Rag was proud of his stock, much of which seemed to have come by way of China, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Martin had browsed often enough and at length to have heard many of Rag’s Vietnam stories, which Rag colored with descriptive hand motions and nudges. The man’s straggly gray hair and beard reminded Martin of Jerry Garcia, the late Grateful Dead guitarist, but the man’s red-eyed stare called to mind more the crazed look of a terrorist. Rag had militia ties, and Rag himself had often made cryptic remarks about the McVeigh verdict and execution.
“Howdy, Rag,” Martin called. A long loop of shrunken, petrified human ears rattled as the door slammed closed. Martin smiled. He couldn’t help smiling every time he saw the illegal ears.
“Hey, dude. How ya been?” Rag took his right hand off the holster he wore on his widening hip. In this neighborhood, Martin was well aware, armed robbery was not out of the question, even in broad daylight. Indeed, Rag had himself foiled two attempts in three years.
“Purdy good, man,” Martin drawled, sliding into the good-old-boy patois as if born to it. “How’s the wife?”
“She ain’t no Cindy Crawford, if ya know what I mean?” Rag grinned. “But she’s okay enough.”
“That’s a good one, Rag.” Martin grinned until he thought his cheek muscles would spasm.
He stood at the counter now, looking down through the display glass at the rows of tagged handguns. He realized that he could identify most of them. The new ones, at least. His research was paying off. Some of the old military models were lost on him, but those he didn’t care about anyway. Martin felt a tingle. This was almost as good as watching high school girls trying on lipsticks at the mall. He suppressed a smile.
Rag sat on his stool and faced him, the frame of a field-stripped Colt .45 in his puffy hand. “Just got this one in—a real beaut, once I scrape off some of the crud. These people didn’t care for it, that’s for sure.”
Martin waited patiently. Rag had a way of thoroughly depleting one track he was on before starting another, and you couldn’t just try to make him switch, either; it had to be on his own terms, when he was ready. But Martin could be patient, and this was a minor inconvenience. Besides, he genuinely enjoyed Rag’s machine-gun scatter of talk ranging far and wide.
“Is it really old?” he asked.
“Naw, prob’ly issued post-Nam, but it sat in this guy’s basement for years. Gave ’im fifty bucks for it, put it out on the shelf tomorrow and get three—four hundred. Life is sweet, man.”
Rag went back to buffing the blue-black frame.
Martin felt a twitch working its way up his left hand. Rag would take his time and get to Martin when he was ready.
“Bet you want an update on your special order, huh?” Rag grinned. He liked a captive audience.
“When you have time, bud,” Martin said, struggling to unclench his jaws. “No hurry.”
“Okay.” Rag nodded, but he set the Colt aside on the workbench that served as his back counter. A half-dozen firearms in various stages of assembly rested in vises or under gooseneck lamps. He turned back and gestured at the case between them. “Take a look at that top one, all the way to the left.”
Martin followed Rag’s pointing finger. It was a bulky, stumpy, squat semiautomatic. Black. Mean-looking and all business. Martin didn’t recognize it, though he knew he should have been able to. He looked up, tilted his head inquiringly, and waited for Rag to fill him in.
“It’s a Glock 17 9mm. Standard cop issue. Light as a feather—about half polymer . Takes a seventeen-round magazine, plus one up the spout. Hell of a gun. Six hundred, you interested?”
He waited for Martin’s reaction. Martin eyed the pistol slowly, muzzle to grip. Standard cop issue. This was very likely Lupo’s side arm, then. It looked every bit as dangerous as Martin knew Lupo to be, and he felt an obligation to get to know it.
“Can I see it?”
Rag grinned. “It’s a nice one, all right.” He unlocked the cabinet and slid the Glock out. In one fluid motion he snapped the slide all the way back and presented it to Martin with the breech open. As Martin carefully took it from him, Rag’s finger pointed to the slide stop lever. “Push that with your thumb.”
Martin did, and the slide slammed forward smoothly. Martin knew that if a magazine had been inserted into the handgrip, the slide would have chambered a round with the forward motion, and the pistol would have been ready to fire.
Fingers tingling, Martin held out the Glock, aiming it at the side of the store.
Lupo held a pistol like this when he was hunting me.
