Cavagnolo made room for me to pass.
A comforter was draped over the top mattress of the bunk bed. A black cloth hung like a curtain from the edge of the top bed to obscure the space above the bottom mattress.
“What’s in there?”
“A place for storage. As you can see, there’s no closet. Phaedra used to be a real slob. Clothes everywhere. The damn dust was so thick you could’ve planted onions. I’m surprised the county didn’t condemn her toilet.”
Outside, the dogs barked like they’d seen a she-bear.
Cavagnolo ran a finger over a shelf. He held up a clean fingertip for me to inspect. “Then three months ago, click, like a bulb had gone off in her head.” Cavagnolo made a pulling motion beside his ear. “She went into a cleaning fit. At first I was worried it was one of those presuicide rituals, you know where someone tidies up their lives before offing themselves. But it wasn’t, fortunately.”
“Wasn’t what?” Jolie said.
Cavagnolo turned, startled by the sudden appearance of the muscular redhead in motorcycle leathers. Her slicked-back hair and sunglasses added to her mysterious and intimidating posture. The dogs barked and snarled behind her, Lorena barely managing to keep them under control.
“She’s my partner,” I explained.
“Can I take a look?” Jolie motioned to the black curtain.
Cavagnolo remained astonished. “Y…yeah, go ahead.”
“Will Phaedra mind?”
“I’m sure she will but serves her right for taking off on us.”
Jolie parted the curtain and peeked inside. “What do you think of this?” She pushed open the curtains.
Clothes on hangers dangled from a cord tied under the top bunk. Under the clothes lay charcoal drawings like the ones Phaedra had in her hideout.
The drawings were of the little Iraqi girl, self-portraits of Phaedra, and one of me.
That drawing was a three-quarter view with my eyes staring at the viewer. I didn’t remember taking a photo of myself this way but the likeness was unmistakable, especially the tips of my fangs poking from under my upper lip.
I stared, unsettled and uncertain.
“How did she manage this?” Cavagnolo asked, surprised as I was. “I never saw her draw and she got your face on the money.” He pointed to the fangs. “Except for these. What’s with that?”
“I dunno.”
Jolie flipped the drawings and lingered on one depicting a box receding to an infinite distance. There was a figure of a girl in the foreground with her back to the viewer. Smaller rectangles were arranged inside the box. Stars filled the background. After a moment, I realized that the figure was Phaedra and she was looking into the void, what she had called the astral plane. The rectangles represented doors or passages to the void.
“She was keeping a lot to herself,” Cavagnolo said. “I figured she was on the computer, not making these.”
“Can we keep them?”
He took the drawings and slipped them behind the curtain. “No. They belong to Phaedra. If she finds out we’ve been going through them, she’ll throw one of her tantrums.” He shepherded Jolie and me from the bed.
“I don’t know if this is related”-I closed the door-“but I’ve got a handle on those who took Gino and Cleto.”
Cavagnolo straightened. “Who?”
“I can’t say.”
His voice got an edge. “Can’t or won’t?”
“Some of both. I have to take care of them but I’ll need some special hardware.”
“Like what?”
“You got a machine gun?” I asked.
“You crazy? The feds hear a whisper about any kind of automatic weapon and the ATF will swim up my butt faster than piranhas.”
“You didn’t answer my question. Let me sweeten the pot. I’ll take care of this problem and your nose stays clean.” In case he didn’t understand, I added, “Of the government.”
Cavagnolo turned introspective. He nodded to himself. “All right.” He looked at me. “What kind you want?”
“A Browning. An M249. I’ll even take an M60.”
“It’s possible.”
“Any dynamite?” I asked.
“For what?”
“Clearing stumps.”
“None of that stuff is here. I have to make a few calls.”
“Then do it,” I said. “Arrange for a place to meet. Tell them you got a buyer. Keep in short. Keep it simple.”
Cavagnolo used his cell phone and mentioned something about horses. We left Phaedra’s room. As soon as we cleared the gate, Lorena let go of the hounds and they threw themselves against the fence, snarling and snapping.
