Sweeter Than Wine Page 4

  I knew Anton wanted desperately to be with Priscilla. I would have in his place. But he absolutely had to go to the range—or do something else that involved plenty of sound and fury—or his heart would burst from the terror and despair that he was unaware he reeked of.

  It was an unusually warm evening, the drive east, out onto the prairie, very pleasant. With the windows down, I could smell a world of coyotes, foxes, deer, prairie dogs, burrowing owls, other winged predators most folks don’t know about except from TV nature programs. The sky was clear and there was no Moon. I could have turned the headlights off and driven by starlight, but it would have aggravated Anton.

  We pulled up to the steel pipe gate. He got out and unlocked it. I drove through. He relocked it and climbed back up into the Suburban. We jounced over a rutted road until we reached the part of the range we wanted. There didn’t appear to be anybody else around this evening. I turned the machine around and backed up to the line of shooting benches.

  I try to avoid violence whenever I can, if only because it doesn’t pay a person like me to be conspicuous. If you can run 40 miles an hour, leave finger dimples in bricks, and punch holes in cinderblocks barefisted (I have to admit that hurts a little), it isn’t much of a problem. I’ve been shot more than once and gotten over it the next day.

  But I keep a couple of guns around, just in case. One is the .45 auto the Army issued me in 1942. The other is a Colt, as well, a .38 caliber Detective Special I confiscated from a sap who shot me with it in Lubbock, Texas, in 1969. Was he ever surprised when I didn’t fall down as he’d expected, but broke his nose and took his gun. I let him escape.

  Oh, and I have a shotgun, too, a Remington Model 870 with what’s called a “riot barrel”, an extended six-shot magazine, and rifle sights, that I can reload shells for when Anton and I go shooting claybirds.

  There was some light provided at the range, of course, the old-fashioned blue-green style, set up on telephone-like wooden posts, approximating the street lights in the older, quieter parts of town. I’m not sure that the effect was intentional, but it was useful. I’ve always disliked the newer reddish-brown street lighting. It’s ugly and depressing.

  I would have been okay without any artificial light, but Anton didn’t know that, and he had too many other things to worry about just now. Pulling his stuff out of the back of my car, he laid an old plaid wool blanket across the top of the concrete bench and set his gun bag down. He laid his long guns in their soft-sided zippered cases beside it.

  I spread my long coat on the next bench to the left, set my .38 in its little plastic envelope on it, and my cased shotgun, as well. Then we took a staple gun and a stack of targets forward—we had chosen one of the 25-yard ranges although most real life and death pistol fighting happens at something more like three yards—and attached them to a couple of four by eight sheets of plywood, already so full of bullet holes, they almost weren’t there. They were held up by four inch steel pipes concreted into the ground. You weren’t supposed to shoot at the pipes, but they were pretty full of bullet holes of their own.

  Both of us had violated strict range protocol, carrying our loaded sidearms downrange with us. To each of us they were like an article of clothing, more or less forgotten until they were needed. But Anton was a cop, with a badge and other credentials. Given the alternatives that portion of Colorado offers, between so-called “open carry” and begging for concealed carry permission, my personal choice is “Don’t ask don’t tell”.

  Back at the benches, each of us removed the magazines and chamber cartridges from the pistols we were carrying—my .45s were 230-grain Federal HydraShok, and the .40s Anton stuffed in his old Glock M22 were 155-grain Winchester SilverTips, both of them accurate, highly effective but expensive loads—and replaced them with magazines filled with cheaper practice ammunition, chosen to duplicate, more or less, the ballistic behavior of the “social” loads we carried every day.

  Shooting glasses, ear protectors, ready on the right, ready on the left, ready on the firing line, Fire!. And we did, with considerable satisfaction. Fourteen rounds for Anton before he ran dry and had to reload, eight for me, leaving one in the chamber so I wouldn’t have to work the slide to get shooting again. I’ve urged Anton many times to count his shots so he might enjoy the same tactical advantage. He replies, in a real firefight, you’ve got other things on your mind, and he’s got a point. I’m in less danger and can take a more relaxed view.

