“Neither were you.”
“Daggett only got Jenn because he was armed and I wasn’t.”
“We’ll fix that.”
“Otherwise I would have kicked the shit out of him.”
“I know you would.”
The gun guy’s name was John Lugo. He lived in a walk-up apartment near Chinatown, where the streets smelled of sour milk and fish water. He was around Ryan’s age, late thirties, heavy enough to stretch out a black Adidas track suit to its max. His thinning black hair was wet from a shower and pulled back in a ponytail. The air was stale with cigarette smoke and fried food. Lugo had the unhealthy pallor of someone who spent too much time under artificial light.
He said, “You guys need anything? There’s coffee ain’t too old, there’s beer if it ain’t too early.”
“We’re good,” Ryan said.
“All right. So Angelo explained the deal to you, right? All sales are final, cash, and every piece comes with a box of shells. And no obscene state taxes, of course. I start around five bills for a basic nine and I can go as high as you can.”
“You have suppressors?”
“Not for every model, but I can cover most of the mainstream stuff.”
He led us into a spare bedroom that had a pine armoire against one wall. There was also a gym mat and weights in one corner. The mat had a fine layer of dust on it. Lugo unlocked the armoire and swung both doors open wide. Handguns hung on pegs on the insides of the doors. He slid out a shelf where a TV might rest and there were more guns lying flat on that.
“That’s the basic collection there. Once you choose your weapons, I’ll match up the suppressors. If you want machine guns, rifles or shotguns, I have to take a trip to a storage unit I got out of state. Fucking Massachusetts gun laws.”
“We’ll see what’s here first,” Ryan said. “We’re hoping we can get by without heavy artillery.”
“A couple of cocky optimists,” Lugo said. “I like that.”
Ryan said, “Show me a Beretta for my friend. The 92 army model.”
“No problem. I got the ten-round version or the seventeen. Takes nine-mil rounds or the Smith and Wesson.40-calibres, which I happen to prefer. Blows a hole just that much bigger in your target. I can do these for seven apiece, six-fifty if you buy two, and no haggling please. It gets me upset.”
“And the suppressors?”
“Four apiece, which is a break, ’cause I could ask four-fifty, five each. But you’re a friend of Angelo’s so …”
“Show him the seventeen-shot model,” Ryan said. “The less he has to reload, the better.”
“I’m in the room,” I said.
“And
Lugo slipped a pistol off its peg and handed it to me. It weighed about the same as the model I’d carried in the Israeli army.
“You can dry-fire it,” Lugo said. “It ain’t loaded.”
I adopted a shooting stance and squeezed the trigger until the hammer snapped down. I looked at Ryan and shrugged. “This is fine.”
“And for me …,” he said. He looked up one side of each cupboard door and down the other. He ran his hand over every gun in the sliding shelf until he stopped at one with a flat black polymer body. “Is this the new Glock 17?”
“That’s it,” Lugo said. “The fourth-generation G17. I was at the SHOT show in Vegas when Glock unveiled it. Great piece. I also have the G22, very similar gun but takes the.40-calibres. Only downside is it carries fifteen rounds, not seventeen. I also got the compact versions of both, the G19 and G23.”
“Nice selection.”
“Thanks. You a lefty?”
“No.”
“ ’Cause the magazine release catches on both models are reversible.”
“I’m left-handed,” I said.
“Yeah? You want one of these instead of the Beretta? Only that’s gonna run you a grand, not including the suppressor.”
“Don’t confuse him,” Ryan said. “He should have something with a safety.”
“So one Beretta and one G17?” Lugo asked.
“Make mine the one that blows bigger holes,” Ryan said.
“One Beretta and one G22.”
“I also need an ankle gun. Does that Baby Eagle there take the same.40 ammo?”
“But of course.”
“All right,” Ryan said. “Add it up.”
“Boys going off to play,” Lugo said. “Warms my heart. Can I interest you in holsters?”
“Three. A shoulder and an ankle for me. You?” Ryan asked me. “Shoulder or hip?”
I imagined drawing a gun, wondering which would be quicker. I opted for hip, since that was how I’d carried my Beretta in the army.
“You can throw in the ankle holster,” Ryan said, counting out hundreds from a half-inch stack. “And I don’t like haggling either.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Lugo said.
CHAPTER 22
It wasn’t far to Upham’s Corner, the neighbourhood where Carol-Ann lived. The GPS map showed a straight route along Dorchester out of South Boston and into Roxbury. But not too deep into it: just a few lights past the I- 93 overpass.
Jenn had been gone about five hours now. The outside world became a blur as rain began to fall and my fear for Jenn clouded my mind. Sean Daggett was a predator, not above harming her if it profited him or filled some coarse dark appetite.
Traffic slowed, then stopped as orange construction cones closed off the right lane. After a moment of silence, Ryan said, “Cara was not strictly pleased I came down here.”
“I can imagine. You picked up and left pretty fast.”
“It wasn’t that,” he said. “It’s what coming here meant.”
I looked over at him, saw the strong set of his jaw. There’s a scar that creeps along the other side that gets darker when he’s angry. I couldn’t see it now but I’d bet it was livid. “That you might have to kill someone.”
“I tried to leave it behind last summer, you know I did.”
“Yes.”
“Then I went to Chicago in the fall to help you and Jenn out. I was ready to kill if I had to but it never came up. That cop pulled the trigger first. Now I’m here again, I’m armed, I’m gonna do what I have to do to get Jenn back and deal with the fucker who took her. I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to her and I didn’t do everything to stop it. But for Cara, it’s like I’m a drunk who keeps walking into a bar. Will he or won’t he slip? Is this thing she hates so much coming back into our lives? What if I kill someone here and it leads to some kind of retribution against Carlo? That’s what it always comes down to. That’s why she left me last year.”
“I remember.” He’d been living in an airport hotel when I met him, thrown out by Cara as the Calabrian Mob family he worked for descended into a murderous fight for spoils as their patriarch lay dying.
“But she threw me another question today, one of her nasty curves in the dirt. Something I know she’s always wondered about but never asked out loud: Did I actually like killing or had it always been just business. We never talked about this shit before, never discussed my work once since we took our vows. But now she’s hammering me over the phone, this is while I’m in the cab on the way to the airport, she’s asking me if I’m looking