I took Cavagnolo in my 4Runner. Phaedra followed on her BMW. He gave directions to a county road north of the highway and east of Morada. We pulled onto a long straight private drive to a farmhouse and barn surrounded by mowed fields with square bales of hay. Cavagnolo made another call and said it was us arriving.
Jolie rode up to the door of my Toyota. I halted and rolled down the window.
She leaned from her bike and shouted. “Can you take care of this yourself?”
“Why?”
“I’m going to stay behind and watch your back. And another thing. Pick me up an accessory.”
“Any size or style?”
“Something ladylike.”
CHAPTER 52
I laughed, said okay, and continued. Jolie turned around and went the other way.
A man and a woman left the house through a side door and stood beside the barn. They both wore plaid flannel shirts, and jeans over work boots. As we approached, the man went to the front door of the barn and pulled it open. The woman passed through and disappeared. The man waved that we follow.
I halted the Toyota and warned Cavagnolo. “Make it easy on yourself and cooperate. If there’s a double cross, you won’t live to brag about it. My friend is out there, waiting.”
“Felix, you’ve made your goddamn point. All this guy wants is money.”
“Which comes out of your pocket.”
“That wasn’t part of any deal.”
“It is now.”
I drove into the barn and the man walked alongside us. The air became humid with the smells of fertilizer, hay, and horseshit. The woman led a horse from the last stable in a row along the far wall.
The man thumped my fender. “Yo, hold it here.”
I halted. Cavagnolo and I got out.
“Eric,” Cavagnolo said. They shook hands.
I was introduced but kept my distance.
We followed Eric into the stall the woman had taken the horse from. He pulled at a plank along the side wall, reached inside, and tripped a latch. The bottom half of the wall swung open and scraped aside the matted hay and fresh horse dumplings. The opening revealed a stairway inside the wall.
Eric made a follow-me nod and crouched to enter the opening. Cavagnolo went next. The woman returned and shut the door behind me. I heard her rake along the door, probably to hide the entryway.
The basement smelled of horse piss and moldy hay.
We passed through a curtain. Eric yanked on the cord of a pull switch. A line of overhead bulbs flashed on. We were on a concrete floor of a cramped hallway that turned left. Good planning. I wouldn’t advise building a basement under horse stables.
The hall opened into a room of about twenty by thirty feet. The air had the greasy odor of Cosmoline. Shelves crammed with crates and boxes lined three of the walls. Battered metal cabinets stood against the other wall. Guns lay in pieces on a workbench in the center of the room.
“What do you have in a.45?”
Eric ran his hand along aluminum suitcases on a shelf. He selected one suitcase and set it on the workbench. He opened the suitcase to display an assortment of pistols.
I picked a Dan Wesson Bobtail, extra magazines, and a box of cartridges.
Eric looked pleased by my choice.
“Plus explosives.” I said. “Hand grenades. Dynami
te.”
Eric’s expression lost its enthusiasm. “What exactly are you planning?”
“I’ve got a big score to settle.”
“I’ll bet.” Eric turned to Cavagnolo. “This is more than a big favor. Your friend blabs, I’ll stick a machine gun up your ass and fire until the barrel glows red.”
“He’s not my friend. And don’t threaten me. We’re in this business together.”
Eric opened one of the cabinets and brought out a cardboard box filled with spare gun parts, loose cartridges of various calibers, electric fuses, and blasting caps. “I once had a whole carton of M67 hand grenades but the state patrol bought them all. They used them in a sting operation to get some white supremacists.”
“Why buy the grenades from you?”
“Less paperwork.”
“What happened to the grenades?”
Eric shrugged. “This is a cash-and-carry operation. What the customer does with the merchandise after the fact is none of my concern.”
“The cops don’t mind?”
“You kidding? Course they mind, but we got this agreement. I pretend I don’t have them, and the state patrol keeps the ATF out of the loop. The deal is I keep this stuff from the hands of unstable elements.” Eric squinted. “You unstable?”