  Each time we fired, blue and pink fireballs 18 inches in diameter blossomed just forward of the muzzles of our pistols. You could have read a newspaper by them, if you’d been an Evelyn Wood graduate. Brass clinked merrily on the concrete walkway connecting the benches and the hardened clay either side of it. Gouts of dust billowed on the earthen berm behind the targets. The night birds even shut up for a little while.

  And there is no perfume like the smell of burned smokeless powder.

  We were in no hurry. I usually carry two spares—the eight-shot reengineered magazines work perfectly in my Colt—so at 25 rounds, I was finished. Anton only carries one 13-round spare, so he was done at 27. He looked over at me, grinning like a little kid from ear to ear as he invariably does. He nodded toward the targets and I nodded back, so we removed our dusty plastic glasses and sweaty ear protectors and walked up front to inspect the holes we’d just made in five pieces of paper.

  Hey, it isn’t any sillier than golf.

  Anton had a 14-round group on his first target (magazine plus chamber) and a 13-round group on the other. Every hole lay within the outermost ten-inch circle, most of them in an inner three-inch circle, centered maybe an inch high and a little to the right. Given the poor lighting—not to mention what was going on inside him—it was more than acceptable. No sane individual would want Anton Varick mad at him.

  I’d put an eight-shot magazine into each of three targets, saving the chamber round by habit. (It had popped out in my hand when I’d cleared the gun to come forward.) Each target showed a single ragged hole an inch and a half in diameter, centered perfectly. Mediocre shooting for me, but when he saw them, Anton whistled, as he always does. He says I’m a wizard. He doesn’t know that the truth—inhuman strength, telescopic nocturnal vision—is a whole lot weirder than that.

  We repeated the exercise a couple of times. I fired three six-shot cylinders of .38 Special from my little Colt revolver. Anton won’t carry a backup, says it’s against department policy (which it isn’t—I looked it up—it’s against Anton Varick policy). I once gave him a little .40 caliber derringer, from Waco, Texas, but he never carries it.

  Priscilla does.

  Then we limbered up our shotguns, his Winchester, mine Remington, using solid slugs instead of birdshot, the latter being much too hard on the range’s poor, abused plywood backboards. Even most shooters don’t understand that slugs put the family 12 gauge high among the ranks of the good old African elephant guns a saner generation of Englishmen treasured. It’s the “nuclear option” of America’s household arsenal.

  I put seven fat slugs into a big mutant cloverleaf-shaped hole. Anton’s group was actually smaller than mine. It made us both happy. Having tidied up behind us, targets in the trash, brass “policed” for later use, Anton was a different man when he climbed back into the car.

  “Giff, what do you say I buy you a drink?”

  “I say, yippee!” Inwardly, I groaned a bit. I knew where we were headed.

  Bryce’s Bar, in Otomy, Colorado.

  Home (one of them, anyway) of the Rocky Mountain Oyster.

  THE TRAVELER: TULSA, OKLAHOMA

  “Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.”—Charles Baudelaire

  According to information that the traveler had sought and found online at an Internet cafe in Memphis, the most common car being driven in America these days was a ten-year-old silver-gray Toyota Corolla.

  Having seriously considered purchasing or renting a conve
yance and rejecting the idea—money was no problem, but the seller or renter would certainly have required more information than the traveler was willing to surrender—the best solution seemed to be to find such a car parked where it could easily be stolen. The city seemed to have an unusual number of colleges and universities, and their parking lots seemed to abound with ten-year-old silver-gray Toyota Corollas, owned, no doubt by impoverished students, parked beside Lexuses, Porsches and BMWs.

  Rich kids, spending Daddy’s money—or tenured faculty members.

