Blood risk (8 page)

    "You're being childish," Mellio said.

    "And you are being dishonest, Mr. Mellio. I'm sure my father directed you to take every step to deny me this loan and to force me into signing the waiver. But you must see that if I don't get the ten thousand now, right now, I've got excellent grounds to level yet another suit against you, the bank and the administrator of the trust. No judge is going to believe that you seriously fear losing what you loan to me. It will be quite evident that your refusal is a spiteful tactic and nothing more."

    Mellio sat up and reached for his intercom controls. To Tucker he said, "I'll want a signed note from you, at least."

    Tucker said, "If I approve of the note's wording."

    "Of course."

    Mellio called for his secretary to bring the proper loan papers, though he was clearly unhappy about being forced into this.'

    "I'll want it in cash," Tucker said. "I'll tell you the denominations of the bills."

    "Cash?" Mellio asked, raising his eyebrows.

    "Yes," Tucker said. "I'm afraid your check might bounce."

    

    

    At nine-thirty, four blocks from the bank, with his ten thousand dollars packed into a slim briefcase, Michael Tucker made three short telephone calls from a public phone booth in a department store-one to a number in Queens, one to a number rather far out on Long Island and the third to Jimmy Shirillo in Pittsburgh. Satisfied that everything was moving along smoothly, he hailed a cab and rode to a point two blocks from the Queens address, got out, paid the driver, watched the taxi pull away and disappear in heavy traffic, then walked the rest of the way. That might have been an unnecessary precaution, even though the driver kept fare records that could be checked, but he had grown accustomed to his father's occasional private detectives padding in his wake, and he did not mind the slight inconvenience. No one followed him the rest of the way to Imrie's place.

    Imrie's place was a ground-floor showroom of a three-story brick structure on a quiet side street in Queens. A sign outside, reproduced in gilt lettering on the cracked glass door, said: antiques and used furniture. When Tucker went inside, the opening door caused a buzzer to shrill loudly far back in the stacks of chairs, tables, scarred bookcases, lamps, hutches, beds and a considerable variety of bric-a-brac. A moment later, as if unwillingly propelled forward by that noise, Imrie waddled out of a shadowed aisle between stacks of chairs and picture frames both used and antique.

    He said, "Just let me attend to the door, and I'll be with you." And he went to attend to it.

    Imrie was in his early fifties, bald except for a fringe of curly gray hair that accentuated the smoothness of the top of his skull, almost like a medieval friar. He stood no taller than five feet six, but he weighed an even two hundred pounds. Though his store looked like the streets of a Florida town after a hurricane disaster, and though his own style of dress was no style at all except comfort, he was a tidy man when it came to his specialty. His specialty was guns.

    "Upstairs," he said, passing Tucker on his way back into the maze of tarnished, tottering furnishings.

    At the back of the store, through a yellow cloth curtain, they went up a set of narrow wooden stairs, passed the second floor where Imrie lived, climbed to the third and last level where he kept his gun collection. Here, as on the first floor, the partitions had been knocked out-to make one large room. Racked on the walls, shelved against wooden display lifts, nestled in velvet-lined cases and-in the case of new acquisitions not yet touched by Imrie-dumped unceremoniously in cardboard boxes, were more than two thousand rifles, shotguns and handguns, with the overwhelming emphasis on the last category. Also in the room, against the far wall, were a number of metal-working machines, including a complete miniature gas-fired forge and cooling pot where metals could be melted and shaped.

    "I think I have exactly what you want," Imrie said. 'In the store downstairs he'd seemed bland, as gray as his fringe of hair, a little sleazy but not sleazy enough to be colorful. Here, among his weapons, he came alive like a puppet jerked up on strings and touched, magically, by some good fairy. His eyes, hooded and dull in the antique store, were wide, bright and shifted quickly from one thing to another-not ignoring, either, Tucker's reaction to everything he said and, in a few moments, to everything that he showed him.

    They stopped at a bookcase that filled half the wall to the right of the door, and Imrie looked up over the bushy gray thatch of his eyebrows, embarrassed. He said, "Mr. Tucker, I hope you'll excuse the television dramatics here."

