Stress (26 page)

But then it occurred to him that after clouting his way down Telegraph Road to the doctor’s office through two-foot drifts in the middle of a raging fucking blizzard, almost anything would.

Lowell Ridgley, M.D., urologist, Knights of Columbus sergeant-at-arms, and one piss-poor cribbage partner at Joe Piper’s old house in the city back when they’d both had time for such things, skinned off and disposed of his rubber finger and washed his hands in the stainless-steel sink.

“Well, pull ’em up Joe. What are you waiting for, a tattoo?”

He pulled them up. “No, and if I was, it wouldn’t be you I’d be getting it from. You got a touch as light as a punch press. So what’s the verdict, do I go ahead and get dressed, or is it just going to slow things up at the autopsy?” He sat down on Ridgley’s stool and tugged on his socks.

“Oh, you’ll be around for a while yet. How long depends on whether you follow up on what I’ve got to tell you.”

Standing now, Joe Piper paused in the midst of reaching for his shirt. Jesus, he loved physicals. They beat Vincent Price and the rolly-coaster for scaring the shit out of you.

Ridgley paged through the sheets on his clipboard. He was a tall skinny fifty or so who appeared to have grown right up through his ring of black hair. “I won’t load you down with numbers. Blood pressure’s high, cholesterol’s high, you could lose forty pounds—”

“Cholesterol, what the fuck’s cholesterol?”

“Too much of it’s bad news, trust me. Your stool’s okay. I wish I had your prostate.”

“What about the chest pain?”

“No sign of serious heart disease or angina. Your EKG shows some arrhythmia, but you’ve had that since you were a kid. We’ll continue to keep an eye on that. Off the top of my head—”

“Yeah, that’s what I want for my sixty bucks besides the chance to pee in a cup and cough when you grab my nuts: Your best guess.”

The physician peered over the tops of his reading glasses. “You want to hear this?”

Joe Piper flicked a hand and went on buttoning his shirt.

“The pains are stress-related. You weren’t always this irritable and short-tempered, so I assume you’re under a great deal of pressure. What kind isn’t my business.”

“It sure as hell is mine.”

“Medical science is just waking up to stress and its effect on health. It’s inevitable, you can’t duck it; just trying makes it worse. But you can step back from it now and then. When was the last time you took an honest-to-Christ vacation?”

“That’d be my honeymoon. We spent the weekend in Chicago.”

“That was it? One weekend!—what, seven or eight years ago?”

“No, no. Dolly and me ain’t got around to a honeymoon yet. We were too busy building that fucking house. I’m talking about Maureen.”

Ridgley took off his glasses. “You haven’t left work in twenty years?”

“Twenty-three, come May. Hey, it takes time to get a successful cement business off the ground. My old man ran it into nothing before he died.”

“You’re in worse shape than I thought. According to all the actuarial charts, you died in 1960.”

“Charts, shit.” He stepped into his trousers. “Gimme something for my dough. A prescription.”

“Have you considered retirement?”

“Only every day for the past five years. Who’s going to buy me out, you?”

“Would that be so ridiculous?”

“Oh, no. ‘Doc Ridgley’s Better Cement.’ Good for what ails your sick foundation. C’mon, Lowell.”

“Not the business. You still own that place up in Pontiac?”

“Detroit Manufacturers owns it. They let me live there as long as I keep sending them fifteen hundred a month.” He pulled up his suspenders. Dolly had been after him to switch to a belt; she said he was starting to look like an old potato farmer. He was considering it.

Ridgley hiked a hip up onto the examining table, scratching his ear with the eraser end of his gold pencil. “The investment group I belong to is looking for residential property in all the northern suburbs. We’re speculating that the white flight from the city that’s been going on since the riots is just the beginning. If Coleman Young wins in November, property values above Eight Mile Road could double the first year. You’ve got a pretty nice lot, as I recall.”

“Pretty nice mortgage, too. I got twenty-four years left to pay.”

“We’d pick it up, of course.”

Joe Piper zipped his coat. “So I get out clean, and you and the orthodontist and the gynecologist and the ear, nose, and throat man make a killing. What’s to stop me from hanging on till the values go up and cutting my own deal without you guys?”

“Nothing. In fact as your friend I’d recommend it. But as your doctor…” He pointed his pencil at the clipboard on the sink counter.

