About ten minutes later, her little cries and moans increased in frequency, and he speeded up to help her. When she climaxed, he let himself go too.
She lay still on top of him for a count of ten, then craned her neck and squinted to see the electric clock on the nightstand. She disengaged from him, crawled off the bed, and began putting her clothes back on. “Old Bobby will be wondering what’s taking so long. He’s an old guy and has to pee a lot. I watch his table when he goes, so he had to watch mine.”
The bomb maker sat up and began to dress too.
She pulled on her right boot, stood, and stomped once to make her foot settle into it. “Do you still want the AK?”
“How much?”
“A thousand.”
“That’s the price for brand-new.”
“This is brand-new.”
“It’s been fired, right?”
“Once or twice.”
“Then it’s not brand-new. It’s secondhand.” He stood, picked up the rifle and examined it, opened the chamber, and then set it down on its open case. It was in very good condition, but it had been fired a few times.
She sat beside him and put her hand on his thigh. “You just got free sex that you had no right to expect, and didn’t even know was coming. If you were a gentleman, you would appreciate that and give me the benefit of my generosity. If I weren’t a lady, I could claim you forced me, get somebody to kill you, and take all your money.”
He laughed. “You can have the thousand. Want to go out to dinner tonight?”
“Gee, I’m sorry, but Bobby is a relative of my ex-husband. Some kind of half-ass cousin, but he calls him his uncle, which isn’t possible. He’d be capable of causing trouble.”
“Want to give me your cell number so I can give you a call another time?”
“Nope. It’s been fun, but I don’t want to get hooked up and moved in with my next guy and then have you calling me up in a month. You know what I mean?”
“Sure,” he said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a stack of hundreds, then counted out ten on the bed. Then he put another hundred down and said, “Here’s a hundred for that carrying case.”
She snatched the pile of bills from the bed and folded them into her jeans pocket. “Thanks. Take your AK and the case, and then we never saw each other before.”
He zipped the rifle into its case and stood. She stepped close, pecked his cheek, and said, “Too bad we didn’t have more time.” Then she stepped to the door and held it open for him to leave. When he was out, she closed the door and gave it an extra tug to be sure he hadn’t done something to jam the latch so he could get in again. Then she turned and hurried into the staircase without looking back.
The bomb maker walked to his van and drove. He had a feeling about this transaction. If he went back into the show, she would see him, and other people would probably notice she was looking at him. Only bad things could come from that. She had been right. It was time to move on.
He went to the gun show in Tucson and picked up another AK-47 in very good condition. Two days later he found two, in Tucumcari, New Mexico, and drove on into Utah. He stopped in St. George for the next show.
After a day at the show without finding another rifle, he was sitting at a table in a bar across the street from his hotel eating a steak dinner. Sitting next to his dinner plate was a glass of bourbon. He had come in mainly because the bar was close to the gun show, and he guessed that drinkers there for the show would rather choose a bar that was in walking distance. There were only five restaurants serving alcohol here on the north side of the Grand Canyon in any case. The liquor law in Utah required it to be served only to members of private clubs, so he had to pay two dollars to join the fictitious club.
The drink sat untouched while he ate his steak. He had bought the drink only because having it would make him look relaxed and ordinary, and if he needed to, he could sip it later to prolong his time in the bar.
There were a couple of groups of men who were there for the gun show. He seldom lifted his eyes from the table, but he eavesdropped first on one group and then on the other, listening for information he could use. After a time, another group of three men came in, and he concentrated on them.
After they ordered, one of the men said, “So, I rented him the old house on the edge of the arroyo. It was the farmhouse from the days when that plot was a separate property. After the arroyo got all filled in with sediment and ran out of water, nothing got planted there except in wet years, but our family kept up the house. He stayed there for twelve years. He was a good tenant, a quiet guy, very steady. He’d worked over at the insurance company for at least seventeen. And then he died. He told me when he retired that he had no relatives left. He’d had parents and siblings, the last one a sister who was much older than he was. He’d had a girlfriend for a while, and she died too. He was eighty-four when his heart attack came, and he was still filling in at the insurance company doing paperwork.
“I paid for his funeral because I figured nobody else would. Then it turned out he had left a will saying whatever was left in the house I rented him was mine. Two days later I went into the house. I figured I’d better empty the refrigerator and cupboards and start cleaning to prepare for another tenant.
“I went down to the basement to look around for anything else I had to get rid of, and what’s down there? He’s got canteens, backpacks, ponchos, sleeping bags, all in desert camouflage. The rest is all guns and ammo. He was apparently waiting for the end of the world.”
“He was a survivalist?” one of the others asked.
“Yeah. He never told me, never talked politics or anything like that. Of course the smart ones don’t tell anybody. They think the government or the Chinese or somebody will come and take them out. They don’t want to make it easy. He had ten AK-47s and about a thousand rounds of 7.62 ammo for them. There were a lot of manuals, maps, contraptions for cleaning water to drink, and that kind of thing.”
“Ten AK-47s. Why did he think he needed ten?”
“Beats me. I guess he didn’t want to be without one. They weigh eight and a half pounds. At his age he couldn’t carry ten, let alone the ammo.”
“What are you going to do with them?” said a third man.
“I’m selling them tomorrow at the show. I’ve got some extra magazines, ammo, and stuff, so I could probably get ten thousand for them.”
The bomb maker waited while the conversation turned to other subjects. He kept watch in case the man with the rifles got ready to leave and he could talk to him outside. But first one, then the other man got up, said good night, and left. When the last man was getting ready to pay and leave, the bomb maker approached the table. “Excuse me,” he said. “I happened to hear some of what you said about the AK-47s. I just happened to be looking for some.”
“You found the right guy,” the man said. “I’ll have them at the show tomorrow morning. Table seventy-four. My name’s John Sutton.”
“Are the ten rifles the only things you’re selling?”
“Yes. They’re not anything I bought. I inherited them.”
“That’s what I thought when you were talking to your friends,” the bomb maker said. “You know, you could save yourself the admission fee and the rental of the display space if you wanted to make the sale to me tonight. Then we could both save another day’s expenses. Hotel, food, and everything can add up.”
“I guess that’s true,” said Sutton. “You mind telling me what you want ten identical rifles for? Are you a dealer?”
“No. I plan to take them to Texas, where I want to open a rifle range. There would be nothing but Russian arms—Tokarev pistols, AK-47s, Makarovs, some old Nagant revolvers. I think a lot of people would like that.”