Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“Well, I didn’t know the half of it. The way this happened, I remembered an old bookcase of Grandpa’s and that we’d dumped all the books in it in a box, and I thought maybe… Well, I finally found the box.”

Swagger was interested.

“Please, go on.”

“At first, nothing. But one of the books, still in its dust jacket, was something called The Postman Always Rings Twice . Crime thing, about a cook and a wife who kill her husband and almost get away with it. Anyhow, it didn’t seem like his kind of thing. He didn’t read novels, especially murder novels, he was more into history and stuff. So I opened it and it wasn’t the novel at all. He’d just wrapped the dust jacket around it as a security measure. It was his journal.”

“Did you find anything?”

“I think so. It’s too much to tell, let me fax you the relevant pages.”

“Please do.”

“I need a fax number.”

Bob grabbed the hotel guidebook, found the number.

“It’ll be a few minutes,” said Bill.

“You’re the best, Bill. Really, above and beyond.”

“My pleasure,” said Bill. “Hope this helps.”

DECEMBER 22, 1934: A CURIOUS ENCOUNTER

He came in late. Mackinaw jacket (it was in the 40s outside), fedora, work pants, and boots. Tall, thin, gaunt. Odd thing, he had a bandage on his right ear, or on the top half of it. Hard eyes, sunken cheeks, wary, cautious. I know the type, man hunters, I’ve seen enough of them. Not cops, but the kind of cops that specialize in hunting men.

He waited for the last customer to slip out, then moseyed over.

“Sir,” he said, “have you got a few minutes to entertain a proposition?”

“I do,” I said. “But times are hard, and I’m not buying much.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out what I recognized to be the compensator of a Colt Monitor, just like the one, maybe the one, I’d sold a couple months earlier to Jimmie Smith.

“You should recognize this,” he said.

“May I ask where you got it? Last I saw, it was attached to a rifle I sold to a young gentleman from West Texas.”

“It’s legit, at least in that no one else claims ownership. I came by it in ways I’d prefer to keep to myself, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I’m known as a fellow who can keep his mouth shut.”

“That’s what I’ve heard. I just use it to establish bona fides. It so happens, again by ways I’d prefer to keep to myself, I have access to a rather unusual cache of weapons. Some are full-automatic—”

“See, right there, that’s trouble. Before June, no problem. But there’s this new law on the books, and right now it’s against the law to even possess such a gun without a federal tax stamp. Do you have the tax stamp?”

“No sir.”

“I was you, I’d take these guns to a bridge over a big, deep river at midnight or later and one by one dump ’em in, and think no more of it. That’s the safe way.”

“I can’t do that. Good men fought bad men with these guns, and death was involved on both sides. Can’t just toss ’em. It wouldn’t be right. I know you have connections with law enforcement people here in Texas. I’m sure there’s plenty of small departments who’d like a weapons upgrade for these dangerous times but can’t afford it. It seems to me you could see these guns channeled, one at a time, to such departments. I’d like to know that they could save a law agent’s life sometime down the road.”

“It’s a tall order,” I said. “The new law is federal, and headquarters people don’t care much for the locals and for local ways of doing things. If they stick their nose under the tent, it’s hell to pay to drive them out.”

“You’d make money; it’s not charity I’m after. You’d do swell, I guarantee it. I’m not on the far side of the law, by the way, I’ve broken no laws. These came to me via an honorable means, and at present nobody’s looking for them or has even thought of them. So they’re pretty clean.”

I wanted to help him. His intentions certainly seemed good, and he wasn’t out to make the big money. But the new law was unsettling. No one had yet figured if it was going to be the start of a crusade or one of those things nobody bothered to pay attention to. Or, worse, first one, then the other. And I didn’t want to end up in Alcatraz.

“You’ll have to tell me what they are, sir. I can’t do anything more to it without that knowledge. I also have to convince myself you’re not a Treasury officer yourself, and this isn’t a way of bringing Mr. Lebman down. I know those boys are interested in me. I have friends in law enforcement and they have told me.”

“Believe me, I am not connected in any way with the federal government.”

“ Were you?”

“Again, it would be my business. I don’t think you’ll find any record of me or files anywhere. I’m not on any wanted list, as I said. To them, it’s as if I don’t exist. And, at least right now, they’re not looking for these guns. They’ve got other fish to fry and probably won’t settle down and pay attention to them for some years, if at all.”

He wasn’t exactly drunk, but I could smell the rye on his breath, and his overly precise diction was that of a fellow concentrating hard on avoiding slurring.

“Well, tell me, then, what exactly are you talking about?”

“It would be two Thompson guns, drums, mags. There’s a Super .38 and a couple .45 autos. One of the .45 autos is a newer C model, and has been worked on, so that it’s ready for fast fire out of the holster. It’s a fine gun and served its owner well. Then, there’s a Remington riot gun, their Model 11, semi. Finally — and I guess this is the one that’d turn heads — there’s the Colt Monitor.”

It was news I didn’t want. I’m pretty sure who Jimmie Smith was and unsure how to feel about the fact that I’d sold him so many weapons over the years. I knew it was a big vulnerability and could bring me down, and my family as well. It was an extremely awkward piece of business that I did not want anywhere near my life.

“I suppose, then, I can guess where you got them, if I’ve read the newspapers in the last month.”

“Sir, I just want these guns passed on AND placed where they’ll do some good. I also don’t want to get nabbed with them myself. It would complicate things a bit. I’m not in this for the money. In fact, I have a crisp, new thousand-dollar bill right here I’ll happily give you. Let it be an advance on any expenses you yourself incur in trying to place the guns well. When that’s done, you figure out how you want to handle it financially and that’ll be fine by me.”

Of course then I knew exactly where the guns had come from. The thousand he offered me was part of the same stack of bills that now rested in my account across the border, with which Jimmie Smith had paid for his Monitor.

“You make it hard to say no, but I have no choice in the matter. You deserve credit for trying to do the right thing, but who knows how the federals would act if they got whiff of such a thing. Do you see?”

He nodded.

“My best advice, now that I understand that destroying them would be a sacrilege: wrap them carefully — I’ll give you the makings of a very long-lasting Cosmoline solution — and bury them. Disguise the site well so that nobody bumbles onto them. In that condition, they can last almost indefinitely. And then… wait. That’s all. Let the years pass, pay attention to the situation. Maybe a decade or so down the road, times will be different. Maybe there’ll be an amnesty on these National Firearms weapons, maybe your own disposition vis-à-vis your employers will be adjusted and whatever happened to drive you away will be forgotten and their return can be effected. In the meantime, nobody’s using them on banks, small-town cops, strikers, postal carriers, what have you.”