Bluff City Pawn (27 page)

“Three years,” Huddy answers to all of them. Paper moves on the desk. Huddy imagines renaming himself or saying a different house number to throw the whole test off. He can’t help but think of Harlan’s name game.

The young agent nods. He doesn’t smile, but he’s not mean. If it were up to him, there’d be no gun dealers, but it’s nothing personal.

The answering machine records another message.

They break for lunch. Huddy drinks water, and waits for them to exit the lot before playing messages. A loan question, and then Joe: “Huddy, give me a call.” He figures he’s heard from Harlan, or about him. Other voices, a merchandise question and another loan, and then a hang-up. Huddy checks caller ID and sees the name and number is Joe again. He feels too monitored to check the Internet, flips on the TV, the news at noon is past crimes and headlines. He picks up the phone, but hangs up. He knows they haven’t tapped it, but talking is complicated. If he tells Joe about ATF, those two collateral antiques will go deeper into hiding. Although, if Harlan called him, the guns are already more gone or even sold. He remembers his food, the meat is leftover dinner, but he’s too panicked to eat. A car rolls up, parks, the driver sees the switched-off signage, reverses, drives off, straight into the center lane and then turning left in the opposite direction of the agent’s cars, but all three seem connected somehow, like some operation splitting off to reattach later. Huddy walks to the locker. Except he’s done the inventory, so there’s nothing else to examine. Bathroom again. He returns to the counter, sees a face pressed to the window, a visored hand against the glare, but Huddy shoos him. The man lifts grocery bags from the curb and walks away, the plastic handles twisted in his grips, the bags tilting his body with each step. Trucks rumble down Lamar, and above the trucks and across the street is a vacant billboard that Huddy can’t read from this sideways angle, but he knows is spray-painted with
sign for rent
. He looks down from the sign to the semis to the itty-bitty man, who looks as if he’s shrunk and lost weight in the time he cut across the lot. Huddy swallows more liquid. The trucks run past the man like movable walls. The man is up against a wall, then he’s not, then he is again. The lunch hour is almost finished and Huddy should eat, but he still can’t. The story could reach Joe in multiple ways, and Huddy sees it happening simultaneously, turning on the TV and the phone ringing while reading the paper. Get off the phone and check the computer inside the phone and it’s released there, too. Huddy looks at his own phone. No word from Harlan—away like he was in Florida, but this time Huddy knows the exact location, 201 Poplar. Huddy unwraps his cooked food, rewraps it, covers up the smell.

They reappear. Just one car pulls in, two agents get out, and Huddy sees which one’s missing, the youngest, which might be fine since the yellow forms are completed and he could be typing up his findings. Huddy cannot think about loose ends. He needs to concentrate not on everything, because he’ll get lost in too much thought, but only the shut spaces of these two rooms. Huddy has a simple story that he can tell endlessly. The phone rings three times and he answers it, to hear someone else’s voice besides his own.

“Bluff City,” he says, and a man asks about phones. “I’m sorry, we’re closed today.”

“You closed but you there?”

“That’s right,” Huddy says.

“The one I’m at, the phone, it ain’t mine, so I’m needing one myself.”

“Call tomorrow. I don’t really know. You’ll have to check back.”

“Just come by?”

“That’s right. Call.”

“How ’bout brushes?”

“Huh?”

“Sir,” Huddy hears from behind the double doors.

“Paint,” Huddy hears in his ear.

“I don’t have paint.”

“Naw, man . . .”

“I have—” Huddy says, and he hangs up and follows the voice, approaches the desk, where the agent presses a finger to the ledger.

“Where is the original paperwork for the guns you logged in on the eighth and ninth?” Yewell’s guns, the widow’s name written more than a hundred times, her name atop her name again and again, like reading a one-name directory, a two-word book. All the names collected there, but the agent only cares about what’s seen over and over.

“I don’t have the paperwork.” Huddy nods because he had to trash the papers last night, after the sergeant left.

“Do you normally destroy documentation?”

“I discarded the paperwork once I logged them in. That paperwork was just a duplicate of what’s in the gun book.”

