Stress (2 page)

There was no mistaking the position the man there had fallen into, all arms and legs like a pile of Lincoln Logs, but Kubicek kept the .45 trained on him as he pushed him over onto his back with a wingtip. Instinctively his eyes went to the man’s hands, then searched the surrounding tiles. Finally he squatted and patted the body from chest to ankles.

He took the automatic off cock, lips pursed. This one wasn’t armed.

“W
HAT’S WRONG WITH THE GUN BUSINESS IS THERE’S
too many cowboys in it, and more coming in all the time,” Joe Piper said. “Dealing in absolute shit, pieces from Norway and Czechoslovakia—Prague, I’m serious, that great firearms capital of the world—where the blueing comes off in your hand. Not that it matters, because you won’t have one after you pull the trigger the first time. They got no
esprit de corps
.”

He knew he was talking too much and too fast. It was a family failing; when a Piper got nervous you couldn’t shut him up. Like his Uncle Seamus, a clam all his fucking life who ran guns to Ireland in the twenties with the dough he made shoving booze for the Machine mob, then at age seventy-one turned into a canary, all because his prostate blew out and he thought he had to dump all his sins before he scaled the rainbow. So far as Joe Piper could tell from the little he knew of Gaelic, the worst of these to Seamus wasn’t the smuggling or the killings or the partner he’d abandoned in Galway Bay and for all he knew was still rotting in some English prison, but the six-month marriage that had ended in divorce in Cleveland in 1930, and that he’d kept a secret from his children, his wife of forty-two years, and the Catholic Church. Fortunately Joe Piper’s father, Seamus’s brother-in-law and a partner on the American end of the old enterprise, had brought in a Polish priest who didn’t know the language to hear the confession. Quinn Piper didn’t care how many wives the old man had had as long as the source of the capital behind the family cement firm remained family knowledge.

Joe Piper’s case of nerves had nothing to do with the prospect of dealing some guns. He’d been doing that all his adult life. Even before that, he’d fetched and carried for his father when the Edsel went bust in 1959 and the Detroit housing market fell down the same hole, and Quinn took up the slack by performing as go-between on a transaction involving surplus Korean War ordnance and some characters from Bolivia or some such shit place, who wore dark glasses indoors and handled English as if it weighed a hundred pounds. Nor was he agitated by the identity of his customer. In his line, a slot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list just meant a higher ante. Anyway, he’d done business with Albanians, and those guys scared Mao Tse-Tung.

No, it was the venue that put him on edge.

He hadn’t been down Twelfth Street since before the riots. In the living room of his house in Pontiac he’d watched its neighborhoods burning on television, paratroopers trading automatic-weapons fire with snipers in windows, and tanks—Sherman and Patton
tanks
, for chrissake—trundling along the pavement, all those great blind pigs and rib joints boarded up, and thought for the first time of moving to California. He’d thought martial law would put an end to the local gun trade; forgetting that this was Detroit, where the answer to a recession was to make more cars and the solution to widespread insurrection was to arm everyone who was big enough to haul a gun uphill without training wheels. The social order had broken down. When you couldn’t count on the cops to protect you, you heeled yourself. Within two years his orders had doubled, and he could have doubled them again in the next three if he wanted to trade in the shit peddled by his competitors. A Joe Piper piece never misfired or blew up in your hand. That was what kept him above ground and out of jail in a business not known for its loyalties.

But he didn’t delude himself. To the majority of his clientele he represented The Man, growing fat off his customers’ need, and he might as well have put on a pigeon suit when he ventured into the Detroit Black Community to work deals. For six years now his only contact with the DBC had been through buffers whose skin pigmentations matched his buyers’. The first time this particular buyer had asked to deal directly with him, Joe Piper had refused. When he found out how big a shipment was involved, he’d suggested a meeting in Pontiac. Told the customer’s name, he’d realized why that was impossible, and after sleeping on it agreed to the Twelfth Street location.

