People began to break up, talking about getting it done, and Miller yelled: “Hold it! Hold it! Let’s thrash this out while we’re all together!”
They came back, a loose congregation of fifty or sixty people in the corner formed by the beer cooler, the storage doors, and the left end of the meat case, where Mr. McVey always seems to put the things no one wants, like sweetbreads and Scotch eggs and sheep’s brains and head cheese. Billy wove his way through them with a five-year-old’s unconscious agility in a world of giants and held up a Hershey bar. “Want this, Daddy?”
“Thanks.” I took it. It tasted sweet and good.
“This is probably a stupid question,” Miller resumed, “but we ought to fill in the blanks. Anyone got any firearms?”
There was a pause. People looked around at each other and shrugged. An old man with grizzled white hair who introduced himself as Ambrose Cornell said he had a shotgun in the trunk of his car. “I’ll try for it, if you want.”
Ollie said, “Right now I don’t think that would be a good idea, Mr. Cornell.”
Cornell grunted. “Right now, neither do I, son. But I thought I ought to make the offer.”
“Well, I didn’t really think so,” Dan Miller said. “But I thought—”
“Wait, hold it a minute,” a woman said. It was the lady in the cranberry-colored sweatshirt and the dark-green slacks. She had sandy-blond hair and a good figure. A very pretty young woman. She opened her purse and from it she produced a medium-sized pistol. The crowd made an ahhhh-ing sound, as if they had just seen a magician do a particularly fine trick. The woman, who had been blushing, blushed that much the harder. She rooted in her purse again and brought out a box of Smith & Wesson ammunition.
“I’m Amanda Dumfries,” she said to Miller. “This gun ... my husband’s idea. He thought I should have it for protection. I’ve carried it unloaded for two years.”
“Is your huband here, ma’am?”
“No, he’s in New York. On business. He’s gone on business a lot. That’s why he wanted me to carry the gun.”
“Well,” Miller said, “if you can use it, you ought to keep it. What is it, a thirty-eight?”
“Yes. And I’ve never fired it in my life except on a target range once.”
Miller took the gun, fumbled around, and got the cylinder to open after a few moments. He checked to make sure it was not loaded. “Okay,” he said. “We got a gun. Who shoots good? I sure don’t.”
People glanced at each other. No one said anything at first. Then, reluctantly, Ollie said: “I target-shoot quite a lot. I have a Colt .45 and a Llama .25.”
“You?” Brown said. “Huh. You’ll be too drunk to see by dark.”
Ollie said very clearly, “Why don’t you just shut up and write down your names?”
Brown goggled at him. Opened his mouth. Then decided, wisely, I think, to shut it again.
“It’s yours,” Miller said, blinking a little at the exchange. He handed it over and Ollie checked it again, more professionally. He put the gun into his right-front pants pocket and slipped the cartridge box into his breast pocket, where it made a bulge like a pack of cigarettes. Then he leaned back against the cooler, round face still trickling sweat, and cracked a fresh beer. The sensation that I was seeing a totally unsuspected Ollie Weeks persisted.
“Thank you, Mrs. Dumfries,” Miller said.
“Don’t mention it,” she said, and I thought fleetingly that if I were her husband and proprietor of those green eyes and that full figure, I might not travel so much. Giving your wife a gun could be seen as a ludicrously symbolic act.
“This may be silly, too,” Miller said, turning back to Brown with his clipboard and Ollie with his beer, “but there aren’t anything like flamethrowers in the place, are there?”
“Ohhh, shit,” Buddy Eagleton said, and then went as red as Amanda Dumfries had done.
“What is it?” Mike Hatlen asked.
“Well . . . until last week we had a whole case of those little blowtorches. The kind you use around your house to solder leaky pipes or mend your exhaust systems or whatever. You remember those, Mr. Brown?”
Brown nodded, looking sour.
“Sold out?” Miller asked.
“No, they didn’t go at all. We only sold three or four and sent the rest of the case back. What a pisser. I mean . . . what a shame.” Blushing so deeply he was almost purple, Buddy Eagleton retired