Iron River Page 3

  “The first floor was manufacturing,” I say. “Second was R and D. Third was management, sales, and marketing. Uncle Chester had the big corner suite on the third even though I was running the shop at age seventeen. I was the one bringing the runs in under budget and making rain. Down here in the basement, we did all the testing. The square footage of this building is much more than you’d think from the outside, which is one reason Chester bought it back in 1980. I wasn’t even born then.”

  “Looks a little neglected.”

  “I think of it as a bear in hibernation.”

  “I think I smell him.”

  “But check out the range.”

  I lead Bradley through a set of swinging insulated doors that close behind us silently. The range acoustics eat sound. It takes a few seconds for the banks of fluorescent tubes to flicker to life, then the firing range spreads before us. It has carpeted floors stained by decades of gun smoke and gun oil and foot traffic and spilled cups of coffee. It has a low ceiling and the same foam-lined walls you would find in a recording studio. Back when business was good, ten of us could test-fire arms side by side at the firing line, with plenty of room between their benches. The targets were set out and retrieved by motor-driven pulleys. You could put the targets anywhere from five feet away to two hundred. I still remember the first time Dad and Mom brought me here. I remember how each time a gun went off, you could feel it right in the middle of your chest, like someone had tapped you there. I look at station two and think of my father, Tony. He died when I was ten.

  I look at the dusty benches and the cobwebs drooping from the light fixtures. There are still old silhouette targets, corners curling, hanging in some of the firing lanes. Everywhere are stacks of unused silhouettes. A year ago, when we ceased manufacture after the judgment, the former night crew had a last-night party here and of course they got drunk and brought out their favorite weapons and blasted one of the silhouettes so the figure was pretty much gone, then they brought the target in on the pulley and signed their names out in the white paper, around the bullet holes. They just left it where it was.

  Bradley Smith nods and looks around. He looks at the autographed target. He has a thoughtful face for a wiseass. “Looks like somewhere the Addams Family would play.”

  “I liked Morticia when I was a kid.”

  “I still smell gunpowder,” he says.

  “The smell of money, the guys used to say.”

  “So, do you have a thousand nines or not?”

  “Before I answer that, I’d like to show you something.”

  I sit at station four, and Bradley takes station three. I unlock the station four gun case and remove a heavily lacquered wooden box with the stainless steel Pace Arms insignia on the lid. The box was a gift from Mom, tenth birthday. Beautiful, really. I set the box on the bench and use the key I still carry on my chain to unlock it, and then I pull out the gun. It’s a handgun, not large, not light. It is well balanced and feels good in my hand.

  “This is the Love 32,” I say. “It’s engraved on the right side of the slide.”

  “Love 32? What kind of a name is that for a gun?”

  “Thirty-two is the caliber. The Love is for the California lawman Harry Love. He shot down the bandit Joaquin Murrieta and cut off his head and brought it back in a jar of alcohol. It toured the state back in the early 1850s. Cost a dollar to see it. Joaquin was California’s first rock star. Harry Love was his promoter. It’s myth and legend and a little history. I like history. It was the only class in high school I stayed awake through. I dropped out junior year.”

  The look on Bradley Smith’s face isn’t something I can readily ID. He looks like he’s been kicked in the balls but trying not to show it. For just a second he looks like he’s going to come up off the bench, but in order to do what, I couldn’t tell you.

  “Most of what people believe about Murrieta is pure bullshit,” he says.

  “The part about Harry Love isn’t.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  More of that look of his. He could be deranged. “Okay.”

  “So who do you like, Ron,” he says. “The outlaws or the lawmen?”

  “Both. The Joaquin 32 didn’t sound right.”

  “What about the Murrieta 32?”

  “Too wordy. It’s my gun. I designed it, so I get to name it. I built this thing by hand.”

  He nods and looks over at the autographed target, takes a deep breath and lets it out. He stands and pulls one of the spotter’s stools over and sits down next to me. “How many rounds in the magazine of the Love 32?”

