Interlude (10 page)

“Here's daddy and Richard. You remember him
from the club right? Anyway, they were both running a shipment of
beer for the front line troops when they took this. They got
ambushed about ten minutes after this was taken. Daddy said that
they spent the next two days pinned down by a Huey helicopter with
no supplies but the cases of beer. All they did for those two days
was drink until they were both stupid drunk! Richard still claims
that daddy would have been a cheap date if he were a girl.” Karen
chuckled at the memory as she thumbed through the pages, intent on
finding a specific one. She pushed her hair behind her ear as she
showed him the next one.

“Here's daddy about one year after he was
honorably discharged. That girl hanging off him is my mom. Daddy
had just opened an Army surplus store. He called it “Re-issue”.
Since he did requisitions and resource management in the Army, he
had all these great contacts for getting surplus equipment. He used
to laugh about the fact that he could buy a case of tents for five
dollars and sell one tent to a group of hippies for ten dollars! He
and my mom ran the store for about ten years before he sold it at a
large profit. After that, he started a company that acted as a
distributor to other surplus stores. Since his contacts in the Army
were so great, he was able to be the middle man and finally take a
day off.” She said. She smiled peacefully as her eyes scanned the
pages. Cal could sense that she was trying to build up to
something, but he was still not sure what.

“He seemed like a really nice guy.” Cal
offered.

“He was. Oh, here's when I was two years
old!” She said excitedly as she pointed to a picture of a little
girl with giant green eyes and light brown pigtails.

“Aw, you look so little there.” Cal said as
he craned to look at the picture.

He could sense her mood changing. She sighed
heavily once more as she turned the page slowly. Cal looked at this
next page as Karen held her fingernail on the album to keep it
open. There was the same girl, only this time; she was standing by
a crate of old military rifles. The toddler looked like she was
playing cops and robbers, with her hands held in the typical child
pantomime of a handgun. Cal was a little puzzled by this picture,
but the next one really confused him! The same happy family...,
There was her dad Kenneth, her mom, and Karen as a little girl.
Only this time, they were all posing proudly over a crate of rocket
launchers! Karen watched Cal like a hawk. She observed all of his
twinges and facial movements as she turned more pages in complete
silence.

The last one that Cal saw had a picture of
only her dad and Karen. This time, she looked to be about eleven
years old. As Karen posed proudly with her father, they both hugged
as they stood over an open container that housed a cruise
missile!

Karen slowly closed the album and slid it to
the side of the table. As she took another long drink from her
glass, she watched Cal's movements. Would he get up and leave?
Would he be mad? Confused? The anticipation was killing her! She
didn't want him to leave! She would do anything to stay with him!
Even if it meant leaving all this weirdness behind..., she grappled
with that thought. This was all she's ever known! Her coworkers,
and surrogate family, were all she had left, and this is how they
all made their living! “Why isn't he saying anything?!” She
screamed inside herself.

“So, your dad sold more than just tents I
take it?” Cal finally said. He bore a look of confusion and relief
as he leaned back in his chair. While he sat in quiet thought,
Karen tried to explain herself in bold terms.

“Cal, I'm an arms dealer,” She said flatly,
adding, “My dad was using all of his contacts to get surplus
camping supplies when he was approached by some white separatists.
They were looking for some guns and ammo to outfit their militia,
and they got daddy's name from a bar in LA. They offered him a
ridiculous amount of money, and he took it. Three days later, they
had a truckload of used M-16 rifles and about a ton of ammunition.
Daddy said that that was the point where he went underground.

“How much money did he make with that deal?”
Cal asked out of curiosity.

“Enough to put me through college,” Karen
said proudly.

“So, your family sells guns for a living, big
deal.” Cal tried to trivialize the situation to placate Karen, but
she wanted to be completely honest with him. If he was going to
leave, she wanted him to do it now.

