Chapter 11

Even with the early morning eye-opening exercise start to our day, it was just after ten o'clock the next morning before Pete and I bothered to drag ourselves out of bed, get dressed and find out what fresh horrors the new day had in store for us. Neither of us were optimists, by any wild stretch of the imagination. The early omens did seem to be promising, especially since I hadn't enjoyed many nocturnal guests or serious play partners in bed since Tori's death three years ago. Pete too muttered something about it being awhile since he'd completely gotten his ashes so thoroughly hauled. Then he mumbled something about a whore he used to know that worked Jupiter Beach that used to give the best blow jobs. I think he was trying to give me a compliment, but I gave him a glare that hinted that I really didn't want to hear any more of the details. Pete was apparently quite the romantic ... not!

DeeDee and the Foole had both been up for hours themselves apparently and had just finished a second breakfast and were just hanging out waiting for us. I thought we ought to have a proper round of formal introductions. Pete really hadn't paid a lick of attention to anything other than Baker's wounds or my cracked ribs last night, but Pete didn't seem too particularly interested this morning either. Both men were alive, kicking and otherwise quite healthy and didn't need anything that required more than a minimal amount of Pete's active attention or participation.

I shrugged. I'd sort of been there myself and could write the lyrics to that particular song. We were both probably sociopaths, in our own different ways, but I was just slightly better at 'pretending' that I cared about the world and people around me. For three years I had needed to beg, schmooze and wheedle anyone and everyone that might have been able to give me any sort of lead or clue concerning Tori's death. I could actually show something resembling genuine emotion once in awhile when I needed to dig deeper inside of myself to at least pretend to be the grief-stricken old friend that I really actually was - and not just a charcoal-cored insane vengeance-filled bitch just looking for the right sort of match to set off the next conflagration of doom and hellfire.

Pete lived to be useful ... so I decided it was time to find out what other skills other than chop-shop surgery he possessed, or other skills in places besides the bedroom. Since his uncle had been a serious local big-time gun dealer, maybe we could still enjoy a bit of one-stop shopping while we were here.

"Pete, while we're here, I was hoping for a bit of a tour of your uncle's private gun collection. We're ... that is I'm, just a bit under-armed for the sort of shootouts we're likely to find ourselves in right now. I've also got this stupid nine-mill that seems to be a one-shot wonder, and I could really use one or two nice semi-auto pistols that are both accurate and not likely to jam up on me. Also, for that matter, I had to dump the would-be new love of my life into the Gulf the other day ... a gorgeous Remington 870 Super Marine baby that I would love to find a replacement for! For trade, I've got a M4 that you can have, along with another rifle and cash too."

"Would that be the Beretta that he shot your friend with last night?" I nodded and handed it to him and this occupied his complete and undivided attention, enough for the Foole to step out onto the beach deck to have a long talk with his FBI buddy on his cell phone. Since the care package of goodies we'd overnight shipped had probably arrived on his desk in Washington, it was now time for some top-level planning on their parts, which they did in privacy for the next half hour. That was fine ... Pete was still fascinated by my malfunctioning gun and had now taken it apart and put it back together again, twice.

"Ummm, Ree, were there any other attachments that came with this gun? Seems like there is something missing." And there actually was. I hadn't had the time to completely dump out and take a full inventory of everything that was in the gun bag of the Blackwell shooters, and this was a good time to really take a closer look. I dumped everything out onto the dining room table and slowly took inventory.

There was the M14 rifle, a semi-automatic converted model with scope, a pile of company related paperwork, including the bounties on myself and the late Captain, and a few other mid-level political folks that the Watters had decided to get rid of too, while they were cleaning house. In a smaller heavy vinyl gun bag was a stripped down M4 with a couple of loaded clips. Useful maybe, but I'd never been a big fan of the M4's performance in life-or-death situations. Too small of an entry and exit wounds, for my personal taste. I like the people I shoot to have a big gaping hole in their chest big enough to shove my fist through, with a knockback of at least five feet. Unrealistic? Sure ... but a girl can dream!