  “There are two ways to answer that. As you see it now, the magazine holds eight thirty-two-caliber ACP rounds, and one in the chamber if you want. It weighs twenty-nine ounces, it’s seven and three-sixteenths inches long, blowback operated, with an alloy frame, sixteen grooves of right-hand rifling, and a trigger pull of four and a half pounds.”

  I drop the magazine to the bench top, rack the Love to make sure the chamber is empty, then close the slide and lower the hammer and hand the gun to Smith.

  “It’s heavy.”

  “There’s a reason for that.”

  Smith hefts the gun, then aims it one-handed at the station four target fifty feet away. “But the balance is good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I don’t love the thirty-two ACP load,” says Bradley. “It’s slow and it doesn’t hit hard.”

  “There’s a reason for that, too,” I say. “The load, I mean. Why I chose the thirty-two ACP.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got all sorts of reasons, Mr. Pace.”

  “Just Ron is fine.”

  “Ron. The Ron of Reason.”

  “Just a few reasons, actually. Want to fire it?”

  “I don’t want my people carrying thirty-twos, I can tell you that right now. I don’t care how good a deal you’ll make me.”

  “Fine. Just fire it. Glasses on the bench there.”

  I get some ammo from the gun safe and thumb the shells into the magazine. Bradley slaps the magazine home, stands and plants eight bullets in the black at fifty feet.

  What a sound. Just like the old days. Even fancy acoustics can’t keep a handgun from sounding like a handgun. I inhale the wonderful smell of exploded gunpowder and watch the brass bounce and roll around the carpet.

  “Dope trigger,” he says. “Those four and a half pounds are smooth as butter.”

  “Here.” I reload the gun and hand it back to him. I listen to the sound of music as eight more circles of light appear in the black body of the enemy.

  He pops the magazine, checks the chamber, safes the gun, and tosses it to me. “I still can’t arm my men and women with it, Ron. Try stopping a drunk, three-hundred-pound Tutsi warlord with this thing. Or some cranked-up Detroit carjacker.”

  I nod and look at the target, then back at Bradley. “Appearances are deceiving.”

  “Stopping-power isn’t.”

  “Watch this.” I give him a wry look and glance at my fake Rolex. Then I set the gun on the bench and use a punch from my pocketknife to push the frame pins through. Then I pry the frame apart, exposing the inner firing and reloading and eject mechanisms.

  “You can use an eight-penny nail for that matter,” I say. “Toss me those needle-nose from off the box there, will you?”

  I catch the pliers midair and swoop them down into the body of the Love 32. I invert the trigger bar pin, remove the catch spring, reposition the detente notch of the extractor, and reverse the block plate and line up the witness marks. It takes twenty seconds, and another fifteen to position the frame and drive the pins back in with the punch.

  “Less than a minute,” says Bradley.

  “It was exactly fifty seconds. My personal best is thirty-six, but that was after two beers. After three beers, my time went up fast.”

  “Really? Will it really fire full auto?”

  “Behold.” I remove the extra-capacity magazine from the lacquered box and push in f
ifty rounds. This takes a little time, but we say nothing. I slam it home and now the Love 32 has eight inches of gracefully curving clip extending below the grip.

  Then, holding the gun in my right hand, I cup my left hand over the back of the frame near the magazine release, and I simultaneously depress two inset buttons. This releases the telescoping graphite butt. It’s like the retractable handle on a piece of rolling luggage, but of narrower gauge and shorter. Fully extended at fifteen inches, the rubber-backed butt can then be braced against the crook of the shooter’s elbow, rib cage, or even hip. It collapses in one-inch increments to fit smaller people.

  I snug the butt against the inside of my elbow and look at Bradley Smith.

  “Stallone should play you,” he says.

  “It’ll burn through those fifty rounds in five seconds. Or you can use short bursts. Do you notice anything else different about this little genius?”

  “The raised comb along the barrel top. It’s like on a trap gun, but wider. It has nothing to do with the sights.”

