Gun Work Read online

  Acclaim For the Work of

  DAVID J. SCHOW!

  “Smart, scathing, and verbally inventive to an astonishing degree, David J. Schow [is] one of the most interesting writers of his generation.”

  —Peter Straub

  “Take no prisoners fiction that rarely pulls away from the grisly heart of the matter, Schow’s prose is extremely cinematic, filled with pungent dialogue, sharp, memorable characters, and a sense of macabre irony worthy of Alfred Hitchcock.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “[A] sinuous psychological thriller... Schow works suspenseful sleight-of-hand with his story... His kinetic orchestration of events [and] vivid hardboiled prose push the plot to a thunderclap climax that... is a measure of coolly calculated audacity.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Evocatively described and expertly paced... Schow cranks up the tension effortlessly and artfully. Reading the novel is akin to being slipped a mickey... a wonderful treat.”

  —The Agony Column

  “Edgy, insightful, and fearless.”

  —Joe R. Lansdale

  “David Schow writes with a lethal beauty.”

  —Robert R. McCammon

  “A highly original, boldly conceived psychological thriller observed with the rapt eye and assassin’s sting of the artist as fer-de-lance...[I’m] a major fan of David’s work.”

  —John Farris

  “A jagged nightmare spiked with charm, melancholy and vicious intelligence. Don’t accept this novel’s invitation to party unless you’re prepared to be dragged to some very dark places — and to love every step of the way. Like being punched in the face by a poet.”

  —Michael Marshall Smith

  “Schow is so fine a writer, so imaginative a storyteller, that he deserves a place in all contemporary fiction collections.”

  —Library Journal

  “Very much in the groove of Thomas Harris.”

  —Twilight Zone

  “David J. Schow is a master of the art of giving the plot an unexpected wrinkle.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “There is poignancy everywhere in his talent, amid the exquisite threat.”

  —Richard Christian Matheson

  “Creepy and fascinating.”

  —Booklist

  “It’s raw, it’s rough, and it’s not for wimps... A damn fine book.”

  —Afraid

  The night came alive with auto weapons fire.

  “What the hell are you doing —” Carl hollered.

  “Shut up. Get in the back. Head down.”

  Lacquer chips jumped from the hood of the Town Car as a fusillade of nine-millimeter slugs flattened into the windshield, making starbursts, rude impact hits without the attendant cacophony of gunfire.

  Triangulating, Barney figured four shooters, three of them the guys after the bag. One grabbed and they all scattered two seconds before the limo came to a dust-choked halt near the natural stone foundation.

  Barney already had the Army .45 in his hand.

  As the car stopped he chocked his door open with his foot and stayed low, popping two rounds and dropping the runner with the bag, who was not shooting. The bag was scooped by another runner who fired back — Uzis, from the sound and cycle rate. Barney ducked the incoming angry metal bees, mostly discharged unaimed, panic fire, gangsta showoff.

  The brake was up and the limo began a slow roll toward the bridge. This was intentional. Barney crabwalked alongside, scanning around for the bonus shooter, who expectedly rose from the crest of the bridge and began shooting downward, ineffectually. Barney put a triple-tap in his general direction to keep him down, under cover.

  The right front wheel stopped against the outstretched leg of the first guy to grab the bag.

  “Now,” Barney shouted at Carl. “Drag that sonofabitch in here...”

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  SHOOTING STAR/SPIDERWEB by Robert Bloch

  THE MURDERER VINE by Shepard Rifkin

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  GUN

  WORK

  by David J. Schow

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-049)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: November 2008

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 2008 by David J. Schow

  Cover painting copyright © 2008 by Joe DeVito

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-326-7

  E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-767-8

  Cover design by Cooley Design Lab

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  Contents

  Part One: The Finger House

  Part Two: The Bleeding Rooms

  Part Three: Gun Work

  Part Four: Felt Recoil

  Part Five: Blowback

  Part One

  The Finger House

  How Barney came to occupy a room on the wrong side of management in a hostage hotel deep inside Mexico City had to do with his friend Carl Ledbetter and one of those scary phone calls that come not always in the middle of the night, but whenever you are most asleep and foggy.

  “This is Carl, goddammit, Carl, are you there? Is that you, man? It’s you, right?” Hiss, crackle. “Look, I don’t have my cards, I don’t have my ID, I don’t have my passport, all I have is one of these shitty phone cards that runs out of time, they took Erica, they got her, man, grabbed her ass right out from under me, I haven’t got a piss to pot, I mean a pot to piss in—”

  “Carl, slow down; I’m not even awake...”

  The phone pad glowed at Barney while his slowly surfacing brain tried to process information. Anonymous Caller.

