“Less than a minute,” says Bradley.
“It was exactly fifty seconds. My personal best is thirty-six, but that was after two beers. After three beers, my time went up fast.”
“Really? Will it really fire full auto?”
“Behold.” I remove the extra-capacity magazine from the lacquered box and push in fifty rounds. This takes a little time, but we say nothing. I slam it home and now the Love 32 has eight inches of gracefully curving clip extending below the grip.
Then, holding the gun in my right hand, I cup my left hand over the back of the frame near the magazine release, and I simultaneously depress two inset buttons. This releases the telescoping graphite butt. It’s like the retractable handle on a piece of rolling luggage, but of narrower gauge and shorter. Fully extended at fifteen inches, the rubber-backed butt can then be braced against the crook of the shooter’s elbow, rib cage, or even hip. It collapses in one-inch increments to fit smaller people.
I snug the butt against the inside of my elbow and look at Bradley Smith.
“Stallone should play you,” he says.
“It’ll burn through those fifty rounds in five seconds. Or you can use short bursts. Do you notice anything else different about this little genius?”
“The raised comb along the barrel top. It’s like on a trap gun, but wider. It has nothing to do with the sights.”
“Correct.” I turn and aim the machine gun downrange, with telescoping butt still braced against my elbow. Then I place my free left hand over the comb and push down.
“For the muzzle rise,” says Bradley.
I nod. Machine guns are notorious for rising as they burn through the rounds. The barrel wants to shoot the sky. Many an inexperienced submachine gunner has pulled the trigger, let the barrel jump up, and pretty much invited the bullets into his head. So long. But not if you brace down on the barrel with your free hand. The brace comb on the Love 32 is raised for cooling because the barrel itself gets hot.
“Allow me,” I say. I set the Love 32 on the bench and bring in the old target, put on a fresh one, and send it back fifty feet. Then I take up the Love and stand just in front of the bench, feet spread, retractable butt snug in my elbow, left palm firm on the comb. I look downrange at the target, glance once at the barrel of the gun, then I let it rip. There’s a five-second Armageddon of noise and smoke, then silence, and the black silhouette has a ragged hole in the middle about the size of a grapefruit.
“Wicked cool,” says Bradley.
“Your turn.”
I reload and Bradley puts up a fresh target. He’s practically beaming as he steps up and gets ready. He’s slow and meticulous about it, savoring the prep and the moment, not a trigger-ditzy moron like half the people I’ve sold weapons to. I hear the safety click off.
Five seconds later he’s standing in a cloud of fragrant gun smoke, and the bottom half of the target is almost detached.
“Unreal.”
“It’s real,” I say. “And there’s more.”
I take the noise suppressor from the lacquered box and screw it on. The barrel threads are recessed into the frame, such that a casual observer won’t see that the gun is fitted for a silencer.
“That’s your reason for the thirty-two ACP,” says Bradley.
“Right. Nine hundred and five feet per second. Subsonic, no boom, easily quieted.”
“I’m starting to like you, Ron.”
“You’re going to love this. Put up some fresh paper, please.”
I reload and step up and fire. You can hear the muffled tap of the rounds going off and the cartridges chattering through and the ejector spitting out the brass, and you can hear the empties pinging on the carpet and you can even hear the ringing in your ears from the prior shooting, but what you mainly hear is the paper silhouette being torn to shreds and the bullets spitting into the sandbags at the distant far end of the range.
“I’ll remain briefly speechless,” says Bradley.
“There’s more,” I say. “These guns are untraceable to me. Untraceable to Favier and Winling. No serial numbers. Nothing that says Pace. Just Love 32, etched with subtle beauty on the forward slide. I can see legions of law enforcement officers worldwide mystified by these guns. Where did these come from? Did they simply spring from the earth, like the skeleton men in Jason and the Argonauts? Or drop from the sky, like manna? Something tells me that you would like to bedazzle law enforcement, Bradley. I think you like the outlaws more than the lawmen.”
“How much per gun?”
“There’s just one small catch. They don’t exist. This is the prototype. Do you like martinis?”
4
Hood got up early to move the last of his possessions into his Buenavista rental home. The dawn was pink, and a vapor light on the carport burned white over the driveway. He carried the boxes into the house. His old Camaro wouldn’t hold much so he’d rented a trailer. He would soon receive an ATFE take-home vehicle. Hood was thirty and never married and he had few things. As he wrestled another box from the trailer, he was thinking it would be nice to have a dog.
The house was a 1920s adobe, one of ten tucked amidst the hills on the northwest side of town, a development that never quite caught on. The place came furnished and had a new swamp cooler. The road in was graded dirt with ruts for gutters, but the hillside views were good: south to old town in which the bell tower of the church was still the highest point, east to infinite desert, and west to more desert and black-orange sunsets that covered miles.
Hood had arrived in Buenavista forty-eight hours ago, just enough time to meet the local chief of police, shake hands with the three members of the ATFE task force he was assigned to, then participate in the gun buy that had resulted in the killing of two men. One of the dead was a teenaged boy named Gustavo Armenta, who was on a date that night, and as Hood carried another box into the house, he pictured the way Gustavo had led his girlfriend by the hand from the restaurant patio and how a few moments later an errant bullet had found his heart in the darkness fifty yards away, stopping eighteen years of past and sixty years of future dead and forever. The other dead man was a gun dealer with a revoked license.
Hood heard a distant noise and through a window saw a vehicle coming slowly up the road. The headlights raked and bounced, and a while later the police cruiser came to a stop just outside the carport light.
Gabriel Reyes got out and let the door close quietly, bumping it shut with his hip.
“I’m glad I didn’t have to wake you up,” he said.
“Coffee?”
“Please.”
In the kitchen Hood poured a cup and Reyes looked around the old home. His uniform was clean and pressed. His expression was that of a man expecting the worst.
“I guess you don’t come out this early with good news,” said Hood.
“Benjamin Armenta ring a bell?”
“Gulf Cartel.”
“The boy who was killed last night is Gustavo, his son. He lived in Buenavista, on the Mexican side. Engaged to the girl. It’s a shame and a mess.”
“Was he mixed up in his dad’s business?”
“Who knows? He was on his way to UCLA.”
Hood sighed and looked out at the lightening day.
“So be extra careful, deputy. Benjamin Armenta will demand vengeance for Gustavo. It’s a point of honor. It’s my job to say that, even though I probably don’t have to. You know the Zetas, don’t you?”
Hood knew they were the latest pestilence in the drug wars raging in Mexico, paramilitary killers leaving corpses, sometimes piles of them, across the nation. “The Gulf Cartel’s beheaders.”