  In a relatively short time, the traveler came across an acceptable vehicle, unlocked it with a simple device—commonly called a “slim jim”—from the canvas bag, cheated the ignition lock (a skill the traveler had been perfecting almost since the time of Henry Ford), and drove it to another college lot, nearby, where another ten-year-old silver-gray Toyota Corolla waited patiently to exchange license plates with.

  Stopping at a McDonald’s on the way out of town—the food was convenient and reasonably palatable and so was the counter girl the traveler trapped in a bathroom stall and allowed to live afterward, without remembering, as a sort of gratuity—the Toyota’s wheels soon turned westward. The traveler tried to find something on the radio besides so-called “country music” but was disappointed. When the device found a rare rap station on the dial, the traveler turned it off.

  ***

  Dawn found the traveler entering a place called Tulsa, Oklahoma. This region of North America had always looked like a desert on maps, but it was almost lush, thickly grown with vegetation both accidental and deliberate. The air was full of vegetable odors and those of all kinds of animals. Most human beings would probably find the whole thing extremely pleasant. It made the traveler want to seek some tall building, crowded about with other tall buildings, where humans were crammed together and kept helpless and vulnerable by predators vastly more voracious and implacable than any vampire could be: their own governments.

  Perhaps it was time to spend some money—and maybe to acquire another car. The traveler steered the Toyota toward the tallest buildings and found a first rate hotel. Leaving the car in a parking garage underground—carefully, every camera was noted and mentally charted—the traveler took some time deciding what kind of car to drive next, made a tentative decision, and then went upstairs to the lobby.

  The transaction for a room was made in cash, of which the traveler possessed an abundance. In these security-conscious times—some few might have called it a police state; the traveler was well acquainted with those—a driver’s license or some other sort of photographic identification was required. The traveler quietly suggested that the clerk use her own; she happily agreed. Once the I.D. had been scanned, she handed a keycard to a nearby bellboy who took the only luggage the traveler carried, the canvas shoulder bag, leading the way to the elevators.

  At the room, the traveler followed the bellboy in, accepted the keycard, and, as the young man held his hand out for a tip, caught his eye. As it often was, there was a second’s confusion on the subject’s part.

  “Shut the door, please,” ordered the traveler, turning on the television to cover up the noise of a struggle in case the victim proved unexpectedly difficult to control. It had happened, on occasion.

  “Sure thing.” Satisfaction. The boy would be no trouble at all.

  The blood was calling out loudly, shrilly to the traveler as it sometimes did; it had been a while since feeding, although far worse privation had been endured. But some discretion was obviously called for.

  “Please take your jacket off.”

  The bellboy complied. “Might there be something else I can do for you?”

  “As a matter of fact,” replied the traveler and sank a pair of incisors into the young man’s pulsing throat. They stood like that for a moment, until the traveler was able to stop—it became difficult sometimes. Then the bellboy’s quickly-healing wounds were cleaned up with a damp paper towel from the little kitchenette area, and his unbloodied uniform jacket was replaced. Its high collar would conceal the puncture marks until, thanks to the traveler’s potent saliva, they faded.

  The traveler handed the young man a twenty dollar bill, pushing him a little. It didn’t require much effort. “I’d appreciate it if you would forget everything that just happened in this room, except the tip.”

  The boy looked at the twenty. “Gee, thanks! Always happy to be of service!”

  ***

  Having taken a long, restorative shower, rinsed out every item in an admittedly limited wardrobe, and left them to dry in front of the air conditioner, blasting away on high, and in the fan-ventilated bathroom, the traveler slept naked and serene through most of the day. Then, dressing in clean clothes, shouldering the canvas bag, and taking an elevator straight to the parking garage was quick and simple.

  The car the traveler had selected earlier was still there, an elderly blue Camaro in fairly good condition with a National Rifle Association sticker on what served as its back bumper. The car’s principal attraction was that it happened to be sitting in what appeared to be a blind spot between two security cameras set a little too far apart. The car was old enough not to have a security circuit, so the door was opened easily and the engine was turning over in a moment.

