Chapter 32
Inside, the older woman dropped the wet hat and her phone on a metal worktable, folded her arms, and looked Peter and Lewis up and down with utter contempt.
Her face was seamed as though from a carver’s knife, the skin stretched taut and thin as parchment.
“My nephew is on the way. You two better get the hell out while you can.”
“Call him back,” Peter said. “Tell him it’s a false alarm.”
“Only one person tells Vance what to do, and it’s not me. If he says he’s coming, he’s coming. And he’s bringing some friends.”
Peter glanced at the clock on the wall. “How long until he gets here?”
“Any minute,” she said.
“Dickie already told us half an hour,” Lewis said.
His mama gave Nickels a withering look. Then she turned it on Peter. “What do you idiots want?”
“I’m sorry about your son,” Peter said. “I told him to put the gun down but he didn’t. It was him or me.”
“You think that makes me feel any better?” Her voice was high and bright.
Her piercing eyes reminded Peter of a raptor’s.
“Anyway, I don’t need your damn condolences.
Between war and cancer, this hard old world already took two husbands and two sons.
Now it’s taken Craig Jr. I’ve no more grief left.
So I won’t be giving you the satisfaction of my tears. ”
Lewis turned to Nickels. “Like I said, we need three good rifles and three pistols, clean and new. Two extra mags for each. And a couple boxes of ammo. Tell me what you’ve got and give me a price.”
“You’re really going to pay me?”
“A fair price. Even though you were gonna hold me up. Where’s your inventory?”
“We’re not selling guns.” Nickel’s mama raised her voice, brassy and sharp. “We need every last one of ’em. Because of people like you. Barbarians at the gates. Your time is coming, and sooner than you think.”
Lewis gave a tired sigh. “Nickels, the clock is ticking. Where are the weapons?”
Nickels led them to the three fireproof cabinets. Each had a hardened padlock, but Nickels had the key in his pocket.
Lewis opened the first cabinet and gave a low whistle. “You boys been busy,” he said. It held two tight rows of AK rifles, twenty in all, with a grab rack of Beretta pistols and two full shelves of neatly labeled plastic reloader’s ammo boxes. Lewis opened the next cabinet. More of the same.
The third cabinet was different. It held a dozen Benelli combat shotguns and four M24 sniper rifles. One shelf was full of the same plastic ammo boxes labeled for the M24 and the shotguns. The other held boxes labeled 7.62x39 AP.
Lewis stood back to take it all in. “This isn’t a gun collection, it’s an armory. What the hell are you keeping all this for?”
“Just in case,” Nickels said.
Peter’s eye had caught on the ammo boxes. AP usually stood for armor piercing. Peter pointed. “Grab one of those.”
Lewis pulled down an ammo box and popped the cover. He tipped it to show Peter. Inside were fifty rounds, long and deadly, with the telltale black tips used to differentiate an armor-piercing round. On the brass, someone had handwritten AP in black marker.
“Holy shit.” Peter looked at Nickels. “Armor-piercing rounds are restricted to law enforcement. Where’d you get these?”
Nickels didn’t answer, a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
Lewis’s eyebrows went up. “You’re making them? In this crappy little shop?” Armor-piercing rounds were made with super-hard tungsten carbide instead of lead or steel. It was a complex and highly technical metallurgical process.
Nickels shook his head, but the pride on his face was unmistakable.
Peter looked back at the shop equipment. The century-old milling machines were functional but cheap. The new machines, whatever the hell they were, would have been very expensive. He turned to Nickels. “Who’s funding all this? Who are the rounds for?”
Nickels shrugged. “Business is good. We sold off some inventory and invested in new machines.”
“Bullshit,” Peter said. “You either have a customer or a partner. Who is he?”
Nickels started to speak, but his mom overrode him. “Dickie, you keep your big mouth shut. You two, this is none of your business. Take your guns and go. This world will catch up with you soon enough.”
Peter’s jaw was knotted up, his stomach sour with bile.
Armor-piercing rounds of that caliber had only one purpose, to punch through body armor, killing soldiers or cops.
When he blinked, he saw Ellie staring at her mother’s dead body.
He walked over to Nickels, put the .357 right in his face, and thumbed back the hammer.
“Answer the question or join your brother. Who are you making the AP rounds for?”
Nickels raised his chin. “Go ahead and kill me. Kill my mama, too. That’s nothing compared to what he’ll do if he learns we talked.”
The older woman had the same defiant look as her son. “Do your worst, barbarian. We won’t betray him. And not because of what he’ll do to us. But because we believe he’s right.” She glanced at the clock. “Vance is on his way. He’ll be loaded for bear. You want to live, you better git.”
Peter put the pistol barrel against Nickels’s forehead. “Give me a name.”
Lewis put his hand on Peter’s gun arm. “Peter.”
Peter felt the air go out of him. He stepped back and decocked the pistol. “Let’s take what we need and get the hell out of here.”
Lewis found a roll of baling wire and bound their wrists behind their backs, then sat them on the ground and bound their ankles.
That done, Peter chose three AK rifles and three Beretta pistols from the third cabinet.
He found a plastic storage crate and loaded it with spare magazines, sound suppressors, and ammunition. “How much?”
Nickels gave them a price and Lewis didn’t even haggle, just took a wad of folded bills from his pocket and counted hundreds onto the counter.
Peter found another crate and began to fill it with boxes of armor-piercing rounds.
“I need those,” Nickels said. “There’ll be hell to pay if you take them.”
“Tell me who’s buying and I’ll leave them.” Although he wouldn’t leave them. He couldn’t live with himself.
Nickels flexed his jaw and shook his head. Peter loaded the rest of the AP boxes started carrying gear out to the Tahoe. By the clock, they’d only been inside the shed for fifteen minutes. Peter had no desire to meet Cousin Vance and his friends.
They left the dead man in the mud.
—
Back on the highway, Peter said, “I thought you said these guys weren’t crazy.”
Lewis shrugged. “People change.”
“You think they rob all their customers?”
Lewis shook his head. “It don’t make sense.
There’d be retribution. The kind of people looking for untraceable full-auto assault weapons ain’t the kind of people you want to piss off.
” Lewis looked out the window into the speeding darkness.
“Unless that old lady just kills ’em. You suppose we went back in daylight we’d find some shallow graves? ”
“Maybe they don’t care about long-term consequences,” Peter said. “They’re just raising cash any way they can. And they’re accumulating a serious arsenal, including armor-piercing ammo. Like they think the end of the world is coming any day now.”
Lewis looked at him, eyebrows climbing high. “Motherfucker. You think?”
“All that stuff about barbarians at the gates? Your time is coming? Sound familiar?”
“You think these ding-dongs are connected to the Messenger. The Dark Time and all that.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But you told me these guys sold to everybody, right? And they’re scared of somebody. How many freaky assholes can there be around here planning something big?”
“We should’ve looked for cassette tapes.” Lewis flashed him his tilted grin. “You want to go back and see Mama, search the house?”
Peter thought about all those guns in that machine shop. Then he thought about Cousin Vance and the kind of friends he probably had, how ugly it would get if he and Lewis went back up there. Somebody else would die for sure, and no guarantees on who it might be.
“No,” Peter said. “I most definitely do not.”