Free Blood risk by Dean Koontz Page A

store looked like the streets of a Florida town after a hurricane disaster, and though his own style of dress was no style at all except comfort, he was a tidy man when it came to his specialty. His specialty was guns.
        "Upstairs," he said, passing Tucker on his way back into the maze of tarnished, tottering furnishings.
        At the back of the store, through a yellow cloth curtain, they went up a set of narrow wooden stairs, passed the second floor where Imrie lived, climbed to the third and last level where he kept his gun collection. Here, as on the first floor, the partitions had been knocked out-to make one large room. Racked on the walls, shelved against wooden display lifts, nestled in velvet-lined cases and-in the case of new acquisitions not yet touched by Imrie-dumped unceremoniously in cardboard boxes, were more than two thousand rifles, shotguns and handguns, with the overwhelming emphasis on the last category. Also in the room, against the far wall, were a number of metal-working machines, including a complete miniature gas-fired forge and cooling pot where metals could be melted and shaped.
        "I think I have exactly what you want," Imrie said. 'In the store downstairs he'd seemed bland, as gray as his fringe of hair, a little sleazy but not sleazy enough to be colorful. Here, among his weapons, he came alive like a puppet jerked up on strings and touched, magically, by some good fairy. His eyes, hooded and dull in the antique store, were wide, bright and shifted quickly from one thing to another-not ignoring, either, Tucker's reaction to everything he said and, in a few moments, to everything that he showed him.
        They stopped at a bookcase that filled half the wall to the right of the door, and Imrie looked up over the bushy gray thatch of his eyebrows, embarrassed. He said, "Mr. Tucker, I hope you'll excuse the television dramatics here."
        "Of course," Tucker said. He had been in contact with Imrie nine times before. Three times Imrie had opened the hidden closet in Tucker's presence-the sign of trust and respect he gave few customers-and every time he apologized for the melodrama.
        "You can't be too careful these days," Imrie said, using both hands to remove several volumes of poetry from the fifth shelf. He handed the books to Tucker, who took them and waited patiently. "There was a time, not so many years ago, you could leave everything out in the open. If I was working on a gun-making special changes-and I got sleepy, I'd leave it on the workbench while I caught a few winks, you know?" Tucker said he knew. "But now you can't take any chances. All this public uproar about guns puts pressure on the cops and, directly, pressure on me too. You'd think, listening to these anti-gun nuts, that every handgun in existence is used in crime of some sort. Take a look around this workshop, though. I got maybe twelve hundred, thirteen hundred handguns. How many of them am I going to sell to special customers like you? Thirty? Forty? No more than that." He made a sound of disgust in the back of his throat, located the lock previously covered by the books, used a key on his chain to open it. He stepped aside and swung the bookcase out of the way, walked into a closet about four times his own size, pulled on a chain that lighted a forty-watt bulb, located a card-board box he wanted, turned out the light and stepped into the main room again. He put the box down, closed and locked the bookcase door, took the poetry volumes from Tucker's hands and slipped them onto the shelf again. "Makes me feel like a criminal," he said, grunting in the back of his throat. He sounded as though he were looking for someone to spit on.
        At the main workbench, Imrie showed Tucker what he had for him. "Three Portuguese National Guard contract Lügers, all in excellent shape."
        "Fakes?"
        Imrie looked hurt. "Genuine, I assure you. A good fake, of course, would be sufficient for