“So who’s going in?” Walter said.
East rubbed his eyes. Exhausted, he wanted no part of it. Fin had people who would work this, go in cool, shake hands like businessmen. Or there was Circo, who would go in with a gun in each hand and all the burners hot. He himself was a watchman. He could run a crew, keep them working all night. But walking in where people were ready to kill you was not his thing.
The feeling in his fingers had come back, and he rubbed them together, letting the skin heat.
“Well, Walt, my man,” said Ty drolly. “Who you want on the outside, if you have a problem, coming to save your ass? Me or him?”
“It’s you and me, man,” Walter said across the front seats.
East nodded and closed his eyes. Plan was broke, gang was broke, Ty trying him at every chance. Might as well go.
Ty kept on. “Glock or a Tec. Glock or a Tec be nice. If they got real guns. If it ain’t all duck-hunting shit. You got five hundred and some dollars. If you can’t get two guns that work, fuck it, we driving back to LA.” He laughed. “Now pull this up and park close. Right across the street. We doing business.”
—
The cold air braced East. He decided not to waste words. The yellow house’s door opened on a thick chain.
“We’re here to buy some guns.”
In the crack was a white face, beard, wire-rimmed glasses. “Show me money,” it said.
Walter made a motion at his hip. Same handful of twenties he’d offered the black man on the bike.
“You packing?” said the bearded man. “Because if you are, hand me what you have now. Change and keys too. And Phillip will come around and wand you.”
“We’re clean,” said East. “All right. But it’s cold out here.”
Around the corner of the house appeared a shamefaced man as skinny as a dog. He had a metal-detector paddle semiconcealed beneath his arm. It squelched as he jostled it. The man nodded uncomfortably before he climbed the stairs.
“You ready?” he said.
“That a metal detector?” said Walter.
“Yep.”
“I know you ain’t gonna scan us standing out here on your porch,” said Walter.
“Yep.”
They submitted to the nosing and grazing of the paddle. East wasn’t sure the skinny man was using it right. Skinny enough that his shoulder joints bulged at the seams of his shirt; his knuckles stood out like knots. Hard to say how old he was.
“All right,” the man Phillip said. “Now you may go in. But let me give you some advice. Okay? Don’t be arguing. The nice man wants to sell you what you need. But everyone else in the house wants you dead.”
Again the country manners, East thought. As if they’d come from a planet a million miles away.
“We just doing business,” Walter soothed him.
Phillip stared with the same red-bitten face. “Remember what I told you.” He nodded at the door, and they heard the chain come off. It opened, and Phillip led them in. Out of his collar curled the beginning of a tattoo, some ancient declaration.
They entered a parlor set with antique, dark furniture that was upholstered in pale peach. “Sit together there,” Phillip said, indicating a sofa, and he slipped through a doorway at the back of the room. The bearded man with glasses split off and crept up the stairway running up behind the front door. To its railing was lashed a thick, transparent slab two inches thick—just roped on haphazardly with yellow nylon cord.
“Bulletproof glass, that is,” Walter murmured.
East nodded.
Walter sat obediently, and East moved that way, but something over the sofa caught his eye. On the wall hung portraits, rectangular and oval, of tall, gaunt men with beards and white women with their hair in curls, or grandmothers with their last wisps. White faces, stolid expressions, their postures rigid in these antique frames. To East they were mesmerizing—the oldest pictures he’d ever seen. These strangers stood in poses that didn’t fit them, that family lined up unhappily in front of a house. Pioneer faces, dead now, but their eyes still blazing, vigilant, even in sepia. He felt drawn, felt them watching.
Reluctantly he sat when Walter tugged at his arm.
Across a low, formal table sat the sofa’s love-seat cousin, also peach. Not far away on the floorboards sat a bassinet in dull gray plastic. A large orange stuffed crab waited there—clutched in the hand, East saw now, of a damp, sleeping baby.
“Make yourself comfortable.” Phillip’s voice floated from the back.
Through the door frame East saw the antique dining room—long table and chairs, a tablecloth of lace, littered with plastic plates and mail. Cheerios had spilled across the floor.