Martin handed Rag the Glock. “Not today,” he said with real regret. “But it’s nice,” he added quickly.
Rag nodded and recased the weapon. There was a squawk and the scanner hidden somewhere on the workbench broke into a series of calls. For a moment, both Rag and Martin listened to the police broadcasts. After the radio quieted down again, Rag stood and squeezed through a doorway to the back of the store, returning in a few seconds with a wrapped bundle and two yellow-and-green boxes.
“Took me a little longer than I thought,” Rag was saying, “but I think they turned out great. And the piece was no problem. It’s clean, a Smith .44 with a four-inch barrel. Still has a serial number, but I’m told it has no history. Not that you care, huh?”
“No,” Martin agreed. “I just don’t want the purchase on the books—all this gun-ban stuff going around, why should they have my name on a silver platter?”
“Right,” Rag nodded. “No sweat. I get a couple a month just for guys like you—law-abiding individuals who don’t want the government to come and take their guns away. So that’s a hundred more, but it’s worth it.”
He unwrapped the holstered Smith & Wesson. Martin gulped. It wasn’t quite as big as the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry gun, but it was big. Martin took it. It was heavy, too. Very solid. He understood why people felt comforted by handguns—such compact power, all in the palm of one’s hand.
“I like it,” Martin said, flexing his fingers around the checkered grips. “It feels great.”
Rag smiled. “I knew it, man. Three hundred even for the Smith. These’ll run you another hundred fifty each.” He laid the two boxes on the counter and slid one open. Fifty cartridges stood at attention on a Styrofoam tray, ten rows of five, rattling gently together. “Took me a couple hours per box, but the stuff you give me was primo, so it wasn’t as hard as I thought.”
Even in the store’s dim light, the silvery sheen of each cartridge tip was obvious.
Martin took out his wallet and laid it on the counter. “Looks like a nice job, Rag. Thank you.”
Rag smiled again. “Not to be nosy, but what are you hunting, anyway? Maybe that werewolf that got on the news a couple years ago? The werewolf of Oconomowoc, they called it on the silly news.”
“Werewolf, huh?” Martin laughed. “No, nothing so bizarre. Actually, it’s a gift for a very special friend. I thought the silver bullets were good for a joke. My friend, he’s a big Lone Ranger fan.”
“Really? I grew up on the stuff, man. Jonah Hex, too. Hey, I hear they brought Jonah back a couple years ago.”
“Yeah?” Martin examined the other box of reloaded ammunition “So what’d I end up with?”
“I coated every slug with the silver, like you wanted. Double-jacketed and split the top, so you should get quite the expanding effect. Loads upped to fifty grains, too, so you get more bang. I was gonna try it out, but we’re talkin’ almost four bucks a shot and I had just enough silver, so I didn’t. You let me know how they handle, okay?”
“You bet.” Martin thumbed the release and swung out the cylinder. “Can I get a bag for all this?”
“Sure thing.” Rag turned around and rummaged on the workbench.
Martin waited until Rag’s head was turned, then he glanced at the front of the store. No one was in sight. He slid a single silver round into the cylinder and carefully closed it, snapping it into the frame so that the cartridge he had inserted sat squarely under t
he hammer. He cocked it back with his thumb.
“Can you recommend some oil to clean it with?” His words masked the hammer’s buttery click.
Rag nodded. “Got just the thing,” he said, turning around to face the bench.
Martin reached out, rested the muzzle lightly on the side of Rag’s head, and jerked the trigger.
The explosion slammed into his ears and the recoil drove his hand up and nearly ripped his shoulder out of its socket.
“Ouch.”
Rag’s head deflated like a balloon, blood and cranial matter smattering the workbench and back wall. His body spasmed just once, his bowels let go, and then he sprawled on the floor, out of sight.
Martin gagged momentarily at the smell, but he recovered quickly and scooped up his own wallet, the handgun, holster, and two boxes of ammunition. He filled the paper bag Rag had just set on the counter.
He glanced at the front of the store. Still nothing. Things were going well, according to his plan. So much depended on luck, even in a perfect plan, and luck was with him—no customers for Rag today. But then Martin had spent enough time with Rag to know that his few customers were so regular that he didn’t have to worry about running into them. And Rag’s walk-in traffic was nearly nonexistent.
