He nodded slowly. “You have papers on it?”
“Papers?” Oh, shit. “Do I need a permit for a rifle?”
“No. Not unless it’s full automatic. You got a bill of sale?”
“It was a gift.”
“Mind if I take a look?”
“Of course not.” Not a good time to rant about “search and seizure.” I started to open the door.
“Stay in the car. Sir.” He opened the back door and lifted the weapon out. He looked it over carefully and sniffed at the receiver.
“I just fired it,” I said helpfully.
“Hm… excuse me.” He carried it back to the squad car. He and the other cop sat there for a few minutes. I could hear the radio crackling but couldn’t understand what it was saying.
He came back without the rifle and asked for my driver’s license and registration. I gave him the license. “I don’t know where the registration is. It’s not my car.”
“No. You’re not Catherine Majors,” he said, deadpan. He walked back to the squad car and returned with the rifle. He put it in the back and closed the door with a quiet click.
“Thank you for your cooperation.” He gave the license back. “Please drive carefully.”
I looked at the batteries and recorder on the seat next to me and had a melancholy recollection: the last time I saw my grandfather before he died, just before I shipped for the desert. He and my dad and I had all had too much to drink. It was his eightieth birthday, and we had a recorder like this one going, while he talked about the past.
Grand-dude and I shared the bond of both having been drafted (Dad’s generation was spared), and we traded Basic Training memories. Then he started to talk about combat, which he never had done before.
He started to cry—not weeping, just his eyes leaking a little, dabbing, and he delivered a slurred soliloquy about how useless it all had been—how much less freedom we had after his war, Vietnam, than before; how the government used war to increase its control over its citizens, what a fucking waste it had all been. Dad got upset with him, me headed overseas in a couple of days.
But I said it wasn’t that different from what I heard in the barracks every night. Grand-dude said yeah, same-same. Soldiers aren’t fools.
But we go anyhow.
4.
Kit’s office was in the main administration building, a short walk from the cluster of student-oriented shops and restaurants downtown. It cost half as much as lunch to park anywhere nearby, so I found a place down in the student ghetto and walked the half mile through quiet streets, checking out every car that passed. This is where the bad guys would appear out of nowhere and tackle me and put a bag over my head and stuff me into the trunk of a car, and no one would notice.
In fact, every car seemed to be a student looking for a parking place. Perfect disguise.
I called Kit and suggested Hamburger Haven, not a ritzy place, but small enough so that no one could come in unobserved. I called her from the door, so I could just step inside to watch and wait.
There must have been something in my voice. She asked me what was wrong.
“Nothing. I just got pulled over by a cop,” I half lied. “No ticket, no problem.”
I sat down at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee, but then realized I was too fucking jumpy already, and changed it to a beer. “Breakfast of champions,” the waitress said, although it was after eleven. I guess I looked like someone who had just gotten up. And found an early Christmas present on the doormat.
I smiled at her and realized for the first time that I smelled like smokeless powder. Would anybody notice? With my current luck, I expected an off-duty cop to sit down next to me and say, “Been shootin’?”
Yeah, think I’ll go assassinate some stranger so the bad guys don’t give my girlfriend myelofibrosis. You ever have a day like that?
I finished the beer pretty fast, and the waitress was delivering my second as Kit walked through the door. She smiled. “Starting early?”
“You have no idea.” I picked up the beer. “Let’s sit in the back.”
The waitress trailed us with menus; we waved them off and ordered burgers. Kit sat down with a pleasant expectant smile. “How’s the bike?”
“Um, it’s good, good. We have a real problem.”
“We?”
“Not like you and me. I mean…” Where to start? “I’m in deep shit. And I’m afraid you are, too.”
“What’d you do? We?”
“Nothing! It’s just… right after you left this morning, the doorbell rang.”
“Before dawn?”
“Yeah.” I took a deep breath and told her about the rifle, the phone call, the rifle range, and the state trooper, talking low and fast. She listened silently, eyes widening.
“And you haven’t gone to the police?”
“They wouldn’t believe me! It’s too fantastic.”
“But you have proof. You have the rifle. The state trooper’s report will verify that you took it straight out to the dump and… well, yeah. That’s a problem.”
“Like why didn’t I tell any of this to the Smokey? I guess it was the timing. Like he was part of it, following me.” Our burgers came and I took a bite and struggled to swallow it. Drank some beer. “I should’ve called the cops first thing, right after I found the rifle and the woman called. Hell, I shouldn’t have picked up the phone when it rang.”
“Let me smell your hand.” She took my right hand in hers and sniffed it. “You still smell like gunpowder. If we went to the police right now, that would strengthen your case.”
I wasn’t sure. “It’d mean I’ve fired a gun recently. But that’s already on record.”
She frowned. “Guess so.”
“Am I just being paranoid? Maybe I should go straight to the cops. But the woman on the phone expressly told me not to, or they’d come after you. Like Timmy what’s-his-name.”
“Jesus.” She sat back and looked around. “‘Damned if you do and damned if you don’t,’ my father would say.”
I bit my lip but then said it: “I’ve thought about your father.”
“What about him?”
“People who might have a reason to do this.”
She frowned and shook her head slightly. “No way. He likes you.”
“So he says, but he’s not sanguine about my earning potential. And he’s a hunter; he does know all about guns.”
“And a fellow veteran. He wouldn’t do this—not to you, not to me.”
“Yeah, I know. Grasping at straws.”
“Grasp at a different one.” She touched both my hands. “Who else would do this?”
“No one, or anyone. You write a book and you sort of become a target.”
“Some of the characters in your first book were based on real people, weren’t they? Maybe somebody didn’t like what you said.”
I shrugged. “Not saying it couldn’t happen. But an e-mail would get the message across better… besides, it’s too oblique for that, and too expensive. You could scare me as much with a postcard, if you said the right thing.”
“‘I’m going to trash your book in the New York Times.’”
“That might work. But I sort of favor ‘I will get you when you least expect it.’”
“You’ve given it some thought.”
“Well, yeah. Trying to put myself in the head of someone who would do this.”
She chewed thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s not personal.”
“You’re the one they’re threatening to murder. That’s not personal?”
“What I mean is, think of it as a business proposition. They want you to do something illegal and probably dangerous. So they offer incentives, positive and negative. If the money isn’t enough, then maybe saving my life would be.”