Free Blood risk by Dean Koontz Page B

anything you'd want to use it for. But these are the real article, 1906-type with four-and-three-quarter-inch barrels."
        "In 7.65 mm?"
        "Yes."
        Tucker worked the unloaded pistol.
        "See?" Imrie asked.
        "What about the silencers?" Tucker ran his thumb over the threads that had been cut into the outer circumference of the Lüger's barrel.
        Imrie lifted three bright tubes from the box, handed one of them over. "I guarantee the continuity of the barrel."
        "Of course."
        Tucker fitted the silencer to the Lüger and had almost eleven inches of barrel. The effect was at once silly and deadly.
        "Ammunition? Clips?"
        Imrie took those out of the box and placed them neatly on the table. He watched while Tucker fitted the silencers to each of the weapons, loaded them, held them, did everything but shoot them. He was not offended by the thoroughness of the examination, for he knew that Tucker was making no comment on his own trustworthiness but was merely taking as many precautions as he could. Indeed, he admired the other man's professionalism.
        Tucker broke the guns down and said, "How much?"
        "You understand that a genuine Portuguese National Guard Lĺuger is a collector's item?"
        "Even modified with a silencer?" Tucker asked.
        "Still, yes."
        "How much?"
        "I paid four hundred and fifty dollars for each gun, thirteen hundred and fifty altogether, the going market price." Tucker knew that Imrie had not purchased the weapons from another collector but from various uninformed sources, probably for as little as fifty or a hundred dollars each. He did not say anything. Imrie was good enough to be permitted as much chiseling as he could reasonably expect was his due. "I restored them to full functional status, supplied the ammunition-considerable ammunition-machined the silencers, a delicate operation that takes no little amount of time-"
        "How much?" Tucker interrupted.
        Bright eyes flickering over his face, down at the guns, up at his face again, Imrie realized Tucker was in a hurry, perhaps pushed the price up a little because of that. "Twenty-two hundred for the three."
        "Two thousand," Tucker said.
        "There is the added problem that these particular weapons were originally prepared for another gentleman, as an advance order. He'll be around to collect them in two days. To fill that order, I'm going to have to close the store and stay up eighteen hours a day-"
        Tucker cut the fat man short. "Hardly likely," he said. "We both know that you always keep a bit ahead of the demand. That's one reason you keep the hidden closet. You've probably got two more like this-maybe not Lügers but something as sufficient-ready to hand behind the bookcase."
        "Really-" Imrie began.
        "Two thousand."
        "You'll want a case to carry them out of here?" Imrie asked, folding thick fingers together.
        "Yes."
        "Two thousand for the guns, twenty-five dollars for the attaché case."
        Tucker smiled. "You're unbelievable."
        "The antique business has suffered through a recent economic recession you might have read about in the papers," Imrie said. He took his hands apart and put them palms up as if to ask, "What can I do?"
        Tucker counted out the money while Imrie put the guns, silencers and ammunition into a pearl-gray attaché case with a silvery stainless-steel handle. He snapped it shut, locked it and gave two keys to Tucker, in exchange for the proper cash compensation.
        "I think you'll be pleased," Imrie said.
        "I hope I will be."
        "Goodbye, then."
        "Goodbye," Tucker said.
        The fat man led him down the stairs again, into the darkened furniture store, past a row of old floor cabinet radios and a Gramophone on a maple stand. The Gramophone trumpet, once gilded and now tarnished, made Tucker think of Elise