Quantico, Virginia
“Jesus H. Christ! What are you shooting over there, Carruth? It sounded like a damned bomb going off!”
Carruth smiled. “What’s the matter, Milo, a little noise bother you?”
“When it about blows my damned ears out through my headphones, hell, yeah, it bothers me!”
Milo, a short fireplug of a man, ambled down the firing line. It was just the two of them at the range on this rainy Saturday morning. Milo was ex-Army, a green hat who’d done his time before, during, and just after the second Gulf War, and so Carruth had respect for him, even if he was Army and not Navy. The man had been shot at, he had shot back, and that was worth something in Carruth’s world. They bumped into each other at the range now and then, but they weren’t drinking buddies or anything, though they could slap coins at one another.
Carruth held up the new handgun. “This here is your basic 500 Maximum, aka the BMF. Custom-made by Gary Reeder, down in Arizona.”
“I heard of him. BMF? I bet I know what that stands for.”
“Best-made firearm,” Carruth said, his face serious. Then he grinned.
“Looks like a Ruger Bisley,” Milo said. “Stainless steel?”
“Yep, about a five-inch barrel, but the frame is heavier, and stretched a little, on account of the round being a tad on the large side.” He tabled the revolver and picked up a round of the ammo. “Fifty-caliber. This particular specimen is a 435-grain LBT-hard-cast gas-checked bullet made by Cast Performance—developed by John Linebaugh—for the elephant herds in Wyoming.”
“Ain’t no elephant herds in Wyoming,” Milo said.
“Exactly.”
Milo shook his head. “I stepped right into that one.”
Carruth grinned again. “Forty-eight grains of powder for a muzzle velocity around sixteen hundred feet per second.”
“Christ.”
He handed the round to Milo.
“Lord, it makes a .45 auto round look like a runt. Bigger around and twice as tall. You expecting to run into a rampaging water buffalo out on the Mall?”
“I wouldn’t use one of those if I did.” He nodded at the cartridge Milo examined. “That sucker will punch right through a water buffalo from beak to bunghole and knock down a lion standing behind him. It’s a bit stout for everyday use. Here.”
He picked another round up from the bench and handed it to Milo. It was a little shorter. “This is the carry load. The 510-GNR, an itty-bitty 350-grain LBT bullet, a mere thirty-three grains of powder pushing only thirteen hundred and fifty feet per second. That’s Reeder’s proprietary load. The big one is the elephant-stopper. There’s a medium version, halfway between, pretty good for brown bear. The littlest one? That’s the sissy load—for people only.”
Carruth picked up the revolver and offered that to Milo.
Milo said, “You ever tap anybody with it?”
“So far, no.”
“Not all that heavy,” the ex-Green Beret said. “What’s it weigh?”
“Right at three pounds empty. Got five ports milled into the barrel to help with the recoil, though they kinda make it look like a dragon sneezing flame. Piece costs a couple house payments in a good neighborhood. Want to cook off a few?”
Milo hefted the piece. “A 435-grain bullet with forty-eight grains of powder? You got a crowbar to pry it out when it recoils and buries the front sight in my forehead?”
Carruth laughed. “Yeah, it’s a wrist-breaker, all right. Your basic .357 Magnum? Six foot/pounds of recoil, with a 125-grain round. Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry .44 Magnum? Fourteen foot/pounds. Casull’s .454? Thirty-one foot/pounds. This honker? Talking about . . . seventy-two foot /pounds.”
“Damn,” Milo said. He handed the revolver back to Carruth.
Carruth laughed again.
Milo shook his head. “What’s the point, man? I mean, it’s way too much gun for anything around here—hell, on the whole continent, the one below us, and those across the nearest two ponds.”
“Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it,” Carruth said.
“Yeah, uh huh, right.” He gave the taller man a look.
“Okay. I’m six-two, two-thirty-five, and I can bench-press four hundred pounds. Fifty-caliber is the biggest round allowed by law for a handgun. It’s a man’s piece and I can handle it. No matter what’s coming down the alley in my direction? I can stop it. Lion busts out of the zoo, I can drop it faster than you can blink. Guy in body armor wants to play? I can knock him down and break something even if it doesn’t penetrate the weave—it’d be like getting hit with a sledgehammer. If I need to shoot somebody, he will stay shot. I like that.”
Milo shoot his head again. “You fuckin’ SEALs, you’re all fuckin’ crazy, you know that?”
Carruth nodded. “Oh, yeah. Big-time.” What he didn’t tell Milo was that he had a custom-made horsehide holster and belt made by Kramer Leather for the BMF, and that it was, in fact, his carry gun. Of course, in D.C., any gun was too much—they frowned on concealed carry, or even owning the suckers unless you were in the employ of the local police or some federal law enforcement agency, or were willing to fill out a shitload of paper, get printed, and wait a year for the FBI check to come back. . . . Well, fuck ’em. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Yeah, the piece was a bit heavy on his right hip, but he was big enough to hide it under a jacket or windbreaker. Milo was right, it was too much gun for anything he was going to run into, but he carried it, and the real reason?
Because he could. And someday, he expected he would get a chance to cook with it when it counted.
He expected that would be pretty soon, too.
4
Washington, D.C.
Abe Kent sat in his new apartment in the city and stared at the guitar in the chair. He had taken it out of its case and set it there and, no doubt about it, it was beautiful. He had done enough research when he’d been chasing the Georgian, Natadze, so that he knew what a good guitar looked like, and he liked listening to people who were adept with them, but he had no musical talent himself.
And yet here he was, with a ten-thousand-dollar guitar.
He sighed. He had taken the instrument out and looked at it a dozen times since he’d gotten it. He didn’t know why, but he felt as if he somehow owed it to the man he’d killed to . . . make use of the thing. He could sell it, or give it to charity, but neither of those felt right. And if he was going to keep an instrument worth that much? It ought not to be sitting in the corner in its case gathering dust.
He sighed again. It didn’t make any sense, but he knew what he had to do. He stood, picked up the guitar, and put it back into the case.
The store was small, in a sleepy neighborhood on the outskirts of D.C., in a little commercial strip mall backed by a residential neighborhood. It was called the Fretboard. It had wrought-iron grates on the windows, curvy patterns made to look like a design element rather than bars to keep thieves out. There were several neon signs in the windows advertising products whose names Kent mostly didn’t recognize.
A bell chimed as he entered. The place smelled like fresh-cut fir, and there were a couple of customers at the counter talking to a long-haired clerk of eighteen or nineteen. The clerk had a soul-patch that had been dyed green, and maybe nine piercings in his ears and nose.
A third man stood nearby, picking out tunes on an electric guitar—he was pretty good. The guitarist was playing a collage, a medley of old rock numbers Kent mostly recognized, and the clerk was laughing.