“Nice weapons,” he said.
I said nothing back. He moved his hand and nudged one of them with his knuckles. Then he sent it sliding across the wood toward me. The heavy steel made a hollow reverberant sound on the oak.
“You want to tell me why there’s a mark scratched against one of the chambers?”
I listened to the ocean.
“I don’t know why,” I said. “They came to me like that.”
“You bought them used?”
“In Arizona,” I said.
“From a gun store?”
“From a gun show,” I said.
“Why?”
“I don’t like background checks,” I said.
“Didn’t you ask about the scratches?”
“I assumed they were reference marks,” I said. “I assumed some gun nut had tested them and marked the most accurate chamber. Or the least accurate.”
“Chambers differ?”
“Everything differs,” I said. “That’s the nature of manufacturing.”
“Even with eight-hundred-dollar revolvers?”
“Depends on how discriminating you want to be. You feel the need to measure down to the hundred-thousandths of an inch, then everything in the world is different.”
“Does it matter?”
“Not to me,” I said. “I point a gun at somebody, I don’t care which individual blood cell I’m targeting.”
He sat quiet for a moment. Then he went into his pocket and came out with a bullet. Shiny brass case, dull lead point. He stood it upright in front of him like a miniature artillery shell. Then he knocked it over and rolled it under his fingers on the table. Then he placed it carefully and flicked it with his fingertip so that it rolled all the way along to me. It came in a wide graceful curve. It made a slow droning sound on the wood. I let it roll off the end of the table and caught it in my hand. It was an unjacketed Remington .44 Magnum. Heavy, probably more than three hundred grains. It was a brutal thing. Probably cost the best part of a dollar. It was warm from his pocket.
“You ever played Russian roulette?” he asked.
“I need to get rid of the car I stole,” I said.
“We’ve already gotten rid of it,” he said.
“Where?”
“Where it won’t be found.”
He went quiet. I said nothing. Just looked at him, like I was thinking Is that the sort of thing an ordinary businessman does? As well as registering his limousines through shell corporations? And instantly recalling the retail on a Colt Anaconda? And trapping a guest’s prints on a whiskey tumbler?
“You ever played Russian roulette?” he asked again.
“No,” I said. “I never did.”
“I’m under attack,” he said. “And I just lost two guys. Time like this I need to be adding guys, not losing them.”
I waited, five seconds, ten. I made out like I was struggling with the concept.
“You asking to hire me?” I said. “I’m not sure I can stick around.”
“I’m not asking anything,” he said. “I’m deciding. You look like a useful guy. You could have that five thousand dollars to stay, not to go. Maybe.”
I said nothing.
“Hey, if I want you, I’ve got you,” he said. “There’s a dead cop down in Massachusetts and I’ve got your name and I’ve got your prints.”
“But?”
“But I don’t know who you are.”
“Get used to it,” I said. “How do you know who anybody is?”
“I find out. I test people. Suppose I asked you to kill another cop? As a gesture of good faith?”
“I’d say no. I’d repeat that the first one was an unfortunate accident I regret very much. And I’d start wondering about what kind of an ordinary businessman you really are.”
“My business is my business. It needn’t concern you.”
I said nothing.
“Play Russian roulette with me,” he said.
“What would that prove?”
“A federal agent wouldn’t do it.”
“Why are you worried about federal agents?”
“That needn’t concern you, either.”
“I’m not a federal agent,” I said.
“So prove it. Play Russian roulette with me. I mean, I’m already playing Russian roulette with you, in a manner of speaking, just letting you into my house without knowing exactly who you are.”
“I saved your son.”
“And I’m very grateful for that. Grateful enough that I’m still talking to you in a civilized manner. Grateful enough that I might yet offer you sanctuary and employment. Because I like a man who gets the job done.”
“I’m not looking for work,” I said. “I’m looking to hide out for maybe forty-eight hours and then move on.”
“We’d look after you. Nobody would ever find you. You’d be completely safe here. If you pass the test.”
“Russian roulette is the test?”
“The infallible test,” he said. “In my experience.”
I said nothing. The room was silent. He leaned forward in his chair.
“You’re either with me or against me,” he said. “Either way, you’re about to prove it. I sincerely hope you choose wisely.”
Duke moved against the door. The floor creaked under his feet. I listened to the ocean. Spray smashed upward and the wind whipped it and heavy foam drops arced lazily through the air and tapped against the window glass. The seventh wave came booming in, heavier than the others. I picked up the Anaconda in front of me. Duke pulled a gun out from under his jacket and pointed it at me in case I had something other than roulette on my mind. He had a Steyr SPP, which is most of a Steyr TMP submachine gun cut down into pistol form. It’s a rare piece from Austria and it was big and ugly in his hand. I looked away from it and concentrated on the Colt. I thumbed the bullet into a random chamber and closed the cylinder and spun it free. The ratchet purred in the silence.
“Play,” Beck said.