“No Cal, we sell a lot more than guns. My
daddy was very good at what he did in Vietnam. If you wanted ten
tons of Agent Orange, he knew how to get it to you. Tanks,
helicopters, planes, boats, fuel, any manner of ordinance, rocket
launchers, grenades he knew how to get it, and who to hold
responsible for repayment later on when he delivered on it,” She
finished. Her calm voice an unnerving change to Cal. This was the
overly confident side of her that he had yet to see!

“Aren't you worried about getting caught?
What about post 9/11 America? Don't government agencies watch you?”
Cal asked.

“Actually, the government is one of our
biggest customers.” Karen said nonchalantly.

“Wait, what?” Cal knew she was lying now!

“If you watch C-span, you'll see them talk
about the annual budget of the USA. One of the things they always
bug out about is the annual “black budget”. This is the thirty or
so billion dollars that the United States keeps on hand for black
ops. Stuff like CIA budgets for covert operations, NSA equipment,
domestic spying. These are all things that get handled by that
chunk of money. When the CIA needs a shipment of weapons to help
rebels overthrow a dictator, do you think they go through normal
government channels?” Karen finished. Her cold business-like
attitude and smug pride were sort of off putting to Cal. His
masculinity had taken enough hits these last couple of weeks. Now,
here was this girl, that he liked so much, waxing loquaciously
about buying and selling the tools of murder.

“Do you ever worry about what the stuff you
sell gets used for?” Cal asked, hoping to find some trace of
humanity in his girl again.

“I used to.” She said calmly, adding, “When
you work in this field long enough, you realize that the only
beliefs that are true are the ones that are driven by money and
power.”

“What do you mean?” He asked, his face a
tense mask of confusion.

Karen opened the photo album on the bottom.
She crossed her legs as she slowly flipped through the pages,
looking for a particular one with concentration. Her face lit up in
recognition as she turned the album around for Cal to see.

“This is a tribe of nomads in Afghanistan.
They were fighting with another tribe, and they were going through
a bunch of mortar shells and other ordinance. Daddy sold his
contact, the tribal leader supposedly fighting for good, a shipment
of what he needed. Here is daddy with the leader. That set of boxes
at the bottom of the picture is their shipment of R.P.Gs and about
three hundred mortar rounds. He netted about three hundred thousand
dollars from that deal.” Karen said as she looked out at the ocean.
She continued, “As you can see on this next page, that leader
wasn't so nice.” Karen's tone changed as she flipped the page. The
picture was horrible! Cal's breathing almost stopped as he saw the
most horrible sight he had ever seen. Lying in a dirt trench were
bodies, about a hundred or so, stacked up like firewood? Most of
them were women and children. There was a bulldozer parked almost
out of frame, and standing over the trench was the same tribal
leader! Cal could only sit in silence as Karen continued her
sell.

“I hate to say it Cal, but there are no good
guys or bad guys. There are just people who do bad things. When
this happened, Daddy was pretty upset. He vowed to work with
different clients who weren't fundamentalists or ethnic
nationalists.” She finished. She waited in silence for Cal to do
something, to say anything!

“Is there a lot of money in this kind of
thing?” He finally asked, his voice quieter than he had
expected.

“It depends on the social-political climate.”
She said, her voice business-like and sincere, adding, “When daddy
passed away four years ago, our net annual was ten million. After I
took the reins, things quieted down on the global conflict front.
We've been holding at around eight million annually, but we had to
become more diversified in our merchandise and clientele to stay
there. As a plus, our provenance as a long time supplier gives us
the ability to avoid working with psychopaths. We mostly sell to
CIA operatives, other gun runners, and a few biker gangs. Not to
mention weapons collectors.” She said, finishing her spiel with a
comical sigh to illustrate her fatigue.

“Wait, you sell weapons to biker gangs too”
Cal was just confused now.

