Persuader

back there. Being ex-military is like being a lapsed Catholic. Even though they're way in the back of your mind, the old rituals still exert a powerful pull. Old rituals like obeying an officer.
    "Eleven bang bang," he said, and smiled.
    Not a great answer. Eleven bang bang was grunt slang for 11B, which meant 11-Bravo, Infantry, which meant Combat Arms. Next time I face a four-hundred-pound giant with veins full of meth and steroids I would prefer it if his MOS had been mechanical maintenance, or typewriting. Not combat arms. Especially a four-hundred-pound giant who doesn't like officers and who had served eight years in Fort Leavenworth for beating up on one.
    "Let's go inside," I said. "It's wet out here." I said it with the kind of tone you develop when you get promoted past captain. It's a reasonable tone, almost conversational. It's not the sort of tone you use as a lieutenant.
    It's a suggestion, but it's an order, too. It's heavy with inclusion. It says: Hey, we're just a couple of guys here. We don't need to let formalities like rank get in our way, do we? He looked at me for a long moment. Then he turned and slid sideways through his door.
    Ducked his chin to his chest so he could get through. Inside, the ceiling was about seven feet high. It felt low to me. His head was almost touching it. I kept my hands in my pockets. Water from his slicker was pooling on the floor.
    The house stank with a sharp acrid animal smell. Like a mink. And it was filthy. There was a small living room that opened to a kitchen area. Beyond the kitchen was a short hallway with a bathroom off it and a bedroom at the end. That was all. It was smaller than a city apartment, but it was all dressed up to look like a miniature stand-alone house.
    There was mess everywhere. Unwashed dishes in the sink. Used plates and cups and articles of athletic clothing all over the living room. There was an old sofa opposite a new television set. The sofa had been crushed by his bulk. There were pill bottles on shelves, on tables, everywhere. Some of them were vitamins. But not many of them.
    There was a machine gun in the room. The old Soviet NSV. It belonged on a tank turret.
    Paulie had it suspended from a chain in the middle of the room. It hung there like a macabre sculpture. Like the Alexander Calder thing they put in every new airport terminal. He could stand behind it and swing it through a complete circle. He could fire it through the front window or the back window, like they were gunports. Limited field of fire, but he could cover forty yards of the road to the west, and forty yards of the driveway to the east. It was fed by a belt that came up out of an open ammunition case placed on the floor. There were maybe twenty more cases stacked against the wall. The cases were dull olive, all covered with Cyrillic letters and red stars.
    The gun was so big I had to back up against the wall to get around it. I saw two telephones. One was probably an outside line. The other was probably an internal phone that reached the house. There were alarm boxes on the wall. One would be for the sensors out in no-man's-land. The other would be for the motion detector on the gate itself. There was a video monitor, showing a milky monochrome picture from the gatepost camera.
    "You kicked me," he said.
    I said nothing.
    "Then you tried to run me over," he said.
    "Warning shots," I said.
    "About what?"
    "Duke's gone," I said.
    He nodded. "I heard."
    "So it's me now," I said. "You've got the gate, I've got the house." He nodded again. Said nothing.
    "I look after the Becks now," I said. "I'm responsible for their security. Mr. Beck trusts me. He trusts me so much he gave me a weapon." I was giving him a stare the whole time I was talking. The kind of stare that feels like pressure between the eyes. This would be the moment when the meth and the steroids should kick in and make him grin like an idiot and say, Well he ain't going to trust you anymore when I tell him what I found out there on the rocks, is he? When I tell him you already had a weapon. He would shuffle and grin and use a singsong voice. But he said nothing. Did nothing. Didn't react at all, beyond a slight defocus in his eyes, like he was having trouble computing the implications.
    "Understand?" I said.
    "It used to be Duke and now it's you," he said neutrally.
    It wasn't him who had found my stash.
    "I'm looking out for their welfare," I said. "Including Mrs. Beck's. That game is over now, OK?" He