Run (3 page)

While I ride the rails back to Washington, reading my book, another diner will pay his tab at Bookbinder’s and as he leaves he will present his chit to the coat-check girl and he will recover his raincoat and his grey Samsonite carry-on bag, and later, when he finds himself at home, he will open the bag. Inside the bag will be a large swatch of chamois, folded neatly into a bundle and secured by string. Inside the chamois will be a pair of new, nicely customized machine pistols, Heckler & Koch MP-5Ks with clean serial numbers, which he will use or he will sell or he will give away or he will mount proudly upon the wall of his den or his office. I don’t much care because we’ve already been paid.

Yeah, I’m a businessman. That’s what Jules Berenger told me, those twelve, thirteen, however many years ago when we sat down to breakfast at the Huddle House on Little River Turnpike and had our long chat over orange juice, pancakes, eggs over easy, and lots of black coffee, before I shook hands with him and signed on, before I became one of the boys. A gunrunner.

Now that wasn’t the job description or the title. Actually I became a marketing representative for VisionWorks, an up-and-coming computer software firm. A few years later I became a senior marketing representative for BioInsights, an up-and-coming medical research facility. Then I became a marketing manager for Line One, an up-and-coming telephone services reseller. Jules owns all these companies, or at least a piece of them, and their clients require a great deal of marketing effort and thus a lot of travel, in-country and out.

Sooner or later, like any upwardly mobile young urban professional who knows his job and gets it done, I became a senior marketing manager for the real deal, UniArms of Alexandria, Virginia—the small arms capital of the free world. I never once looked back, and why should I?

I’m living the American Dream: Nice house, nice lawn, nice car;
there’s no wife, no kids, but what the hell, there’s Fiona. I’m drawing down a hundred thousand on the books, with payroll stubs and W-2 forms to prove it. Pay my taxes, too, fucking twenty-eight percent a year and growing with each new smiling Democrat that they put in the White House. Then the state takes … what? Five and three-quarters. The city gets half a point, too, not to mention the real estate tax and the personal property tax and now this goddamn recycling tax. Then there’s the sales tax. Once you pay the monthly hit for your mortgage, your car loan, your phone bill, electricity, gas, water, insurance, cable TV, and then the credit cards, what have you got? Nothing. Everybody owns a piece of you: the bank, MasterCard and VISA, and most of all the politicians.

Like I said, it’s the American Dream.

So I’m a businessman. I buy and sell commodities on the open market, not to mention the occasional closed one. That those commodities have calibers or gauges and muzzle velocities doesn’t mean much to the business. Pickups and deliveries can, on occasion, be a bitch. Suppliers, the good ones, the smart ones, do business. They can’t afford to screw around. Customers are another story.

Here’s how it works:

People need guns. But people can’t get guns. At least not all the people, not all the time. Which seems a bit strange, since there is one firearm out there for every man, woman, and child in America.

So let’s say you want to buy an AMT Hardballer, a cheap .45 with crappy metallurgy that kicks like a bitch; I’d recommend the long slide auto for better accuracy, probably cost you only twenty-five dollars more. But you have to be able to buy the Hardballer first.

If you live in New York City, forget about it. You can’t own a handgun. That’s the law. You need a permit, and unless you have big money or big balls, forget even filing an application. But if you live in, let’s say, Texas City, well, you can grab hold of one of those babies and snap in the seven-round magazine on the very same day if you want.

Maybe. You do have to fill out this sheet that the Feds call Form 4473, and let them run a background check. And unless you choose to lie, an offense punishable by several years of incarceration, you will have to tell about that arrest and that conviction and that mental problem. Unless you choose to lie.

So here you are, deprived of a necessity of life by the law, the law, the law; here a law, there a law, everywhere a law-law.

Let me try to explain this thing.

These Founding Father guys, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, whoever, the guys on the dollar bills, they kick the British guys out and they start themselves a new government. Their own government. So what’s the first thing they do? They make up rules. The Constitution, for starters. That’s a good one: All men are created equal, right? Bullshit then, bullshit now. These guys owned slaves, their women didn’t vote, so who were they kidding? Well, nobody. But since they were the guys who wrote the rules, they wrote them just the way they wanted.