I decided to keep the M14, which still smelled of packing grease and had probably never been fired in anger. It's an extremely accurate weapon and an excellent man-killer at all ranges. I unceremoniously pushed the M4 assault rifle over towards Pete, who gave it a similar look of distain and resumed his preoccupation with the odd M9 pistol.

Finally, sort of buried within a smaller zipper pouch with a combo laser range finder and humidity sensor (both useful things for a sniper) I found something that sort of looked like a small upper register or part of a silencer, and actually it was sort of both. And just what Pete had been looking for!

"Sweet!" He exclaimed, after showing off and demonstrating the completely assembled handgun. "This is a Beretta XM-9 Hushpuppy, ultra-brand new and not even in stores yet ... if it ever will be! This is an unregistered demo model, probably for government field testing. Spook Central stuff probably. It's a modified M9 with a slide lock so there's no action noise, and it has an integrated silencer designed specifically for it. With the slide lock on, it's insanely whisper silent ... all you'll hear is a click, and then a hiss when you later manually eject the shell. Granted that's not semi-auto, but this is the closest thing on this earth that you'll find to a completely silenced gun. Probably uses reduced load 9mm's, just like the old SEAL S&W 39. Unc' has a couple of those in his bunker. Real silent killers for sneaky frogman work at night, but this next generation puppy is even more hush-hush! It's the ultimate silenced weapon!"

I started to revert to my usual argumentative self about how there was no way that a stupid supersonic 9mm bullet could possibly be quieter than a big, fat and slow round like the .45 ACP. Back in the Big Sandbox or in Afghanistan, most of the spec-force guys I knew had taught me that for quieting things down - suppressors work best with subsonic bullets. Ergo, that the .45 ACP is the quietest if you are firing any of the typical grain weight rounds. Why? Because a standard pressure 230 grain .45 ACP bullet travels at subsonic speeds (about 830 fps). The speed of sound is about 1125 fps. Even standard pressure 124 grain 9x19 clocks at about 1150 fps. For good measure the 155 grain .40 S&W clocks about 1160 fps. The difference between all of these is about 2-3 decibels, which doesn't seem like much, but it actually is, as a 3 db increase is twice as loud.

Now, Pete was telling me that the 9mm will in fact be the least noisy, as long as you use subsonic reduced powder ammo. This is because the 9mm silencer has a smaller bore and lets out much less noise than the other silencers with their larger bores.

'It is that simple!' He said. "The other most important variables are powder charge and whether or not the bullet goes faster than the speed of sound. Furthermore, the Beretta 92 was arguably the "best" 9mm for suppression," he stated, "because its barrel doesn't tilt back and up like most other pistols." Putting a suppressor (or any heavy object) on the end of a pistol barrel that is designed to move that way may retard the delayed-blowback operation enough to either fail to extract the spent cartridge or cause a 'stovepipe', either way making the pistol a single-shot firearm. The Beretta uses a straight-back (the barrel doesn't tilt up) delayed-blowback design, and does not suffer such problems ... especially when suppressed. Supposedly.

This gun was actually not a true Beretta and it was converted by Knight's Armaments, with its body heavily modified to be used with a specially engineered suppressor built-in to it. The much maligned 9mm handgun was now in theory suitable for ultra-quiet covert operations (with proper ammo). It still wouldn't put a huge hole through your enemy – but it could put a carefully aimed shot into a lethal part of your foe very, very quietly. Sometimes that's extremely useful, and exactly what the success of a mission calls for.

Pete then muttered something about getting the key to the storage bunker and he wandered off. That was fine – I suddenly had one of my patented uncontrollable urges to take my new pop-gun outside and see just how really quiet it was. I had a partial box of seventeen 9mm bullets left that did appear to be hand-loaded so I figured I could spare a couple. The rounds were all jacketed hollow-point (JHP), not milspec full metal jacket around the lead. Nice! If you're going to have to shoot a tiny little bullet at less than top speed, having something that will mushroom nicely inside the bad guy, creating a bigger wound cavity would help definitely make up for the lighter velocity rounds. A headshot with one of these ought to be a sure 99.9% kill, or at least put him down and out fast and long enough for me to take care of the final .1% more personally.

