“You’ll get it straightened out, Andrew?” he asked.
“Absolutely. It may take a while, I’ve got to go through the records. I may have to call them. And I haven’t even begun to put the handguns in the safe.”
“Oh, I’ll do that.”
“No, no,” said Andrew. “I know you’re tired. I’ll take care of everything.”
That pleased the old man. There were over seventy handguns on display in the store and, though it had never been robbed, the old man wanted it never to be robbed, which committed him or Andrew to a half hour’s hard labor every night, picking up the guns and carefully stowing them in the two big safes behind the counter, then locking them tight. The rifles he could leave on display; the thieves were mostly black people from the city and they only wanted handguns.
“Okay, Andrew. I think we’re due for an ATF walk-through anytime now and I don’t want any trouble. There was never any trouble with Flora, she kept the records so neatly. It’s not my skill, you know. Not my kind of mind. I’d rather talk hunting with customers. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“It’s not a problem. I’ll get to the bottom of this and by the time you get in tomorrow, we’ll be shipshape.”
“Make sure to-”
“I know, I know,” said Andrew, “log the shipment into the ATF bound book, no worries.”
Andrew knew the ATF regs forward and backward, maybe better than Flora. If any gun spent twenty-four hours in a retail outlet, it had to be accounted for in the big log book ATF required, which would show its arrival and ultimately its dispersal, either via retail sale or, rarely, shipment back to wholesaler.
“Mr. Reilly, you go on home. I’ll run this through, and if it’s a mistake, I’ll relabel and ready for shipment back and Wally can pick them up tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Andrew. Don’t know what I’d do without you.”
It took the old man more than a few minutes to get himself together enough to leave. Since Flora’s death, he’d become a ditherer. He’d start one thing, get halfway through, then move on to another. In the end, he had accomplished nothing except to half start a bunch of things that poor Andrew would have to follow through on. Mr. Reilly knew he had this tendency and he was too reliant on Andrew, but he’d never really come out of the fog that his wife’s death had caused. Anyway, in time, he was set to leave, and he yelled good night to Andrew, unlocked then relocked the door, and got into his car and drove away, wondering if he could still make the early bird rate at the Walloon Lake Sizzler.
As soon as the old man left, Andrew used an X-acto knife to slice the shipping pouch on the big crate and slid out the bill of lading. He knew that it contained sixteen Bulgarian AK-74s from WTI. They’d arrived in the United States as surplus kit purchased by Century Arms, of Vermont. Century’s not particularly subtle armorers had replaced the full auto parts with American-made semiauto parts, which by regulation qualified them for US retail sale, and somewhat haphazardly reassembled them. Usually they worked; sometimes they didn’t. Those guns were wholesaled to WTI, who overstamped them with their own emblem, then repackaged them for entry in the great American gun ocean, 300 million and growing. The smaller package contained two hundred of the orange Chinese magazines held to be the best on the market. Nobody cared much about them and they went uncovered in ATF regs.
Andrew recorded each gun by serial number off the bill of lading as well as all other pertinent data. Then, using the blade again, he sliced the box end open skillfully, careful not to make any jagged cuts or rip anything in haste. He slid out the guns, each of which arrived packed in a Styrofoam box, then sliced the tape on the boxes. The guns lay inside, along with a moldy leather strap, a ten-round aftermarket magazine, a bayonet, a brass oiler, and a poorly translated manual. The 74s were real cool. He’d seen them initially in the first edition of Modern Combat, where Merc Force Blue used them to take down a Soviet missile silo in Uzbek that had been commandeered by Muslim terrorists. In that game, they’d worked well, though of course the 74s fired a smaller round than the 47s, an Eastbloc variant on our own 5.56 NATO. The cool thing about the Modern Combat series, as opposed to Medal of Honor or Black Merx or Commando Ops, was that the game took into account the muzzle energy of its weapons, so when you smoked a muji on the 74, it took more center of mass hits to put him down. You had to make that adjustment, just like in real life, or he was the one that got the kill.
In any event the guns bore no surprises: standard Red design, utilitarian, untroubled by aesthetics, uninterested in making a statement other than “This machine exists to kill people,” with rough triggers and painted or baked enamel finishes. It was a gun for small, brown people, with a smallish pistol grip and a shortish buttstock, just the thing for little men trying to upset a big, US-supported government, the rifle’s purpose the world over. The metal was pressed-that is, stamped out crudely-or industrially bent to form by some huge, clanky device in a hellish, dismal, steam-punk factory next to a river of sludge in some perpetually smog-shrouded Eastbloc or ChiCom city. Its makers were all government workers, paid in pennies by the national defense industry; they went home to nothingness and squalor, while the guns, in the millions, were shipped to hot spots, under license to their original artisans in the then Soviet Union. That’s why the pieces were so crappy; no gunmakers’ craft here, as was evident in the older Winchesters and Remingtons in the old man’s rifle racks.
Next, Andrew filled each of the Styrofoam boxes with scrap metal from decommissioned shopping carts he’d bought with cash and smuggled into Mr. Reilly’s store. About six pounds in each box, just an array of coaster wheels, tubes, gratings, screws, washers, and bolts. When the lids were retaped over the trays to form a whole, the whole reinserted in the crate, the crate carefully sealed by packing tape, the result was a package equally the size and weight of the one that had arrived, with the same shifty, noisy density. Short of an X-ray exam, no one could tell the difference between the first package and this one.
Now he went to the store computer and printed out a West Texas Imports address label to patch over the Reilly’s Sporting Goods label. Except that it contained carefully engineered errors: the return zip code for Reilly’s Sporting Goods and for West Texas Imports were both a number off, the 4 from West Texas being where the 3 from Reilly’s should be, and vice versa. Computer error, obviously.
Then, the piece de resistance. It was a UPS Next Day Air bar code, self-adhesive, and the key to the UPS system. It was fake, carefully hand-manufactured by the clever Andrew in his lair in a Minneapolis suburb. No human eyes could read it, but the computers would send the package to New Mexico, to a store that didn’t exist on a street that didn’t exist. At that point, the confused driver would use his optical reader on the bar code for the return address and send it on its way. But its way was not back to Mr. Reilly; it went instead to another store that didn’t exist on a street that didn’t exist. Then it would go to the UPS undeliverable warehouse in Schenectady, New York, with thousands of other items, a facility bound to become overloaded with misaddressed packages during the upcoming Christmas shipping season as clerks struggled to keep up with and track each package either to its proper destination or back to its point of origin.
Tomorrow he would log them out and record the transaction in the bound book for ATF and in the notebook of shipping records that UPS issued to all commercial customers. The missing guns, thought delivered to their destination by the sender and thought returned to their sender by Mr. Reilly, would go unnoticed for months. No money was missing to alert any bean counters either, as Andrew stole about five thousand dollars a month from his wealthy father by equally intricate computer strategies and had financed the transaction out of that fund.