He’d regretted the decision the moment he left his Buick Electra in Redford and boarded the DSR to downtown. The bus was loaded with black passengers, and in his fur-collared overcoat and doeskin gloves he’d felt their suspicion instantly. He was Black Irish, but not nearly black enough, pale-skinned under his rebellious shock of black hair, blue-eyed, pug-nosed, and built like a retired heavyweight fighter spreading into his middle years. Freezing on sidewalks in the Michigan March they’d seen his kind capering in the St. Patrick’s Day parade when Cavanagh was mayor, green-hatted and swinging a shillelagh, and it might have been a peek at life on Pluto for all it meant to the way they lived.

The building, an apartment block with common walls built early in the century, looked vaguely familiar. It could have been any one of the places Joe Piper had stopped for a drink after hours or a barbecue sandwich in the days when he’d stepped back and forth across racial lines without having to think about it. The bricks and Edwardian gingerbread were charred and crumbling. He could just make out the ten-inch-high SOUL spray-painted on the plywood in a window beneath several generations of increasingly profane graffiti; an old attempt to forestall destruction by proclaiming the owner’s race brotherhood, fruitless in the swirl of the tempest. The funereal black CONDEMNED printed on a notice tacked to the wood looked faded and chalky. It stood as much chance of being fulfilled as the building of which it had become a part. Most of the damaged blocks were still standing, a ghost town in the center of the country’s seventh-largest city.

Someone who thought the place was worth finding had hand-painted the address Joe Piper was looking for on a door with a tarnished brass handle. When he pushed it open, a metallic crackle answered from the gray darkness inside. He obeyed the command to enter with his hands away from his body.

Although he had been around guns most of his life, he never carried one. The man inside frisked him, uncocked and belted his revolver, a short nickel-plated .357, and pulled a six-foot steel cabinet away from the door to a staircase leading to the upper stories. He was short, but he was as strong as a horse. His shoulder-length black hair, beaded headband, and the sweatshirt he wore with tribal designs painted on it under a quilted vest gave Joe Piper the impression he was an American Indian. It seemed an odd association, but then nothing had made much sense downtown since July 1967.

The Indian motioned up the stairs. He walked that way, accidentally kicking a piece of debris across the floor. The place appeared to have been a laundromat. Twisted and broken-off pipes stuck out like tentacles from the walls and there was a smell of detergent and mildew beneath the smoky stench.

At one time the second floor had been divided into apartments, but the walls had been torn out to make room for a single enterprise. Joe Piper knew where he was then. Before the riots he had come there on occasion to shoot pool and seal bargains over an unlicensed drink. A room without character at the best of times, now that the tables and fixtures were gone and the windows blocked it felt empty even of ghosts. The only light came from a Coleman lantern hissing on a square Formica-topped table and a kerosene heater on the floor. The flames cast more shadows than light and warmed little besides themselves.

Having delivered the visitor, the Indian made for the far wall facing the door and leaned against it. No introductions were made. They were unnecessary. Joe Piper assumed the man seated behind the table knew who he was, and even in the hollow illumination of the lantern he recognized the man’s features from his FBI circular.

Wilson McCoy. The narrow dusky face, black beret, Fu Manchu moustache, and straggly chin-whiskers reminded Joe Piper of the young Dizzy Gillespie, but he was implicated in the daylight ambush of mob boss Patsy Orr and three associates in an elevator of the Penobscot Building in 1966. That had been at the time of the Kercheval Street Incident; although that dress rehearsal for the full-scale rebellion that took place the following summer had pushed the assault off the front pages, McCoy’s connection with the Black Panthers brought him to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, who had been searching for thirty years for another John Dillinger to touch up the Bureau’s image. McCoy now occupied a spot on the list just below Jane Alpert, the woman sought for the 1969 New York bombings.

Unimpressive in person, with eyes set too close together and a sickly, hollow-chested look that Joe Piper suspected was congenital, McCoy had one habit that fascinated him: He chain-smoked marijuana. There was no mistaking that scorched-grain smell or the noisy way he sucked in air along with the smoke, but Joe Piper, a sometime indulger, had never before seen anyone round over an ashtray with hand-rolled butts, or light a fresh reefer off the stub of the last. The procedure was expensive and should have turned his brains to cornmeal, but there was nothing mushy about the way he opened the conversation.

“I know a smoke shop on Michigan where I can score all the pieces I need for half what you charge. How come everyone says call you?”