    "Of course," Tucker said. He had been in contact with Imrie nine times before. Three times Imrie had opened the hidden closet in Tucker's presence-the sign of trust and respect he gave few customers-and every time he apologized for the melodrama.

    "You can't be too careful these days," Imrie said, using both hands to remove several volumes of poetry from the fifth shelf. He handed the books to Tucker, who took them and waited patiently. "There was a time, not so many years ago, you could leave everything out in the open. If I was working on a gun-making special changes-and I got sleepy, I'd leave it on the workbench while I caught a few winks, you know?" Tucker said he knew. "But now you can't take any chances. All this public uproar about guns puts pressure on the cops and, directly, pressure on me too. You'd think, listening to these anti-gun nuts, that every handgun in existence is used in crime of some sort. Take a look around this workshop, though. I got maybe twelve hundred, thirteen hundred handguns. How many of them am I going to sell to special customers like you? Thirty? Forty? No more than that." He made a sound of disgust in the back of his throat, located the lock previously covered by the books, used a key on his chain to open it. He stepped aside and swung the bookcase out of the way, walked into a closet about four times his own size, pulled on a chain that lighted a forty-watt bulb, located a card-board box he wanted, turned out the light and stepped into the main room again. He put the box down, closed and locked the bookcase door, took the poetry volumes from Tucker's hands and slipped them onto the shelf again. "Makes me feel like a criminal," he said, grunting in the back of his throat. He sounded as though he were looking for someone to spit on.

    At the main workbench, Imrie showed Tucker what he had for him. "Three Portuguese National Guard contract Lügers, all in excellent shape."

    "Fakes?"

    Imrie looked hurt. "Genuine, I assure you. A good fake, of course, would be sufficient for anything you'd want to use it for. But these are the real article, 1906-type with four-and-three-quarter-inch barrels."

    "In 7.65 mm?"

    "Yes."

    Tucker worked the unloaded pistol.

    "See?" Imrie asked.

    "What about the silencers?" Tucker ran his thumb over the threads that had been cut into the outer circumference of the Lüger's barrel.

    Imrie lifted three bright tubes from the box, handed one of them over. "I guarantee the continuity of the barrel."

    "Of course."

    Tucker fitted the silencer to the Lüger and had almost eleven inches of barrel. The effect was at once silly and deadly.

    "Ammunition? Clips?"

    Imrie took those out of the box and placed them neatly on the table. He watched while Tucker fitted the silencers to each of the weapons, loaded them, held them, did everything but shoot them. He was not offended by the thoroughness of the examination, for he knew that Tucker was making no comment on his own trustworthiness but was merely taking as many precautions as he could. Indeed, he admired the other man's professionalism.

    Tucker broke the guns down and said, "How much?"

    "You understand that a genuine Portuguese National Guard Lĺuger is a collector's item?"

    "Even modified with a silencer?" Tucker asked.

    "Still, yes."

    "How much?"

    "I paid four hundred and fifty dollars for each gun, thirteen hundred and fifty altogether, the going market price." Tucker knew that Imrie had not purchased the weapons from another collector but from various uninformed sources, probably for as little as fifty or a hundred dollars each. He did not say anything. Imrie was good enough to be permitted as much chiseling as he could reasonably expect was his due. "I restored them to full functional status, supplied the ammunition-considerable ammunition-machined the silencers, a delicate operation that takes no little amount of time-"

    "How much?" Tucker interrupted.

    Bright eyes flickering over his face, down at the guns, up at his face again, Imrie realized Tucker was in a hurry, perhaps pushed the price up a little because of that. "Twenty-two hundred for the three."

    "Two thousand," Tucker said.

    "There is the added problem that these particular weapons were originally prepared for another gentleman, as an advance order. He'll be around to collect them in two days. To fill that order, I'm going to have to close the store and stay up eighteen hours a day-"

    Tucker cut the fat man short. "Hardly likely," he said. "We both know that you always keep a bit ahead of the demand. That's one reason you keep the hidden closet. You've probably got two more like this-maybe not Lügers but something as sufficient-ready to hand behind the bookcase."

