The Enemy

through the same question-and-answer with her, when she was looking for Carbone’s new P7.
    “What does Sergeant Trifonov use for a handgun?” I asked.
    “Trifonov? He favors the Steyr GB.”
    “Show me.”
    He turned away to the pistol rack and came back with a black Steyr GB. He was holding it by the barrel. It looked oiled and well maintained. I had an evidence bag out and ready and he dropped it straight in. I zipped the bag shut and looked at the gun through the plastic.
    “Nine-millimeter,” Summer said.
    I nodded. It was a fine gun, but an unlucky one. Steyr-Daimler-Puch built it with the prospect of big orders from the Austrian Army dancing in its eyes, but a rival outfit named Glock came along and stole the prize. Which left the GB an unhappy orphan, like Cinderella. And like Cinderella it had many excellent qualities. It packed eighteen rounds, which was a lot, but it weighed less than two and a half pounds unloaded, which wasn’t. You could take it apart and put it back together in twelve seconds, which was fast. Best of all, it had a very smart gas management system. All automatic weapons work by using the explosion of gas in the chamber to cycle the action, to get the spent case out and the next cartridge in. But in the real world some cartridges are old or weak or badly assembled. They don’t all explode with the same force. Put an out-of-spec weak load in some guns, and the action just wheezes and won’t cycle at all. Put a too-heavy load in, and the gun can blow up in your hand. But the Steyr was designed to deal with anything that came its way. If I were a Special Forces soldier taking dubious-quality ammunition from whatever ragtag bunch of partisans I was hanging with, I’d use a Steyr. I would want to be sure that whatever I was depending on would fire, ten times out of ten.
    Through the plastic I pressed the magazine catch behind the trigger and shook the bag until the magazine fell out of the butt. It was an eighteen-round magazine, and there were sixteen cartridges in it. I gripped the slide and ejected one round from the chamber. So he had gone out with nineteen shells. Eighteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. He had come back with seventeen shells. Sixteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Therefore he had fired two.
    “Got a phone?” I said.
    The clerk nodded at a booth in the corner of the hangar, twenty feet from his station. I walked over there and called my sergeant’s desk. The Louisiana guy answered. The corporal. The night-shift woman was probably still at home in her trailer, putting her baby to bed, showering, getting ready for the trek to work.
    “Get me Sanchez at Jackson,” I said.
    I held the phone by my ear and waited. One minute. Two.
    “What?” Sanchez said.
    “Did they find the shell cases?” I said.
    “No,” he said. “The guy must have cleaned up at the scene.”
    “Pity. We could have matched them for a slam dunk.”
    “You
found
the guy?”
    “I’m holding his gun right now. Steyr GB, fully loaded, less two fired.”
    “Who is he?”
    “I’ll tell you later. Let the civilians sweat for a spell.”
    “One of ours?”
    “Sad, but true.”
    Sanchez said nothing.
    “Did they find the bullets?” I said.
    “No,” he said.
    “Why not? It was an alley, right? How far could they go? They’ll be buried in the brick somewhere.”
    “Then they won’t do us any good. They’ll be flattened beyond recognition.”
    “They were jacketed,” I said. “They won’t have broken up. We could weigh them, at least.”
    “They haven’t found them.”
    “Are they looking?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “They dug up any witnesses yet?”
    “No.”
    “Did they find Brubaker’s car?”
    “No.”
    “It’s got to be right there, Sanchez. He drove down and arrived at midnight or one o’clock. In a distinctive car. Aren’t they looking for it?”
    “There’s something they’re not sharing. I can feel it.”
    “Did Willard get there yet?”
    “I expect him any minute.”
    “Tell him Brubaker is all wrapped up,” I said. “And tell him you heard the other thing wasn’t a training accident after all. That should make his day.”
    Then I hung up. Walked back to the wire cage. Summer had stepped inside and she was shoulder to shoulder with the armory clerk behind the stand-up desk. They were leafing through his logbook together.
    “Look at this,” she said.
    She used both forefingers to show me two separate entries. Trifonov had