“My Uncle Seamus had a saying,” the gun dealer said. “ ‘Don’t sell your sheep to the same guy who tells you wool’s down.’ Suppose after I sign the papers I get a check-up from another doc who says I’m going to live to be a hundred?”

“That’s a fucking insult.” Ridgley spoke mildly. “You’re free to get a second opinion. I wasn’t thinking real estate when I was going over the results of your examination.”

“Don’t get your shorts in a wad, Lowell. I got to have some fun. I got a hundred and thirty-two thousand tied up in the place. How much you offering over that?”

“I’d have to talk to my partners. They’ll want to look at the house and lot.”

“Yeah, yeah. How much?”

“Say fifty thousand.”

His heart thumped against the wall of his chest. “Hell, I can say fifty thousand with my eyes closed.”

“I’ll call you.”

Joe Piper turned toward the door. “Now I just got to find a buyer for the business.”

“I’m sure you will. Everybody needs guns.”

He turned back.

Ridgley hoisted his eyebrows toward his bald crown. “We played cribbage. You never could bluff for shit.”

The drive home took two full hours. The snow had stopped falling, but the wind had increased, blowing the powder into big pillowy drifts. He got stuck twice and had to detour via Square Lake Road and I-75 for a fender-bender involving a Gremlin and a VW Super Beetle on Telegraph.

The radio was jammed with commercial spots extolling the virtues of cruises to the Bahamas and barefoot strolls along Malibu.

Unwinding at last in front of the big color console TV in his living room, with his feet propped up in warm dry socks and his hands wrapped around a glass of the Irish whiskey he’d been saving since Christmas, Joe Piper watched the man he knew as Wolf being rolled on a gurney from the box of an EMS van through the wide emergency-room doors at Detroit Receiving Hospital. Although he only got a brief glimpse of the Indian’s face behind an oxygen mask before it was obscured by a gang of paramedics, nurses, and Detroit police officers, the gun dealer immediately recognized the man who had frisked him in McCoy’s quarters on Twelfth Street nearly a month ago.

The scene shifted abruptly to another emergency room at another hospital, Harper-Hutzel, where a man in FBI cap and windbreaker was shown carrying a little girl wrapped in a yellow blanket into the building from an unmarked sedan.

“…six-year-old was reported in good condition,” announced Channel Seven newsman Jack Kelly. “The name of the slain Detroit police officer is being withheld pending notification of relatives.”

The doorbell startled Joe Piper. He got up, turned off the set in the middle of a scene of snowy vehicular mayhem on Outer Drive, and opened the door to Homer Angell.

The former militiaman filled the doorway in a huge inflated army-issue parka whose hood framed his face in thick fur, dyed olive-drab to match the material. Below this were jodhpurs and black leather boots laced to his knees. His fair skin was flushed cherry-red.

“Jesus Mary,” said the gun dealer. “I thought you were Bigfoot come to call.”

“Well, do I come in or what?”

Joe Piper moved out of the way and closed the door behind his visitor. Standing in the entryway, Angell stripped off his big mittens, the coat, the boots, an insulated Korean War-surplus jacket whose insignia had been removed, and six feet of green knitted scarf wound around his telephone-pole neck. His host hung the garments in the hall closet and left the boots in a puddle of melted snow on the floor. Angell had to duck to clear the living room archway. He looked around with bright blue eyes. “You’re alone?”

“I was till you came. Dolly’s stuck at her sister’s till the plows get out. How’d you get here, by helicopter? I thought everything was shut down.”

“The Cherokee eats this stuff up. When was the last time you swept the place?”

“Sunday. This too hot for the phone?”

“We’ve been using the same code for too long. Six weeks is my limit.” The big man occupied Joe Piper’s chair. “What’ve you got to drink?”

He named Scotch and bourbon. He wasn’t going to waste his good Irish on this company.

“Tea?”

“Upton’s okay?”

“If you haven’t got camomile.”

“Jesus. I’ll check the pantry.”

He didn’t have a pantry. He didn’t have camomile tea either. What he had was two bags left in a box with the guy who looked like a seagoing Colonel Sanders on the lid. He filled a pot from the tap and set the burner on high. When he returned to the living room, Angell was flipping through a copy of
TV Guide
with the cast of
M*A *S*H
on the cover.

He flipped it onto the coffee table. “In my unit we’d’ve busted out a bleeding-heart pinko like Alan Alda the first week. Hollywood doesn’t know shit about the military.”