“Yes, they're the most stable customers.
They're also pretty fun. Most of them just like to get drunk and
destroy old cars in the desert. They throw the best parties!” Karen
added with a little laugh. As Karen spoke she flipped through the
pages looking for a particular one. She showed Cal a photo with a
bunch of the manliest men he had ever seen. Posing in front of,
what looked like, a handmade banner with their gang's name “Pacific
Ironclad” were a bunch of leather pants-ed men with assault rifles
held in the air. As he scanned the photo, he could see Karen
standing in the middle with her own gun in one hand and a bottle of
Boone's Farm in the other. She looked out of place in her khaki
shorts and black tank top. She pointed out various members of the
rough group with hazy recollection.

“This one to my left is Mitch. He's actually
the gang's lawyer too. He's how I made the contact to start selling
to the whole group. He's a really great guy, but a little rough and
tumble.” She added. “This guy here is Alvaro. He's the leader. The
others are kind of fuzzy. I was really drunk, and we haven't done
business in a while.” Her far off smile was kind of disconcerting
to Cal as he sat in silence again. His brain fumbled through morals
and ethics he never had to think about before. What could he
compare this to? She was so business-like, but what she sold killed
people. Did that make her bad? He thought back to how he felt
sitting in the coffee shop, trying to hold on to her memory. The
pain and darkness, the emptiness that had swept over him like a
black flood. He knew he wanted to be with her. But how to make
sense of this new life she wanted him to be a part of? She must
really trust him! This thought made him smile with happiness as he
watched her eye him with timid anticipation. Her mouth opened in
surprise when he spoke.

“Boone's Farm huh?” He queried with a
grin.

She gave him a quick frown, saying, “It's a
little joke between Alvaro and I. He always thinks it's so funny to
see this girly girl dropping off his weapons!” She recalled with a
chuckle. “So, he always has a bottle on hand for me when I make a
drop off. They always make a big deal out of it; barbeque, drinks,
and lots of shooting. They have a piece of land out in the
California Valley, so no worries about the local PO PO.”

“PO PO?” Cal asked.

“Yeah the local cops are sometimes a pain for
us. If we get in really deep trouble we can use our pull with the
CIA to get things cleared up, but we still have to be careful.” She
finished. Cal hadn't noticed how late it was, he was so enthralled
with Karen's picture presentation that he didn't see the sun set
from that beautiful viewpoint. In the following calm, Karen took
the opportunity to move over to Cal and sit in his lap. He tensed
up visibly as she sat down, his bruises still fresh where the thugs
kicked him in the lower abdomen. Upon the recollection, he turned
her around to face him in the tall pub chair.

“By the way, what was the deal with my break
in? You said you somehow brought it on me?” Cal asked in
recollection.

“Oh yeah that...” Karen stalled for time as
she tried to think of a way to explain things. How was she to tell
him about her real staff? Cal thought they were just insurance
salesmen. He knew Soren's name, but he didn't know about what he
really did for a living. How was she going to tell him about how
she handled his little break in?

“The guys who broke in and ransacked your
place were Dick Stevenson and Alan Jones. They're small time hoods
in Santa Barbara that think that they run some kind of crime ring.”
Karen said, waving her hand dismissively, adding, “They sell stolen
goods and occasionally try to break into the illegal drug market.
They always fail. Lately they had a bent on becoming gun runners,
so they tried to take over business like you do on the streets. It
was entertaining at first, watching them fall on their faces and
make asses of themselves, but when they attacked you Soren saw to
it that they didn't bother anybody again.” Karen said, her voice
trailing off into a quiet whisper.

“Wait, so this guy Soren, who's not an
insurance guy at all, was sent by you to go kill these two thugs on
my behalf?” Cal said in disbelief. He was glad he was sitting down.
This was too much to process.

“Well, technically it was my behalf.” She
paused, elaborating quickly when Cal gave her an astonished look,
“He didn't kill them!” She finally added with exasperation.

“Then what did he do?” Cal asked, even though
he didn't want to know the answer.

“He just flogged them pretty good, and then
set fire to their house..., and car.” Karen said defensively.

“Oh thank goodness he didn't over react or
anything!” Cal said sarcastically. The wine was starting to make
his head spin when he attempted to break the tension.

“How about I cook you dinner?” He finally
said, moving her off his lap so he could stand up straight.