  “Correct.” I turn and aim the machine gun downrange, with telescoping butt still braced against my elbow. Then I place my free left hand over the comb and push down.

  “For the muzzle rise,” says Bradley.

  I nod. Machine guns are notorious for rising as they burn through the rounds. The barrel wants to shoot the sky. Many an inexperienced submachine gunner has pulled the trigger, let the barrel jump up, and pretty much invited the bullets into his head. So long. But not if you brace down on the barrel with your free hand. The brace comb on the Love 32 is raised for cooling because the barrel itself gets hot.

  “Allow me,” I say. I set the Love 32 on the bench and bring in the old target, put on a fresh one, and send it back fifty feet. Then I take up the Love and stand just in front of the bench, feet spread, retractable butt snug in my elbow, left palm firm on the comb. I look downrange at the target, glance once at the barrel of the gun, then I let it rip. There’s a five-second Armageddon of noise and smoke, then silence, and the black silhouette has a ragged hole in the middle about the size of a grapefruit.

  “Wicked cool,” says Bradley.

  “Your turn.”

  I reload and Bradley puts up a fresh target. He’s practically beaming as he steps up and gets ready. He’s slow and meticulous about it, savoring the prep and the moment, not a trigger-ditzy moron like half the people I’ve sold weapons to. I hear the safety click off.

  Five seconds later he’s standing in a cloud of fragrant gun smoke, and the bottom half of the target is almost detached.

  “Unreal.”

  “It’s real,” I say. “And there’s more.”

  I take the noise suppressor from the lacquered box and screw it on. The barrel threads are recessed into the frame, such that a casual observer won’t see that the gun is fitted for a silencer.

  “That’s your reason for the thirty-two ACP,” says Bradley.

  “Right. Nine hundred and five feet per second. Subsonic, no boom, easily quieted.”

  “I’m starting to like you, Ron.”

  “You’re going to love this. Put up some fresh paper, please.”

  I reload and step up and fire. You can hear the muffled tap of the rounds going off and the cartridges chattering through and the ejector spitting out the brass, and you can hear the empties pinging on the carpet and you can even hear the ringing in your ears from the prior shooting, but what you mainly hear is the paper silhouette being torn to shreds and the bullets spitting into the sandbags at the distant far end of the range.

  “I’ll remain briefly speechless,” says Bradley.

  “There’s more,” I say. “These guns are untraceable to me. Untraceable to Favier and Winling. No serial numbers. Nothing that says Pace. Just Love 32, etched with subtle beauty on the forward slide. I can see legions of law enforcement officers worldwide mystified by these guns. Where did these come from? Did they simply spring from the earth, like the skeleton men in Jason and the Argonauts? Or drop from the sky, like manna? Something tells me that you would like to bedazzle law enforcement, Bradley. I think you like the outlaws more than the lawmen.”

  “How much per gun?”

  “There’s just one small catch. They don’t exist. This is the prototype. Do you like martinis?”

  4

  Hood got up early to move the last of his possessions into his Buenavista rental home. The dawn was pink, and a vapor light on the carport burned white over the driveway. He carried the boxes into the house. His old Camaro wouldn’t hold much so he’d rented a trailer. He would soon receive an ATFE take-home vehicle. Hood was thirty and never married and he had few things. As he wrestled another box from the trailer, he was thinking it would be nice to have a dog.

  The house was a 1920s adobe, one of ten tucked amidst the hills on the northwest side of town, a development that never quite caught on. The place came furnished and had a new swamp cooler. The road in was graded dirt with ruts for gutters, but the hillside views were good: south to old town in which the bell tower of the church was still the highest point, east to infinite desert, and west to more desert and black-orange sunsets that covered miles.

  Hood had arrived in Buenavista forty-eight hours ago, just enough time to meet the local chief of police, shake hands with the three members of the ATFE task force he was assigned to, then participate in the gun buy that had resulted in the killing of two men. One of the dead was a teenaged boy named Gustavo Armenta, who was on a date that night, and as Hood carried another box into the house, he pictured the way Gustavo had led his girlfriend by the hand from the restaurant patio and how a few moments later an errant bullet had found his heart in the darkness fifty yards away, stopping eighteen years of past and sixty years of future dead and forever. The other dead man was a gun dealer with a revoked license.

