Guns [John Hardin 01] (24 page)

“I thought he used to be a hunter or something,” Hardin said.

“If you call shooting deers in some kind of deer zoo great sport,” Sarah said.

“We heard them talking about that for about an hour,” Rose said. “The brave hunters. They’re going to some big place in upstate Pennsylvania, I forget the name of it, where they raise the deers and you pay a heavy fee so you can shoot yours. They guarantee you get to kill one.”

“They probably tie one to a post that’s got like a sign on it says deer,” Sarah said with a laugh, “and then lead you over to it by the hand.”

“Maybe they spray-paint a target on it for you,” Rose said, giggling. “Shoot it here or here but don’t shoot it there or you’ll have a hole in your steak.”

“Did they say when they’re going?”

“Next week, I think,” Rose said. “I guess that’s when zoo deer season starts.”

“And you don’t know the name of the place?”

Rose frowned and tried to focus on him, getting a little suspicious. “Just some kind of big fancy hunting club. Why?”

“No reason. Just curious. It looks like you girls could use another drink.” He motioned for the waitress and asked Rose what her favorite gambling game was.

She was heavy-lidded now and her friend Sarah was not far behind. They were both slurring some of their words.

“Craps,” Rose said. “It’s real exciting, but it goes like so fast it’s hard to follow, you know? You can wooze…lose big-time and just like that.” She tried to snap her long-nailed fingers. “Leo, what you say after this drink we go get something to eat?”

“Sure, ladies. Do you know a good place?”

“You bet,” Sarah said. “You got a car, Leo? We took a cab here so we wouldn’t have to worry about driving home after.”

They went to an all-night diner for early breakfasts, Sarah looking even more disheveled in the harsh light. Rose was drunk and nodding. After they ate he drove Rose to her apartment first and Sarah helped him get her inside and comfortable on the couch. Her miniskirt rode up while Sarah was slipping her shoes off. There was a small tattoo of a rose on her inner thigh. She was snoring lightly and she looked worn, vulnerable, and bereft of hope. Hardin got a pillow and a sheet from her bedroom and covered her up. Then he drove Sarah home and left her at her door with a kiss on her heavily made-up cheek and an empty promise to see her again soon at the Little Italy Lounge.

The next morning, with a pocket full of change, he found a pay phone in the corner of a convenience store parking lot and started calling hunting clubs in Pennsylvania at numbers supplied by information, asking to confirm a reservation for Walter Calzo.

The Beechwood Sporting Association covered six hundred rolling, posted acres of fields and woodlands in northwestern Pennsylvania, some of it adjacent to the Allegheny National Forest. The staff raised pheasant, partridge, doves, rabbits, and deer for the pleasures of the guests. The accommodations were log cabins, each plushly furnished and screened from its neighbors by careful rustic landscaping. Staffers in a log lodge prepared excellent meals and box lunches, sold gear and ammunition, and rented out such items as fishing rods, rifles, and shotguns. A basic three-day deer hunt cost $3,000 per person and results were guaranteed.

If a guest happened to kill his or her buck or doe on the first day or two there were other pursuits depending on the weather, including cross-country skiing, snowmobiling, tennis, chip and putt golf, indoor swimming, horseback riding, and serious drinking, all at extra fees, of course. Since this was a private club there was no need to observe legal hunting seasons.

A half hour before dawn a Beechwood guide had used a flashlight to lead Walter Calzo along a path to a deer stand that the guide claimed was one of their best, a log bench atop a low boulder that protruded from a hillside, lightly screened by brush and with a commanding view of a wooded vale about 100 yards out where there was a stream that had been dammed to create a small pond. A salt lick near the pond had been not-too-cleverly disguised as a tree stump. Particularly tempting forage had been planted near the pond. Calzo could see none of this yet because it was too dark, but the guide described it like he was reading from a color brochure. The guide left him with a small canvas shoulder bag packed with a thermos of coffee, soft drinks, sandwiches, and two hand warmers.

