The bomb maker would have to be leaving in a few days, so he began with the drill press. He would have to order it and get it delivered before he left. That way it wouldn’t be left boxed up and sitting in the driveway while he was gone. He also wanted to keep this purchase as distant in time from the other purchases as possible.

He found a drill press advertised online that was almost new. A metalworking business had gone under, and the shop equipment was being liquidated. This one was perfect for precision work. It was laser guided, with a one-and-a-half-horsepower motor that turned at 4,200 rpm, and it had a work light over the oversize table. He had to drive to Santa Ana to pick it up, but that meant he would be able to install it in his garage workshop right away. When he got to Santa Ana he also saw a lathe for sale, so he bought that too, and set both up in his shop.

The next day he planned his trip. There were a surprising number of AK-47 rifles for sale by licensed dealers across the country, but he couldn’t afford to let them make background checks. Instead he looked for gun shows in states where a seller who didn’t earn most of his living as a gun dealer didn’t have to report sales.

In a couple of hours he had plotted a route between large gun shows. He would start in Las Vegas; go next to the Crossroads of the West Gun Show in Phoenix at the Arizona State Fairgrounds; then stop for a show at the Tucson Pima County Fairgrounds, one in Tucumcari, New Mexico, one at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, and then one in St. George, Utah. He added a few running across Texas in Lubbock, Houston, and San Antonio.

He judged he would probably have what he needed long before he ever got near Texas. And if he didn’t by then, he could continue on through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. None of those states required private gun sellers to report anything to anybody.

When he was ready, he packed a suitcase and put it in a metal storage box in his van. He also had four empty metal storage chests running along the floor. He had locks for them, but to start out he didn’t use those. Sometimes a lock just attracted attention.

As he drove along Interstate 15 toward Las Vegas he reviewed his strategy. He would walk around the show looking for AK-47s on the tables. He had selected big shows, so there would be at least a hundred tables with guns of all kinds lying on them. It would be fairly easy to tell which sellers were licensed gun dealers with lots of merchandise and which were private collectors with a few pieces they wanted to get rid of for cash or trade for something better. He would select a likely seller and watch for a while. Sometimes a licensed dealer might be willing to run checks on customers for a nearby collector, or even serve as a middleman for a modest cut of the profit. The bomb maker would watch and see if anything like that was going on before he inquired about an AK-47.

After his first circuit of the Las Vegas show, he made his first inquiry to a man about sixty-five years old who had a row of AR-15-style rifles of various makes with a range of configurations. Beside them he had five AK-47 rifles. The bomb maker said, “Can I take a look at your AKs?”

The man nodded, and said, “Help yourself.”

The bomb maker was excited. He could feel that, of the usual three positions, the selector lever had only two: the Safe position and the third, lower one that permitted semiautomatic firing. There was no fully automatic position. The older man said, “They’re semiauto only. You can’t bring one into the country until it’s been modified.”

“Where are these from?”

“What used to be Yugoslavia. All of them were made for the army, but they were never issued.”

The bomb maker could see from the wear patterns that two of the rifles had been fired a lot, and carried in the field. The wooden butt pieces and forestocks had lighter places where being touched had rubbed and discolored them. The bomb maker decided not to mention that. He said, “How much for all of them?”

“A thousand apiece.”

“I’ll give a thousand each for these three,” he offered.

“No thanks, they’re sort of a collection, and I want to get rid of the lot.”

“How about eight hundred each for all five? That’s four thousand bucks, in cash.”

“All right,” the man said.

The bomb maker counted out the cash and the man began bundling them up in a tarp for him. The man threw in four extra thirty-round magazines, but charged him three hundred more for the five hundred rounds of 7.62 × .39-mm ammunition. He made three trips to load his car.

A couple of days later at the Arizona State Fairgrounds he noticed a woman selling off a collection of rifles and pistols. Her sign said: DIVORCE SALE. Each of her weapons had a sticker with a price written on it with a magenta-colored marker. She was about forty years old, blond with skin that had been in the sun too much. She wore tight jeans and a Western shirt with pearl snaps instead of buttons. When she turned in his direction he saw she had blue eyes that were almost startling in her reddish face.

“Sorry about the divorce,” he said.

“Not me. How can I help you?”

“I like AK-47 rifles. You don’t have any, do you?”

“I got one,” she said.

“Oh?” he said. “I didn’t see it.”

“Bobby?”

A man about fifty-five who sat at the next table looked at her.

She said, “You going to be around for a while, Bobby? Can you watch my table?”

“How long were you thinking of?”

“Half hour or so.”

“Sure.”