Outside behind the house on the beach there was a suitable old wooden utility pole that looked suitable for the role of a designated target and I found a bit of a washed up sea shell which I used to scratch out an oval of where the head would be on a normal size man. Then I scampered off a bit to try a bit of practice sneaking, to crawl up to within about twenty feet of the target and the pop off a simulated surprise headshot.

I struck the bull's-eye into the center of my scratched target and the gun was now indeed so quiet that even I could barely hear it fire. Even pulling the slide lock back to manually eject the fired shell and chamber the next, the sound would have been virtually indistinguishable even at close range with any sort of even minor background sounds to provide cover. I fired off another three rounds with identical accuracy with reasonably quick speed, once I'd gotten the rhythm of manually having to work the slide to eject and chamber the next round.

Not the world's best semi-automatic indiscriminate dealer of death. True, but wow, this was indeed an awesomely sweet gun for clandestine operations, like taking out sentries very, very quietly. Damn! I wished I had this baby the other night in that swamp cabin!

A great situational or backup weapon, but I was still going to need something more suited to everyday use.

I admit it, freely and of my own will, that I did not love, nor was I ever likely to be in love with Pete. On the other hand, the moment after he unlocked the steel door to his uncle's hidden storage bunker out in the dunes further behind the beach house, I was so agog with wonder that if he'd suddenly dropped to one knee and proposed I probably would have said 'Yes' out of sheer bewilderment and gun-lust.

There were enough weapons in that bunker to start a small war. Heck, I don't think the Blackwell Security Services armory back in Georgia had this many guns! Besides the usual stuff, the mundane AR-15/M-16 and AK platform assault rifles still packed in grease in factory crates, there was a glorious assortment of thousands of other guns from probably close to a hundred countries. Assuming that the ATF didn't collectively have themselves a heart attack over some of the nastier and more lethal items, this collection was absolutely museum quality. There were even muskets in display cases that dated to at least the Revolutionary War period, not to mention relics from the Civil War, the wilder parts of the old west, and obviously many more modern twentieth century conflicts.

With all of the dark corners, piles of crates higher than Pete's head and various other tarpaulin covered mounds of assorted goodies, I couldn't make out more than a tiny fraction of the complete collection. If Pete had yanked off a tarp to reveal a fully-working Nazi Tiger tank, I wouldn't have been in the least bit surprised.

Following Pete's lead, I began working my way to the back of the long bunker where I found a small but still nicely functional shooting range with low but adequate lighting. A few more light bulbs would have been nice, but I could see well enough to string up a fresh row of targets at the back of the range and wait for Pete to start bringing me sweet offerings of firearms for my fondling and approval.

I didn't have to wait long. The biggest problem was that I really didn't know what I wanted. It was worse than being a kid in a candy store with a pocket full of quarters ... or worse, a toy store just before Christmas. My 'gimmie' gland was twitching, wanting anything and everything in sight ... now, and preferably all loaded and ready to shoot!

Did I mention that this was a serious weapons collection? Not just a pile of mil-surplus crap waiting for a midnight cargo run to some African dictator or Latin American shithole. Sure, there were piles of the usual wholesale and retail stock, junk suitable only for gangbangers or crackpot dictators from third-world shitholes, but most of this collection had been put together by someone with knowledge, a discerning eye, and a lot of good taste. That probably let out either Pete or his late uncle. My boy-toy medic caught my thoughtful look and more or less finished reading my mind.