So then somebody says: Hey, we fucked up. Wrote this Constitution thing but we forgot a bunch of stuff. We need to write these Amendments to sort of list the stuff we left out. So now there’s another set of rules, this thing they call the Bill of Rights, and there in big print is the Second Amendment. Not the first, not the last, and not even in the middle, but second, number two, meaning it’s almost at the top of the list. Which is to say, it’s important.

This Second Amendment thing says you’ve got the right to bear arms. Looks clear as window glass to me. But the First Amendment, the one at the very top of that list, says you’ve got the freedom of speech. Tell that to the teacher who wants to read the Bible in class. Tell that to the video store that wants to rent you some X-rated movies. Tell that to my Aunt Eustacia. She wanted to put this sign that said
PRAY FOR PEACE
in her front yard during the Gulf War, and the city made her take it down.

In other words, these Founding Father guys, they wrote this Bill of Rights, but they didn’t really mean what they said. They just said these things because they sounded like good ideas at the time, but once these guys died, and the next guys were in, the ones who didn’t write the rules but sure wished they had—well, they got busy rewriting those rules.

So they tell us that the Founding Father guys didn’t really mean we’ve got the right to bear arms, and they sure didn’t mean we’ve got the right to
buy
arms. What we’ve got is the right to have some sorry-ass politicians tell us whether we can bear arms, and when and where and what kind of arms we can bear, if we can fill out the right forms and wait
long enough. Somebody ought to sit down and rewrite that Amendment to make all that clear.

Meantime, if you want to bear arms, fuck the law: You just need cash. Not a lot. If you’ve got some green, then there’s always somebody like me, somebody who knows somebody else, and they can get you whatever you want. You want a gun—and not just any gun, let’s say a clean gun with clean ammo—I can get you one inside an hour. Or take Charlie Hardin out of Roanoke. You want a more exotic weapon, the guy can get it for you, seven-day turnaround max. The weirder the better: One time Charlie pulled a Belgian .223 Minimi belt-fed light squad auto machine gun for me, and it was like going to the catalog counter at Sears. Saw him on a Friday, paid one half down in cash, picked that baby up on Monday. Sold it that night for a two hundred percent markup.

Like I said, it’s the American Dream.

Ch-ch-ch-changes.

On Wednesday I’m standing in the 7-Eleven, trying to decide between Snapple Mint Tea and a Bud Light, when my pager beeps. Good timing. It’s ten-thirty in the morning and I really don’t need a drink, not yet. So I go for the Snapple and check the number on the pager while I’m waiting in line to pay.

Bingo.

Sometimes—not often, but every once in a while, before the memory of the last one has faded entirely—the pager gets you at the perfect moment, the one that reminds you that maybe, just maybe, you’re working for Domino’s Pizza and you’re about the best-paid delivery boy on the block.

I trade two bucks for the Snapple, give the change to Jerry’s Kids, and wander out front to the pay phone—only a fool would use a cellular for business—and I look over at the dry cleaner that’s next to the 7-Eleven while I make the call, not to the number that’s showing on the pager, but to this week’s number, probably another pay phone, probably in some other parking lot of some other 7-Eleven just down the way from some other dry cleaner, and on the second ring somebody picks up and says:

Hey.

Yeah, I tell him.

Need you, baby.

Somewhere between the
need
and the
you
, I know it’s CK; that little nasal twang seeps on through no matter what he has to say. And what CK has to say next is:

Lunch.

Okay, I tell him.

Twelve-thirty.

Yeah, I tell him.

The usual place.

Shit, I tell him.

Click.

Click.

So there goes the afternoon, probably the evening, and maybe even the rest of the week; but what the hell: To make it in this business, you’ve got to like change. Only dead things stay the same.

The rules to this game are simple: They’re our rules. We make them up as we go, and if we don’t, somebody else is going to make them up for us. Sort of like that Constitution thing. And since I like to play by my own set of rules, I like to make them and, every once in a while, to break them.

I drop down Quaker Lane to the Interstate and head south. There’s more than an hour to kill and I may as well kill it in style. Today I’m driving the metallic-blue Corsica, about the most forgettable car on the road, and when I find a parking space at the strip mall off Little River Turnpike, I settle in behind the wheel and read my book. Every so often, I lamp the entrance to the Greek Gourmet, which Lukas, the loser who’s supposed to be bird-dogging this place, swears to Sunday is on the up-and-up, but Lukas has a bit too much religion. Me, I’ve never been a believer.

