Tommy waved the butt at the plaque, scattering ash across its face. “It’s constructed out of an undetectable contact poison?”
“No.”
“It’s hiding a shiv and a Beretta Nano?”
“No.”
“Then that raises the inevitable question. Which is this: What the motherfuck? I mean, a decorative tchotchke? It’s to … what? Prettify your fucking powder room? Hang it above the decorative antique butter churn in the corner? Or, no — wait — use it as a backdrop to spruce up your Hummel collection?”
“Tommy … It’s just … it’s for a friend.” Evan held up his hands. “It’s got a brass patina, and I figured you’d know how to solder it.”
“Oh, yeah. This ain’t below my pay grade or nothing. You want I should cut you a spare set of house keys while I’m at it?”
Tommy specialized in procurement and R&D for specified government-sanctioned black groups. He was the finest armorer Evan had ever met, able to machine up a ghost pistol or produce a next-gen sniper scope at a moment’s notice. They knew little about each other’s background or current extracurriculars, but Evan had learned enough to know that he could trust Tommy absolutely and that their moral bearings were aligned.
To acquire specialty gear, Evan visited Tommy’s shop on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The exterior looked like just another auto shop, but inside, it was a dungeon, its oil-spotted floor buried under mills and lathes, RPGs and munitions crates, cutting torches and test-firing tubes. If few people knew of the lair hidden by the banal exterior, fewer yet were afforded the respect of having the surveillance cameras unplugged before they arrived. But Tommy honored Evan’s request that they meet only under full-black protocols.
On the drive to Vegas, Evan had kept the mirror Boeing Black resting on the passenger seat in speaker mode. Again he’d activated the mike on Naomi Templeton’s phone, allowing him to listen in on her lunchtime conversation with the president. By the time he’d arrived at Tommy’s shop, he — like the president — had received her full security brief.
Right now Evan breathed in the scent of gun oil and steroidal coffee and tried to refocus his friend. “Like I said, I’m happy to—”
Tommy snapped down the welder’s mask and fired up a butane microtorch. Sparks flew up against the dark rectangle banding his eyes. He made slow but meticulous progress, smoothing out the lines until the plaque had been restored to its previous glory.
The mask snapped back up. “Now can we please get to some real fucking work? Or do you need me to sew knee patches onto your corduroys?”
Evan said, “I need you to design and field-test a weapon for me. By Thursday.”
“What is it?”
Evan told him.
Tommy’s bird’s-nest eyebrows hoisted up to touch the forehead band of the welder’s mask. He whistled. “That’s a whole other Oprah,” he said. “You sure you don’t want something more straightforward? Mosey on up to the bad guys and spit out copious amounts of brass and lead?”
“Straightforward’s not an option.”
Evan removed a folded sheet from his pocket that contained the calculations of his chosen perch and slid it across the workbench. Tommy scowled down at the paper before donning a pair of rectangular reading glasses better suited to a librarian. He read everything over again.
“Look,” he said. “I know I’m your RKI, but I gotta say—”
“RKI?”
“Reasonably Knowledgeable Individual.” Tommy smiled his gap-toothed grin. “But this?” He shook the paper. “By Thursday? Is asking a lot.”
“I also need it to meet me in D.C.,” Evan said. “I can’t travel with it.”
“Oh, well. Of fucking course. You sure you don’t prefer Dubai? I could airlift it in, set it down on top of the Burj Khalifa.”
“Some supporting weaponry also. Explosives. Oh, and I need less lethal options. Make sure the wrong people don’t get hurt. There’s a list of specialized gear on the back of the page—”
Tommy held up both hands, closed his eyes against the apparent strain of it all. “Can you pretend you’re not comprehensively impossible? Just for, like, a minute? Lie to me? Whisper sweet nothings? Tell me my ass don’t look fat in these cargo pants?”
“I’m prepared to pay heavy.”
“Well, that’s fortunate, ’cuz it’s gonna cost you heavy. I mean, fixed location, single shot, no adjustments. It’ll have to be more perfect than perfect.” His basset-hound eyes peered down at the data through the ridiculously tiny eyeglass lenses. He looked like Santa Claus if Santa Claus were a qualified marksman. “This survey of site better be dead-on.”
“It is.”
“I gotta duplicate the elevation precisely. It’s not like I can wander out into the desert and find a dune at the same height. Nah, I’ll have to rent a scaffolding platform lift and drive it out to a remote location so I can range-test a whole goddamned bunch.”
“Whatever you need to do.”
Eyes on the paper, Tommy flicked a hand at the coffeepot. “Pour me a cup of shut-the-fuck-up, would ya?”
Evan found Tommy’s sticky mug beside the salvaged ship’s porthole he used as an ashtray and coaxed a stream of sludge from the pot.
He handed it off to Tommy, who was already muttering to himself under his breath: “… looking at two hundred sixty-six meters to impact area, which means time of flight has to be…”
He shifted the cigarette to the side of his mouth, sipped coffee across a lip still pouched with Skoal Wintergreen. His hand patted his shirt until it came up with a well-chewed pencil, and he started jotting equations down next to the numbers Evan had supplied — overpressure calculations, projectile angle and velocity, speed of the moving target. His forefinger had been blown off at the knuckle, one of countless injuries, but he gripped the pencil between the stub and his thumb.
He was a hard man to slow down once he got going.
“Tommy?” Evan said.
Tommy did not look up. “I only got three days. Why are you still here talking at me?”
Evan stood another moment watching Tommy work and then withdrew. He threaded through the shadowy shop to the door, escorted out by just the echo of his own footsteps.
47
Roused Beast
Driving home, Evan watched the sun bury itself in the horizon. Its dying glow washed the hills in gold, the sepia-toned filter of another era. The sky, too, was hyper-real, the kind of soft lavender reserved for children’s sketches of sunsets. Soon enough darkness prevailed, headlights and freeway overheads spot-bleaching the endless black strip of the 10.
As Evan neared downtown, the vehicles proliferated like prairie mammals. In short order the freeway grew constipated even by L.A. traffic standards, so he looped south on the 710 and cut west across Slauson Avenue. Given the streetlights, it would probably take him just as long to get home, but there was a pleasure in keeping the Ford pickup on the move, a sense of hard-won progress.
Huntington Park was three square miles of densely packed Hispanic working-class folks living mostly above the poverty line. It felt dreary and vibrant at the same time, nightclubs and health centers, shops and run-down apartments. When Mexico beat Croatia in the World Cup a few years back, the whole neighborhood had taken to the streets, prompting LAPD to dispatch mounted officers in riot gear to ensure that the celebration didn’t tip into lawlessness.
Evan almost didn’t notice the sign as he drove past.
In hindsight he wished he hadn’t.
Waiting for the light to change, he read the reversed words in the reflection off his windshield, a neon-pink glare: NNI ROTOM REGAYOV.