Like all guides and hunters at Beechwood, Calzo was dressed in a blaze orange winter jacket and an orange billed cap with ear flaps, along with good boots, heavy pants, and orange shooter’s gloves to ward off the cold. He sat on the bench with his Winchester Model 70 Classic .30-06 lefthander bolt action rifle across his ample lap, a cartridge from the five-round magazine chambered and the safety on. With the scope the rig had set him back over $1,000 but it was deadly accurate and hit like a pickax. He knew the ballistics by heart. The rifle fired one of his favorite bullets, a Springfield soft-nose 150-grain Power-Point notched around its metal jacket so it would instantly blossom like a gray flower when it hit living tissue. The bullet would be moving at more than half a mile per second when it blew out of the 24-inch rifle muzzle. All the way out to 400 yards the drop would only be 27 inches and the velocity would still be 1,700 feet per second, so it could still hit with 967 foot-pounds of punch, plowing a half-dollar-diameter tunnel through muscle, flesh, and bone. From here to the pond off there in the murk, if the guide was right about the range, the bullet would hardly be slowing down, would rise just over two inches, and would hit with over 2,200 foot-pounds. One hell of a smack.

The log bench had a back rest so he relaxed. He unzipped the jacket enough to dig a fat greenish cigar out of his inside pocket. He clamped it between his teeth but didn’t light it.

The air was still but as the sky turned gray and the trees and pond began to emerge from the darkness a light breeze came up, blowing down-slope at his back, which meant he was upwind of the pond and any deer coming that way would probably smell him.

“Phuck,” he said around the cigar, thinking
I might as well eat a sandwich.
He pulled a ham and cheese out of the canvas pack and rested the cigar on the edge of the bench seat. He had both cheeks full and was thinking about moving around the pond to a spot between two trees over there that looked pretty good when a man stepped out from behind brush just downhill to his right and he damned near choked on the sandwich.

He coughed heavily and spat to the side and said, “Hey, asshole. You don’t want to get shot you don’t come up on a man like that.”

But there was something bad wrong here. The man was dressed all over in Realtree camo. He was holding an un-scoped lever action rifle across his chest, his finger inside the trigger guard. His eyes were shadowed by his hat brim. He stood there real still, his legs apart, like he was ready to make a fast move. Was he wearing fucking moccasins? He wondered if he could get the Winchester up off his knees, hit the safety, and shoot before this asshole could swing down on him and pull. In the distance a rifle went off twice. A semi-auto.

He tossed the rest of the sandwich aside carefully and said, “Well, you ain’t a guide or a hunter here or they’d make you wear orange. So, who the hell are you?”

“That was smart,” the man said. “Saving your night vision until I took off and I was right over you.”

“What?” Winston said, but then he knew and he went still inside. He reached for the cigar slowly, very carefully got his Zippo out of his side coat pocket, and lit up, blowing out a small bluish cloud.

He put the lighter down on the bench and said, “You made a hell of a splash. Didn’t think you’d get outta that. I hit you?”

“In the hip.”

“Good. You here tryin’ to kill me? Have a shoot-out? Is that it?”

Hardin watched the big man carefully, ready to shoulder the rifle and fire. He’d bought the Marlin .30-30 in a Harrisburg Wal-Mart for $265 and had practiced with it at short range for three hours two days ago in an old sand pit he’d found deep in the woods. He had a soft-nose deer round chambered, the hammer back and the safety off.

Winston showed no change in his bulldog expression.

Just sat there pulling on the cigar.

“I want to know who planted the bomb in my Jeep.”

Around the fat cigar Winston said, “Why the phuck should I tell you anything, asshole?”

“It killed a woman I knew who had nothing to do with Strake or any of you.”

“Look. You gonna do something here or you wanna talk all morning, asshole.”

“Tell me who planted that bomb. If it wasn’t you, maybe you’ll live.”

Winston thought for a moment as he studied Hardin intently. Then he slowly removed the cigar with his right hand, inspected the glowing end, and said, “I hated that skinny fuck from the time we picked him up. Talks in a little kid voice and don’t know when to shut up. A ex-Marine fuzzhead. Name’s Donny Loomis. Supposed to know all kinda fancy shit with stuff like grenades and C-4. Got this big stainless Sig Sauer cannon. He probably sleeps with it between his legs. Lives upstairs in a warehouse in Brooklyn someplace near the docks. Place looks like a rat hotel.”

“So Strake sent Montgomery Davis, this Donny Loomis, and you.”

The old man had told him one night by the fireplace, “Watch the eyes; because it has been said they are the windows to a man’s soul. It’s true. But it is not such a simple thing to do. You must look deeply, deeply, to see a man’s soul. Watch, and you’ll know what that man is going to do.”