“Not today.” I gave him a three-fingered salute. “Scout’s honor.”
“What about the sunglasses? You doing drugs?”
“Naw, nothing like that. I got an eye condition, that’s all.”
“In both eyes?”
“Yeah, and it’s contagious.” I stepped toward Eric.
He put his hands up for me to keep away.
Cavagnolo said, “The fucker thinks he’s a vampire.”
They both chuckled.
“That true?” Eric asked. “You a vampire?”
“What do you think? Want to see my union card?” I took electric fuses and blasting caps and put them in my pocket. “Get me two sticks of dynamite.”
Eric looked from me to Cavagnolo and back again. “Who’s got the bucks?”
I pointed to Cavagnolo. “Put it on his tab.”
He gave me the stink eye but shouldn’t have been surprised.
I picked up a rumpled garment from the workbench. It was a bird hunting jacket made of oilskin, now cracked and ripped. “How much?”
“For that rag? Take it.”
I opened my scout knife and cut off the jacket’s sleeves; all I needed was a vest with lots of pockets.
“What about a machine gun?”
Eric went to the bottom shelf on the northern wall and grasped a rope handle on one end of a long wooden crate.
Eric talked as he eased the crate to floor. “These are worth plenty on the black market but they’re hell to get rid of. I gotta be real careful who I sell to. Goddamn gangbangers would get a hard-on this big”-Eric spread his hands a foot apart-“for any of these. But they can barely handle pistols, so these would be like giving chainsaws to monkeys.”
The crate was longer than my leg and eighteen inches deep. The stenciled lettering on the top read: Water Pump Bearing Rod. Eric undid the four brass latches on the long sides and removed the top.
A machine gun lay inside the wooden support cutouts. The gun had a long perforated jacket over the barrel. It looked like the weapons the Imperial Stormtroopers carried in Star Wars.
“It’s surplus from the former Yugoslavia. The weapon is the modern version of the German MG42.” Eric gushed with the enthusiasm of a collector who finally had an audience. He mentioned something about the best machine gun ever made, the American army almost adopted it but fucked up the design, yada, yada.
“Thanks for the trivia,” I interrupted. “You ought to get a job with the History Channel. What I need to know, does this work?”
Eric chuffed as if I had offended him. “No point if it doesn’t. That’s like dating a girl who won’t give head.”
I lifted the machine gun from the crate. The finish was oily and cool. I cradled it under my left arm and wrapped my right hand around the pistol grip. I appreciated the familiar weight and potential for mass carnage.
Its heft and smell took me far away, to my service in the Third Infantry Division. The last time I held a machine gun, it was the day I became a vampire. Second by second, the gun grew heavier until its weight threatened to pull me to the floor. Remaining upright took great effort. The room dissolved into the dust of war-torn Iraq. The cacophony of battle filled my ears: explosions; the zippered bursts of automatic fire; the chaos of radio chatter; confused shouts; the cries and sobbing of the Iraqis.
Something cracked inside my headset and I realized it was the snapping of fingers. Eric stood before me, his thumb snapping against his index finger. “You okay?”
The machine gun practically fell from my arms, but once I set the butt on the floor, the gun’s weight returned to normal. The noise of war faded like a dying radio signal.
“Sorry, I was getting a little wistful for my days working for Uncle Sugar.”
“The rate of fire is 1,100 rounds a minute,” Eric said proudly. “When this bitch talks, people listen.”
I did quick arithmetic in my head. “That’s about eighteen rounds a second. Burns quite a lot of ammo.”
Eric waved to the crates and olive green metal cans on the opposite wall. “No problem. I can sell it to you by the ton.”
I went through the logistics. Machine-gun ammo comes in belts of fifty. Four belts in a standard ammo can. That’s two hundred rounds. Weighed around sixteen pounds, if I remember. It’s not the weight but the convenience. How would I carry that much ammo and feed it through the machine gun? For all that trouble I’d only get about twelve seconds of shooting time. Plus, I’d be spraying bullets all over the hills.
