“Good. Because I’d like to spend it in your bed with you.”

It’s not comparable to anything else that’s ever happened to me. Two minutes after we lock the penthouse door, we are in bed, but seconds later I’m uncontrollably spent though still half dressed. I’m not a veteran of love. I feel humiliated, but Sharon finds humor in all this and assures me that things will be looking up soon. And up they do look. An hour later we’re finished again, and two hours after that, again. I call up a sushi place that delivers, then make hot fudge sundaes, and after that we’re back at it. We are electricity. By midnight, we lie in each other’s arms, and Sharon snores on my chest. I look out the window at the lights of the mall and the Christian compound and the freeways red with taillights going one way and white with headlights coming the other, and these are the rivers of the here and now, the rivers I tried to tell Sharon about. I know that we are waist deep in them and getting deeper. I press my nose onto the top of her scalp and breathe deeply. Human female sweetness beyond words. For the first time in my life, I feel absolutely responsible for another person. I know that her welfare is more important than my own. I realize that I am no longer the most important person on earth. In fact, I barely rate a distant second.

Early that morning while Sharon is sleeping and long after the manufacturing team has gone, I let Bradley Smith into the building through a rear fire exit and we make our way to the manufacturing bay. Here I unlock and open the steel safes that contain the first five hundred Love 32s.

“You look like you’ve been worked over by the sultan’s harem,” says Bradley.

“Better than that,” I say.

“ Sharon?”

I smile and feel myself blush.

“She’s pretty quick on the rebound,” says Bradley.

“I take it as a sign of healing.”

“Well, congratulations. All your tail wagging paid off.”

I watch Smith examine the weapons. I must admit they are beautiful. Not like a woman is beautiful, or a sunset, but as a car might be, or a laptop. Even with his hair cut short, Smith looks familiar to me. I know I’ve seen him before.

“You still look familiar,” I say.

“You’ve said that before, Ron.”

But the longer I look at him, the less it helps. I have a good memory for faces, yet it does me no good now. I feel drained but in the best of ways.

“If Herredia will commit to another thousand now, I can come off the price,” I say.

“How much off?”

I think Uncle Chet is wrong. You keep your prices down. You build relationships. You make friends. “Three percent. It would save him twenty-seven grand.”

“Indeed. And put another eight seventy-three in your hot little pocket. How much commitment?”

“One hundred K. I can deliver them by the end of September. Tell him he can name them something else. He didn’t like the name.”

Bradley looks hard at me. “What about Harry Love and all that bullshit you call history?”

“He can name his own gun is what I’m offering.”

“He’ll want muerte something. I’ll see what he says.”

Bradley extends the brace rods on one of the Love 32s, sets the gun into the crook of his arm, and sweeps it across the room.

“He’ll use them against the Zetas, won’t he?” I ask.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I think-”

“Do not attempt to think. Stay far away from your customers, Ron. You are a gunmaker. That’s all. If you go sticking your nose into other people’s business, they’ll chop your head off and mail it to Sharon. I’m serious.”

The mention of Sharon ’s name sobers me. Bradley counts the guns. They’re packed ten to a wooden case in twenty stacks of five. Each gun is housed in a foam envelope and the layers are separated by pasteboard sheets. Of course the lids aren’t nailed on yet. There are four hundred and ninety-five weapons, not counting the first five production-line guns I fronted him last week. The cases smell of freshly milled steel and gun oil and grip rubber. There are little blotches of new-gun oil on the pasteboard packing sheets, a sight that has always pleased me, something akin to a job well done. The noise suppressors are packed separately.

Bradley steps into a corner of the bay and makes a short phone call. When he’s finished, he wraps his phone in one of the red shop rags from a workstation, then picks up a hammer and pounds it to pieces within the rag. He drops the package into a trash can, then pulls another phone from a pocket and pushes it into the carrier on his belt.

We sit on patio chairs on the third-floor balcony and watch the sun rise. Highway 55 is already busy and the Santa Ana Mountains to the east are rimmed with light. We drink coffee spiked with whiskey, and Bradley has two good Cuban cigars, so we light up. Breakfast of champions. This is our third such celebration. The first was when he delivered the three hundred thousand start-up money, and the second was when Herredia enthusiastically accepted the production model last week. Now we can celebrate the halfway point.

What a way to start my first day of being Sharon Novak’s man.

22

Mike Finnegan’s Los Angeles apartment building was on Aviation Boulevard near LAX. Hood stood outside and looked at the complex, fifty years old at least and in disrepair, with peeling paint and a grassless dirt courtyard littered with plastic toys and brooded over darkly by a large magnolia.

Hood climbed the stairs and opened the door with Reyes’s key. He entered and stood in a rhombus of soft L.A. sunlight while the jets rattled the window glass and vibrated the floor.

The carpet was blue shag and the walls were white. There was a worn red vinyl sofa that sagged and was stretched in the middle, and on the wall behind it a framed print of a big-eyed Mexican girl holding a puppy. The TV was a vintage black-and-white with a rabbit-ear antenna set on top. The walls were taken up with bookshelves that went to the ceiling, mostly inexpensive and unmatched but full of mostly hardcover volumes of history, biography, warfare, natural science, and drama. There were two small stools so the little man could reach the upper shelves. In the middle of the room, between the TV and the sofa, stood a small card table and one folding chair. The table was stacked with books and spiral notebooks.

The kitchen was neat and foodless. The refrigerator had ice cube trays in the freezer and that was all. There was a small kitchen table and two chairs, and on the table was a telephone and answering machine. Hood pushed the PLAY button and listened to the one new message, from Owens, saying she was sorry to have left so abruptly but she was in a good place in a desert and happy and not to worry. Hood pictured her lovely face and arresting eyes and the scars on her wrists. You will have a reason. There were no old messages.

The bedroom was curtained with bamboo-look plastic blinds and contained a twin bed neatly made up. The olive-colored bedspread was without wrinkle and the pillow was plump and perfectly centered. Hood saw his own military training in this, wondered if Uncle Sam might have more information on Mr. Finnegan. There was a small dresser and more bookshelves. In the closet were pants and shirts on hangers, a heavy canvas jacket with fleece lining, a few pairs of shoes.

Hood saw an odd glint beneath the canvas jacket and he lifted it open for a look. Hanging under it was a garment of dull gray mesh. Hood lifted out the coat and the gray garment. They were surprisingly heavy. Hood peeled off the jacket and tossed it to the bed. The garment was a vest, apparently made for a tall and slender man. Hood held it to his nose and smelled the flat metallic scent of steel. Down one side were buttons made from large silver Mexican fifty-peso coins. Down the other were thickly braided steel loops. Hood let the hanger drop and shrugged on the vest and buttoned up the side. It was snug and weighty but also supportive, the tail firm against his lumbar vertebrae. The arm holes were small, so the vest rode up almost to his armpits. He could imagine no use for such a thing except to repel bullets or blades. He wondered if it would work.