Winston looked away to the side, seemingly unconcerned, took a careful pull on the cigar and plumed the smoke upward, then settled his dark eyes on Hardin. “I always liked a good cigar,” he said, suddenly snapping it spinning, pin-wheeling sparks, straight toward Hardin and quickly grabbing up the Winchester, feeling surely for the safety. All he needed was for this guy to focus on the cigar for a fraction of a second before reacting.

But Hardin had been staring coldly into the big man’s eyes and was ready. He totally ignored the cigar even as it struck the ground not far from his feet. He was already swinging the 30-30 down smoothly and time seemed to slow as he focused all his being on aiming and firing accurately and his rifle kicked his shoulder just as Winston pulled his trigger half a heartbeat too early, the crack of the supersonic round loud close by Hardin’s ear. Hardin’s bullet flew true and caught Winston in his broad chest just to the right of the heart, plucking a black dot into the blaze orange. Winston slammed against the bench back, stiffened, and groaned, “uuuuuk” weakly, his rifle sliding out of his grasp, his chest spurting dark redness. His head tilted back, the whites of his eyes showing. He seemed to slowly deflate, and toppled sideways off of the bench.

Hardin slowly lowered the rifle. He stood frozen, his right eardrum numb. He didn’t have to look closer to know the man was dead. The dew-damp woods seemed unnaturally still. He fought off an engulfing, dizzying wave of nausea.

And then he ran, swiftly and quietly, alert for fellow hunters, only a fleeting shadow in the woods.

It took him forty minutes to get back to where he had left his car in a grassy turn-off by a dirt road in the Allegheny Forest. He drove by a circuitous route back southeast, stopping only once at a remote bridge across a wide brown river to throw the rifle and his remaining six cartridges into the water.

24

T
EN DAYS LATER HE RENTED A ROOM BY THE WEEK IN A
run-down back-street motel, a place where the Pakistani management looked nobody in the eye and asked no questions and where there were furtive happenings far into the blackest hours. The furnishings were frayed and stained and the room stank of cigarettes and a dozen kinds of despair.

There was no listing for Donny Loomis in the Brooklyn directory in the motel’s dirty office. Information said the number was unlisted. He began asking around near the docks in corner groceries, gas stations, and bars. He spent two days at it but nobody knew anything about a Donny Loomis.

Past midnight he came out of a filthy side-street establishment that had no apparent name, just a red neon BAR sign hanging from a rusted bracket bolted to the brick above the door. He was dressed in a lined nylon jacket and a ball cap against the cold. A half block from him in the darkness, between him and his car, there were four figures grouped under a streetlight. Those buildings along the narrow street that weren’t gutted were heavily barred at their sightless windows.

He was about to cross the street to avoid the group and get to his car when one of them said clearly, “Hey, you. White boy. You in the wrong neighborhood, heah, ain’t you?” Two of the others uttered short derisive laughs. One of them was softly punching a fist into a palm as though merely keeping warm.

I could just go back into the bar and wait,
he thought. He looked at them and then walked up to stand twenty feet from the group. They were now arranged on the sidewalk to block his way. They all wore red bandannas, voluminous jeans, and oversized brown leather flight jackets with dirty fleece collars and cuffs. “I’m looking for a man,” he told them. “Name of Donny Loomis. White. Thin. An ex-Marine. Talks in a high-pitched voice.”

Ignoring the question, one of them said to his friends, “You think this here white boy’s some kinda law?”

“Naw,” another one said. “This ain’t the Man. The Man be crazy come down here this time a night all by hissef.”

“Maybe he ain’t the Man but he shore be crazy. Maybe we ought to make him pay like a toll an’ use our sidewalk. You know whose turf this be, muh’fuckah?”

“I guess it’s yours. I’m not here to challenge that. I don’t have any fight with you, but there’s something you ought to know.”

“What that be, muh’fuckah?”

He pulled his hands very slowly and deliberately out of his jacket pockets. He had the .45 in his right hand, cocked and locked. All four men stopped all movement. He held the gun casually down at his side. “Like I say, I don’t have any fight with you. I’ve practiced a lot with this thing and I’m good with it. It’s cocked. I don’t like paying street tolls but I might pay a hundred for some information I need. Then I could walk away and there wouldn’t be any blood on this sidewalk. Yours or mine.”

A low-slung violet car with dark tinted windows sped past, its bass speakers thudding into the heavy cold air trapped between the brick buildings.

Two of the men started to ease hands inside their jackets so he slowly brought the .45 up to level it from the waist, freezing them all in place.