I spun the cylinder again and raised the revolver and touched the muzzle to my temple. The steel was cold. I looked Beck straight in the eye and held my breath and eased the trigger back. The cylinder turned and the hammer cocked. The action was smooth, like silk rubbing on silk. I pulled the trigger all the way. The hammer fell. There was a loud click. I felt the smack of the hammer pulse all the way through the steel to the side of my head. But I felt nothing else. I breathed out and lowered the gun and held it with the back of my hand resting on the table. Then I turned my hand over and pulled my finger out of the trigger guard.
“Your turn,” I said.
“I just wanted to see you do it,” he said.
I smiled.
“You want to see me do it again?” I said.
Beck said nothing. I picked up the gun again and spun the cylinder and let it slow and stop. Raised the muzzle to my head. The barrel was so long my elbow was forced up and out. I pulled the trigger, fast and decisive. There was a loud click in the silence. It was the sound of an eight-hundred-dollar piece of precision machinery working exactly the way it should. I lowered the gun and spun the cylinder a third time. Raised the gun. Pulled the trigger. Nothing. I did it a fourth time, fast. Nothing. I did it a fifth time, faster. Nothing.
“OK,” Beck said.
“Tell me about Oriental rugs,” I said.
“Nothing much to tell,” he said. “They go on the floor. People buy them. Sometimes for a lot of money.”
I smiled. Raised the gun again.
“Odds are six to one,” I said. I spun the cylinder a sixth time. The room went completely silent. I put the gun to my head. Pulled the trigger. I felt the smack of the hammer falling on an empty chamber. Nothing else.
“Enough,” Beck said.
I lowered the Colt and cracked the cylinder and dumped the bullet out on the table. Lined it up carefully and rolled it all the way back to him. It droned on the wood. He stopped it with the heel of his hand and sat there and said nothing for two or three minu
tes. He was looking at me like I was an animal in a zoo. Like maybe he wished there were some bars between him and me.
“Richard tells me you were a military cop,” he said.
“Thirteen years,” I said.
“Were you good?”
“Better than those bozos you sent to pick him up.”
“He speaks well of you.”
“So he should,” I said. “I saved his ass. At considerable cost to myself.”
“You going to be missed anywhere?”
“No.”
“Family?”
“Haven’t got any.”
“Job?”
“I can’t go back to it now,” I said. “Can I?”
He played with the bullet for a moment, rolling it under the pad of his index finger. Then he scooped it up into his palm.
“Who can I call?” he said.
“For what?”
He jiggled the bullet in his palm, like shaking dice.
“An employment recommendation,” he said. “You had a boss, right?”
Mistakes, coming back to haunt me.
“Self-employed,” I said.
He put the bullet back on the table.
“Licensed and insured?” he said.
I paused a beat.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Reasons,” I said.
“Got a registration for your truck?”
“I might have mislaid it.”
He rolled the bullet under his fingers. Gazed at me. I could see him thinking. He was running things through his head. Processing information. Trying to make it fit with his own preconceptions. I willed him onward. An armed tough guy with an old panel van that doesn’t belong to him. A car thief. A cop-killer. He smiled.
“Used records,” he said. “I’ve seen that store.”
I said nothing. Just looked him in the eye.
“Let me take a guess,” he said. “You were fencing stolen CDs.”
His type of guy. I shook my head.
“Bootlegs,” I said. “I’m not a thief. I’m ex-military, trying to scrape a living. And I believe in free expression.”
“Like hell,” he said. “You believe in making a buck.”
His type of guy.
“That too,” I said.
“Were you doing well?”
“Well enough.”
He scooped the bullet into his palm again and tossed it to Duke. Duke caught it one-handed and dropped it into his jacket pocket.
“Duke is my head of security,” Beck said. “You’ll work for him, effective immediately.”
I glanced at Duke, than back at Beck.
“Suppose I don’t want to work for him?” I said.
“You have no choice. There’s a dead cop down in Massachusetts, and we have your name and your prints. You’ll be on probation, until we get a feel for exactly what kind of a person you are. But look on the bright side. Think about five thousand dollars. That’s a lot of bootleg CDs.”
The difference between being an honored guest and a probationary employee was that I ate dinner in the kitchen with the other help. The giant from the gatehouse lodge didn’t show, but there was Duke and one other guy I took to be some kind of an all-purpose mechanic or handyman. There was a maid and a cook. The five of us sat around a plain deal table and had a meal just as good as the family was getting in the dining room. Maybe better, because maybe the cook had spat in theirs, and I doubted if she would spit in ours. I had spent enough time around grunts and NCOs to know how they do things.
There wasn’t much conversation. The cook was a sour woman of maybe sixty. The maid was timid. I got the impression she was fairly new. She was unsure about how to conduct herself. She was young and plain. She was wearing a cotton shift and a wool cardigan. She had clunky flat shoes on. The mechanic was a middle-aged guy, thin, gray, quiet. Duke was quiet too, because he was thinking. Beck had handed him a problem and he wasn’t sure how he should deal with it. Could he use me? Could he trust me? He wasn’t stupid. That was clear. He saw all the angles and he was prepared to spend a little time examining them. He was around my age. Maybe a little younger, maybe a little older. He had one of those hard ugly corn-fed faces that hides age well. He was about my size. I probably had heavier bones, he was probably a little bulkier. We probably weighed within a pound or two of each other. I sat next to him and ate my food and tried to time it right with the kind of questions a normal person would be expected to ask.
