Haskel cut an eye toward Leonard. “You mean stewardess, don’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” Leonard said, and let Haskel churn that one over. Haskel didn’t seem to come to any decision. Maybe he’d look up the word “steward” in the dictionary after we left and think about it some and be real upset. I hoped so.
I was amazed at all the guns and ammo and the boxes that surely contained more of the same. On racks were things like rocket launchers and grenades and knives. I personally don’t like the idea of someone as stupid as Haskel with guns. Actually, I didn’t like the idea of anyone with guns. Me especially. It was one thing to own a handgun, a hunting rifle, but to have enough weapons to give the United States Army a fight went beyond desire for liberty and went over into plain ole anarchy. Pretty soon we would decide liberty also included the right to own our own personal backyard nuclear device. That goes with our right to bear arms, doesn’t it? Maybe Haskel could sell us a nuke and we could use it to turn Tillie’s new pimp into a mushroom cloud. That would teach him.
Haskel raised an arm and pointed around the expanse of the barn. “This has got to be the best goddamn store of weapons in East Texas. Maybe Texas. What I’m sayin’ to you is, had I not done business with you before, colored fella—”
“Leonard,” Leonard said.
“—I wouldn’t be doing business with you now. If anything goes wrong, and things come back on me, and I get my dick in the wood chipper over selling you guns, I got connections, and these connections, they wouldn’t like to find out you fucked me. You did that to me, even if I’m in a jail cell, some night you go to bed, you won’t wake up. There’s people I know will see to it.”
“Wow,” Leonard said, “I just had a little tingle all the way to the end of my big black toes. What about you, Hap?”
“My toes aren’t black, but I think I felt a tingle.”
Haskel said, “What I want you to do is go over to that table there, write your name on the pad, and I want you to show me your driver’s license so I know you got the same name you put down. You got other identification, I want to see it. That way, something goes wrong, cops come down on my head, I got your name and identification. We all go down together.”
“Last time I was here you just had guns in the trunk of your car,” Leonard said.
“Business is good,” Haskel said. “That Waco thing, the Oklahoma bombing. That’s good for business.”
We went over to the desk, got out our driver’s licenses and let Haskel look at them. Neither of us had credit cards to show, but we both had ancient Social Security cards and we let him look at those. He carefully wrote down our license and card numbers and we signed the notepad.
I felt creeped by all that. Cops, FBI agents raided this place, there was my name, my address. Not only was I fucked, but so was Leonard. Once again, I had dragged him into the shit.
When we finished, Haskel went away for a moment, came back with an armload of weapons. He put them on a bare table by the door. He picked up one of them, a double-barreled shotgun.
“Apologies to you, colored fella, but they call this a nigger spreader.”
“How nice,” Leonard said.
“Twelve-gauge Remington double-barrel. Short barrels, not sawed but specially altered by yours truly. Short-range, hair triggers. Let this fucker go in a filling station shitter, it’ll kill everyone in there, wipe their asses and flush the commode. Interested?”
“How much?” I asked.
“Eight hundred dollars.”
“Goddamn!” Leonard said. “Sonofabitch better not just wipe asses, it better come on over to my house and suck my dick.”
“It might do it,” Haskel said, “but this baby sucks your dick, you won’t like it. Shit, colored fella—”
“Leonard.”
“—you was expectin’ illegal cold guns to come at Kmart prices?”
“We were hoping,” Leonard said. “I don’t suppose that price includes ammunition?”
“It don’t, but I’ll throw in a box of shells.”
“Two boxes of shells, and shave a hundred dollars off and you got a deal,” Leonard said.
“Sold,” Haskel said, and put the shotgun on the table and picked up a rifle. It was one of two. “My design. You want to cowboy, you get to cowboy.” Haskel tossed the gun to me and I caught it.
It was a Winchester-style rifle, mid-length, with a loop cock and two barrels, over and under. “Unique,” I said.
“Yeah,” Haskel said. “I call it the Haskel ’cause I made the sonofabitch myself. Got a general Winchester design, and I put that loop cock in there ’cause it’s easy and fast to handle. I always liked the old
I turned the rifle over in my hands. I may not like them, but I know a good one when I see it.