The tallest of them had so far said nothing, just standing motionless at the back of the group. Now he said, “You’re talkin’ to the Bones, mister. What you want this Marine for?” The other three held their positions. The two kept their hands close to their open jacket zippers.

Hardin focused on the tall one, the obvious leader.
You’ll die first,
he projected to the man.

“I heard he knows about some things,” Hardin said calmly. “Maybe deals in some things. There’s an item I might want to buy from him.”

“Way I heard it,” the tall one said, smiling, “that dude likes fireworks. Big fireworks.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Information ‘bout a man like that oughtta be worth a couple hundred.”

“It’s worth a hundred to me, no more. If you don’t know anything I’ll find out somewhere else.”

“Let’s see the hundred.”

“I’d have to see everybody’s hands first. And then I’d have to hear what you have to say before I give it to you.”

One of the men with his hand now inside his jacket had hard black eyes and a long scar on his cheek and was standing with his feet apart, ready to make a move. He said evenly, “What we could do is we spread out a little and then maybe I show him what it feel like to catch a nine in the knee.”

Hardin said, “The thing Army men used to like about this gun was you hit a man anywhere and he’s out of it. Maybe you’ll be the first here.”

“Chill, Mustafa,” the leader said. “This guy coulda just gone back in the bar when he seen us. That tells you some-thin’. Business be a little slow. A extra hundred wouldn’t hurt none. Let’s all take it down a notch.” The two let their hands slide down to their sides, the one with the hard eyes pulling his hand out of his jacket slowly and then flexing his gloved fingers like claws.

Hardin lowered the .45 but didn’t take his eyes off of the leader. He reached for his wallet with his left hand, flipped it open, and thumbed out the corners of two bills from the back that he knew were fifties, nipping them between his teeth while he returned the wallet to his pocket. He held the bills in his left hand at his side.

“How much more you figure he got?” hard-eyes grinned and said.

“You’ll never know,” Hardin said coldly. He knew they could probably sense whether or not he would shoot if pressed. That might be his only advantage, all that was holding them in check. He had it locked into his mind that he absolutely would shoot to kill if any of them showed a gun.

The leader said, “Crown Street off of Lafayette. Lives upstairs in like a warehouse. Not our turf. But you best watch how you go knockin’ on his door. Might not be too healthy, I hear.”

Hardin took two steps sideways and slid the two bills under the wiper on a parked car. He pointed at the street behind him and said, “I’ll cross the street now and walk that way.”

Hard-eyes said, “This be you lucky night, muh’fuckah.”

He crossed the street and walked backward for forty feet, the .45 still held at his side. He turned and walked quickly to his car and drove away.

For three days and much of the nights he parked two or three blocks from Crown, then walked the dingy streets in dark clothes, keeping a wary watch. There were few people in the area. He got lucky the fourth night as the sun was setting. He saw a man who matched Donny’s description, right down to a camo jacket and pants, walking along Crown Street to enter a run-down brick building.

The former warehouse was in a blitzed area not far from the docks. It looked as though some time ago an effort had been made to salvage several blocks by converting the old brick buildings into ground-floor business spaces and studios for photographers and artists, judging by the remnants of signs, with loft apartments on the second floors, but the effort had obviously failed miserably. Broken windows, piles of refuse, blown-out streetlights, and splashes of angry graffiti served as warning to any other redevelopers not to try something that foolish again.

The area was so devastated there were not enough people to hide among while trying to observe Donny’s loft for any length of time, so he abandoned the idea of planning an outside ambush. Instead he decided to carry through with what he had told the gang bangers and try to get close to Donny by offering him a business deal. He parked halfway along the block and watched the loft for almost two hours, until he had the feeling that Donny might be in for the night.

He got out and locked the car, making sure nothing tempting was left on the seats. He was wearing jeans, a ball cap to shadow his face, a dark windbreaker, and thin driving gloves. He walked over to the steel door that Donny had entered and used the heel of his gloved fist to pound on it.

He waited a minute and pounded again.

After another half a minute the door creaked open three inches against a heavy chain lock. It was dark inside but Hardin caught the darkly glinting outline of an automatic hand gun.

A high-pitched man’s voice said, “Yeah. What?”

“Are you Donny Loomis?”

“Who’s asking?”

“I’m John Hardin. I’m alone. I was told I might be able to buy something from you.”