“I heard they couldn’t get Sergeant York. Dead.” Joe Piper sat on the couch. “What’s the rumpus?”

“Tomorrow’s the first.”

He pulled a frown, turning that one over. Then he got up and checked the calendar in the niche by the fireplace.

“Damn, you’re right.” He went back and resumed his seat. “Don’t know why you couldn’t have told me that over the phone. ATF knows tomorrow’s February.” He pronounced both
r
s. He hated it when people made it rhyme with “January.”

“When I didn’t hear from you I thought maybe you forgot. You were going to buy those Ingrams from me tomorrow. Twenty guns at fifteen hundred apiece.”

“Oh, them. That deal went south.”

“When?”

“Last night, around midnight. Did you see the news?”

“I sold my set when they canceled
Combat
.”

“My customer’s under arrest for kidnapping a girl and killing a cop. Plus he’s got a bullet in his chest. I consider that a bad risk.”

“That’s your problem. We had a deal.”

“Bullshit. This ain’t Wall Street. Everybody loses when the customer takes a fall.”

“He’ll have company if I get nailed with two cases of hot guns.”

“What happened to the Perón deal?”

Angell ran a freckled hand over his buzz cut. “There wasn’t exactly a Perón deal. I made it up.”

“Homer, Homer.”

“Well, you were dragging your feet. You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”

“Yeah, the kicks went out of it for me a long time back. I think it was the Bay of Pigs done it. All that ordnance shot to shit, and for what? A ratty little piss-hole of an island we already got rid of once. And we didn’t get it then. Fucking Kennedy.”

“One of yours.”

“Uh-uh. Wrong county. The business was different when I came to it. My Uncle Seamus really thought he was making a difference. The Irish Free State came out of the guns he smuggled over there. It didn’t matter that he got stinking rich doing it.” Perched on the edge of the sofa, he realized he was gesturing like some broken-down drunk from the Old Sod. He let his hands fall between his knees. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe the business has always been rotten. Maybe it just took getting my throat cut to see it.”

The tea kettle whistled. Joe Piper went into the kitchen filled a mug, sank a tea bag in it, and went back out pumping the bag up and down by its string.

Angell reached up and took the mug. “You’re wrong.”

“Hey, fix your own fucking tea.” He scooped up his glass of whiskey and slung himself back onto the sofa.

“I mean about the gun business. I think it’s whatever you bring to it. To you it’s just a living and to hell with it. To me it’s all those beautiful guns.”

“I hate guns.”

“Oh, but you shouldn’t. They’re the only true precision instruments still in mass production. Cars are crap. You bring home a TV set or a radio, watch it until it breaks, then throw it away and buy another. Not a gun. Why do you think so many killers get nailed with the pieces they used still in their possession?”

“That’s easy. They’re stupid fucks.”

“Wrong. It’s because they can’t bear to part with them. Guns are history. They’ve won wars and freed nations. The man who sold Hitler the gun he used to blow his brains out made more of a difference than the six hundred thousand men in the
Wehrmacht.
Every time I handle an Ultra Light Reb Hunter or unpack an L71A British FN MAG, I wonder where it’s been and where it’s going. And when I open a newspaper and read some thug dictator in some country I never heard of took one in the melon, opening that country up to democratic government, I wonder if I had a part in it.”

Stretched full-length on the sofa, Joe Piper studied Homer Angell inside the
v
of his stockinged feet. He’d been about to inform the gung-ho prick that he knew for a fact he’d unpacked and handled the gun his first wife had used to blow out her brains, but as the speech went on he’d grown thoughtful.

“I got two hundred thousand bucks’ worth of guns, ammo, and C-4 sitting in a barn just outside Saline,” he said. “I can let you have the lot for half that.”

Angell looked at him, seemed about to say something. Then he sat back and sipped tea. Joe Piper went on.

“I could get the full amount piecing it out, probably more, but that takes time. This is virgin stuff. It’s a sweet deal, one time only. A going out of business sale.”

“I’d have to see it.”

“We’ll run out there soon as the roads are clear.”

“I don’t know if I can lay hands on that much.”

“How much can you?”

Sip. “Twenty thousand.” Sip. “Maybe twenty-five.”

Joe Piper swirled the golden liquid in his glass. “That’ll do for the down. After that you can send me a couple thousand a month for three years. Well, thirty-seven months. You get good at doing arithmetic in your head in this game.”