Iron River (3 page)

Hood gained. The street was narrow and steep and the desert cobblestones were uneven. He heard Ozburn huffing along behind him and he felt the sweat burning into his eyes. He saw the crowd breaking up ahead of him, parted by stout Tilley. Hood ran past an ice cream shop and a festively lit bar and a leather shop and a jewelry store, though he was barely aware of them.

At the first intersection, Black Suit appeared from a side street and fell in next to Tilley. Both men looked back at Hood, and when he saw Black Suit reach inside his coat, Hood dove behind a decorative clay planter filled with succulents and yelled back at Ozburn to get down. A little bullet grazed the planter and ricocheted, buzzing like a fat hornet. A twenty-two, thought Hood. He heard a sharp crack, and another bullet took a chip off a paver and whined off into the darkness.

Then there was silence, and Hood looked through the succulents and saw the empty street ahead. He drew his sidearm and came up running.

Bly and Holdstock merged from the side street. Ozburn caught up with the other three, muttering curses, a big automatic in his hand. They followed the gunrunners through an outdoor marketplace that was shutting down, dodging stalls of Coachella Valley dates and Imperial Valley grapefruit. The shoppers were gone by now, but the vendors ducked quickly and efficiently because they had seen this kind of thing before. Up ahead, one of the bad guys upturned a table of cantaloupe, which rolled toward Hood, but he long-jumped them and saw that he was catching up. The gunrunners took to the sidewalk that ran behind a colonnade of rounded arches facing the street. Hood heard music. Near the top of the gentle hill that Buenavista was built upon, the road ended in a large open square ringed by restaurants and bars. There were tables with white linen set up in the patios of the restaurants and there were horses tethered to hitching posts amidst the gleaming sports cars and SUVs and luxury sedans.

As Hood entered the square the music was louder, a disco tune throbbing from Club Fandango at the far end. Ahead of him he watched Tilley and Black Suit shove through the small crowd waiting to get into the club. The revelers hustled away under the protective archway columns of the colonnade and the gunrunners disappeared inside.

Hood figured they were headed out the back into an alley, so he ran left around the building. He saw Ozburn split off the other way, and Bly and Holdstock heading straight in.

Behind the building was another dining patio, quieter here, tables lit by candlelight, and a fountain gurgling. Hood leaped the short adobe wall and waved his hand for the young couple to get up and out. They scrambled over the wall and headed off into the darkness.

Then Hood was aware of two new things at once: Black Suit and Tilley heaving toward him through the open back doors of the building, and a young teenaged couple rising from their table in the private far corner of the patio. The boy held the girl’s hand in an elevated, courtly way. The girl looked frightened, but the boy looked cool. Hood waved them to his left and the boy nodded to him, steadying his date toward the short wall.

Ozburn rounded the building just as Black Suit and Tilley burst onto the patio from inside, and Ozburn yelled,
Drop the guns!
Tilley dropped his weapon. Hood set Black Suit’s chest atop his front sight and waited for him to drop his pistol. Black Suit was deciding when three shots roared from inside and the young dealer collapsed in a dark heap.

Tilley was jumping up and down, hands up:
Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!

Bly and Holdstock stumbled through the open doors and fell into shooter stances.

In the abrupt silence, a girl screamed from the darkness beyond the wall.

 

 

 

 

S
o I’m sitting at my desk on the third floor of Pace Arms and studying the guy across from me. He says his name is Bradley Smith. He’s even younger than me, which pleases me because I think the young should grab what’s left of this world before the old piss away every last bit of it.

“Your company is French?” I ask.

“The management is French. I already told your secretary that.”

“With how many armed employees?”

“Two thousand.”

“That’s a lot of armed guards.”

“We’re international. I told your secretary that, too.”

“Sharon relayed everything to me with perfect accuracy, Mr. Smith.”

“She has nice paint, as the Mexicans like to say.”

I smile at this. “No kidding. And she composes letters, figures out my calendar, and keeps the assholes out of here.”

“Quite a woman.”

“She’s engaged,” I say, wishing it were to me.

“I am, too.”

“Really? I wouldn’t mind that someday.”

“What kind of thing is that to say? You get what you take, my man.”

I nod and silently cede the point. I look out the window to the mild Orange County morning. The blinds and the glass are dirty because we quit paying the custodial contract ten months ago, not long after Pace Arms was sued into bankruptcy. But to the east I can still see the swirl of concrete where the 405 meets the 55, and the malls stretching into the distance, the mirrored corporate buildings, the Performing Arts Center and the evangelical Christian broadcasting compound. Uncle Chester showed me pictures of that land when it was still bean fields, and gave me a stern warning that laziness never turned a bean field into a shopping mall. I was six. And Chester said if I wanted my piece of the American dream someday, it was going to take energy, vision, balls. It would take
Pace.
He usually smiled after saying that, not a pleasant thing. He’s huge but his teeth are small and even, like infant teeth. Back then, Pace Arms was making 145,000 handguns a year, right here in Orange County, right here in this building. Hardly anybody knew what we did. The guns were semiautomatic, semidependable, and dirt cheap.
The workingman’s equalizer
was what Chet called them. Most everybody else called them Saturday Night Specials. Uncle Chester is a lecher and a bore, but he knew how to make a buck on cheap guns.

