Stress by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online Page A

most of its options, including the wheel covers and radio antenna. The vanity plate on the front read USNO-1. Joe Piper took two steps backward as it squished to a stop on waffle-patterned tires.
    Homer Angell uncramped his legs from under the dash and stepped down. At six feet seven he towered over the gun dealer in pleated khaki trousers, an insulated coat splotched with jungle camouflage, size fifteen combat boots, and a tight canvas cap whose bill rested on the bridge of his nose.
    His pale hair was cropped a quarter-inch from his scalp and he had blue eyes that were painful to look at, like a bright sky. He had a long slack jaw and ears that stuck out.
    Joe Piper, who never knew quite how to speak to the man, opened with the weather. “Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”
    “It’s summer in Nam. On the Mekong Delta the frogs are frying.”
    “I didn’t know you were over there.”
    “I read up on it. My unit was about to be called up when Kissinger threw in the towel.”
    “Well, it was a shit war.”
    “It didn’t have to be. When you’ve got guns and you’re fighting pygmies, you don’t go in with spears. I’m just glad my old man didn’t live to see us tucking in our tail. He was on the Enola Gay .”
    “Mine was with the marines. He sent back a case of captured Schmeissers. My mother and my older brother traded them for meat stamps and made a bundle.”
    For reply, Angell fingered a crop of pimples on his jaw. The gun dealer was pretty sure he’d said something wrong. Homer Angell had first come to Detroit with the 82nd Airborne during the riots, apparently found the chaos there to his liking, and when his enlistment ran out moved to Highland Park and joined the Michigan National Guard. Implicated when a cache of automatic weapons came up missing from the downtown armory, he had been allowed to resign his lieutenant’s commission in return for a promise not to prosecute. Since September he had been employed part-time as a caretaker at the Fort Wayne museum. His appetite for illegal gun money notwithstanding, he had an aversion to any calling that took him away from things military. It was his private opinion—not so private among those who knew him and had the patience to listen—that the army had lost another Omar Bradley when it refused to promote him above the rank of quartermaster sergeant.
    Joe Piper changed the subject. “I may have a customer for those Ingrams.”
    “How much?”
    “Thousand a piece.”
    “Two thousand’s the price. I said that before.”
    “I’m not talking about a couple of guns here. This is a shipment. Twenty grand in a lump.”
    “I’m not sure I can deliver twenty.”
    “You told me just last month you had twice that many sitting around in cases under an Indian blanket.”
    “Iraqi. And that was last month. Come the new year, when they tot up those shooting statistics, Congress shakes loose appropriations. The ATF cracks down. I can promise maybe ten. If they haul me over with more than that I’m looking at three to fifteen in the federal house.”
    Joe Piper said shit. “I don’t fucking believe this. You sort mail for a living, you might get a paper cut. Cops and the ATF are the reason we’re talking thousands instead of hundreds. You got such a hard-on for safe you should’ve stayed in and kept on stacking undies till retirement.”
    “Not enough thousands. Two’s the price if it’s twenty you want.”
    “Twelve hundred then. Shit. My balls ain’t exactly off the block either.”
    Angell walked away and laid a jersey-gloved palm against the fender of a tank. The milky vapor of his spent breath frothed and shredded in the wind. “Sherman Mark Five,” he said. “Tiger eighty-eights punched holes in that eighty-five-millimeter skin like your finger through cheap toilet paper, but they couldn’t punch holes in all of them. Not enough shells in Europe for that. Volume, that’s what wins our wars. If we dumped one-third of the