  Hood heard a distant noise and through a window saw a vehicle coming slowly up the road. The headlights raked and bounced, and a while later the police cruiser came to a stop just outside the carport light.

  Gabriel Reyes got out and let the door close quietly, bumping it shut with his hip.

  “I’m glad I didn’t have to wake you up,” he said.

  “Coffee?”

  “Please.”

  In the kitchen Hood poured a cup and Reyes looked around the old home. His uniform was clean and pressed. His expression was that of a man expecting the worst.

  “I guess you don’t come out this early with good news,” said Hood.

  “Benjamin Armenta ring a bell?”

  “Gulf Cartel.”

  “The boy who was killed last night is Gustavo, his son. He lived in Buenavista, on the Mexican side. Engaged to the girl. It’s a shame and a mess.”

  “Was he mixed up in his dad’s business?”

  “Who knows? He was on his way to UCLA.”

  Hood sighed and looked out at the lightening day.

  “So be extra careful, deputy. Benjamin Armenta will demand vengeance for Gustavo. It’s a point of honor. It’s my job to say that, even though I probably don’t have to. You know the Zetas, don’t you?”

  Hood knew they were the latest pestilence in the drug wars raging in Mexico, paramilitary killers leaving corpses, sometimes piles of them, across the nation. “The Gulf Cartel’s beheaders.”

  “They’ve been busy. Thirty-four headless men, women, and children in eight days. All of the victims tied to Carlos Herredia’s Baja Cartel. Of course, Benjamin Armenta has lost ninety-seven of his own. That’s one hundred and thirty-seven killings in a week and a day.”

  “Have you talked to my task force people?”

  “I called them.”

  “Thanks for coming out.”

  “Gustavo and the Zetas aren’t why I came out.”

  “So there’s even more good news.”

  “Let’s sit outside and watch the sun rise.”

  They sat on the low courtyard wall because there were no chairs. Hood saw that Reyes walked with a slight limp. The chief loo
ked sixty, gray-haired, thick.

  “Be careful at dusk and dawn this time of year,” said Reyes. “If you step on a western diamondback, it can ruin your whole day. I still limp.”

  Hood nodded and looked down at Buenavista.

  “I got an anonymous call two mornings ago,” said Reyes. “It was the same day you got here. It was a woman, and she told me there was an injured man in the desert outside of town. She told me to drive east on 98 until I saw a pickup off to the side. I did that. Big skid marks at the truck. A rear flat and a jack ready to use. I followed two sets of tracks to a bloody patch in the sand about fifty feet from the highway. Then those two sets doubled back, then I followed a third set into the desert. He’d walked half a mile or so. I found him dug in underneath a bush, just about dead. Half an hour later, the med center ambulance got there and they carried him out on a stretcher.”

  “Did she hit him while he was getting the jack ready?”

  “That’s a reasonable explanation, but she didn’t say anything about it. I called for a tow and did a DMV check on the truck. Registered owner is Mike Finnegan of Los Angeles. Later in the impound yard, I went through the truck. He had a big tool chest in the bed and ninety thousand cash dollars inside it. Wasn’t even locked. So I went to the hospital. He was in surgery to set two broken legs and a broken arm. His jaw and both cheeks were broken also. And four ribs. Serious internal injuries. The ER doctor told me the X-rays showed two skull fractures. The doctor said there would certainly be damage to the brain—the question was just how much. I examined the guy’s wallet. Valid CDL, same address as DMV had. No credit or debit cards, no phone or insurance cards. No pictures of the wife and kids. He had a chain video store membership card, a key, and a punch card for a car wash up in Los Angeles. He had four hundred and sixty-four dollars. And a folded piece of plain white paper with your name and your new Buenavista P.O. box number on it.”