  The first stop, after having the car washed and vacuuming it out thoroughly—it had been full of some student’s books and other junk that had to be thrown away—was a big parking lot elsewhere in town where the traveler failed to find another blue Camaro, but saw a blue Pontiac Firebird of about the same age that might be mistaken for a Camaro. Plates were exchanged, as they had been in Memphis, and the traveler was off toward the western edge of Tulsa, for a meal and to feed.

  A young would-be car thief the traveler had lured by leaving the Firebird running at Arby’s was found in an unfinished subdivision—the economy again—snagged by a branch, floating in the Arkansas River.

  7: COJONES

  “Boredom is the root of all evil.”—Soren Kierkegaard

  Back into the night, we headed away from New Prospect, not toward it. Northern Colorado, east of Interstate 25, used to be rural for the most part, but these days it’s filling up with light at a frenetic pace.

  On the other hand, when I was born in 1920, the United States population was one sixth of what it is now, but you couldn’t drive around the corner for a cheeseburger or taco, and there was nothing on TV.

  There are always trade-offs.

  Otomy, halfway between I-25 and US 85, out on County Road 23, is supposed to be an Indian—pardon me, “Native American”—name, but, given the specialty of the house at the little town’s principal bar and grill, it seemed to me that its surgical implications were more appropriate.

  Anton was like a different guy for our trip to the range, although I was well aware that the apparent change was mostly temporary. Sooner or later, he’d need to get back to his Priscilla, mortally ill as she was, back to being Chief of Detectives, and the weight of the world would settle on his weary shoulders again. But at least he’d had this evening.

  I’d been there, myself, although the circumstances hadn’t been nearly as dire. The night of the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago—where I happened to be living at the time; it was the closest I’d come geographically to the tiny farming community in which I’d been born, and from which I’d taken my nom de guerre, in almost a quarter of a century—the damn cops made me so mad that I went down in the basement of the house where I lived in Lincoln Park (and a previous tenant had thoughtfully left huge bales of old newspapers I used as a backstop) and burned up four boxes of .45 ACP. No ear protection: the virus defends my ears, repairing any damage I might do them.

  It had helped a lot. I was able to go back to work (I was a private security consultant in those days), no longer shaking with age. That year’s candidate, Hubert Humphrey, resembled Porky Pig so strongly that I always expected to see him with a curly tail and no pants.

  When we pulled up at Bry
ce’s, the tiny, odd-shaped gravel lot was filled with more fancy road iron than a Harley-Davidson dealer. It didn’t bother me, particularly. Most bikers are perfectly decent folks. Even when they’re not, their blood—after the virus deals with any drugs or diseases it discovers—is just as good as anybody else’s.

  As we clambered out of the Suburban, I watched Anton readjust the holster on his belt and cover it with his jacket. It’s always a good thing to be ready, just ask the Boy Scouts. In any case, the man just plain looked like a cop, no matter what he did. Take away his gun, his badge, and all of his clothing. What would you have? A naked cop. He didn’t really try to hide it on this occasion, which was also a good thing. Anton thought going undercover meant turning his baseball cap around.

  It could be embarrassing, sometimes.

  We needn’t have worried. Inside, sixty knights of the open road (or is that hoboes—I always forget) and their old ladies appeared to be celebrating the birthday of somebody’s four-year-old daughter. A dozen rug-rats and anklebiters in Levis, miniature Harley Ts, tiny black leather vests, and paisley do-rags, were running around with cake on their faces. It’s an increasingly strange world that we live in.

  The place was long and narrow, with an oval bar down the center, the shape dictated by the plot of land it occupied, squeezed between the town’s main street and the nearby river. The ceiling was low, and obscured by smoke despite the prissy preferences of the Colorado legislature. Someday, somebody’s going to find a way to organize smokers as a voting block, and the political world will never be the same. The jukebox was blaring out “Let Freedom Ring”, which I’ve always found stirring, even though it’s about divorce, rather than politics.