Dowling sat, not moving, and Santos smiled. He hadn’t thought the man had it in him. He was a good judge of such things.
He killed the motorcycle’s flashing lights, unclipped them and the siren and controls from the bike, then pushed the two-wheeler into a clump of bushes nearby, so it wasn’t visible from the road. Now it was just an ordinary motorcycle. By the time somebody found it, this would be all over. And there wouldn’t be any way to connect it to Dowling and his bodyguards anyway — the rest of the night’s business was going to happen thirty miles away on a different highway. The motorcycle wasn’t stolen; it had been bought under a fake name, and there was no reason to link it to the limo. It would be another of life’s little unsolved mysteries.
Santos walked to the car, opened the driver’s door, and sat behind the wheel. “Just sit there quietly,” he said. “We’ll go for a ride, then we’ll have a chat. Behave yourself, and all it costs you is a little inconvenience.”
A lie, that. Dowling and his two guards would be dead within an hour, all things going as planned. But no point in upsetting the man, was there?
It was the nightmare that had finally pushed Michaels into it. He’d awakened in a sweat, heart pounding, from a dream in which the psychotic doper Bershaw had come to his house and captured Toni. In this one, the would-be killer had Little Alex and was holding him by one ankle, getting ready to smash the baby against the kitchen counter.
Michaels hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after that horrific image.
John Howard had told him whenever he was ready to give him a call. As soon as it got late enough, he did just that.
Now, they were in Michaels’s office.
“I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time,” Michaels said. “Thanks, John.”
“No problem. Makes perfect sense to me,” Howard said. “In your place, I’d have done it a long time ago.”
“I mean, even with all of Toni’s expertise, and the knives and tasers and stuff we have laying around, somebody has twice shown up at my house with murderous intent.”
“I remember the last incident quite well,” Howard said. “It’s about time you got some more serious hardware.”
“Yeah. I want to be a little better prepared if it ever happens again.”
“I expect this will do the trick,” Howard said. “Let me show you what we have.”
Michaels nodded and looked at the gun case, which seemed to be some kind of brownish-gray canvas or oil-cloth, darkened here and there with splotches of lube.
He untied a string at the fat end of the cloth case and slid the weapon out.
“This belonged to my uncle,” he said. “It’s what they call a ‘coach gun,’ being the kind of weapon a lot of the stagecoach drivers used when they rode shotgun guard duty back in the Old West. This one is a European American Armory Bounty Hunter II, actually made in Russia for export. My uncle used to use it in cowboy action shooting.”
“Cowboy action shooting?”
“A competitive sport. Men and women get dressed up in pre1900 costumes like those that might have been worn in the Old West, give themselves names like ‘Doc’ or ‘Deadeye’ or ‘The Kid,’ and while in persona, shoot for scores using period weapons — single-action six-shooters, rifles, usually the lever-action kind, and shotguns.”
“Really?”
“Yep. A grown-up version of cowboys ’n’ Indians. Got Native Americans who wear period stuff and compete, too. Everybody wears hearing protectors and safety glasses and all, but otherwise the look is usually pretty authentic.”
“Huh.”
“My uncle used to love it. There were a fair number of black cowboys on the frontier. After slavery was abolished, and before Jim Crow got going, nobody much cared what color you were, long as you could ride, punch cattle okay, and could shoot snakes or rustlers if they showed up. At least that’s the story I heard growing up.”
“Interesting.”
“It’s not a particularly expensive gun, basic walnut stocks and case-hardened color. The Russians don’t build ’em pretty, but they are very solid and mechanically well-made. Uses 12-gauge shells, the short ones, two-and-three-quarter inchers only. Just as well — the high-powered three-inchers would have a fierce recoil with a barrel this short.”
He pivoted a lever in the middle to one side, and opened the breech. “Got twenty-inch-long double barrels, extractors that pull the shells out, but not ejectors, so it doesn’t throw them on the floor. External hammers, they call them ‘rabbit ears,’ see? This one is a modern copy of the old ones, so the hammers don’t actually hit a firing pin, but cock internal strikers. That way, you can use a hammer block as well as a trigger-block safety, here, this button. It’s about as simple as you can get. You open it up, put a pair of shells in, close it, then cock the hammers. Got two triggers, one for each barrel. Slide the safety off, aim it like you would a rifle, or if somebody is in your face, poke them with it like a stick and pull the trigger.”
“What if I miss? Is this going to go through the wall and kill my neighbor in his bed?”
“Not if you use birdshot. You don’t need buckshot or slugs for close range stuff. Combat distance, a load of bird- or rabbit-shot works just fine, and the little bbs don’t go far after hitting couple of layers of sheet rock and siding. Even though you could get a permit for a handgun, this packs a lot more punch, it’s safer, and it’s legal to own here in the District, even for civilians.”
Michaels took the gun, worked the action open and closed, then tried the hammers out. It had a nice, solid feel to it.
“You should drop by the range and put a few rounds through it. It’ll kick some, but you can hip-shoot easy enough if you don’t want a sore shoulder. Just like pointing your finger.”
Michaels nodded.
“And here’s the gun safe.”
He held up an oblong box big enough to hold the shotgun, with an image of a hand on it.
“This is titanium, lightweight, but strong enough to resist somebody trying to pry it open with a screwdriver. It’ll hold a couple of long arms. You bolt it to a couple of wall studs in a closet in the bedroom, put your gun and ammo inside it. It’s got a fingerprint reader in the hand-print here that will accept sixty-four different ones, so you can program it to read yours and Toni’s and anybody else you trust. Uses a lithium-ion battery to run the reader, battery is good for five or six years, and when it starts to run low, it flashes a diode, right here, so you know to replace it. It can also be wired into your house alarm system if you want.”
“Seems, well, safe enough.”
“If you really want, you can get Gunny at the range to install the electronic safeties we use in our issue guns, get a transmitting ring, and cover it that way, too. That way, if an unauthorized person should manage to get it out of the safe, it won’t shoot for them — but I wouldn’t worry about that.
“So if somebody starts kicking in your front door in the middle of the night, you can get this out and ready to go in a few seconds. Anybody who sees you standing there with a piece like this is apt to think twice about proceeding in your direction. A lot of guys who would charge a pistol will pull up when they see the muzzle of a shotgun yawning at them.”
“I can understand that. Looks like a cannon.”
“Downside is, you only get two shots. A pump would give you five rounds minimum, more with an extended tube.