The woman tapped the bomb maker’s solar plexus with the back of her hand. “Come on.” She started walking fast along the aisle in front of her table. The bomb maker followed her outside onto the vast parking lot and up to a red pickup truck. He veered toward the cargo bed, but she got into the driver’s seat. “It’s not back there. Get in.”

He climbed into the passenger seat and she drove across the lot, turned right, and then drove into the lot of the closest hotel. She jumped down. “It’s upstairs.”

He followed her into the hallway and into an elevator. She took him to the third floor and through the door of a room that was littered with clothes, an open suitcase with the clothes mixed up and hanging out of it, and several gun cases and some cardboard cartons. She dragged a gun case into the center of the floor, unzipped and opened it so he could see the AK.

“Where’s it from?”

“It says Bulgaria on it.”

He looked at the lower receiver and saw something written in the Cyrillic alphabet and some Arabic numerals. “Can I touch it?”

She smiled. “You can touch anything you can reach.”

His eyes met hers. “A half hour?”

She shrugged. “So it won’t be a long courtship.”

He stepped close and put his arms around her, and she leaned into him to kiss him. He pulled the sides of her Western shirt apart so the snaps all opened, and then she was working the buckle of his belt apart while he unhooked her bra. She shrugged it off and backed onto the bed. He pushed her over and tugged off her cowboy boots, so she could wriggle out of her tight jeans.

“You’ve done a cowgirl before,” she said.

“No, you’re my first.”

She laughed. “Cowgirl is the name of a position, dumb ass. It’s a joke.”

He flopped onto the bed beside her, naked, and touched her, his hands moving everywhere, arousing them both.

“Use a condom,” she said.

He paused, panicked.

“In my purse,” she said wearily, and nodded toward the desk across from the bed.

He swung his legs off the bed, stepped to the desk, and riffled through the purse. He felt a familiar square packet and the ring shape inside, tore the pack open, and unrolled the condom onto himself before he returned to the bed. As he began to find his way she thrust her hips forward, clutched his buttocks, and seemed to climb his body to take him in. The sex was eager and rushed, almost violent.

It occurred to him that he had not had intercourse with anyone since he caught his wife cheating and threw her out of the house. It explained to him why he felt so excited. But then the thought of her made his lust for this woman less compelling, and he found the distasteful memory of his marriage was helping him control his sexual urge, delaying the end.

He tried to reestablish a friendly feeling about this woman. He tried their one joke. “Cowgirl.”

She giggled and pulled away, pushed him on his back, and straddled him.

“Oh that,” he said. “I didn’t know there was a word for it.”

“But you’ve done it?”

“Of course.”

“Then shut up and do it again. Hard.”

About ten minutes later, her little cries and moans increased in frequency, and he speeded up to help her. When she climaxed, he let himself go too.

She lay still on top of him for a count of ten, then craned her neck and squinted to see the electric clock on the nightstand. She disengaged from him, crawled off the bed, and began putting her clothes back on. “Old Bobby will be wondering what’s taking so long. He’s an old guy and has to pee a lot. I watch his table when he goes, so he had to watch mine.”

The bomb maker sat up and began to dress too.

She pulled on her right boot, stood, and stomped once to make her foot settle into it. “Do you still want the AK?”

“How much?”

“A thousand.”

“That’s the price for brand-new.”

“This is brand-new.”

“It’s been fired, right?”

“Once or twice.”

“Then it’s not brand-new. It’s secondhand.” He stood, picked up the rifle and examined it, opened the chamber, and then set it down on its open case. It was in very good condition, but it had been fired a few times.

She sat beside him and put her hand on his thigh. “You just got free sex that you had no right to expect, and didn’t even know was coming. If you were a gentleman, you would appreciate that and give me the benefit of my generosity. If I weren’t a lady, I could claim you forced me, get somebody to kill you, and take all your money.”

He laughed. “You can have the thousand. Want to go out to dinner tonight?”

“Gee, I’m sorry, but Bobby is a relative of my ex-husband. Some kind of half-ass cousin, but he calls him his uncle, which isn’t possible. He’d be capable of causing trouble.”

“Want to give me your cell number so I can give you a call another time?”

“Nope. It’s been fun, but I don’t want to get hooked up and moved in with my next guy and then have you calling me up in a month. You know what I mean?”

“Sure,” he said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a stack of hundreds, then counted out ten on the bed. Then he put another hundred down and said, “Here’s a hundred for that carrying case.”

She snatched the pile of bills from the bed and folded them into her jeans pocket. “Thanks. Take your AK and the case, and then we never saw each other before.”