  Carl Ledbetter worked for a specialty imprint of a New York publishing house that had recently been inspired to cherry-pick non-American talent, in this case, genre novelists — science fiction, detective, horror and romance writers — and provide the best of their work in translation to US paperback audiences. Eric
a, whom Barney had never met, was thumbnailed by Carl as a swoony bit of red-headed business working as an editorial assistant at Curve magazine. They had met at an American Booksellers Association conference, struck sparks, fell in love, cohabitated, and had recently begun referring to each other as fiancé and fiancée.

  That was the last Barney had heard; he was not in the habit of keeping in touch. It was nearly-forgotten news, the kind for which you tender congratulations, then round-file. Bad news lasted longer.

  Good for Carl, Barney had thought at the time. The whole marriage deal eliminated the thorny problem of how to refer to your supposedly significant. Boyfriend, girlfriend, lover, partner, sex monkey all seemed inadequate and socially inept for any pair of people who were actual adults. Because of their jobs, Carl and Erica rarely traveled together. The deal Carl’s publisher wanted to cut with several rising stars of the Mexican printed word afforded an opportunity to superficially fake a vacation. From Mexico City they could do Guadalajara or perhaps Acapulco.

  Instead, Mexico City had apparently done them.

  Barney had been keeping off the societal radar for the last year and a half — personal travails, old stories that don’t need telling right now — and had secured a position at the Los Angeles Gun and Rifle Range downtown in the warehouse district, occasionally working the counter, sometimes pitching in on gun repair if the problem was arcane enough. When you worked at a range with a piece on your hip, every customer was your pal from bangers to cops. It never occured to anyone to question the legitimacy of your identity. Guns were sexy and empowering and lots of women begged instruction. Ample time for practice and all the free ammo your hardware could eat. It wasn’t actual combat with real stakes, but it sufficed to fill the in-betweens, and for a gunman it was as natural a thing as breathing free air.

  Meanwhile, people tended to seek Barney’s counsel whenever they fell afoul of some extralegal difficulty, the kind of gray-zone balls-up that consistently befalls people you think of as completely normal and law-abiding. Like Carl Ledbetter, who had known Barney even before they both wound up wearing dusty desert camo in Iraq. First came the reunion (hey, it’s you!), then the wild coincidence of it all (Carl had come as a journalist with a camera; Barney as a soldier with a gun), followed by the effortless bond of de facto brotherhood between men in the same war — the kind of brotherhood that was supposed to permit, years later, the sort of advantage Carl was about to ask of his amigo.

  Carl and Barney had known each other since their 20s. Carl knew somewhat of Barney’s checkered past and politely never insulted his friend by asking about it. If you ever got a close look, Barney’s body was peppered with old scars, the kind of wounds that never got explained. The conceits of formula storytelling would not suffice to describe him — this height, that hair, this-or-that movie actor with whatever eye color. Barney knew the value of blending; call it instinctual. To the world at large he was a stranger, a background extra quickly moving on, and he liked it that way.

  Now, rate your friends, your acquaintances and your intimates. Among that group you already know which person you’d ask for help when shady badstuff rears up in your life. Yeah, that one — the person you always suspected was a bit illicit, a hair violent, two baby steps beyond the law. After-hours help, a less-than-kosher midnight run, some muscle, maybe some payback, and you know the person you’d call when quiet society says you should be calling a cop.

  “From the top, Carl,” Barney said into his phone in the dark. “Deep breaths. Simple sentences. Subject, object.”

  “This goddamned phone card,” Carl’s voice crackled back at him from one country to another. “You’ve got to get a phone card to use the payphones and half of them don’t work. The time on the cards runs out faster than—”

  “You said that already. You said they grabbed Erica. Who-they?”

  In Mexico, kidnapping constituted the country’s third biggest industry, after dope and religion.

  “They didn’t leave a business card,” Carl said.

  “But she was abducted.”

  “Kidnapped, right.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They said a million.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Yeah.”

  Barney wiped down his face. Squeezed the bridge of his nose. He didn’t need to click on the nightstand lamp and become a squinting mole. “Why you?”

  “Because they think I’m a rich gringo.” Carl started breathing more shallowly and rapidly on the other end of the line. “My god, bro, how can I—”

  “Don’t start that,” Barney overrode. “You were doing just fine. Calm. Calm.” A beat, for sanity. “So... are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Rich. Can you cough up seven figures?”

  Another beat. Barney frowned. His long-lost friend was wondering whether to lie.

  Finally, Carl said, “Yeah. Don’t ask how.”

  “And you want what from me, exactly? They’ve got the hostage and you’ve got the ransom. So, trade.”