That was when he told McCoy what was wrong with the gun business.

Teeth shone on the other side of the table. Whether it was a smile or a grimace was anyone’s guess. “I’m off the tit a long time. I guess I know a good gun from one that’s going to blow off my own dick.”

“You’d be surprised. I’ve seen some pretty guns, museum quality, that I wouldn’t fire without a long string and a brick wall to squat behind. Automatics are the worst. They’re the knock-off Rolexes of the gun trade. They gut them, part out the actions, and stick in any old Mickey Mouse works. You think you bought a Beretta, but what you’ve really got came from a boiler factory in Seoul. A real melting-pot piece. And there’s something else to consider besides quality of merchandise.” He started forward, intending to lean across the table. The Indian straightened and rested a palm on his .357. Joe Piper put his hands in his pockets.

“A gun can kill you without ever going off,” he said. “Last month three guys got stopped for busting a light on Woodward. The cop turned out the car and came up with three unregistered S-and-Ws. Okay, that’s a Class A felony, but any kid with a degree could plead that down to a fine and time served. Only come to find out one of the pieces killed a clerk in a Seven-Eleven in Dearborn last Thanksgiving. None of these guys was even close to Dearborn that day, but they’re nailed for felony homicide. Now they’re singing, taking everybody down with them, including the guy that put them on to the guy that sold them the guns. Not the guy that sold them the guns, though. Cops in Wyandotte snagged him out of the river three days after Christmas. See, that’s another reason you can trust a Joe Piper piece. My balls are on the block. No fuck-ups. No history. Better than General Motors.”

“There’s another way.” McCoy chain-lit a joint. “Don’t bust no red lights.”

He ignored the remark as irrelevant. “Someone told me you were asking about grease guns. That’s a wide field: Uzis, AK-47s, BARs, M-16s. The whole alphabet. Maybe you better nail it down.”

“I heard shitty things about M-16s.”

“They’re shit, all right, but they get the job done. Plastic stock, banana clip. Low velocity. Fucking bullets tumble end over end. Sometimes they go in sideways. Make a hell of a hole. I can cut you a deal now that the war’s winding down. In six months they’re going to be a drug on the market.”

“What else you got?”

He hesitated. It occurred to him that he was dealing with a man who faced serious time. Joe Piper had a nose for such things as informants and wires. He wondered if the FBI’s priorities had shifted to the supply side. He had contacts in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and none of them had reported a thaw in the cold war between ATF and the Justice Department; still, Hoover was dead. “I’m not saying what I’ve
got
,” he said. “We’re just talking. Why don’t you tell me what you have in mind and we’ll figure out what’s best for the job.”

Again he saw teeth. “Last time I told whitey what I was thinking, I got six years at Whitmore Lake.”

“Maybe you should tell me what you have to spend. If you were buying anything and I had anything to sell;” he added.

“I might go fifty large for twenty pieces. Depending on the pieces.”

Joe Piper never showed surprise. He had learned the art of dissembling early, when he had continued in the weapons trade on his own after his father had gotten over the hump and returned to the cement business, without the father ever suspecting what the son was up to until he was out of the house for good. Yet the amount quoted by McCoy rocked him. He did some fast mental arithmetic, and in his professional interest forgot to be cautious about terminology.

“For twenty-five hundred apiece, I can put you behind twenty Ingrams.”

“What the fuck’s Ingrams?”

“Machine pistol, folding stock. U.S. made, if you’re patriotic, only I guess you’re not. Comes in two calibers. Thirty-eight’s easier to handle, but the forty-five pokes holes big as a champagne cork.”

“I like big holes. What’s the ROF?”

He measured out a small smile. “Eleven hundred and forty-five rounds per minute. I’m telling you, you can’t flutter your lips fast enough to duplicate the sound.”

There was an impressed silence. Joe Piper broke it.

“For hard cash I’ll throw in the suppressors and fifty thousand rounds of ammo.”

“What the fuck’s suppressors?”

“Well, silencers.”

“Don’t want no silencers. I like to make noise. Keep the silencers and make it a hundred thousand rounds. When’s delivery?”

“I got the guns if you got the cash.”