He zipped the rifle into its case and stood. She stepped close, pecked his cheek, and said, “Too bad we didn’t have more time.” Then she stepped to the door and held it open for him to leave. When he was out, she closed the door and gave it an extra tug to be sure he hadn’t done something to jam the latch so he could get in again. Then she turned and hurried into the staircase without looking back.

The bomb maker walked to his van and drove. He had a feeling about this transaction. If he went back into the show, she would see him, and other people would probably notice she was looking at him. Only bad things could come from that. She had been right. It was time to move on.

He went to the gun show in Tucson and picked up another AK-47 in very good condition. Two days later he found two, in Tucumcari, New Mexico, and drove on into Utah. He stopped in St. George for the next show.

After a day at the show without finding another rifle, he was sitting at a table in a bar across the street from his hotel eating a steak dinner. Sitting next to his dinner plate was a glass of bourbon. He had come in mainly because the bar was close to the gun show, and he guessed that drinkers there for the show would rather choose a bar that was in walking distance. There were only five restaurants serving alcohol here on the north side of the Grand Canyon in any case. The liquor law in Utah required it to be served only to members of private clubs, so he had to pay two dollars to join the fictitious club.

The drink sat untouched while he ate his steak. He had bought the drink only because having it would make him look relaxed and ordinary, and if he needed to, he could sip it later to prolong his time in the bar.

There were a couple of groups of men who were there for the gun show. He seldom lifted his eyes from the table, but he eavesdropped first on one group and then on the other, listening for information he could use. After a time, another group of three men came in, and he concentrated on them.

After they ordered, one of the men said, “So, I rented him the old house on the edge of the arroyo. It was the farmhouse from the days when that plot was a separate property. After the arroyo got all filled in with sediment and ran out of water, nothing got planted there except in wet years, but our family kept up the house. He stayed there for twelve years. He was a good tenant, a quiet guy, very steady. He’d worked over at the insurance company for at least seventeen. And then he died. He told me when he retired that he had no relatives left. He’d had parents and siblings, the last one a sister who was much older than he was. He’d had a girlfriend for a while, and she died too. He was eighty-four when his heart attack came, and he was still filling in at the insurance company doing paperwork.

“I paid for his funeral because I figured nobody else would. Then it turned out he had left a will saying whatever was left in the house I rented him was mine. Two days later I went into the house. I figured I’d better empty the refrigerator and cupboards and start cleaning to prepare for another tenant.

“I went down to the basement to look around for anything else I had to get rid of, and what’s down there? He’s got canteens, backpacks, ponchos, sleeping bags, all in desert camouflage. The rest is all guns and ammo. He was apparently waiting for the end of the world.”

“He was a survivalist?” one of the others asked.

“Yeah. He never told me, never talked politics or anything like that. Of course the smart ones don’t tell anybody. They think the government or the Chinese or somebody will come and take them out. They don’t want to make it easy. He had ten AK-47s and about a thousand rounds of 7.62 ammo for them. There were a lot of manuals, maps, contraptions for cleaning water to drink, and that kind of thing.”

“Ten AK-47s. Why did he think he needed ten?”

“Beats me. I guess he didn’t want to be without one. They weigh eight and a half pounds. At his age he couldn’t carry ten, let alone the ammo.”

“What are you going to do with them?” said a third man.

“I’m selling them tomorrow at the show. I’ve got some extra magazines, ammo, and stuff, so I could probably get ten thousand for them.”

The bomb maker waited while the conversation turned to other subjects. He kept watch in case the man with the rifles got ready to leave and he could talk to him outside. But first one, then the other man got up, said good night, and left. When the last man was getting ready to pay and leave, the bomb maker approached the table. “Excuse me,” he said. “I happened to hear some of what you said about the AK-47s. I just happened to be looking for some.”

“You found the right guy,” the man said. “I’ll have them at the show tomorrow morning. Table seventy-four. My name’s John Sutton.”

“Are the ten rifles the only things you’re selling?”

“Yes. They’re not anything I bought. I inherited them.”

“That’s what I thought when you were talking to your friends,” the bomb maker said. “You know, you could save yourself the admission fee and the rental of the display space if you wanted to make the sale to me tonight. Then we could both save another day’s expenses. Hotel, food, and everything can add up.”

“I guess that’s true,” said Sutton. “You mind telling me what you want ten identical rifles for? Are you a dealer?”

“No. I plan to take them to Texas, where I want to open a rifle range. There would be nothing but Russian arms—Tokarev pistols, AK-47s, Makarovs, some old Nagant revolvers. I think a lot of people would like that.”

