Lawrence Block - A Ticket To The Boneyard

"So you sold them."

"So I did. And two nights later I'm having a drink at Morrissey's, and Tim Pat himself calls me aside. You remember Tim Pat Morrissey."

"Of course."

" 'I hear you've a few extra rifles,' he says. 'Wherever did you hear that?' I say. Well, the whole of it is that he wants the lot of them for some friends of his in the north of Ireland. You knew they were involved in all of that, the brothers. Didn't you?"

"I'd certainly heard as much."

"Well, nothing would do but he must have these rifles. He won't believe I've already sold them. He's sure I couldn't have moved them so quick, you see. 'You don't want them in this country,' he says. 'Think what your man may do with them.' Why, I said, he and his friend will go and play toy soldier with them, or at worst they'll go and shoot a few niggers. 'You don't know that,' he says. 'Maybe they'll start a revolution and storm the governor's mansion. Maybe they'll give the guns to the niggers. Sell them to me and you'll know where they're going.' "

He sighed. "So we stole them back and sold them to Tim Pat. He wouldn't pay the price the little Nazis paid, either. What a bargainer he was! 'You're doing this for Holy Ireland,' he said, driving the price down. Still, when you collect twice for the same fucking guns, any price is a good price."

"Did the original buyers come back at you?"

"Ah," he said. "Now there's the part the statute of limitations doesn't cover. You might say they were in no position to retaliate."

"I see."

"I made good money on those guns," he said. "But once they were out of the country, well, that was an end to it. I was out of guns, and so I was out of the gun business."

I went to the bar and got another Coke. This time I had Burke cut me a wedge of lemon to cut the sweetness. When I got back to the table Mick said, "Now what made me tell you that story? The gun business, that's what put me in mind of it, but why go on and tell it?"

"I don't know."

"When we sit together, you and I, the stories roll."

I sipped my Coke. The lemon helped. I said, "You never asked me what I needed with a gun."

"Not my business, is it?"

"Maybe not."

"You happen to need a gun and I happen to have one. I don't think you'll shoot me, or hold up the bar with it."

"It's not likely."

"So you owe me no explanation."

"No," I said. "But it makes a good story."

"Well," he said, "now that's another thing entirely."

I sat there and told him the whole thing. Somewhere along the way he held up a hand and drew a short horizontal line in the air, and Burke chased the last few customers and started shutting down the bar. When he started putting the chairs up on the tables Ballou told him to let it go, that he'd see to the rest of it. Burke turned off the lights over the bar and the ceiling lights and let himself out, drawing the sliding gates across but not engaging the padlock. Mick locked the door from inside and cracked the seal on a fresh bottle of whiskey, and I went right on with my story.

When I got to the end he looked again at the sketch of Motley. "He's a bad bastard," he said. "You can see it in his eyes."

"The man who drew the picture never even saw him."

"No matter. He put it in the picture whether he saw him or not." He folded the sketch and gave it back to me. "The woman you brought in the other night."

"Elaine."

"I thought so. I didn't recall her name, but I thought it must be the same one. I liked her."

"She's a good woman."

"You've been friends a long time then."

"Years and years."

He nodded. "When it all started," he said. "Your man said you framed him. Is he still saying it now?"

"Yes."

"Did you?"

I'd left that part out, but I couldn't see any reason to hold it back. "Yes, I did," I said. "I got a lucky shot in and he went out cold. He had a glass jaw. You wouldn't remember a boxer named Bob Satterfield, would you?"

"Wouldn't I though? His fights looked fixed. The ones he lost, that is. He'd be way ahead, and then he'd get tapped on the jaw and go down like a felled steer. Of course you'd never fix a fight that way, but the average man's reasoning powers don't reach that far. Bob Satterfield, now his is a name I've not heard in years."

"Well, Motley had Satterfield's jaw. While he was out I stuck a gun in his hand and squeezed off a few rounds. It wasn't a complete frame. I just made the charges more serious so that he'd draw a little jail time."

"And you trusted her to back you?"

"I figured she'd stand up."

"You thought that well of her."

"I still do."

"And rightly so, if she did stand up. Did she?"

"Like a little soldier. She thought it was his gun. I had a throw-down with me, an unregistered pint-size automatic I used to carry around just in case. I palmed it and pretended to find it when I frisked him, so she had no reason not to believe it was his gun. But she was there to see me wrap his fingers around it and shoot holes in her plaster, and she still went in and swore he'd done the shooting and he'd been trying to kill me when he did it. She put it in her statement and signed it when they typed it up and handed it to her. And she would have sworn to it all over again in court."

"There's not many you could count on like that."

"I know."

"And it worked. He went to prison."

"He went to prison. But I'm not sure it worked."

"Why do you say that?"

"Since he got out he's killed eight people that I know of. Three here, five in Ohio."

"He'd have killed more than that if he'd spent the past twelve years a free man."

"Maybe. Maybe not. But I gave him a reason to select certain people as his targets. I broke some rules, I pissed into the wind, and now it's blowing back in my face."

"What else could you do?"

"I don't know. I didn't take a lot of time to think it through when it happened. It was the next thing to instinctive on my part. I figured he belonged inside and I'd do what it took to put him there. Now, though, I don't think I'd do it that way."

"Why? All because you gave up the drink and found God?"

I laughed. "I don't know that I've found Him yet," I said.

"I thought that was what your lot did at those meetings." Deliberately he uncorked the bottle and filled his glass. "I thought you all learned to call Him by His first name."

"We call each other by our first names. And I suppose some people develop some kind of a working relationship with whatever God means to them."

"But not you."

I shook my head. "I don't know much about God," I said. "I'm not even sure if I believe in Him. That seems to change from one day to the next."

"Ah."

"But I'm not as quick to play God as I used to be."

"Sometimes a man has to."

"Maybe. I'm not sure. I don't seem to feel the need as often as I used to. Whether or not there's a God, it's beginning to dawn on me that I'm not Him."

He thought that over, working on the whiskey in his glass. If it was having any effect on him, I couldn't see it. Nor was it affecting me. The incident in my hotel room that afternoon had been some sort of watershed, and the threat of picking up a drink had lifted for the time being once the bourbon was done splashing in the sink basin. There were times when it was dangerous for me to be in a saloon, sipping Coke among the whiskey drinkers, but this was not one of those times.

He said, "You came here. When you needed a gun, you came here for it."

"I thought you might have one."

"You didn't go to the cops, you didn't go to your sober friends. You came to me."

"There's nobody on the force who'd bend the rules for me, not at this point. And my sober friends don't pack a lot of heat."

"You didn't just come here for the gun, Matt."

"No, I don't suppose I did."