  “It stinks, amigo. It stinks like underbrush when you probe by fire.” He was playing the war-buddy card again. “Probing by fire” was when you cut loose a few rounds into unknown territory. If return fire erupted, you knew the hide was enemy-occupied. It helped to be fast-footed in such circumstances. The suspense was gut-wrenching, and you could smell your courage leaching out in your sweat.

  “You want backup,” Barney said, dreading it.

  “There’s nobody else I can trust in a shitstorm like this. No good faces. I’ll wind up nose-down in a ditch with my money and Erica gone. I need your help. The kind of help you can’t just buy.” Another telltale beat of quiet. “Will you help me?”

  Barney got Armand to feed his goldfish during what looked to be a weekend absence. He flew into Mexico City — gunless — on an ironclad passport that did not have the name “Barney” anywhere on it. Carl Ledbetter would not meet him at the airport. They had arranged a rendez in a hole-in-the-wall tapas joint that served surprisingly good carne, as long as you didn’t question the source animal for the meat too stringently. Carl’s shirt and jacket were already ringed with perspiration.

  Carl looked like a victim.

  A victim of the Zone diet, among other things. Too much turkey in controlled portions, therefore too much tryptophan, sedating him as his life softened, knocking his guard down into comfy semi-coma. If you had to hit the gym to keep fit, you weren’t moving around enough in the first place.

  Carl looked like an American tourist — sideswiped by sunburn (already peeling), at sea with a non-native tongue, confused by the currency, lost without a guide. Pattern baldness, prescription spectacles and a general mien that said mug me. Sweating, nervous, jumpy now, ill at ease in clothing the wrong fabric for the climate; clothing which announced his outsider status to locals who grossed ten bucks a week if they were lucky.

  Carl looked like a neutered tomcat. He had put on thirty pounds since hooking up with Erica. He ignored his tapas and swigged from a glass bottle of Mexican Coca-Cola loaded with real sugar, not fructose or corn syrup.

  Part of the explanation he offered involved tapping the cash-flow of a rich guy on Wall Street, a broker who had learned to stash the pennies that constituted the fallout from the cups-and-balls shuffle of big money accounts. Rounded-up or down half-cents and quarter-cents from millions of dollars in invisible transfers. The crimes of which the broker was guilty already constituted more than a single-spaced page of malpractice, but it explained where Carl had been able to score his million on short notice and without suffering a credit check. The story smelled flimsy but Barney knew that was all the exposition he was going to get on that front, at least for now.

  What Barney wanted was a drop plan, or shadowy faces he could track. Instrumentality, not cryptography.

  At the same time, Barney hated himself for re-evaluating his old buddy Carl. There is a nasty section of the human heart: everyone has it, some people flaunt it, and it is ne
ver flattering. The I-told-you-so impulse. That was what Barney was feeling now, but vaguely, not wishing to confront it head-on. Carl had gotten legitimate. Hooked up with Erica, who by all reports was splendid. Then blundered into a zone of hostiles like a tyro and gotten blindsided, worse than a damned tourist. Carl had forgotten or ignored the rules of engagement. He had exposed his throat to a sharpened world.

  Never, thought Barney. Never would I get foxed like that.

  And at the same time as that same-time, Barney felt powerful and enabled. The weaknesses of guys like Carl permitted guys like Barney to exist and persevere. Barney could fix things. Lots of people can’t fix a leaky faucet. Even more people had no idea how their automobile worked; it’s just a magic box, you get inside and it goes. Barney could strip an engine or put a drop of solder into an iPod and make the magic thing go again.

  The tough part, really, was surfing the waves of emotional garbage people brought to their problems as extra baggage, to prove how human and normal they were. You were supposed to sympathize and coddle. None of which had anything to do with fixing the problem.

  So it came as a surprise when Carl whipped out a dirty kerchief and displayed a woman’s severed finger with an engagement ring on it. Supposedly the diamond was non-conflict.

  “I’ve looked at this a thousand times,” he said, not meaning the ring. “I don’t have to. It’s Erica’s.” His expression had the dull infinity focus of someone who has been overloaded with too much truth.

  “The cut looks three days old,” said Barney. You could tell from the way the flesh desiccated. Lividity. Whether the amputation was rough or precise. A dozen details Barney thought he could spare Carl just now.

  Carl nodded. Yep, three days. Most abductions at this price took about a week to play out.

  “What else did they give you?”

  Carl dug out a cellphone. “I’m supposed to call them if things screw up. Otherwise I’m supposed to wait for this thing to ring.”

  Barney examined the phone. Scratch marks on the case where it had been pried open and customized — probably to route through several other countries to make it trace-proof.