Martin reached over the counter with a handkerchief in his hand and slid open the display case door, which Rag hadn’t yet locked. He scooped up the Glock and the four spare magazines neatly lined up next to it. Then he ducked below the gate, inhaling deeply of the cordite smoke that hung in the air. He grabbed two handfuls of 9mm ammunition boxes from the wall case, and with his foot slid the metal footlocker out from below the workbench—Rag’s box of goodies. He threw open the lid, his fingers still covered by the cloth, and made a quick selection. Two UZI submachine guns (“the full-auto kind,” Rag had said once, showing him how to cock the stubby thing), a tiny MAC-10, a bundle of spare thirty-round magazines, and a dozen grenades strung on a webbed belt so they resembled a bunch of green metal grapes.
This ought to do it.
Martin unfolded a cloth shopping sack from under his jacket and stuffed it with his new acquisitions. He shoved the locker most of the way back under the counter. Then he felt under the countertop for a lever, felt it and pulled it toward him, and a metal box swung down and out and into his waiting hand. Rag’s paranoid distrust of banks and the government had led him to believe his money would only be safe where he could protect it himself. The cash box was ingeniously hidden but unlocked, and Martin helped himself to Rag’s life savings. He didn’t bother to count it—Rag had once told him he had set aside twenty-five thousand dollars. As Martin stuffed the cash into his shopping bag, he reflected that it did feel like about twenty-five thousand, if not more. It made his score all that much higher, and it killed two birds with one bullet, to paraphrase one of Rag’s favorite distorted clichés. Now he wouldn’t have to arouse suspicions with further bank transactions.
Less than thirty seconds later, he strolled out the door of the shop and onto an empty sidewalk. Human ears rattled once as he eased the door shut after wiping the handle and jamb as best he could, and then he was walking slowly away. A dumpy woman climbed out of a minivan a few doors down and glanced at him briefly. He smiled widely—not a care in the world—and nodded in greeting. Her features softened and she smiled back.
By then, Martin was crossing the street.
The blood and cordite smelled sweet in his nostrils, and he couldn’t help but grin and hum a nonsense tune in his head.
Chapter Eleven
Jessie
Circle Moon Drive was deserted. It felt almost abandoned, as if everyone had disappeared in the middle of supper. Like that English colony, what was it? Roanoke? Her history lessons were a jumble of useless and disordered trivia, but she prided herself on occasionally chancing upon the perfect one to describe something in her life.
Jessie Hawkins turned left onto the frost-wedged remains of the blacktopped road and shifted down, slowing to let the Pathfinder negotiate each pothole one at a time. All around, white and jack pine rose impossibly straight and tall, like organ pipes waiting for a musician’s loving touch.
The Schulze mailbox was shot full of holes again, Jessie noted, as was their cheery Welcome! sign. The stop sign at the intersection had sported three dimpled bullet holes as well, but Jessie thought she might have seen them already, on her last visit nearly a month ago. Vilas County Sheriff Bunche had cleared out most of the ruined signage just last year, but the local itchy trigger fingers continued to claim their flat victims.
“Might as well paint a target on these damned signs,” Bunche had commented with a snort while a crew worked to extract a gun-shot road sign from the shoulder.
“Maybe then they’d miss,” Jessie had pointed out, dragging a chuckle out of the serious lawman, whose laugh lines belied the tension his job brought during spearfishing season, when blaze-orange-clad locals took to the protest trail while tribesmen took their quotas of game fish at spearpoint, leaving the sheriff and his force of six deputies to defuse each and every potentially flammable situation. It was a job Jessie appreciated, and she never avoided reminding him.
Bunche had laughed heartily, trying unsuccessfully to pull his pants up around his widening belly while a holstered pistol applied opposing downward pressure. It was obvious Bunche liked Jessie, everyone in town did, even if she did practice on the Reservation. That fact alone might have doomed a lesser individual, or a lesser general practitioner and sometime marriage counselor. Jessie had grown up in the controversy of a mixed household in a mixed county and the tensions here between Indians and locals went deep enough to cause occasional feuds and violence, but never so much that a forest fire couldn’t be fought by the cooperation born when the regular volunteers accepted the aid offered by a couple companies from the Reservation. After such an event, the beer frankly tasted the same no matter who was buying, and Jessie tried to turn each uneasy occurrence into a low-key lecture on cooperation and good neighborliness. The trick was not to get caught lecturing.