A gray area and the agent shows no emotion. He doesn’t say which way he understands. Doesn’t shake his head or accuse Huddy of wrongdoing, and doesn’t signal he’ll accept the conduct at face value. The action is lawful, even if Huddy won’t admit it’s right. Instead, he thinks of her. She’d hate to know her name was all across his book, especially with how she wanted to get rid of the guns. She never wanted to touch that list, so why save it? Huddy’s heart accelerates. He waits for another request, to help find some numbered gun,
Where would this one be?
But the agent doesn’t ask. Huddy grabs a toolbox off the shelf and starts for the counter, even though the item is still in pawn. The phone rings once and he goes to answer it and sees a second parked car, the third agent at the door. He picks up the phone, says, “Hold on,” replaces it for the door, lets the agent in. The agent doesn’t look at Huddy—but he hardly looked at him all morning—but he doesn’t carry a report. Huddy gets to the phone again.

“What the hell’s going on?” Joe says.

“I’m afraid we’re closed today.”

Silence for too long, and Huddy’s about to interrupt it when he hears, “I just talked to Harlan.”

“I can’t tell you that. You’re gonna have to check back.”

“Jesus Christ,” Joe says, his voice between a hiss and a whisper. “I’m hanging up,” he says, and he does.

Huddy returns to see three guns moved from the racks onto the table, the two AKs and one AR-15. “Sir, we’re gonna field-test your AKs. So those will come out today. Your AR—” The agent lifts the rifle by the stock and the handguard. “We’d like to field-strip it here.” He waits for Huddy’s okay, but he doesn’t need it.

You run my industry. Pointless to say no, they’ll get a court order authorizing what they’re asking to inspect now. Huddy wants to let them take apart this gun since he’s without Yewell’s papers. He stares at the many holes in the handguard.

“Big-brother caliber,” the oldest agent says.

“That’s right,” Huddy says.

The agent nods. He’s the nice one, but he’s not his friend. He presses the pin, the upper receiver swinging open to view the trigger assembly, and set inside the lower receiver is a lightning link, a thin metal strip that converts this legal gun to an M16—and for Huddy, makes possessing it a felony. His eyes water, his head shivers. He’s never been more scared by a smaller piece of material. It lies flat, dropped in over the disconnector hook, but it looks enormous, bigger than the gun it’s set within. “Wait,” Huddy says. If they’d just give him a moment to modify this illegal gun back, dismantle the link. Countless people double-crossed him and inserted it—these agents when Huddy answered the phone for Joe, yesterday’s sergeant, Joe, Harlan (he took one gun, so he must’ve messed with this one to make two), dead man Yewell and the gun owner before him or the amateur gunsmith before them both who tinkered in the basement, Yewell’s widow and son, the customers Huddy turned away today at the door, or the one who came in two days ago wanting to sell him phone lines, garbage bags. A whole system that sabotages.

“I never tested it. I would never have sold it before test-firing it. It’s logged in my book as semi-auto.”

“It’s logged in your book wrong.” The oldest agent looks at him like he’s old enough to know better. “You are in possession of an automatic weapon.” Which is what the sergeant would have said to Harlan yesterday.

He can’t stop the agent from writing down the violation. Now Huddy has two automatic weapons to answer for. He feels like everyone and no one put it there, like it wasn’t here until all of a sudden it was. Like a magnet flying in.

“I’m gonna need you to open the front door.”

Huddy doesn’t want him to leave, but he can’t stop him, not even with all of these guns. The agent walks off and Huddy follows him through the room and to the entrance, passing him only when the agent steps away for him to unlock the door. He watches him walk out, into his car to contact his superior and report the new evidence. Out the door is one man, behind another door are two others, and Huddy waits between, alone in a showroom with empty cases, an empty gun room. These three might sweep up what’s in back.

“His list said semi-auto,” Huddy says, when the agent re-enters, but the man won’t answer him. Huddy needs Yewell here to explain it. Two mistakes or two disguises? Why would Yewell have two full-autos? Were the guns disguised or was the disguise Yewell?
I wanted to have ’em just to have ’em. Never shot these guns, they just complemented my gun room nice.
Yewell talking to Huddy, but how does Huddy know it’s him? And how does he explain to strangers a dead man’s secrets? Yewell entered them in his gun list as semis, so it’s oversight, or an oversight on purpose. Huddy says his line again about the list, says it the same way, and repeating it makes it pleading.

“How do you know that?” the agent says, only after he’s passed through the double doors and rejoined his team.

“Because that’s what I wrote down in my gun book.”

“And everything you wrote down in that book is what was on the list. Except you don’t have the list.”

