“Weapons, Charlie? Weapons going south? I’ll bet I’m getting warm.”

“What else would be on my mind, Mike? Guns are my job with Blowdown.”

“Something new? Something value-priced and made locally in, say, Orange County?”

Hood stared at the little man, thinking: If he knows I’m surveilling Pace Arms, then my cover is blown or soon could be. But how can he know? By reading my mind a few minutes ago? We’re less than eight feet apart. Fucking ridiculous.

But Hood tried to keep his mind open and blank. “Why locally? Why Orange County?”

“Speculation only, deputy.”

“Help me, Mike. Like I helped you with Owens.”

“You already know the big picture, Charlie. You know that the other cartels all need firepower against Armenta and his Zetas. And against Vascano, who’s a bigger threat than Armenta because he recruits. Vascano’s band is growing. They’re over two thousand well-armed men. They’ll kill the cartel leaders and consolidate trade. They’ll make a nice profit off American appetites and they’ll try to win the hearts and bellies of Mexico ’s poor. They may succeed. Finally they’ll have to do battle with Calderón’s troops. Vascano is already plucking the best poor soldiers from the Mexican Army and the Guatemalan Kaibiles. The rate of defection increases weekly. Everyone needs guns in Mexico. Everyone.”

“Where are they leaving from, these new, locally made products? When?”

Finnegan again went silent. Hood glanced at the vitals, then at the stack of books, then at the flecks on the linoleum floor.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“You owe me, Mike.”

“Yes, I do.”

Hood stood and plucked the phone off the book and tossed it onto the crook of Mike’s good right arm and walked out.

38

I sit in the penthouse and listen to the sounds of the last eighty Love 32s coming to life down in manufacturing. Three more nights should complete the job, and this night is already half over. One thousand units, nine hundred thousand dollars and the promise of more. I am not prone to contentment, but I smile slightly and circle the cold martini glass in my hand. Through the picture window, I look out across South Coast Plaza and the Trinity Broadcasting Center and beyond them I see the bank of pale coastal fog inching in from the night.

Sharon has gone for take-out sashimi and ice cream. I watch the fog drift in, but suddenly the window glass holds another great pale shape that is not fog. Uncle Chester stands before the open penthouse door, left unlocked of course for Sharon. He comes into the room with small steps, his immense bald head catching the light, his unstructured linen suit adding to his enormity. He carries a leather briefcase. He stands in the middle of the room, looking at either the back of my head or the reflection of my front side in the window.

“And where is Sharon?” he says softly.

“Out.”

“That’s too bad. Ron, I have the documents.”

“What documents?”

“The creation of our new company. You were right about going legitimate again. Utterly right. I was a fool to think we could make a living illegally. What kind of living is that, really? I’ve paid for a battery of lawyers on this one. Expensive lawyers. But they have found ways to re-create what we once had. They can protect us from the past and open up our future. You will be most pleased, I promise-as head of research and development. And Sharon -straight to marketing. Where is the best place for us to sign these?”

“I’m not signing anything.”

“You will change your mind when you see what I have.”

“I doubt it, Chester.” I stand. I do not want to see or hear Uncle Chester.

I lead him to the beveled glass dining room table under the twinkling glass chandelier. Chester is deferential and insists that I sit at the head. He sets the briefcase on the glass and moves his thumbs across the combination locks. The latches spring open.

Sharon bursts through the door with two handfuls of dangling plastic bags. I’ve never been happier to see her, which is saying something. She looks at Chester and her face goes pale, then she glowers at me.

“ Sharon, you are beautiful,” he says.

In fact she is. Her summer dress is a weird shade of green that looks ravishing on her, her espadrilles have good heels, her body is tanned beautifully from all the swimming and sunbathing we did down in Laguna this last weekend.

“Help, Ron?”

But Chester is up and there before I am, sweeping the bags from Sharon ’s grip and small-stepping across the hardwood floor to the granite countertop, where he gingerly lands the bags and smiles at her. Still smiling and oddly formal, he moves toward the dining room.

Sharon sets her purse on the counter beside the shopping bags and gives me an even darker look than the one she gave me when we were seventeen and I declared my love for her. “Get him out of here,” she whispers. “Fast.”

But Chet has gone back to his briefcase on the table and brought out a bottle of wine. From my occasional splurges at the locked premium rack of the wine store, I recognize it as a two-hundred-dollar bottle of Anderson Valley cabernet sauvignon. Then he’s back in the kitchen again between Sharon and me, twisting the lead cork sealer off the bottle with one little white hand and then pushing the corkscrew in and turning, all the while chattering away about possible names for the new company-Chetronsha Arms being his favorite, a neat compounding of all our names, equal billing with allowances for seniority and…

“You’ve got five minutes of my time, Chester,” says Sharon. “Starting right now.”

We sit at the dining room table, and Chester passes the documents to us. The cover sheets bear the name of a prominent Newport Beach business law firm. In a soft voice, Chester summarizes the contents and intentions of each thick clipped packet. He makes them sound logical and simple. There are scores upon scores of thin rubber arrows stuck to the edges of the sheets to mark the places for signature and dating-blue for me, pink for Sharon, and black for Chet. Among the docs are a draft general description of the new Chetronsha Arms, a DBA form, a business plan, a tax plan, an asset sheet describing the real property and furnishings here at the former Pace Arms address, and several shorter agreements, addenda, letters of intent, an applicable compendium of State of California corporate laws, and finally a draft proposal of Chetronsha Arms corporate bylaws.

Sharon has gone silent as she reads. I do, too. I can hear the faint tap-tap-tapping of the gunsmiths downstairs and their music, which I know is loud down there but barely audible up here. When Chester looks at me, his expression tries to confirm my joy and pride in these sounds. I’m not much of a businessman, so I just scan the pages, looking for God knows what. Sharon, on the other hand, is a very attentive and discriminating reader of business documents. She used to drive Contracts crazy with her eye for minutiae when she was tasked with proofing their drafts.

Five minutes comes and goes. I’ve drunk half the wine. I look out the window and see nothing now, just a pale infinity of fog through which come no shape and no light and no color.

Sharon reads on for another five. During the last two minutes, she’s not really reading, just flipping pages with increasing speed and loudness. When she turns the last page, she is shaking her head.

“Thanks for all your hard work, Chester,” she says. “I see you spent a lot of money on good counsel. They’ve been thorough and thoughtful. Ron and I have talked long and hard about this company. We have dreamed about it. We have worked hard to put ourselves into the position of making it a reality. We have a vision for it, and this vision does not include you as the president and CFO. It does not include you at all. With due respect, Chet, I now ask you to take these documents with you and leave this building forever. Ron?”