"Martin's dad, Dominic DelRey, my grandfather started this collection after the war ... the second, the big one. He was in the Big Red One and fought from North Africa all the way into Germany. Never got a scratch. Family story was he and a few squad mates got lucky about two weeks before the Bulge and nabbed some retreating Germans with a truck loaded with gold stolen from a French or Belgian bank. They captured and buried it, and then the confusion of the battle covered up pretty much everything else, and he lost most of his new partners in the process. In any case, he came home from the war a rich, rich man. Dom had friends who were in the OSS, which became the CIA after the war, and he spent the next twenty or thirty years helping to finance bits of the cold war and he ran guns for them all over the world. Martin then made some brand new CIA buddies while he was in 'Nam, and when Dom passed he took over the family business. Still dealing guns for the CIA and then of course the Watters. They're joined at the hip these days, partners, running guns into Mexico mostly these days or to Columbian cartels. The Company helps keep the FBI out of the Watters business, and everyone gets what they want."

"Your grandfather had a good eye. If the day ever comes when the Feds or ATF owe you a huge favor, I'd make them let you open a museum to publicly display some of these beauties." Pete looked aghast at even the thought of any of the great unwashed putting their nasty eye-marks all over the family jewels and I quickly bit my tongue to keep my mouth shut before I said anything else particularly stupid. Probably old Dominic was just as sociopathic as his descendants. No one with this many guns could possibly be considered 'normal' or well-adjusted. Pete hadn't had much participation in building this collection, but it would be obviously over his dead body that he'd let much of any of it go!

Well, except for a few pieces for me!

Replacing the lost (deep-sixed) Remington 870 Super Marine turned out to simple and quickly done. Pete tossed me a Benelli M4 Super 90 "Neptune" 12-gauge and I forgot all about looking at alternative Remington 870's or Mossberg 500's. This beauty was a spec-ops upgrade to the new M1014 Joint Service Combat Shotgun, and it had a blue parkerized non-reflective and corrosion-resistant finish over every metal part with additional BearCoat Teflon coating down the barrel and operating chambers. As a gas operated, smoothbore, magazine fed semi-auto shotgun this baby was born for battle and you could leave it in sea-water virtually forever before it would even think about corroding. Better yet it had a weaver-style rail installed at the top of the receiver with a combination laser illuminators and night-vision sights. With a tractable stock and a barrel just over 18-1/2 inches long it would be perfect for in-close defense, such as indoors at night or it would be utterly reliable in any weather condition.

Oh yes, it would do!

I admit that I missed my old .357 SIG. It was a nice, semi-standard law enforcement grade round, easy to find, fairly easy to shoot. I'd recovered mine from the vile clutches of the Miami-Dade County Police, but all too temporarily. Along with my backup .45, it was now resting in the trunk of the Foole's rental car ... along with the dead body of Pete's homicidal uncle. The Foole assured me that none of the above were ever likely to see the light of day again. Now I needed a suitable replacement to accompany my Hushpuppy, and as Pete brought out box after box of options I soon found myself swamped with choices.

.45 ACP is an excellent answer to a great many questions. It's a nice big powerful round designed by Saint John Browning himself to put the ungodly flat on their asses with large holes in them. Perfection ... or was it?

In the nearly one hundred years since, every gun maker has tried (and usually failed) to create that better mousetrap, a semi-automatic handgun worthy of smiting the wicked and sending them hastily on an abrupt and one-way journey to meet their maker. A lot of relics of that journey, modern and not-quite so, sat here waiting for me to try out, and I emptied three full one hundred round boxes of ammunition in the process, not to mention innumerable partial boxes of less common ammo sizes.

Pete wasn't prepared in advance with any ballistic gelatin, but in my experience wet telephone books work just as well, and after a couple of hours I'd just about blown holes in most of his stack. It wasn't time that was particularly misspent.

Hey! Picking out a gun is at least as important to this girl as picking out a pair of shoes is for a 'normal' lady ... and takes about a similar length of time!

In the end I decided upon going 10mm, just because of the way that the wet phone book targets simply seemed to explode once the bullets hit them! The biggest problem was that the Glock 30 was too big for my hands and the Glock 29 and H&K USB Compact were either little too small and 'girly' feeling or felt 'out of control' a bit when firing. I needed something in-between ... and yeah there was probably more than a little something Freudian there as well, with me being unhappy with my sexual relationships with both men and women. Let's not go there right now!