“Maybe,” said Sutton. “I guess time will tell. I like your other idea, though. Maybe we can make a deal tonight and be ahead of the game. What do you want to offer for the ten rifles?”

The bomb maker thought about his problem—finding AK-47s with no histories and getting them to his house without having his name on any government list. These, if the story Sutton told his friends was true, were probably brand-new, and he was far ahead of the schedule he had devised. “I’ll give you the going rate in cash tonight. No haggling. What everybody seems to ask is a thousand a rifle. I’ll give you a thousand a rifle. Ten thousand cash for the lot of them.”

Sutton looked at him for a moment, and whatever doubts he had seemed to fade and disappear. “All right.”

“Where are the guns?”

“In my room at the hotel across the way. You staying there?”

“Yes,” said the bomb maker.

“You bring the money and we can load the guns into your vehicle right away. You got a truck?”

“A van.”

“That’ll do it,” said Sutton.

They shook hands and walked out of the bar. When they reached the street they looked up and down and saw that there were long breaks in the traffic. At the right moment they stepped into the wake of a semi and strolled across to the hotel parking lot.

Sutton said, “Bring your van over here to the nearest spot to this door, and I’ll start bringing the guns down.”

The bomb maker trotted to his van as soon as Sutton went inside. When the bomb maker got into the van he removed one of the rifles he’d already bought, inserted a loaded magazine into it, and set it down across the passenger seat. Then he sat still for a moment. He scanned all the windows and balconies, then the dark spots around the hotel. He saw a room on the fourth floor where two men stood on the balcony looking down on the lot. They were the same two who had been in the bar with Sutton. He watched for a few seconds, then pulled his van into a space near the door to Sutton’s corridor. He went into his suitcase and found a banded stack of hundred-dollar bills that had the numerals “10,000” and stuck it in his jacket pocket.

In a moment Sutton came out with a two-wheel dolly that held a box. When he moved up behind the bomb maker’s van, they lifted it off the dolly into the van. The bomb maker looked into one end of the box and saw five muzzles and into the other end and saw five rifle butts. He pulled one out at random and examined it, then said, “Looks good. Want to get the others?”

Sutton said, “What’s to stop you from taking off with those five while I’m up there?”

“Okay, let’s go together.” He locked his van.

They walked into the building with the dolly, took the elevator, and walked to a room on the fourth floor. Sutton opened the door and loaded the second box on the dolly.

The bomb maker examined the other five rifles and said, “Here’s your money.” He handed Sutton the banded stack and then stepped back to look out the window so he could see his van. “Feel free to count it.”

Sutton leafed quickly through the stack. “They’re all hundreds. That’s good enough for me.” He put the money in his coat pocket and started to wheel the guns out.

The bomb maker said, “I’d be careful from here on. People in the hotel will have seen us hauling these guns out. They’ll know you must have gotten a lot of money for them.”

“Don’t worry. They’re the only guns I’m selling, not the only guns I have.”

They took the rifles down and loaded them in the bomb maker’s van. They shook hands, and the bomb maker drove off. He turned into the parking lot of a diner far down the street just before the city road met the highway, and pulled in between two big semi trucks.

While he waited he loaded a second thirty-round magazine for the AK-47 he’d already taken out and set on the seat beside him. In a few minutes he saw Sutton, the man who had sold him the weapons. Sutton drove past the lot, but didn’t see the bomb maker’s van. He was busy looking in the rearview mirror of his pickup truck. Then he swung up the westbound entrance to the interstate. After about two minutes another truck pulled up the ramp after him. The driver was one of the men who had been in the bar with him hours ago.

The bomb maker shrugged. He had warned Sutton. Looking for a buyer for ten military rifles was a dangerous task, but obviously it wasn’t as dangerous as the time after the sale was made and everybody knew you must have the cash on you.

For the first couple of hours he wondered if Sutton was going to make it home, but after that he forgot because he didn’t care. He had nineteen rifles, four more than he needed to keep his employers satisfied, and nobody knew his name.

When he stopped for a snack and a cup of coffee outside Salt Lake City, he went to the case where he’d been storing the .45 pistols he had bought. He hadn’t been paying much attention to them along the way, just buying a good one whenever there was one in the inventories of the private sellers. When he counted, he came up with only thirteen, so he headed southeast and bought his last two at the Houston show. Once he had all of the AK-47s and the .45 ACP pistols, he knew how many extra magazines and boxes of ammunition he could pay for in cash, so he bought them from a wholesaler at the show. He drove homeward in a leisurely manner, not taking any chances of being stopped by police.