chief of engineers, in the interest of “flood control, commercial navigation, and related purposes,” had been requested to undertake the Clearwater Trench Reconnaissance Study. It was an undertaking long since completed. Meara had heard their choppers over the farm a dozen times. His crumpled pile of papers included their assessment, and he looked at the line map that accompanied it.
The drawing was roughly in the configuration of a pistol with a misshapen trigger guard, the barrel of the gun beginning at the inflow point in Illinois, north of Cairo. The blue feature was the Mississippi River, as it traveled down past Columbus to the curving trigger guard, Bayou City. The sides of the pistol were a pair of levees: the set- back main line levee on the west, the front line levee to the east. The blue line divided Missouri from Kentucky as it headed south. Raymond's ground was pinched between the two levees, a small dot approximately where a screw would go on the grip of the pistol. Screw, to be sure, was the appropriate nomenclature.
The study's conclusions were that it was indeed feasible to divert floodwater from the mighty Miss by cutting, by means of high explosives, the front line levee and so allowing excess waters to bleed off into the relatively unpopulated lands north of the pistol's butt, Clearwater Trench. This act, however, would place Raymond Meara's bean and wheat fields at the bottom of the Mississippi.
He put the papers back where they belonged, thinking things couldn't get a whole lot worse, so they'd have to get better. But, once again, he was dead wrong.
9
The number of the beast is twelve, but he cannot fathom why. There were twelve letters in Udanax Xanadu.
His mind is stranger than a glass hammer. It does, or tries to do, many things simultaneously: receive and transmit impulses, assess and collate, identify, compute, extrapolate, measure, recall, plan, direct, monitor, safeguard, but the infinitesimal data stream has been dammed to a trickle.
One piece of information computes: his mouth is dry. Two: he is hurt. How badly? This fails to compute.
For no reason his wobbly mind locks onto a line of errant poetry. Something he'd read in a stolen library book, something that caused him to smile his fierce parody of a human grin, tear the page from the book and eat it, which he sometimes did to things that pleased him.
He tried to shake it off and saw the word cauterization imprinted, like a sign, above his thoughts. Twelve letters ... no, thirteen in cauterization: to make insensible, dead; to sear, burn, or destroy tissue. Had he undergone cauterization? The number of the beast was thirteen.
Bunkowski tried to focus, searching for memory of cauterizations past, as a caustic envelope of sunrays, reflected or refracted by the curved surface of his broken computer screen, catoptrically mirrored the reflected light.
A catalyzed cataplexy had left him catabolized, catastrophically catatonic on the catafalque of his categorically catadioptric catechism.
What this cat wouldn't give for a mouse!
10
She is beautifully slender. Her skin is perfect. Flawless. Only under magnification will one see the microscopic imperfections. A tiny curlicue against the skin, a single wispy tendril. She is so lovely. Run your hand down her length and feel the pleasure of her shape. Smooth, sleek, and shapely. She is a work of art. He labors over her, moving back and forth, grunting with effort, and a drop of his sweat falls onto her skin.
Her skin glows with a thin sheen of oil. She is his ... and soon he will take her and hold her as he screws her, and she will hardly make a sound.
The tiny silver curlicue is gone now as he removes her from the metal lathe. She is delicate and he caresses her silvery skin, removing invisible metallic hairs. He will look at her again now, closely, in the strongest light, searching for anything that might interfere with her perfection.
Her insides are already mounted on the receiver of the piece in one of his heavy-duty workbench vises, turned carefully, meticulously, her inner core true to the thousandth of an inch, and soon her strange innards will be covered by this beautifully shiny tube of skin.
She is baffled, double-walled, packed, stacked, mounted, milled, fastidiously turned, scrupulously calibrated, and now it is his pleasure to slide her outer body over this intimacy of washers, one-eighth-inch space expanders, and coiled steel wool.
Slowly he eases her skin into place and screws her tight. She is a perfect fit with her insides. Both of her parts have been cut from the same block of aluminum. Her metal curls litter the floor like the shorn hair of a silver- tressed woman, and at last she is in place. Silver and slick and streamlined—a perfect creation that looks like a glistening extension of the barrel. Her tiny, dangerous mouth is open and ready. The exquisitely shaped lips form a hard permanent O.
His income tax returns do not read “Raymond Meara, gunsmith.” Meara is a farmer by occupation. But there are four perfectly turned suppressors to belie this, and under his hand-hewn cedar barn, packed in their original Cosmoline sheaths, wrapped and sealed in four-mil plastic, then sealed again in a watertight, airtight coffin, are ten assault rifles.
Tonight he will sell some of these pieces—these collector's items. It is not something Meara looks forward to with any degree of pleasure. The man who buys is extremely dangerous, and of a disposition that at best might be called tricky. Meara has promised to deliver a half dozen of these illegal weapons, for which he will receive nine thousand dollars in cash. Raymond Meara is what the jargon terms a runner. He runs guns.
He has paid seven thousand dollars for the ten pieces. Why, you might well ask, would he put himself at risk for two thousand dollars? There are two reasons, three really. He needs money. The farm from which he derives his main livelihood is located in a floodway that may some day be dynamited. Meara owes money, and must have more money still to operate.
But he does not make this move for the two-thousand-dollar immediate profit, but for the four pieces he will keep. For these four pieces, with their custom-made sound suppressors, he will net another eight to ten thousand dollars. He will probably move three. Take a quick six thousand dollars. Keep one for hard times.
In theory the math supports Raymond Meara's venture. The problem, the unknown element, is always the point of exchange. Meara gambles.
Raymond has some degree of trust for the man
Meara will concentrate on the eight-thousand-plus that will be his profit on an investment of seven thousand dollars and a bit of his time, skill, and expertise.
