“I know,” Chaz said. He picked up a cell phone and touched the keys. “We have another recruit.”
Tauber was still stirring his coffee as Chaz listened to the ring tone.
Six rings. Seven. A click on the other end. “Hammond.”
“I’m done here,” Lee Hammond said and tossed to the desktop a laminated ID badge with the name Carter, Dolan J. next to an overexposed photo of himself scowling for the camera.
“This is kind of sudden,” the blonde behind the desk said. “You’ve got vacation coming, Dole.”
“Got a better offer,” Hammond said and pulled off the jacket with the White Horse Security Inc badge sewn on the sleeve. He folded it and put it on the desk by the badge.
“Captain Hodge isn’t going to be happy.”
“When is Captain Hodge ever happy?”
“What about your benefits?” the blonde said and watched him unbuckle the gun belt around his waist. “Insurance, retirement. You qualify for dental next month.”
“Don’t need them,” Hammond said as he placed the gun belt by the folded jacket. He slipped the Colt Python from the clamshell holster, flipped the cylinder out, and dropped the six fat rounds into his palm. He placed the rounds atop the folded jacket. “Company’s ammo. The Colt’s mine.”
“We’re gonna miss you, Dole,” the blonde said and came around the desk.
“Yeah,” he said and pulled his own leather jacket from a steel rack bolted on the office wall.
“We were just getting to know each other,” she said and leaned back on the desk, long legs crossed, skirt riding up to heaven. She tilted her head and smiled crookedly.
“Darling,” Hammond said as he turned and opened the office door. “I think you know just about everything there is to know about me.”
Chaz stepped off the jet to find Hammond waiting for him on the tarmac, standing by a battered Jeep Cherokee spotted with primer. It was a small county airport outside Rexford, Idaho, one strip, one hangar, nothing but flat fields of soybeans all around, and the Rockies way off on the horizon. The crew deplaned and went into the airport’s mini-lounge to await Chaz’s return.
Chaz threw a Nike bag into the rear seat of the Jeep and Hammond drove them away on a two-lane blacktop that ran straight as a string through miles of soy.
“You leave a job for this?” Chaz said after a while.
“Security,” Hammond said. “A wind farm.”
“They need that much security?”
“Naw. The crazies are only pissed at the nuke plants. Mostly shooing away campers.”
“So, it was quiet then?”
“Not really,” Hammond said, eyes on the road. “Those windmills are noisy as hell.”
Hammond pulled onto the gravel lot of a mom-and-pop truck stop off 20 and they found a booth.
“You need some heavy ordnance, bro,” Hammond said after the waitress left coffee and a carafe.
“And your services, if you’re up for it,” Chaz said.
“Domestic or foreign?” Hammond said. “That make a difference?”
“Not for the kind of money you’re talking about.
It’s two days, and you never leave the country,” Chaz said.
“And you’re on a tight schedule.”
“We need to be guns-up and on post in thirty-six hours.”
“Let’s go shopping.” Hammond whistled for the waitress and made a circle motion over the coffee carafe. “We need this to go, darling.”
The strip mall sat as dead as an ancient burial ground at the back of an acre of cracked asphalt. Three cars sat at a faded old KFC by the road. There was a boarded-up Olive Garden. The strip of stores was anchored by a shut-down discount store on one end and a shut-down supermarket on the other. The only occupied stores were a Chinese take-out and a place called simply Guns/Pawn that sat next to the shuttered Sav-A-Lot Market.
“You vouch for this guy?” Chaz said.
“I dealt with him a few times,” Hammond said. “He didn’t screw me over, and he doesn’t talk.”
“It’s just, I mean, he’s set up shop in a strip mall.”
“Hiding in plain sight.”
“I guess,” Chaz said. They drove past empty shopping cart corrals.
“You need this stuff in a hurry,” Hammond said. “That doesn’t leave a lot of options. Hurry means risk, and hurry means money. Live with it, Raleigh.”
Hammond pulled around the back and parked by a military-model Hummer finished in real tree camo. He knocked at the heavy metal door set in the back wall. Chaz held the Nike bag under his arm.
The rusting door creaked open to reveal a metal bar-lock and slap bolts top and bottom. The wall around it would come down before this door ever fell. A heavyset guy with biker tats met them with an open smile. He had an automatic in a pancake holster in the shadow of his spreading gut. His t-shirt read TAX THIS! with an arrow pointing toward his crotch.
“Meet Wall,” Hammond said. Wall held a hand out.
“You are?” Wall smiled, revealing two missing upper front teeth. The butt of an unfiltered Camel dangled from his lip.
“Mister Cash,” Chaz said.
Wall laughed with a wet rumble deep in his chest. Emphysema or worse.
“Well, shit. You’re always welcome, Mister Cash!” He pulled the door aside and let them by.
The back room was typical pawn. Some dirt bikes. Shelves of appliances and musical instruments. Chaz glanced through the door to the front room, where there were rows of lighted show counters loaded with watches, rings, necklaces, handguns, and knives. The walls were lined with rifles and shotguns chained into racks. The front windows and door had heavy iron bars set in them. A rail-thin woman in a t-shirt and jeans sat smoking in a register cage, watching a small TV monitor. She wore a snubby revolver in a clip-on holster in the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back.
“Goin’ in the back, Jolinda,” Wall called.
“Uh-huh,” she sang back, never taking her eyes from the TV. One of those courtroom shows where low-rent dickheads made fools of themselves in front of a studio audience, arguing over shit only they cared about.
Wall led them to where an area rug embroidered with
