The Day of the Guns Read Free

feet above the street, hanging on to a rig I had snapped into the window washer’s clamps, with a .45 in my fist for safety’s sake and they came in the door with a key, smiling and joking like it was their room and the two of them pumped a full clip of slugs into the mound on the bed, each one going off with an almost inaudible plop, and the idiots were so sure of themselves and so anxious to be out of there they didn’t check to see what they had hit. You don’t catch a slug, even in your sleep, without a twitch or rearing up or some blood spilling out and the jerks didn’t check it. They simply laughed some more, opened the door and walked out.
    I gave them a full minute, opened the window, swung in and looked at the holes in the bedclothes. Tomorrow the house-keeper was going to be one teed-off broad. Maybe I’d even make a complaint. Fourteen shots had torn up three pillows under the blankets and left the room stinking of cordite.
    I threw the chain on the door, double-locked it, fanned the fumes out of the room and climbed into my nice shot-up sack. Tomorrow was going to be full of surprises. For Rondine, anyway.

Chapter 3
    Unless you’ve made a trip to the U.N. and sat in on a meeting of the General Assembly or the Security Council you don’t know what you’re missing. Outside on the door there’s a quotation from Scripture ... about turning swords into plowshares. There’s not even a credit line ... you’d think they had dreamed the possibility up. But considering the fact that ever since its inception the world has been at war, you’d think that this magnificent conglomeration of brains assembled from the world over were there for one purpose ... not to make peace, but to figure out how many ways there were to kill. Hell, it’s an old story, look at the record. We get stuck with the bills and the trouble. They scream for the gravy. But there are still some of us left. They can’t kill us all.
    Something had come up about Ghana and week-end passes had been canceled. I made a phone call from the lobby and an innocuous-looking guy had come out to show me to a spectator’s seat. He gave me that funny look I always got when my calls had been routed and didn’t ask any damn questions, but there was a distaste in his face when he saw my eyes. Maybe he knew. Maybe he didn’t. But he felt. I made sure of that.
    The Russians were shouting that day. They didn’t like what was coming up. It had to do with U.N. dues and some million-dollar trivialities and all I could think of was the slobs who didn’t let Patton go ahead into Berlin and we had to split the spoils with pigs who later built the wall. We break our asses fighting and the striped-pants gang loses the peace.
    Nothing much came out of it, but I found Rondine.
    I came up behind her and said, “How much longer, honey?”
    She was better than when we met. She looked around slowly, never hesitating in her translation, but the sudden widening of her eyes was enough to spell it out. The only thing that was wrong was that the wetness came back again and all I could think of was how much a woman could hate that she’d cry because one man didn’t die.
    I looked at the clock. The session was almost over. “I’ll wait outside,” I said.
    She only took fifteen minutes. She came through the door composed and smiling as if death and terror were a daily occurrence. And they were. “Hello, Tiger.”
    “Tell me something.”
    “All right.”
    “Who did the face job ... the plastic surgery? You look great. The lines don’t show at all.”
    “They weren’t supposed to.”
    “Your boys missed last night. I want you to tell them something. Will you?”
    “Yes.” Her eyes dropped to the floor.
    “I could have killed them, baby. It would have been fun. Tell them they don’t get a second chance. Neither do you.”
    “Tiger ...” She was clear again. Beautiful as hell, woman all the way. She was almost as big as I was, soft luxurious woman I could fall