T. Parker - The Famous and the Dead

“What is it?”

“The Love Thirty-two.”

“Love?”

“The manufacturer was the old Orange County outfit, Pace Arms.”

“I never heard of them.”

“Saturday night specials. Pace Arms was run out of business not long ago.”

“Why call it Love?”

“Something to do with history.” Stren reached into the bag and pulled out a sound suppressor, which he screwed onto the end of the barrel. Then he pointed the barrel down and with his left thumb and forefinger depressed two buttons on either side of the frame, near the back end of the weapon. Out popped two short rods connected by an end piece. The doctor then extended the assembly, like the telescoping handle on a piece of luggage. Rovanna heard it lock into place. A skeleton butt, he thought, to brace in the crook of your elbow when firing. Truthfully, it seemed more like a gimmick than something you’d need.

“It’s fully automatic,” said Stren.

Not a gimmick at all then , thought Rovanna. The doctor pulled a very long magazine from his bag, and Rovanna could see the glimmer of the brass and copper within until Stren pushed it up into the handle of the gun. It snapped into place with a sharp click. The bottom half of the magazine protruded from the handle in a gently lethal curve.

“Thirty-two-caliber ACP,” said the doctor. “Fifty rounds in one five-second burst. Or, several shorter bursts. Or, you can choose semi and just squeeze them off one at a time. Subsonic, of course, and practically silent. The casings hitting the floor make as much noise as the gun.”

Stren took his sky blue pocket square and wiped down the weapon. He ejected the magazine and wiped this also. When the Love 32 was whole again, he dabbed away once more with the silk square then set the gun on the couch. From his bag he took a box of ammunition and a spare magazine and put them beside the gun. He pushed the square back into his coat pocket, zipped shut the doctor’s bag, and stood.

“I’ll recommend that your constitutional rights be restored,” he said. “Though quite honestly I don’t think your chances are good. It will take time for the court to decide. There is nothing wrong with you, Lonnie. Sometimes friends are all we have. And voices speak to all of us at different times. Listen to them and do what you think is right. As a human being you are free to decide. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to enslave you. In the meantime use this gift to protect yourself and those around you and to advance the ideals you believe in. I cannot force you to accept this gift. You are free to reject it at any time.”

Rovanna watched Stren walk back down the gravel drive. The doctor turned and tipped his hat, then disappeared around the main house. The lump in Rovanna’s throat had returned, and he realized how badly he had misjudged this man. He sat on the plaid couch and looked down at the Love 32 for a long while before picking it up.

Charlie Hood’s first big undercover assignment began with a nineteen-year-old girl living in a small town in Russell County, Missouri. Her name was Mary Kate Boyle and she had first told her disturbing story over the phone to a girlfriend recently moved to Los Angeles, who happened to have just read a piece in the Los Angeles Times Magazine about a cool G-man.

The G-man was the Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Los Angeles, and Mary Kate took a very long Trailways journey to come find him. In conversation Mary Kate got the A, T , and F correct but kept getting the order wrong, calling the bureau FAT. It was her first time away from her little piece of Missouri.

The SAC heard her out before handing her down the line to an ATF-led task force working guns along the Mexico border. She told of four men-three of them Russell County deputies-who were stealing confiscated evidence and selling it. Mostly guns and drugs. Of course any cash they just put in their pockets. This had been going on for over a year. Three of them were headed to California to do some business, hoping to find some drug cartel “beaners” with money to spend. The city of El Central was the place to be, they had told her. They wanted to find straw buyers. Cash, cash, and more cash, all that profit from the drugs the cartels sold. Plus one of the deputies had a friend in El Central with a restaurant that had the best burritos in the world. So they could eat there for cheap. You know how cops are. Oops.

All of this she had overheard, in pieces, during the last months of her senior year of high school. Last week she had been assaulted by one of those men, beaten sharply, and thrown out of his double-wide. His name was Lyle Scully, Skull for short, the leader. Now here in the ATF field office in Buenavista she sat, skinny, fair, and freckled. Mary Kate had an eye swollen up the color of a plum and a deep continuous split in both lips, but still she talked more than a little.

“And I don’t think too high of that kind of treatment. Skull says I was born trash and will stay trash and it may be true. That sure didn’t stop him making me pregnant, now, did it? God knows it took him long enough and I thought maybe a ring would come attached. It didn’t. His divorce is long finalized. So I got the procedure. And now I’m here in California and that’s behind me and I’m not going back. Never. Except maybe to get some things. I always wanted to rent one of them U-Haul trucks and just drive away from Russell County. I like the ones with the palm trees and waterskiers on the side. I’m going to be an actor, model, or nurse, whichever happens first. I told all this to your boss up in L.A. and he told me you’re the people who can get things done down here.”

Hood kept notes but mostly he just listened. He was a Los Angeles County sheriff deputy assigned to the ATF Operation Blowdown task force. The people in this room were part of his Achilles team, Mary Kate notwithstanding. Fourth year now for Hood. He thought of ATF not so much as Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, but as GDT-Guns, Dust and Treachery. ATF was chronically understaffed and the caseload was heavy, but scandal had further lowered the bureau in the public eye and sent its supporters in high places running. Certain ATF supervisors had implemented some bad ideas in an operation dubbed Fast and Furious and gotten bad results. Even before this calamity, ATF had been an easy political target but now it seemed nearly friendless. Hood had always thought that, just for starters, ATF had it rough because most Americans liked alcohol, tobacco, and firearms-and disliked regulation. Hence the agency was spooked and defensive. He chuckled when Mary Kate called it FAT. But Hood enjoyed the work because there was action, and he felt it was necessary work. Hood wanted to be necessary. He was a Bakersfield boy and he had served in Iraq, Anbar Province. He was thirty-four, tall and loose, with an open face and strong eyes.

“El Centro?” asked Janet Bly. Janet had been the senior agent of this Achilles team and still seemed to think of herself as such. Last month ATF had brought in a more senior agent, Dale Yorth, who now sat at the head of the table with an eager look on his face. He’d come in from Miami and the team jury on him was still out.

“Yep. Skull said El Central, pretty sure.” Mary Kate dabbed her lips with a tissue.

Hood saw the still unhealed split and felt bad but he also thought that a beating and an abortion might in the long run be a fair trade for escaping a life tied to Lyle Scully. The womenfolk in her part of the world tended to bear the brunt of things, or so he’d read and seen in movies. But Mary Kate would have to stay escaped, of course. Would have to want to stay escaped. People had surprising needs and default settings.