Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“Oh, boy,” said Les. “I have to shoot that!”

“This way, boys.”

Lebman led them to a cellar door engineered for airtightness, down the wooden steps to a chamber heaped at one end with broken lumber, stacks of newspapers, old mattresses, busted furniture, and various expendable bric-a-brac, the wall behind lined with sandbags. It smelled of gunpowder and brass, which emitted the unmistakable odor from the piles of casings that had been swept against the brick walls. Other odors generated an atmosphere as rich as it was unhealthy, much amplified by the total lack of ventilation: carbon, the stench of splattered, splintered lead, the more acrid tang of shattered copper, and the styphnate of fired primers.

“Smells good down here,” said Les. “Man, I love this place.”

It was no formal shooting range, but it let potential customers run a few rounds through whatever pleased them. He took the weapon from Mr. Lebman, reacting first to its weight — sixteen pounds, unloaded — and then experiencing its easy heft when tucked under his arm and braced against his body, the comfort of its pistol grip, the fluidity of its design that seemed to encourage firing from the hip.

“This is the aces,” he cried in delight. “Man, it feels like a million bucks. Wait’ll you try it, J.P.”

“That’ll be a toot,” said J.P.

Mr. Lebman handed over another pound of twenty-round magazine, fully loaded with .30 caliber Government, and, knowingly, Les inserted it into the mag well. Then he reached up, caught the bolt handle, and slid it back to apogee, released it, and felt it slam home with a satisfying chunk as it stripped a cartridge from the mag and locked it in the chamber.

“Here we go,” said Les. “Cover your ears.”

Les squeezed off a five-round burst and the gun cracked hard and fast, leaping, spitting, filling the air with its exhaust and the explosiveness of its muzzle blast. It flashed so incandescently, it almost obliterated reality, since the barrel was shortened and only a portion of each cartridge’s charge burned inside, the rest left to alchemize to golden radiance just beyond the muzzle. Twenty-five feet away, the chaos that had been junk furniture and other detritus seemed to detonate and fill the air with shards and splinters and pellets.

“WOW!” said Les. “Oh, boy, is that a blast! Here I go again!”

This time, confident of his control of the weapon, he hammered out the last fifteen in the mag, ripping the barricade up, down, sideways, left and right, driving yet more carbon stench, paper flecks, and hot gas, jet-spraying frags and bits into the atmosphere, sending a steady stream of brass from the blur of the bolt operation that landed with audible clinks on the pavement floor.

“HOLY COW!” screamed Les again. “That is the wildest thing I ever saw! Man, I can’t wait”—and he almost blurted a fiction-destroying wish—“to hose down a State Police car and turn the coppers inside to hamburger”—but caught himself and instead said, “to get this on the ranch and shoot up some hay bales!”

“It is a superb piece of work,” said Mr. Lebman.

“How much, Mr. Lebman?”

“Now, we have to be careful, fellas,” said Mr. Lebman. “There is this new federal law, though I do so much business with Texas law enforcement, I think I’m okay. But, at the same time, just to be safe, I’d like some discretion. No walking out with the gun over your shoulder, then going to the nearest field for an afternoon’s shooting.”

“Of course not,” said Les.

“Maybe pick it up on your way out of town. I’ll break it down, clean it, lubricate it, make sure there’s no cracks, though I’ve never seen a Colt product crack, and have it secured in a case for an after-dark pickup.”

“No problem,” said Les. “Extra mags, plenty of ammo, what’s it come to?”

“Ten magazines, five hundred rounds of .30 Government, the gun itself, the secure packing, I’m thinking, fair profit for me, economical for you, five thousand seems right.”

That was the standard underworld fee for the gun.

“Hmm,” said Les. “Man, I love this piece, but five, I don’t know. What about four, cash, right now?”

“Four?” said Mr. Lebman.

“Who knows, maybe the cops come by tomorrow and confiscate all the full-autos because of that new law. The longer you hang on to it, the more awkward it could become. The four is instant, right now, this second.”

“Hmm,” said Lebman.

“Four crisp thousand-dollar bills, you won’t go wild with ’em? You’ll sort of wait, or maybe spend them in Mexico or on a foreign buying trip, and just like we’d never tell anyone where we got the Monitor, you’d never tell anyone where you got the cash?”

“I think you’ve got a deal,” said Lebman.

“J.P., want to burn a mag?”

“No, that’s okay. I’m fine.”

They headed upstairs, and Mr. Lebman took the gun to the back of his shop. Les got out his wad, peeled off the four big ones, and laid them out for Mr. Lebman. When the gunsmith came back, he took the money without counting and slipped it into his own pocket. No accounting was necessary; they’d done enough business before.

“Now, you call me when you want to pick it up.”

“Absolutely,” said Les. “I think we’ll be in town another week. All that good Mexican food, man, I have five more restaurants at least I want to try.”

THE T&T & A$$ CLUB

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

Two months earlier (cont’d)

“Ah,” said Mr. Leon Kaye, “haircut fee?”

He didn’t like where this one was heading. It was going to cost him money and he didn’t like spending money on something of little calculable value.

“Now, look here, Mr. Kaye,” said Braxton. He put his hand on his hair. It was thick, luxuriant, golden, a pure Viking mane from the seventh century A.D. It cost Braxton about three hundred dollars a month to maintain it.

“This hair, see, I been growing it for twenty years. It’s what’s called my brand. Rawley and I are known for our hair in the way a country singer or a rock star might be known.”

“Braxton, it’s your choice how to grow your hair. It’s nothing I’d be expecting to pay a fee for.”

“It took me best part of three years to grow it out like this. It takes one of Little Rock’s best beauty shops on healthy retainer for a visit twice weekly to keep it such a brilliant blond. Same for Rawley.”

Rawley nodded. His mane, if anything, may have been a little more luxuriant, a little more blond, a little more Viking than his brother’s. It was quite a head of hair. And, taken together, the two of them looked like Siegfried and Roy on HGH from Samoa.

“See, that’s where you’re misunderstanding the situation, sir,” said Braxton. “What you ain’t getting is that in the Negro community, where we do most of our work, and as well in the low-white community, mostly of Appalachian heritage, found in trailer parks and government housing the mid-South over, this hair ain’t only a certain look — a trademark, you might say — it’s a communication, and it speaks in a certain tone to them that has to be spoken to. First off, it gets their attention fast. They ain’t the most alert folks, you see, and getting them to pay attention is part of the battle right there.”

Glumly, Mr. Kaye nodded. His pawnshops also served roughly the same demographic and he had to admit there was some wisdom in Braxton’s assertion, not that under any other circumstances, and things being what they were, he would have acknowledged it.

“And here’s the message it carries. It says to them: We wouldn’t look so ridiculous if we couldn’t kick your asses all the way to Tuesday. It says: We do this for a living. We done a lot of it. Best now you cooperate with us, you save yourself a lot of hurt that way. It says: See, we ain’t no white person all teared up and gulpy over the horrible things our kind did to your kind. We the other kind of white people. We the kind that did them horrible things. We do ’em again, twice as hard, twice as mean, if you don’t cooperate. That’s a language our Negro clients understand, clear as a bell, and, like as not, they cooperate. Nobody done gets smacked about, arms broke, teeth swallowed, faces swelled like a grapefruit, right, Rawley? They have to know we represent the principle that it can all go away fast.”