J. Black - The Shop

Landry didn’t completely trust him, but it was the best he could do. He had more important business to attend to, and there was no choice in the matter.

Landry drove seventy miles out of his way to Llewellyn, Alabama, a town with little to recommend itself except for a bank, a smattering of small businesses, a Sonic, and a gun shop. He had lunch at the Sonic, enjoying the old-fashioned car-hop experience, then drove two doors down to the gun shop set back from the road.

A yellow plastic sign stood out on the grass, the stick-on letters proclaiming, “CHUCK’S GUNS AND BAIT – Ammo All Kinds – Smith & Wesson Special Ask Within – We Have Wigglers.” Behind the grimy store window, backed by a sun-faded panorama of a woodsy fishing scene, rifles and handguns shared space with an umbrella stand holding cane fishing poles.

Landry had to duck to get through the door. Chuck’s was small inside, too, like a sod house on the prairie. The owner sat on a stool behind the cash register. Late fifties, Harley cap, ponytail, a complexion like the deli meat mortadella.

“Good day, sir.”

Landry nodded toward the window. “You know you misspelled wigglers?”

“Wigglers?”

“On the sign. There’s an ‘r’ in it. After the ‘w.’”

He thought about it. “That don’t sound right. If it was, it’d be pronounced ‘rigglers.’”

Landry removed the packet from his hunting vest and laid it on the glass counter.

“And what is that, sir?”

Landry undid the flap and laid out three thousand dollars in cash.

The owner looked at the money, then at Landry. “What’s this for, sir?”

Landry nodded to the clock. “Almost lunchtime. You could go for a coffee while I take a look around.”

The man stared at the money. “How do I know it’s real?”

“There’s a bank two doors down. Why don’t you deposit it?”

“You’re just looking, right?”

“I promise I won’t steal anything.”

“Doesn’t appear that you would. Thank you, sir.” He took the packet and stuffed it in his own vest. “But you’re wrong about wigglers. I grew up around here, and it’s always been wigglers.”

Landry watched him walk down to the curve in the road where the one-story red-brick bank stood in a patch of mowed lawn. He watched as the man went inside. Then he started shopping.

Before long, the box he’d brought in with him was full. He pulled a bag of Pemmican off the rack by the cash register and put it on top, just as Harley came back. Harley scrupulously avoided looking at the box and its contents.

Landry laid out another three thousand dollars. “You have some nice weaponry here. I like your sound suppressors.”

“Yes, they’re the best. Expensive, too.” Looked ruminatively at the three thousand dollars. “So nothing struck your fancy?”

“Maybe next time. Where’s the nearest liquor store?”

“Sir, guns and liquor don’t mix.”

“Tell you what, you give me back the six thousand, and I’ll put everything back.”

“There’s a liquor store on the way out of town, on 71.”

“Thanks.” He looked out the window again. “I really think you should change that sign.”

“I’m not changing that sign, sir. You can forget about that. It’s still a free country, last I heard.”

Landry nodded, picked up his box, and walked out to the car. The maid’s car fit right in around here. He loaded the box into the backseat. He would have liked to put the box in the trunk, but the trunk was taken. He covered the box with an army blanket.

At the liquor store, Landry bought three ice picks and four bags of ice from a sullen kid with a faceful of acne and a mullet. He was surprised anybody still wore mullets, even in the deep South.

He drove to a Dumpster hidden from view by a strip mall, opened the trunk, and replaced the melting bags of ice under and around the bodies of Special Agent Eric Salter and the “piss-poor” private investigator, Ted Bakus. Salter had told him Bakus was in way over his head. This turned out to be true.

Landry threw the old ice bags in the Dumpster.

Back inside the car, he loosened the handles on the ice picks. Just a couple of threads; he didn’t want them too loose. Then he stopped for pie and coffee at a diner called Sandie’s in Wewahitchka, Florida. He hated secondhand smoke, and the fifteen minutes in the diner irritated his eyes, but on the up side, the pie was good.

From the post office box in Port St. Joe, he picked up the key to the safe house. The safe house was on the outskirts of Port St. Joe, in a recently built subdivision. A third of the subdivision was unoccupied.

A foreclosure sign stood outside the safe house. The house next door was empty. A cloud of mosquitoes dogged him to the house. He looked over the fence to the neighbor’s yard. The pool was olive-green. Algae floated on top.

He went in through the kitchen. A list of instructions had been left on the counter. He read them through, paying particular attention to the detailed schematic of the target area, which included aerial photos and blueprints.

He was right about the target.

Landry looked at his watch. His brother Gary would have landed by now, probably already on the road, visions of stud farms dancing in his head. If someone with the Shop checked, they would see that Bill Peters had departed LAX at six thirty this morning, changed planes in Dallas and Atlanta, and arrived in Panama City at four fifteen this afternoon. A check with the car rental desk at the Bay County International Airport would show that Bill Peters had rented a car from Avis. No one would know that Landry had been in Florida for the last two and a half days.

Landry divided up the handguns, ammo, knives, rifles, sights, infrared scopes, night vision goggles, and suppressors, then stashed them in three of the house’s four bedrooms—one for Jackson, one for Davis, and one for Green. There would be three bags of goodies, and three closets. The walk-in closet he saved for Jackson.

Every time they met, they spent time getting acquainted with their weaponry. Broke the firearms down, cleaned them, put them back together. Checked the sights. So many weapons for them to look at.

It would be like Christmas morning.

As Landry decided which guns would go where, he flashed on the Aspen massacre. That one, they’d kept simple—just three Bowie knives. Two were destroyed afterwards, but the last one they left in the possession of a white supremacist gas station attendant named Donny Lee Odell.

Acting on an anonymous tip, the local police, the ATF, and the FBI converged on Bud’s Texaco in Colorado. Landry had watched it on television. The local cops paraded Donny Lee out before the cameras, a jacket draped over his manacled hands. He looked a lot like the poor mope with the mullet at the liquor store in Llewellyn—the same kind of stupid. Donny was a natural because he was weak. He had been jailed twice for the possession and sale of crystal meth.

The plan had been to set him up and then widen the circle to his friends, the white supremacists he hung with. From what Landry had seen on the television, that plan seemed to have worked. Donny Lee insisted he spent the night playing pool at a Salida tavern, but it appeared there was no one to corroborate his story. Donny Lee Odell had been on the wrong path long before the knife was discovered in his car.

Landry knew about Odell from an incident in Iraq four years ago. Donny Lee Odell’s lack of caution and subsequent cowardice had been responsible for the death of another soldier. Everyone in the armed services who was in Iraq then knew about it. Odell had received a dishonorable discharge, but he had returned stateside to continue on with his life.