I set the machine gun back in its box. “Too complicated. Do you have anything simpler? More basic? Yet a little exotic?”
Time was passing, and I wanted to be ready by nightfall.
Eric turned from me, frowning and disappointed at losing this sale. He tapped along boxes and bundles on a shelf beside us. “Simple. Basic. Exotic.”
He yanked a bundle in a grimy cloth. He unwrapped a stubby antique double-barreled gun. “It’s a Pedersoli Kodiak elephant gun I bought at a police auction. In mint condition, it’ll be worth eleven grand. As you can see, the previous owners-crack dealers-weren’t interested in the gun’s pedigree.”
Eric ran his hand over the cut-down stock, the wood gouged and scratched. The metal work was pitted and rusted from the twin triggers to the truncated barrels. The twin muzzles still had hacksaw scratches.
Eric broke open the stock and showed the enormous chambers. “Ten-gauge.”
A 10-gauge elephant gun? “Got ammo?”
“Of course.”
Perfect. “I’ll take it.”
CHAPTER 53
I left Eric’s place. Cavagnolo had to get his own ride home.
Jolie appeared behind me on her big BMW. We stopped in a little clearing along the river to discuss our plans to attack the zombies.
I handed her the Dan Wesson pistol. She accepted it with only a simple thanks. While I studied the topographical map, she played with the gun, disassembling it into a pile of shiny pieces, then in a blur of fingers had it back together again. She loaded the magazines and after slapping one into the Dan Wesson, dropped the extras into a leather fanny pack.
She said, “In case you wondered how the zombies snatched Phaedra from her uncle’s place, I found a bunch of footprints behind the little cottage.”
“How’d they get past Cavagnolo’s dogs?”
Jolie pulled a plastic ground beef wrapper and a prescription bottle of Ambien. “It’s a miracle the little poochies didn’t get poisoned.”
“Told you the zombies were clever.”
I sketched the layout of the zombie lair and we drew up our plan.
We’d get into position on her BMW, which could cover all but the worst terrain in a hurry. I’d dismount and sh
e would draw the zombies away from me.
“Don’t try any stunts like running them down,” I said. “The zombies catch on quick and they’ll sacrifice one of their own to set you up. Don’t be shy about using the pistol.”
“I’m not shy about anything,” Jolie replied.
We spent the rest of the afternoon going through our shopping list. Afterward, we returned to the clearing and got ready as we waited for night to fall.
I tested the number of a cheapie cell phone I’d bought in a convenience store. It worked. I opened the phone case, removed the vibrating mechanism, and in its place attached an electronic fuse. I called the number and a red LED on the fuse illuminated. I turned the phone off-hell of a time to get a wrong number-and inserted the blasting cap into the fuse. I extended a talon and poked a deep hole into a stick of dynamite. I inserted the blasting cap into the hole and wrapped the cell phone tight against the dynamite with electrical tape. I taped the second stick of dynamite to the first.
After loading all the guns, I tucked my pistol into its holster and slipped spare magazines into the pockets of my cargo pants. I dropped a flare gun, flares, and the cell phone bomb into one pocket of the vest and dumped the 10-gauge cartridges into the other pockets.
The sun sank below the western hills and the long fingers of night reached across the valley. I sat cross-legged while Jolie stretched out and propped herself on her elbows.
I said, “Assuming the raid goes off okay…”
“There’s no assuming, Felix. Not after what you and I have been through.” She meant Carmen. “We get in and destroy.”
“I was getting at your partner, Nguyen. When we get done, what about him? I think he’s going to make a stink about not coming along.”
“Notice that he didn’t protest too hard about me bracing him.”
“I thought you were pulling rank.”
“I got no rank on him. He reports directly for the Araneum.” Jolie cocked a thumb to the sky. “The very top.”
“As?”
“As a snitch. Plus he’s a fake.”
“Fake?” I asked.
“Yeah. A real poser. He likes wearing the leathers and talking smack but he can’t ride a motorcycle worth a shit.”
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