Now that the Reservation elders had voted to build a casino, things would get even uglier and stranger here, as the res would probably get rich off the local morons who’d gladly stuff the slot machines for the unlikely possibility of a big win.
Serves them right!
She laughed once, bitterly, as she pulled into the driveway at the 1090 Circle Moon Drive marker.
Nothing was ever as easy as it seemed. Take, for instance, this property of hers. For forty years it had been her father’s, a getaway far from the usual getaways, and now it had become her side income, a long-term rental property that required relatively little upkeep besides the usual winterizing and opening or closing as the seasons changed. Boats in the water in spring and out by mid-September.
After a storm as violent as the one that had rocked the woods the night before, though, all bets were off. Indeed, before Jessie could reach the cottage, she rolled the Pathfinder to a stop inches from a toppled pine trunk that angled from out of the woods. It had been snapped like a twig a few feet above the roots and lay across the narrow drive, effectively blocking access to vehicles. It was too large and heavy to drag off the drive without chains, and its trunk was so well threaded between living trees that she couldn’t risk damaging others.
“Shit,” muttered Jessie, though she was not unused to the mysterious ways of the woods. She took an axe from the back of the truck and went to work, knowing that—based on her calendar and a phone message left on her machine—her tenant would be driving up to the cottage sometime either today or early tomorrow. She swore again as the sweat started to form on her forehead and drip, and she put her back into it, wishing she had her chain saw.
She’d charge Nick Lupo for the time and labor, she decided, and make him pay before the end of his next little vacation. That way, she reasoned, she could deliver the bill in person. Any excuse would do. She smiled, then swung her axe again, relishing the exercise. But she’d f
ind some way to make him pay.
Klug
Wilbur Klug wriggled his big toe into the leather stirrup and kicked open the cover of the rusted Coca-Cola bottle cooler he kept on his porch. He dunked his bare foot into the cold square opening and grabbed the thin neck of a Rhinelander bottle between his big and second toes, relishing the nip of the cap’s sharp little creases.
One of the pleasures of life, he allowed, as he drew his foot close enough so he could transfer the bottle to his eager hand. Now unburdened, his foot kicked the cover closed. Rust flaked off the side of the cooler and disintegrated, falling on the bare wood planking of the porch. He pried the top off on a bent nailhead and took a long swallow, fighting down the burp that was already working its way back up, letting it build and then escape in one glorious explosion. He smiled and chugged from the bottle.
Wil’s day was already turning out to be a keeper. First old man Brawlings had called to bitch him out for screwing up the deliveries last week, threatening to cancel his standing order for Wil’s services—Fuckin’ dink don’t deserve a job well done, Wil figured after getting his ear chewed for ten minutes, before hanging up on the old bastard and canceling his own services, thanks a fuckin’ lot to your sister, too. Lost a two-bit job, maybe, but here he was, barely ten in the morning and a cold one going down, and others near at hand.
Then there was Shelly. Oh, yeah, she’d held out her wifely duties long enough, and this morning was one of those days a headache just didn’t cut it, no sir, and that had made his early-morning rise ‘n’ shine a real riser. Woman was still in bed, crying about how he’d hurt her, but hadn’t she been asking for it, with her innocent-as-an-angel routine? What was it, a month since he’d last cajoled some decent sack time from his timeworn better half, groveling for it like a starving beggar and having to make do with the crumbs she saw fit to toss his way? Was that any way to love, honor, and obey? No sir, it hadn’t been. But she’d seen the light today, that was for sure. He had finally entered that holy orifice, the same one that Shelly had sworn he would never breach. He relished the memory. He had paused at the puckered entrance to her anus and then, holding her down forcibly and with little interest in her comfort, had thrust his engorged penis into her over and over with no lubrication, skewering her pride along with her flesh until her cries were drowned out by his bellowing surge of orgasm, the force of which sent his semen squirting half in and half out of her bowels to dapple her inner thighs along with the blood drawn by his savage entry.
Wolf's Trap (The Nick Lupo Series Book 1) Page 9
