I laughed, said okay, and continued. Jolie turned around and went the other way.
A man and a woman left the house through a side door and stood beside the barn. They both wore plaid flannel shirts, and jeans over work boots. As we approached, the man went to the front door of the barn and pulled it open. The woman passed through and disappeared. The man waved that we follow.
I halted the Toyota and warned Cavagnolo. “Make it easy on yourself and cooperate. If there’s a double cross, you won’t live to brag about it. My friend is out there, waiting.”
“Felix, you’ve made your goddamn point. All this guy wants is money.”
“Which comes out of your pocket.”
“That wasn’t part of any deal.”
“It is now.”
I drove into the barn and the man walked alongside us. The air became humid with the smells of fertilizer, hay, and horseshit. The woman led a horse from the last stable in a row along the far wall.
The man thumped my fender. “Yo, hold it here.”
I halted. Cavagnolo and I got out.
“Eric,” Cavagnolo said. They shook hands.
I was introduced but kept my distance.
We followed Eric into the stall the woman had taken the horse from. He pulled at a plank along the side wall, reached inside, and tripped a latch. The bottom half of the wall swung open and scraped aside the matted hay and fresh horse dumplings. The opening revealed a stairway inside the wall.
Eric made a follow-me nod and crouched to enter the opening. Cavagnolo went next. The woman returned and shut the door behind me. I heard her rake along the door, probably to hide the entryway.
The basement smelled of horse piss and moldy hay.
We passed through a curtain. Eric yanked on the cord of a pull switch. A line of overhead bulbs flashed on. We were on a concrete floor of a cramped hallway that turned left. Good planning. I wouldn’t advise building a basement under horse stables.
The hall opened into a room of about twenty by thirty feet. The air had the greasy odor of Cosmoline. Shelves crammed with crates and boxes lined three of the walls. Battered metal cabinets stood against the other wall. Guns lay in pieces on a workbench in the center of the room.
“What do you have in a.45?”
Eric ran his hand along aluminum suitcases on a shelf. He selected one suitcase and set it on the workbench. He opened the suitcase to display an assortment of pistols.
I picked a Dan Wesson Bobtail, extra magazines, and a box of cartridges.
Eric looked pleased by my choice.
“Plus explosives.” I said. “Hand grenades. Dynamite.”
Eric’s expression lost its enthusiasm. “What exactly are you planning?”
“I’ve got a big score to settle.”
“I’ll bet.” Eric turned to Cavagnolo. “This is more than a big favor. Your friend blabs, I’ll stick a machine gun up your ass and fire until the barrel glows red.”
“He’s not my friend. And don’t threaten me. We’re in this business together.”
Eric opened one of the cabinets and brought out a cardboard box filled with spare gun parts, loose cartridges of various calibers, electric fuses, and blasting caps. “I once had a whole carton of M67 hand grenades but the state patrol bought them all. They used them in a sting operation to get some white supremacists.”
“Why buy the grenades from you?”
“Less paperwork.”
“What happened to the grenades?”
Eric shrugged. “This is a cash-and-carry operation. What the customer does with the merchandise after the fact is none of my concern.”
“The cops don’t mind?”
“You kidding? Course they mind, but we got this agreement. I pretend I don’t have them, and the state patrol keeps the ATF out of the loop. The deal is I keep this stuff from the hands of unstable elements.” Eric squinted. “You unstable?”
“Not today.” I gave him a three-fingered salute. “Scout’s honor.”
“What about the sunglasses? You doing drugs?”
“Naw, nothing like that. I got an eye condition, that’s all.”
“In both eyes?”
“Yeah, and it’s contagious.” I stepped toward Eric.
He put his hands up for me to keep away.
Cavagnolo said, “The fucker thinks he’s a vampire.”
They both chuckled.
“That true?” Eric asked. “You a vampire?”
“What do you think? Want to see my union card?” I took electric fuses and blasting caps and put them in my pocket. “Get me two sticks of dynamite.”
Eric looked from me to Cavagnolo and back again. “Who’s got the bucks?”
I pointed to Cavagnolo. “Put it on his tab.”
He gave me the stink eye but shouldn’t have been surprised.
I picked up a rumpled garment from the workbench. It was a bird hunting jacket made of oilskin, now cracked and ripped. “How much?”
“For that rag? Take it.”
I opened my scout knife and cut off the jacket’s sleeves; all I needed was a vest with lots of pockets.
“What about a machine gun?”
Eric went to the bottom shelf on the northern wall and grasped a rope handle on one end of a long wooden crate.
Eric talked as he eased the crate to floor. “These are worth plenty on the black market but they’re hell to get rid of. I gotta be real careful who I sell to. Goddamn gangbangers would get a hard-on this big”-Eric spread his hands a foot apart-“for any of these. But they can barely handle pistols, so these would be like giving chainsaws to monkeys.”
The crate was longer than my leg and eighteen inches deep. The stenciled lettering on the top read: Water Pump Bearing Rod. Eric undid the four brass latches on the long sides and removed the top.
A machine gun lay inside the wooden support cutouts. The gun had a long perforated jacket over the barrel. It looked like the weapons the Imperial Stormtroopers carried in Star Wars.
“It’s surplus from the former Yugoslavia. The weapon is the modern version of the German MG42.” Eric gushed with the enthusiasm of a collector who finally had an audience. He mentioned something about the best machine gun ever made, the American army almost adopted it but fucked up the design, yada, yada.
“Thanks for the trivia,” I interrupted. “You ought to get a job with the History Channel. What I need to know, does this work?”
Eric chuffed as if I had offended him. “No point if it doesn’t. That’s like dating a girl who won’t give head.”
I lifted the machine gun from the crate. The finish was oily and cool. I cradled it under my left arm and wrapped my right hand around the pistol grip. I appreciated the familiar weight and potential for mass carnage.
Its heft and smell took me far away, to my service in the Third Infantry Division. The last time I held a machine gun, it was the day I became a vampire. Second by second, the gun grew heavier until its weight threatened to pull me to the floor. Remaining upright took great effort. The room dissolved into the dust of war-torn Iraq. The cacophony of battle filled my ears: explosions; the zippered bursts of automatic fire; the chaos of radio chatter; confused shouts; the cries and sobbing of the Iraqis.
Something cracked inside my headset and I realized it was the snapping of fingers. Eric stood before me, his thumb snapping against his index finger. “You okay?”
The machine gun practically fell from my arms, but once I set the butt on the floor, the gun’s weight returned to normal. The noise of war faded like a dying radio signal.
“Sorry, I was getting a little wistful for my days working for Uncle Sugar.”
“The rate of fire is 1,100 rounds a minute,” Eric said proudly. “When this bitch talks, people listen.”
I did quick arithmetic in my head. “That’s about eighteen rounds a second. Burns quite a lot of ammo.”
Eric waved to the crates and olive green metal cans on the opposite wall. “No problem. I can sell it to you by the ton.”