They all face him. Huddy shakes his head. And as soon as he does, he knows they do, that they’ve tracked it back to her. He watches the lead man reach inside his pocket. Like a magic trick how it got from the youngest one to him, although he probably handed it over when Huddy switched rooms before, when the phone rang with Joe. He imagines the widow inviting the agent in, sitting him down just as she did with Huddy in the same hunt room. The agent called so she’s expecting him, prepared tea to sip, along with another copy of the gun list, again centered on the table. He smiles when he sees the list, and she smiles, too, as if the pages were a favorite recipe.

“Okay, that’s
her
list.”

“What are you saying? Are you saying it’s not the same? You saying you have a different copy?”

No, he says, but not aloud, because he’s already talking to his lawyer. He can’t speak, because if he does, he’ll stutter.

“That she added something? Because I’m having trouble understanding how your brother could fire an AK that only existed on paper.”

“It’s the same.” His copy was her copy. Huddy shakes his head at his own inconsistent statement. What he means is that maybe Yewell himself had two lists, a phantom one where he recorded them as full-autos. Yewell’s list was wrong, just like Huddy’s book is wrong, and both of them know it. But Huddy shakes his head at that, at Yewell. The dead man telling me things is just me. “I’m saying, I logged in near two hundred guns. You seen this big pile. I might’ve missed one.”

“You missed
two
. And missing an AK?” The agent’s eyes pop open, as wide as Huddy’s when he saw the link. “You got three AKs. You telling me you take in two hundred guns—Winchesters and Colts and
three
AKs—and one goes missing and you don’t notice it? That’s like a bunch of handguns and a rocket launcher.”

Huddy wants to sit down, but the chairs are taken even when no one sits. “My brother logged in the guns with me. If he’d already swiped the gun, he must’ve checked off the gun when we were doing the inventory, so I thought I’d already booked it.”

“Look. We know you’re lying. You know you’re lying.”

And Huddy can’t even shake his head. He wants to say nothing’s ever popped up with him, that he’s only done something sloppy. But the guns are neatly racked, so it can’t be that. “I’ll need to talk to my attorney.”

“You do that,” the agent says. “And we’ll go write up the case report. And we’re freezing your inventory. None of these guns move.”

Thirteen

Heritage cove has a
brick wall that steps with the gradations of the land. Huddy drives through the dual entrance and passes the stone guardhouse, and views the overblown properties, the upscale many-gabled mansions and the terraced beds and the long, well-kept lawns with Sold signs posted at the edges, but before he can feel familiar resentment, he sees a fountain with water not playing, and other markings of what’s wrong at this well-to-do place. Just beyond the sold houses are even more completed, darkened homes with For Sale signs, the windows without drapes or curtains. In a driveway of this vacant, finished section sits a car, a Lexus, Joe’s, and Huddy slows and sees a shape in the lit-up front room, the interior unfurnished, like staring into a cold house with dead eyes. Joe called the meeting, directed him here, but he doesn’t get to pick the time, not after Huddy’s been commanded all day, so Huddy keeps moving, travels a half-mile farther, he’ll assess the entire premises, make Joe wait longer inside.

He circles a landscaped roundabout, sees unnumbered houses framed and roofed and weathertight, with manufacturing stickers on the windows, a cement mixer at the curb, some scaffolding beside an unfaced exterior, brick ties sticking out of the house wrap, and cubes of brick strapped and stacked on the ground. And then the buildings drop down to foundations, with sawhorses and a Dumpster and a backhoe, with wire mesh and rebar lying in the dirt. A second roundabout has only a big stone in the center and nothing planted, and then there are more poured slabs, as if the structures had collapsed, were flattened by disaster or demolition. Joe began at the front, but this partial construction looks older, not merely delayed but forever left unassembled. The cement slabs resemble giant tombstones for the families who lived here long ago, or those who will never live here now. Huddy coasts to the end, where Joe still hasn’t broken ground, and surveys For Sale signs on empty lots and wild grass a foot and a half tall. He parks at the last circle, engine running, and stares at the patch of weeds and neglect, the overgrowth like an away-going crop, a final harvest on an old field. Huddy will lose big, but Joe’s misfortune is greater—a confusing consolation, that he’s been outnumbered, that he can’t compete with Joe’s steep losses. After work, Huddy had phoned his lawyer to tell him about the AK and the AR and his bad statements and his bad gun book and the recovered list, and the lawyer went silent before saying, “They have proof of all of this?” and then it was Huddy’s moment of silence, in which he could detect the sound of the evidence sticking.