadn’t told him not to fuck her, either, and even if he had, she had no reason to expect him to obey.

  Well, he hadn’t come to her door. But she knew if she went out, he’d be there in the hallway waiting, or down in the lobby the way he had been the first night. She’d slept with the door double-locked and the chair that belonged to the little writing desk propped under the knob, and when she woke up she’d turned on the TV for company. It had been on all day. The programs were undiverting: infomercials, weather reports, someone else’s horror in the Middle East, a dumb comedy with Rock Hudson and Doris Day. The Turner channel was playing Murder, Incorporated. She couldn’t take more than a minute of that. Gangster films used to be her favorite, but she knew she would never watch one again.

  Peter was a gangster. Worse than that, he was a hired murderer like that other Peter in the movie, Peter Falk. Not the cuddly cop on Columbo. A rat who knifed people on crowded subways and threatened witnesses with death if they went to the police to tell what they’d seen. Peter—her Peter—would do the same to her.

  No. She didn’t believe that. When she didn’t, at the time she didn’t, she was thinking of the look on his face close up when they made love. At the moment of release, there was a vulnerability she knew no one else ever saw. That other Mrs. Macklin would have seen it, but if she’d known what it meant, she’d forgotten, or they would still be married. But there had been no such look or promise of it on the face in the picture she’d seen at police headquarters. That was the face she feared, the one she saw when she thought of him out there now, preparing to murder someone.

  This time, though, there was a difference. He wasn’t killing for money or to protect himself, but to keep her safe. And so the two faces kept superimposing themselves upon each other, changing from evil to tender and back to evil, like one of those holographic images on a ticket to a sold-out rock concert, depending upon the angle you held it.

  She could call the police and the whole thing would end that day. The whole thing including her life with Peter, because he would certainly go to prison with Abilene and Major and whoever else was involved. Or she could keep the police out of it and preserve her relationship with a killer. Or if something went wrong on Peter’s end, he might be killed himself. She did not know how long he’d been inactive, and supposed one got sluggish and careless in that as in everything else, from lack of practice. When she thought of that, pictured Peter sprawled in a pool of his own blood on some street in some unknown city, staring at the sky without blinking, it was the Peter who’d swerved to miss an inattentive seagull on the Coast Highway she thought of, and not the sullen criminal in the photograph.

  That image, of Peter’s eyes sightless in a head haloed with blood, was on her mind when the knock came. It startled her as if she’d been dozing and dreaming, and she was certain it was a policeman knocking at her door to tell her she was a widow.

  Her head was swimming when she swung her legs off the bed, and she realized she had fallen asleep. She glanced at the clock—3:03, so it had been just a brief doze after all—and went to the door, stopping on the way to run her fingers through her hair before the mirror above the bureau. Did wives do that when they knew they were about to receive word their husbands were dead? The terrible certainty came to her that she was unprepared to be a proper tragic figure.

  The chair jammed under the doorknob reminded her of the need for caution. She put an eye to the peephole. No one was standing outside. Just as she took in that information, the knocking started again, and she realized it wasn’t coming from the hallway.

  As she followed the sound, it took on a kind of jaunty rhythm—not the conventional shave-and-a-haircut, more of a marimba beat. And she knew before she got to the door that connected with the next room who was on the other side.

  “Yes?” The single word sounded prim. She was suddenly aware that she was wearing only a dressing gown. She clutched the collar ends together.

  “Me, nursie. Open up.” Abilene’s voice was as clear as if nothing separated them. Which was nearly true. Two inches of air and a sixtieth of an inch of flimsy veneer on either side. All this time barricaded from the outside, and he’d been there all along. He could have punched through with his fist. She knew the power behind that fist. He’d held most of it back before and still drawn blood.

  “I’m not dressed.”

  She regretted saying it. In the pause that followed she felt as if she were standing naked in an open doorway. She knew that was how he was picturing her.

  “Well, throw something
on. We’re going out for a bite.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Pardon me for calling a lady a liar, but I could eat the asshole out of a skunk, and I had a big breakfast. Them candies on your pillows wouldn’t keep a Rhode Island flea alive.”