Caxton shook her head. “A vampire’s only vulnerable point is his heart. He’s got a IIIA ballistic vest and over that a steel trauma plate.”
The armorer rubbed his chin. “Vests aren’t perfect. They don’t do anything against knives or, say, wooden stakes.” Before she could even react the man waved one hand in the air. “Just a little joke. And anyway, you don’t want to go into this with a knife. By the time you got close enough to stab him you’d already be dead. Okay. Next thought. The ballistic fabric loses its effectiveness when it gets wet.”
“So you’re saying I should only shoot him if it’s raining? I don’t have that option.” She shook her head. “I need firepower.”
“And I am most happy to oblige. I don’t get to bring these out near as often as I’d like.” The armorer’s small eyes burned with glee as he opened the first box. Inside lay a revolver with a ten-and-a-half-inch barrel—twice as long as the barrel on her Beretta. It was made of stainless steel and had a thick rubberized grip designed to help cut down on recoil. She lifted it with both hands and almost gasped. It must have weighed five pounds. It felt like she was holding some massive machine part, and she wondered if she would be able to even draw it comfortably.
“What’s this one?” she asked.
“Smith & Wesson Model 500. 500H, to be precise. It loads .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum rounds, some of the most powerful in the world. The gun-control lobby calls that round the vest-buster.”
“What do other people call it?”
The armorer shrugged. “The NRA claims it can’t actually penetrate a trauma plate. They say they have ballistic tests to prove it. You can choose who you believe. What I do know is that this round is recommended for stopping a charging grizzly bear before it can gets its claws in you.”
Caxton’s eyes went wide. She reached for a pair of earplugs. The armorer handed her a pair of cup-style ear protectors as well. “You’ll want both,” he told her.
She lined up a shot on a paper target at twenty yards, adjusted her stance, leaned into the shot.
Squeezed the trigger. A jet of flame burst from the gun as it squirmed and pushed—her arm leaped up and the gun nearly hit her in the face. It felt like someone had kicked her in the shoulder. “Jesus,” she squeaked. Her ears were still ringing when she put the weapon down and removed her ear protectors.
“You didn’t flinch,” the armorer said, admiringly. “Most women when they take their first shot with that kind of power, they close their eyes and turn away from the blast.”
She picked up the handgun again and studied it. “Double action, at least. But this looks wrong.” Most revolvers carried six shots in a cylinder behind the barrel. “There are only five chambers.”
“The bullets were too big to fit six,” the armorer explained. He pressed a button to bring in the target.
The round she’d fired had made a sizable hole near the shoulder of the silhouette on the target, and she hated to think what that bullet could have done to a human body. Still—it hadn’t even come close to the target’s heart, and Caxton was a good shot. She practiced religiously and she had been trained by her father, who had been a sheriff up in coal country and who had been an excellent shot. That meant she knew her limits. She knew that the first round she fired from a new gun was never going to be a bull’s-eye. She also knew she’d had a lot of trouble controlling the weapon.
“I’m not strong enough for that,” she said. “I think maybe if I was Arnold Schwarzenegger. But I’m not.”
“With enough time and practice you’d be fine,” the armorer said.
“Time is something I’m short on.”
The armorer frowned sympathetically and put it back in its box. He had another gun for her to try, one she recognized right away. She’d seen it in plenty of movies and TV shows—a Mark XIX Desert Eagle, an Israeli-made gun that she’d always thought was perfect for men with especially small penises. It had a thick triangular barrel and a massive grip she could barely get her hand around. Its barrel was almost comically long—fourteen inches, even longer than the Model 500, and when she held it she felt like she had picked up some kind of movie prop. It made her Beretta look like a cap gun.
She checked the safety, then ejected the magazine. It held seven rounds. Better than the five in the revolver, but her Beretta held fifteen.
The armorer fingered one of the bullets. “That’s your .50AE round. Pretty nasty. Very powerful.”
“Okay.”
He took the weapon from her and reloaded it. “Usually, with ammo this big you’d use a revolver. The Desert Eagle’s a little different. It’s built more like a rifle than a handgun, especially with this barrel. Gas operated. Polygonal rifling. The rotating bolt is pretty close to what you’d find on an M16.”
“Cool.” Caxton replaced her ear protection, called to clear the range, then sighted and fired. The recoil wasn’t as bad as with the Model 500, but still she nearly lost control of the gun after it discharged. When the target fluttered up to her she saw she’d gotten a little closer to the heart, but not much. “Not so cool.”
She sighed and put the weapon down. “Bigger bullets isn’t going to do the trick. What about a different kind of bullet—hollow-points or something.”
“Hollow-point bullets actually decrease penetration,” the armorer told her. “They’re designed for maximum tissue damage inside your target, but they’ll never get through a trauma plate. If you’re looking for a magic bullet what you’d really want is depleted uranium rounds.”
“Really?” Caxton asked, raising her eyebrows.
“Sure. Much denser than lead, so they hit harder. DU rounds are just about perfect for armor piercing.
Plus they’re pyrophoric, so when they deform on impact they tend to catch on fire and explode. They’re also a little bit radioactive, so if you don’t blow up your target you still give him cancer. Just one problem, though.”
“What’s that?”
“You’d have to be in the Army even to see a DU round, and even the Army doesn’t make small-arms ammunition out of the stuff anymore. They did back in the nineties, but then somebody realized that we were shooting radioactive slugs into every bunker, hut, and hospital in the Middle East. The political blowback on that could have been enormous, so they stopped producing them. The UN is trying to get people to stop using DU of any kind.”
“So you don’t have a box of it lying around,” Caxton inferred.
“No.” He ran his fingers along his mustache for a while and then opened an unmarked cardboard box and set it before her. “I do have these. Highly illegal, of course. We took them in evidence during a big drug raid a couple years back.”
Caxton drew one of the bullets out of the box. It was the same size and shape as the rounds she loaded in her Beretta 92. The only apparent difference was that it had a smooth green coating on the tip. She ran her finger over it and wondered why it felt so familiar. Then she looked up at the armorer. “What are they?”
He wasn’t meeting her gaze. Instead he was looking at the box of bullets. He was looking at it as if the box were full of poisonous snakes. Eventually he shifted his weight to a different foot and told her what she was looking at. “Cop-killers.”
“No shit?” she asked. She examined the bullet again. It was lighter than a normal bullet, strangely enough.
“These are Teflon bullets?”
He shrugged. “That name’s misleading. The Teflon coating is just to protect your gun. It doesn’t make them any more deadly. The real improvement comes from using a brass slug instead of a lead one. Brass is a lot harder than lead, so when it hits the target—say, your trauma plate—it doesn’t squish or melt. It keeps going in one piece, with all of its energy intact. Theoretically that bullet can punch through any police vest.”