I needed, wanted, something a bit in-between sized that didn't shoot like the toy cannon it was with uncontrollable recoil, and eventually Pete found me just the right thing, a matching pair of Lady Cougars, in matching blue-steel 1911-style bodies. These were a just slightly smaller but classic styled Browning 1911 with all-metal body and carved teakwood grips with silver accented trim. Wow, just wow! And they shot like a dream as well! Just right for my hands, not too heavy but substantial enough to handle and absorb most of the recoil.

10mm comes and goes in and out of style. Right now they were on the outs and not being made much, and not every gun shop would even carry the ammo. Even the .45 ACP experts agree (grudgingly) that the 10mm is the hotter and nastier round but the problem has always been how to contain all of that energy. Law enforcement has repeatedly evaluated it but in most cases they've stuck with their 9mm toys, or better yet .357 SIG or .40 S&W. For starters most mass manufactured 'compact' versions end up being some sort of compromise, in mostly vain efforts to keep the recoil under control. Most women can't handle it. Even the Glocks (and I love Glocks) just didn't feel right – or at all under control when fired. These Lady Cougars, which were custom made by real craftsmen, retailed in the ballpark of $4k each. Definitely not normal law enforcement fodder, or even affordable by most discriminating shooters. Fortunately my 'friend with benefits' was feeling generous.

"Nice matching pair! Here's the presentation box that they came in from the factory too. Martin bought these a couple of years ago I think for a drug dealer friend of his. They were to be a gift for this broad that ran a swanky nightclub on South Beach who passed a lot of coke for him. He had these custom ordered for her, real craftsman pieces ... took them almost nine months to ship these. The happy couple had had a falling out by then and she allegedly poisoned him, and also cut out the middle-man in the coke distribution channel. She got iced a month or two later, not sure by whom ... probably someone in the Watters organization though, since they were the primary source for his blow."

Pete shrugged and held the box open so that I could place both of the pistols into their velvet lined receptacles. Closing the box he then handed it to me and gave me a rather unromantic peck on the cheek and something that resembled a sisterly hug. Ok, I could deal with that. I wasn't sure if I was relieved or somewhat disappointed.

While I was thinking about it, I had Pete grab for me a nice gun cleaning kit that was better than the more limited and portable one I'd kept in my travel knapsack and a small but suitable hand-loading kit so that I could make some reduced powder load 9mm's for my HushPuppy later. Then for good measure I asked him to find and load up a case of two dozen boxes of 10mm rounds. That would keep me and my 'wanted' face out of local ammo or gun shops for awhile!

"Gold Hammers work for you?" He asked, rummaging through a big wall cabinet with a couple of dozen drawers. "Conventional wisdom says go either 'Double-Tap', 'Gold Tip' or 'Hydro-Shok', but I really like what the Hammers do in .45 ACP." Yeah, I shot a few of those and almost had decided upon a nice pair of .45's before Pete had uncovered these Lady Cougar lovelies and I'd found lust at first sight.

"Sounds good to me! Just stick with JHP, but a little mix of everything would be nice ... except no +P's." Shooting factory over-stuffed/over-powered +P rounds in 10mm was just asking for trouble like a stovepipe or feed jam, not to mention a strained wrist!

He handed off the case of ammo and my gun box to DeeDee, who had been lurking with impatience in the shadows watching the children at place. We did have places to be, bad guys to shoot, etc, but now I could contribute my share, and more, of the necessary mayhem.

I still wanted something 'tote-able', bigger than my semi-auto pistols but not quite full sized machinegun territory. Pete tried to talk me into taking his uncles' Stoner 63, a huge pig of a 5.56 NATO sputtering death machine that probably weighed about as much as I did. Well, it was only about thirty pounds or so, but I'd need the strength of madness to tote that bastard around with me. No jokes about my madness, please!