“Okay, Bradley Smith,” I say. “
Director
of North American operations for Favier and Winling Security of Paris, France. You made this appointment. You were late. You tell me my secretary is stupid but hot. You tell me I’ll get what I take, my man. Maybe you should tell me something that might be worth my time, like, for instance, what do you want?”

“Time? You’ve got
time
. You’re bankrupt. But maybe I can help you with something else.”

“Help away.”

Bradley gets up and goes to the dirty window and looks out. He’s wearing the five-hundred-dollar Jimmy Choo boots I tried on a few months ago but had to get less expensive ones. And pricey jeans and a white shirt that’s cleaned and pressed, and a leather vest. He’s got long dark hair and a goatee and something about him besides his attitude bothers me but I don’t know what.

“You ought to get these windows cleaned.”

“We fired the custodians.”

“They fired you, actually, because you failed to pay them. Look, Ron, I did my due diligence on Pace Arms. I always liked your products. The twenty-five Hawk was decent, and the twenty-two LR was better. The nines weren’t bad, either. If you’d have gotten the design on the forty caliber right, your gun wouldn’t have killed the little boy, and Pace Arms would still be cranking out guns, money, and happiness. But . . . well, no need to rehash all that.”

“No.”

“So. In the course of my research, I reviewed the court transcripts and the financial declarations and the terms of the corporate dissolution. And I got out my trusty calculator and pushed a few keys, and guess what I saw.”

“Numbers?”

“Inventory still unsold.”

I figured this was where Bradley Smith was going. “And you’re going to help me by taking it off my hands.”

“Maybe I should know what it is.”

“Maybe I should know what you want it to be.”

“We’ve got two thousand men on the business end of things, all over the world. Some are in the most vile places on earth, some are in the most beautiful. Some in cities, some in mud. They go where they are needed. And what they all need is short-range stopping power, concealability, and one-hundred-percent reliability.”

“That would be the Hawk nine. We have a few. Thirty or so.”

“I need a thousand.”

My heart does a quick little somersault. “That’s quite an order for a bankrupt company, Mr. Smith.”

“And if the Hawk nines do what they’re supposed to do, we’d like to have all our people carrying them by the end of next year. So, a thousand more.”

Now, I attended church this last Sunday. I’ll admit it was to meet available women in the singles ministry, but it was church nonetheless.
Thank you, God in heaven
is all I can think.

I nod and push back in my rolling chair and glide across the carpet protector. “Come with me.”

I raise my eyebrows at Sharon on the way to the elevator. She smiles at Bradley Smith in a way that she has never smiled at me. But I knew she would smile at Smith that way because Smith has the thing that most women can’t resist.
The thing.
I’ve been trying to develop it for my entire adult life but I can’t even define it, so there’s no place to start. I once reverse-engineered an Egyptian submachine gun, and it was easy compared to developing
the thing.
You can’t reverse-engineer what you can’t define. Maybe it’s his goatee. I don’t know.

The elevator takes us down to the basement. The door opens and it’s dark. The basement is almost wholly below ground level, so the only natural light slips in through the long narrow windowpanes up top. I step out and key on the lights. I light only the lobby and part of the third floor these days. No use wasting money. My secretary, Sharon of my heart—Sharon Rose Novak is her full name—is my last pretense at solvency. Last week she actually braced me for a raise to help her pay for her wedding, which is set for next month. I haven’t met the groom, though I dislike the way he talks to her on the phone. She’s normally talkative but during their calls there are long silences on her part, then short, quiet replies. He takes something out of her. They registered at Bloomingdale’s and I bought them all twelve of the requested service settings, a Wedgwood design that was not cheap. Maybe they’ll have me over for dinner someday. She’s a blue-eyed blonde and has the prettiest face I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, I’ve spent almost all of what little money I had on keeping the doors open here at Pace Arms. Eighteen months ago when we correctly foresaw the courtroom mud bath, Chester got some building department friends to fast-track a city permit for a small penthouse up on the third floor, making the building a residence, which is outside the terms of the settlement. So I sold my home and bought the penthouse from Chet and I live here now. Chet holds the deed on the office footage. He left the country before the judgment and there have been only three postcards from him since—Thailand, Berlin, and Tahiti. They were addressed to “All” at Pace Arms. He took the last of the company cash with him, thirty grand. I pay his property taxes. Before leaving, he told me that any dreams of saving Pace would be foolish pride, but I still think there’s a way to salvage the business.

And I think the way to salvage it is now standing right next to me.

We pause in the basement vestibule for a moment. It used to be a waiting area for customers about to test-fire one product or another. Gone are the genuine 1878 walnut bar from a saloon in Bodie, the King Ranch furniture and the Remington bronzes and the framed Catlin lithos and the big-screen hi-def and the bear and bison mounts. Uncle Chet also made off with the proceeds from the sale of these beauties, approximately eighteen paltry grand. Now all we have here in the vestibule are cobwebs and daddy longlegs. The air is stale and warm.

“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.