“So tell me about the rug business,” I said, with enough tone in my voice that he knew I was saying I assumed Beck was into something else entirely.
“Not now,” he said, like he meant not in front of the help. And then he looked at me in a way that had to mean anyway I’m not sure I want to be talking to a guy crazy enough to chance shooting himself in the head six straight times.
“The bullet was a fake, right?” I said.
“What?”
“No powder in it,” I said. “Probably just cotton wadding.”
“Why would it be a fake?”
“I could have shot him with it.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I wouldn’t, but he’s a cautious guy. He wouldn’t take the risk.”
“I was covering you.”
“I could have gotten you first. Used your gun on him.”
He stiffened a little, but he didn’t say anything. Competitive. I didn’t like him very much. Which was OK with me, because I guessed he was going to wind up as a casualty before too long.
“Hold this,” he said.
He took the bullet out of his pocket and handed it to me.
“Wait there,” he said.
He got up off his chair and walked out of the kitchen. I stood the bullet upright in front of me, just like Beck had. I finished up my meal. There was no dessert. No coffee. Duke came back with one of my Anacondas swinging from his trigger finger. He walked past me to the back door and nodded me over to join him. I picked the bullet up and clamped it in my palm. Followed him. The back door beeped as we passed through it. Another metal detector. It was neatly integrated into the frame. But there was no burglar alarm. Their security depended on the sea and the wall and the razor wire.
Beyond the back door was a cold damp porch, and then a rickety storm door into the yard, which was nothing more than the tip of the rocky finger. It was a hundred yards wide and semicircular in front of us. It was dark and the lights from the house picked up the grayness of the granite. The wind was blowing and I could see luminescence from the whitecaps out in the ocean. The surf crashed and eddied. There was a moon and low torn clouds moving fast. The horizon was immense and black. The air was cold. I twisted up and back and picked out my room’s window way above me.
“Bullet,” Duke said.
I turned back and passed it to him.
“Watch,” he said.
He loaded it into the Colt. Jerked his hand to snap the cylinder shut. Squinted in the moonlit grayness and clicked the cylinder around until the loaded chamber was at the ten o’clock position.
“Watch,” he said again.
He pointed the gun with his arm straight, aiming just below horizontal at the flat granite tables where they met the sea. He pulled the trigger. The cylinder turned and the hammer dropped and the gun kicked and flashed and roared. There was a simultaneous spark on the rocks and an unmistakable metallic whang of a ricochet. It feathered away to silence. The bullet probably skipped a hundred yards out into the Atlantic. Maybe it killed a fish.
“It wasn’t a fake,” he said. “I’m fast enough.”
“OK,” I said.
He opened the cylinder and shook the empty shell case out. It clinked on the rocks by his feet.
“You’re an asshole,” he said. “An asshole cop-killer.”
“Were you a cop?”
He nodded. “Once upon a time.”
“Is Duke your first name or your last?”
“Last.”
“Like he told you, it’s a rough business. There’s a lot of money in it.”
“You really want me here?”
He shrugged. “I might. If somebody’s sniffing around, we might need some cannon fodder. Better you than me.”
“I saved the kid.”
“So what? Get in line. We’ve all saved the kid, one time or another. Or Mrs. Beck, or Mr. Beck himself.”
“How many guys have you got?”
“Not enough,” he said. “Not if we’re under attack.”
“What is this, a war?”
He didn’t answer. Just walked past me toward the house. I turned my back on the restless ocean and followed him.
There was nothing doing in the kitchen. The mechanic had disappeared and the cook and the maid were stacking dishes into a machine large enough to do duty in a restaurant. The maid was all fingers and thumbs. She didn’t know what went where. I looked around for coffee. There still wasn’t any. Duke sat down again at the empty deal table. There was no activity. No urgency. I was aware of time slipping away. I didn’t trust Susan Duffy’s estimate of five days’ grace. Five days is a long time when you’re guarding two healthy individuals off the books. I would have been happier if she had said three days. I would have been more impressed by her sense of realism.
“Go to bed,” Duke said. “You’ll be on duty as of six-thirty in the morning.”
“Doing what?”
“Doing whatever I tell you.”
“Is my door going to be locked?”
“Count on it,” he said. “I’ll unlock it at six-fifteen. Be down here by six-thirty.”
I waited on my bed until I heard him come up after me and lock the door. Then I waited some more until I was sure he wasn’t coming back. Then I took my shoe off and checked for messages. The little device powered up and the tiny green screen was filled with a cheerful italic announcement: You’ve Got Mail! There was one item only. It was from Susan Duffy. It was a one-word question: Location? I hit reply and typed Abbot, Maine, coast, 20m S of Portland, lone house on long rock finger. That would have to do. I didn’t have a mailing address or exact GPS coordinates. But she should be able to pin it down if she spent some time with a large-scale map of the area. I hit send now.
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