I watch the earnest black couple in front of the CVS Pharmacy, hawking peace and love for the Reverend Gideon Parks, even though everyone ignores them. I watch the bottle-blond gamine who’s wearing a dress that fits like a T-shirt and a smile that isn’t quite right, leaning into the line of shopping carts at Food Giant. But mostly I watch the Greek Gourmet: Four booths, eight tables, looks like they could sit maybe forty
people for a full house, but this place hasn’t seen a full house, maybe even half a house, for years.

I spend thirty minutes in front, then I drive around back, find another spot in the shade, and sit for a while and watch the delivery trucks unload and load. I’ve got a pair of Nikon binoculars that will let you count the hairs on a ferret’s butt, but this excursion doesn’t call for much in the way of eyesight. They’re moving guns.

Time flies whether you’re having fun or not, and soon the great disappearing Corsica winds its way out of the parking lot and back to the Interstate and I’m off for lunch with CK at the usual place. I call Lauren in Philadelphia on the car phone, get her machine, and tell her I’m doubtful for dinner on Thursday, maybe next month, good luck with what’s-his-name; and then I call home and leave one of those helpless messages for Fiona:

I don’t know, maybe, can’t say. Call you later. Maybe.

Then it’s time for lunch at the usual place, and sooner or later I’m caught in the corner of a booth at the Red Lobster on Van Dorn, Renny Two Hand on my left, Mackie the Lackey on my right, and I’m listening to CK tell the one about Hillary Clinton’s prostate for about the twelfth time and I sure could use a drink. Instead, I ponder the catch of the day or the popcorn shrimp and I decide maybe I should just have the soup and salad and I order clam chowder, Manhattan, which I remember is the red kind because Manhattan means blood, and I can’t believe that CK is actually going to have the Shrimp Lover’s Feast again.

Like all good sociopaths, CK does things his way, and his way, which is always the same way, includes not talking business until the food has arrived, and the food is the entree, not the drinks, not the bread, not the soup, not the salad. So I suck on an iced tea and listen to a few more old, bad jokes and then Mackie tries to tell us something about this new Tom Hanks movie and sooner or later we get the bread.

Sometimes I try to sit outside this thing. Sometimes in restaurants, or at gas stations, hotel lobbies, I watch the other people, watch them watching us, and I wonder what they think about what they see. Right now two women sit at the table next to us, just five, six feet away, but the noise level is high enough to allow us to discuss their private parts and, even if they were trying to listen, they wouldn’t have a clue.

This gun thing isn’t like selling cars, all flash and cash; this is about being grey, about hiding in sunlight. I do this thing well. It’s not a trick, it’s a skill. You have to be plain. Everything about you has to be plain. You shave, you shower, you brush your teeth every day. You wear just a little cologne, and it’s not too cheap but it’s not expensive, and you wear white shirts with your dark suits, but they’re not too dark or you’ll look like a lawyer and you can always spot the lawyers, or the people who want to look like lawyers, from a mile away. You want to wear ties, cheap ties, dark cheap ties, and you want to wear a nice Timex with a leather band. You want to wear black shoes that you shine, just barely, about once every three weeks. You want to drive Chevys and Fords. You listen to AM radio, you watch a lot of football and baseball, you eat at McDonald’s and Hardee’s and Red fucking Lobster, and you rent the top ten videos at Blockbuster. And somewhere along the way, you might get invisible. Though it helps if you’re like me:

Born that way.

These women at the next table, thirtywhatever and showing it, should be taking it easy on the french fries, but they’re nicely dressed in a JCPenney kind of way. So they’re secretaries, right? It’s a reasonable guess. Too well dressed, and a little heavy on the makeup, for a friendly get-together; not dressed well enough for the white-collar world. That one of them has a WordPerfect handbook doesn’t hurt, but then again, Mackie over there has a nice fat Day-Timer on the table next to him, and he has a white button-down shirt and a suit that’s just that right notch above cheap. You can tell by the look of him that he sells insurance, that he worries about those homeowner policies and replacement values and flood exclusion clauses. Just one look, it’s all you need. You look at this guy, and you sure wouldn’t guess that he’s just spent a month in southeast Missouri, moving enough M-16s to arm a battalion of Aryan patriots. Some kind of insurance he’s selling.