It’s early morning. The sidewalk is cold under her bare feet. She’s shaken, and her burned arm throbs, but she feels lighter than air.
A car stops.
A john, cruising. Rolls down the window and asks if she’s for sale.
“Not anymore,” Moni says.
She walks away, not looking back.
An Unkindness of Ravens
Gary, Indiana, 2003
Javier Estrada
Javier had been transporting a package west out of Pennsylvania en route to meet his drop-off in Boise—a fat-assed trucker named Jonathan—when he started seeing the billboard advertisements.
The early ones, those just over the Indiana state line, were vague.
GOT BABGAKS?
By Richmond, the billboards were advising him to….
GET BABGAKS!
…and he was becoming angry—some bullshit American marketing scheme. All this fucking country did was try to sell you shit.
But by the time he reached the west side of Greenfield, the acronym had revealed itself, literally:
BABGAKS = BULLETS AND BABES GUN AND KNIFE SHOW
Jav’s anger melted, just a tad.
A gun show.
Hmmm.
In theory, he hated them. Or rather, he hated the people who attended them. Small-dicked redneck pieces of shit who had no concept of the beauty and function of a perfectly-constructed weapon. Crackers who didn’t have a drop of the inner-steel it took to use them for their true purpose.
It wasn’t shooting mangy-looking deer, and it wasn’t shooting targets at the range.
But despite this, he could feel himself coming to the gradual realization that he kind of wanted to go. The billboards said the show was being held at the Indianapolis Merchandise Mart, which was right off I-70, not even ten miles ahead. He’d driven all night out of Pittsburgh, and he was already well-ahead of schedule. Even better, since his Escalade was in the shop for a new sound system install, he’d rented a brand new 2003 Infiniti G35 sedan for this job.
Which had a trunk.
Which was where his cargo currently slept in a blissful black tar dream. He could simply redose her, hit the gun show for several hours, and see if there was anything special that caught his eye.
Porter
Leo Porter, of Porter’s Guns and Ammo, surveyed the customers milling about in his eponymous shop and frowned. He was busy, but not busy enough. Unless he started selling some big ticket merchandise, and plenty of it, he was never going to be able to repay the loan.
The loan, eleven thousand bucks, had been given to him by Sal Dovolanni, a Chicago wiseguy who wanted the principal, plus an outrageous thirty percent interest, by noon tomorrow. Porter had taken the loan to bid on hosting the annual Bullets and Babes Gun and Knife Show. The BABGAKS traveled around the country, and Sal had done well as a vendor during the past years. But he’d been told the big money was in sponsoring the event. If Sal did that, the vendors would pay him, and he’d be able to offer his entire inventory for sale, rather than just the limited amount of firearms he could cart from state to state.
So he’d taken the loan, convinced that he’d make the money back and plenty more besides. And actually, he’d more than doubled the loan. But he’d forgotten something extremely important.
The majority of his sales were by credit card. Porter wouldn’t see that money until next week, when it was direct-deposited into his bank account.
Dovolanni wanted cash. Wanted it right fucking now. And Porter only had 5k in the safe, maybe another few hundred in the register.
He’d realized his mistake that morning, but a frantic call to Dovolanni for more time had been met with derision. Sure, Porter could be late. But he’d get two broken legs just the same.
So earlier that day, Porter began offering drastic discounts for cash. In some cases, he was actually losing money by selling below cost. But he liked his legs as they were, functional and unbroken. Years ago, he’d dislocated a finger. That had been agonizing. He couldn’t imagine the pain of a larger bone being broken. If it came down to that, he’d seriously consider eating a bullet first. Porter knew plenty of guys who’d been shot. Supposedly, it didn’t hurt that much.
“How much is this box of 7.62 shells?” The question came from a guy in fatigues with SWANSON stenciled on his breast pocket. Two other matching wannabes named MUNCHEL and PESSOLANO flanked him. Porter knew they were wannabes because they called the ammo shells instead of their proper name, cartridges. He would have bet all the cash in the safe that none of them had a shred of military experience.
“Price is on the box, like all the other cartridges you asked about,” Porter said. These guys had been in his shop for over an hour and hadn’t bought a single thing.
“Right,” said Swanson, “but you said there’s a twenty percent discount for cash.”
“Yeah.”
“So how much?”
Porter fought not to shake his head, and instead explained, with infinite patience, as if speaking to a brain-damaged child, how to calculate twenty percent off.
The moron put the ammo box back anyway.
Porter turned away and sighed, wondering if he should run for the border now, or at least wait until closing time.
He decided to ride it out. Occasionally, miracles happened.
Maybe he’d stumble into one today.
Jack
Cops and guns went together like cops and donuts. While I’ve never been partial to donuts, except for an occasional Boston Crème, I did respect and appreciate guns.
Last year, the Bullets and Babes Gun and Knife Show had been in Chicago, and I’d attended with my partner, Herb Benedict, for the express purpose of buying a semi-automatic.
My carry gun, a .38 Colt Detective Special, held six cartridges and weighed twenty-one ounces. It was no longer being produced, and I was becoming the butt of ageism jokes around the station. The latest was a Photoshopped pic of me wielding a wooden club with the caption: “Lt. Daniels Finally Upgrades Her Weapon.”
I liked revolvers, because they never jammed—one of my first cases almost ended in my death because I’d been relying on a semi-auto. But last year I’d been tempted by a Heckler & Koch P2000, which weighed the same as my Colt, and held a clip of ten .357 Sig rounds. I liked how it fired, how it felt, how it didn’t jam even though I put two hundred rounds through it on the practice range, and I’d been very close to sealing the deal when Herb was overtaken with a particularly terrible bout of food poisoning, publicly erupting at both ends. Which, coincidentally enough, came from eating donuts. I took him to the ER, intending to return to the show, but didn’t have the chance. And while Illinois had its fair share of gun shops where I could order an HK P2000, real life had gotten in the way and I never got around to it.
But my Captain had forced me to take a day off, and so I drove out to Indiana for this year’s BABGAKS, with the intent to pick one up. It didn’t hurt that the gun dealer from last year was easy to look at. Though I was currently living with a guy, things had been going poorly, so it didn’t hurt to keep my options open. My boyfriend was the reason for my recent tendency to put in more hours at work. Better to stay at the Job than try to deal with our growing dissatisfaction with one another.
The show took place under a gigantic tent, in a parking lot adjacent to Porter’s Guns and Ammo. Half of it was apportioned to the vendors, the other half to speakers for various demonstrations. Even though it was cold outside, the body heat generated by the number of people inside provided so much efficient heating, I regretted not leaving my Donna Karan jacket in my car.
The crowd was 90% men, most of them carrying. You’d think there’d be strict regulations about bringing in ammo for fear of a disagreement that ended in a shooting, but in fact the opposite seemed to be true. When everyone was armed, people tended to stay on their best behavior.