“Who told you that?”

“A man who runs with the Bones, over on Franklin Street.”

“What are you looking to buy?”

“Let’s call it a special kind of fireworks.”

“I don’t know you and I don’t know anybody in the Bones gang. You could be a cop.”

“I’m not a cop of any kind. There’s somebody else who told me about you. A guy from Newark named Walter Calzo. They call him Winston. An ugly son of a bitch.”

“Winston sent you to me? I didn’t think he was a big fan.”

“He’s not. The fact is he doesn’t like you much, but he says you know a lot about things that make loud noises.”

There was no response.

“Look,” Hardin said, “I’m willing to spend some money with you if you can help me out. Why don’t you let me come in and we can talk?”

More silence. Then Donny said, “Okay. Here’s how we’ll do it. You lace your fingers and put your hands on top of your head. That’s the way. Stay like that.” The door closed and reopened just enough to let him in, Donny using the door for partial cover but not standing too close to it, and making sure that Hardin saw the big stainless automatic. “Come on in and stand over there with your back to me. Keep your hands on your head and spread your legs. More. Okay, hold it right there.”

Donny closed and locked the steel door, moved up behind him, and patted him down thoroughly, finding and removing the .45 stuffed under his belt at the small of his back. “Old timer,” Donny said of the gun. “But it’s still a good side arm. You’re not carrying any I.D. and no money. Why is that?”

“I left my wallet locked in the car and hidden pretty well. This looks like it could be a bad neighborhood.”

“Okay, keep your hands on your head and go up those stairs. The door’s open at the top.”

Upstairs there was a large loft, with a kitchen in one corner, a bedroom area partially screened in another corner, the door to a bathroom, a dining area merged with a living area that had a furniture grouping. Area rugs. None of it was expensive but it was all neat and clean. Spartan. Donny used his shining automatic to motion toward the couch. “You can take your hands down and sit there.”

Donny slid his own gun back into the shoulder holster he wore. He took a straight armchair facing the couch on the other side of a heavy oak coffee table. He ejected the magazine and the chambered cartridge from the .45 and put it all on the coffee table close to himself. “So talk to me.”

There was a cold feral intensity to the slim man, and the eyes, devoid of emotion, seemed to mask a hair-trigger ferocity.

Hardin blanked his own emotions, calming himself throughout his mind and body, projecting absolutely no threat, as the old man had patiently taught him to do over many long hours, if he should ever find himself in the presence of such an innate killer as Donny.

“I’ve got a situation,” Hardin said. “There are these three people who will be together at an out-of-the-way place soon. It would be in my best interests if these people weren’t around much longer.” Building the lie. Believing it himself. Seeing three shadowy men he wanted to kill. “I don’t want to use a gun. They’ll all be armed. I need something quick and effective. I want a grenade.” Seeing himself tossing a grenade into their midst. Seeing them freeze in shock and fear.

Donny showed no change of expression. He said, “Something like that would cost a lot out on the street and it would probably be old junk.”

“How much would one cost from you?”

“If I had something like that it would cost seven hundred. No dickering.”

“It might be worth almost that much if it was untraceable.”

“You think I’d sell anything that could point back to me?”

“No, I guess you’re smarter than that. Can you help me or not?”

Donny gazed at him coldly and intently for several seconds and then said, “Stay right there.” He got up and went over to a footlocker that was against the wall. He opened it, removed several items and placed them on the floor, rummaged inside, and came back carrying something in each hand. He sat back down in the armchair.

He looked at the grenade cupped in his right hand. It was smooth and round, about the size of a baseball. “This is your US standard-issue M 68 impact frag. American as apple pie. You know how to use it from watching the movies. It’s got a wire clip as a backup retainer for the safety lever. You take that off when you’re getting ready for action. Then you hold it in your fist with the safety lever clamped down against the body of it. You can pull the ring pin and hold onto the grenade all day if you want, as long as you keep the safety lever clamped. When the time is right, you lob it, the safety lever flies off while it’s in the air, and within two seconds, still while it’s in the air, the impact fuse arms, so it goes off when it lands. That’s partly to prevent any attempt at toss-back from your target. Say for any reason the impact fuse doesn’t work, like it lands on thick grass maybe, or in mud, then a pyro time fuse takes over and it goes bang in anywhere from three to seven more seconds anyway. The throwing range is forty meters if you’ve got a good arm, and the casualty radius is fifteen meters.”