    "Really-" Imrie began.

    "Two thousand."

    "You'll want a case to carry them out of here?" Imrie asked, folding thick fingers together.

    "Yes."

    "Two thousand for the guns, twenty-five dollars for the attaché case."

    Tucker smiled. "You're unbelievable."

    "The antique business has suffered through a recent economic recession you might have read about in the papers," Imrie said. He took his hands apart and put them palms up as if to ask, "What can I do?"

    Tucker counted out the money while Imrie put the guns, silencers and ammunition into a pearl-gray attaché case with a silvery stainless-steel handle. He snapped it shut, locked it and gave two keys to Tucker, in exchange for the proper cash compensation.

    "I think you'll be pleased," Imrie said.

    "I hope I will be."

    "Goodbye, then."

    "Goodbye," Tucker said.

    The fat man led him down the stairs again, into the darkened furniture store, past a row of old floor cabinet radios and a Gramophone on a maple stand. The Gramophone trumpet, once gilded and now tarnished, made Tucker think of Elise Ramsey. She had appeared in a cigar commercial seated on a divan beside an ancient Gramophone. That was one of his favorite commercials, perhaps because she had been wearing a plunging, lacy-necked dressing gown; he had always had the feeling that, as in a cartoon, the Gramophone trumpet was alive and that its gaping mouth was opened in awe of her formidable cleavage.

    Imrie unlocked the front door.

    Tucker went out and away without saying anything more.

    The time was 11:06 on Wednesday morning.

    

    

    The small Long Island airport out of which Paul Norton and Nick Simonsen operated their catch-all air service had two macadamed runways, one new and even, the other cracked and eroding and hoved up at the center like the back of an angry cat. Both runways were in use. Three buildings-one a warehouse, the second a hangar and the third a combination office suite and three-plane berth-had all seen better days. The corrugated roofing was badly rusted, and the wooden walls needed painting. Tucker paid the taxi driver, tipped him well for running out to such an unlikely spot from which he'd hardly obtain a return fare, and went inside the nearest structure, which contained Norton's office.

    Norton was there, behind a scarred desk that looked ready to collapse, leaning way back in a rickety spring-backed chair, his booted feet propped on the stained, notation-cluttered blotter. He was a big man, five inches taller and sixty pounds heavier than Tucker. His face was broad and flat, since his nose had been squashed and his cheeks scarred during his tour in Vietnam. He'd never told Tucker how or why that had happened, or even if the two injuries were from the same source. Perhaps, with unlimited resources and several major operations, a very good plastic surgeon could have rebuilt that ruined nose so it would look as good as new, though no improvement in his appearance would have been noticeable until something was done with the white scars on both cheeks. Looking at him, Tucker had the eerie feeling that some enormous cat had sneaked up behind Norton, dug its claws into his face and shredded the flesh backward in one powerful jerk. Despite the disfiguration, he was not a particularly ugly man-just damned mean-looking.

    When he spoke, however, your impression of him shifted like the colored glass in the bottom of a kaleidoscope. The voice was soft, the tone even, the words measured and warm. His was the voice of a man who had seen too much and gone through more than his share of agony, the voice of a man who never wanted to have to kill or hurt anything again. "A beer?" he asked.

    "This time of day?"

    "It's after noon," Norton observed, taking his feet off the desk and rising. He moved smoothly, gracefully. From an old refrigerator in the corner of the room he got two chilled beers, opened them and put them on the desk without offering any glasses.

    Tucker sat down in the client's chair, both briefcases beside him.

    Norton did not give either of the satchels a glance. He knew that if they were any of his business, Tucker would tell him so. Vietnam had not only made him a gentle man but an extraordinarily wary one as well.

    "Ballantine's India Pale Ale," Norton said, lifting his own bottle. "I've tried everything, and this is the only one that makes me happy." He drank a third of his beer in one long swallow that set his Adam's apple bobbing like a dinghy in a typhoon.