No news. Still getting my shit together. Still having revelations that will result in better books – including discovering a resource tracking organized crime with a ton of interesting reports on the subject. ( I started here: https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/russia-drug-trade-organized-crime/ )
I am more convinced that I am suffering from, and recovering from Burnout, and am working my way (more slowly than I’d like) through a book on the subject (Burnout, by Dr. Claire Plumbly) which is helping, so far.
On the positive side, I am managing to write short vignettey snippets. Going over the eight or so I’ve managed so far, I found one that doesn’t contain any spoilers for stuff I’m working on, which is at the end of the post – a raw first-draft vignette introducing an erstwhile killer for hire, one of the war dogs of Dog Country living in the slums of Del Cora.
For now, and as ever, thank you so much for your interest, your kindness, and your support. It all makes a difference. Hopefully more to say on everything next month!
—
The gun wasn’t anything special. Schaltin had seen dozens of them for sale in Ecuador’s high Sierra. Little towns with centuries of history up in the mountains, places that should have been ski resorts, not black market arms markets.
He turned the gun over. The good side had been filed down and stamped with a maker’s mark claiming it had been built in Exeter, New Hampshire, which was unlikely for a home workshop pistol built to imitate a Robham Arms L6. The bad side showed the gritty stitch-pattern of a badly calibrated polymer printer and a few bubbles where, when the gun’s frame had been pour-cast, the molten metal hadn’t been quite hot enough to burn away the polymer cleanly.
It felt good in his hand. Heavy. Seemed small, of course, but he’d been six or seven years old the last time he’d held an L6.
“We don’t have any money. He won’t help.”
The young woman, speaking in Spanish, didn’t know Schaltin could speak it. She was too used to the city people, the first and second generation émigrés to San Iadras who had arrived with money and Anglocentrism. Schaltin was local. In the obvious sense – he’d been gengineered and decanted from the tissue beds along with his clone brethren just a few miles away – and the less obvious.
He’d been living in Del Cora since the Emancipation. His foster-mother had been an elderly abuela, his foster-father her retired British husband living off his pension with her. There had been six other children – one of them his brother, Soragno, two Edwardses their mother insisted on calling los gatos, Paul and Andrew, and the human grandchildren they cared for while their actual children struggled for a living.
“He will help. He will do it. He doesn’t mind what we ask – the big dogs, they don’t have the same ethics as us.”
“I know that,” the young woman snapped. “But they work for money. Not iron.”
“We don’t have money. We have to hope he has a pure heart.”
The young woman’s companion was an elderly man. Elderly. Old enough have been born in Colombia, before most of it became the MACP. Old enough to have seen the worst of the Eurasian War. Maybe to have fought in it, although most locals hadn’t done that.
Schaltin carefully pulled the pistol’s slide. Smooth, but… By reflex, on auto-pilot, he began disassembling the weapon. Pulling back the safety and unlatching the takedown pin, removing the slide frame and burrowing into the weapon’s guts to expose the mainspring.
The pair stared at him, sitting on the bedside in his single-room apartment in Del Cora’s tallest residential building, laying out pieces of steel, all almost-perfect.
“You think he killed her,” Schaltin said, using the tip of his fingernail to twist the spring in its housing.
“We know Izan killed her. He threatened it over and over.” The young woman’s eyes were fierce. Angry.
Whoever had assembled the gun had it almost right. But the main spring was retained by a clip on one end, and on the other, it met the forward arrest stop. To the average eye, the arrest stop was just a steel dish with a post to hold the spring. But Schaltin knew, inconsequential as it was, that the spring was supposed to be tightened a few turns on the post, to let it ease into a recess on the arrest stop. Once the spring relaxed, it locked in place with a faint click.
The additional millimetre or two of travel didn’t do very much, but with the spring locked into the recess, the spring was held ever so slightly away from the post. And that meant it would remain centred, avoid snagging, and…
Schaltin finished reassembling the gun, and relaxed. The slide moved smoothly, still, but this was the way an L6 was supposed to be. An off-centre main spring was incorrect. Off schedule. An excuse for one of the drill sergeants to loom over him and yell until he stripped the weapon down and reassembled it, correctly.
The yelling had never bothered Schaltin, not really, nor repeating the operation so often his fingers became cut and bloodied. What had bothered Schaltin was that he hadn’t seen his mistake, first, to rectify it.
“You don’t have proof,” Schaltin said quietly, setting the gun down.
The elderly man went a little blank. The young woman, she became angry, sour. Bitter.
“No,” she agreed. “No proof. That is why the police won’t listen.”
“If you want me to kill this man, I need proof,” Schaltin told her. “Not as much proof as the police need, but proof.” He looked up at her, blinking, slowly.
“I can prove he hit my sister.” The sourness dissolved. Began to turn to tears. She pushed out a phone, images of bruises frozen on the screen. “Look,” she said.
Accepting the phone as gently as he’d accepted the gun, Schaltin pressed play. Watched another human, who looked a lot like the young woman, crying. Explaining that a man named Izan had beaten her, again. This young woman, filming her sister explaining what had happened to her.
“I need a little more than that,” Schaltin told her, giving the phone back.
“How much money do you want?” Her eyes became wetter.
“More proof. Proof that Izan is the same Izan you want me to kill.” Schaltin blinked at her, slowly. “It’s not a rare name. If I kill the wrong man, I have to find you, to make it right. You understand?”
She went pale, cold. Almost frozen. “What would proof be?”
“The man with your sister. Pictures off socials. Ideally a social media account he controls, or she did. Nothing you, or he, could manipulate.” Schaltin gestured at the old man.
Him? He was smiling. The old man understood, a little. “The dog doesn’t need money,” he told her, while she raced through the phone. “He needs to absolve himself.”
Schaltin blinked at him, as if Schaltin couldn’t understand.
“Look,” the young woman said, holding out the phone. There it was. Izan and her sister, smiling. Happy, at their six month anniversary.
Her sister was wearing makeup thick enough to hide bruises.
“That’s enough proof,” Schaltin said, voice quiet.
“You’ll do it?” she asked, voice close to breaking with an emotion not unlike grief.
“You should go, now.” He pulled the L6 across the bedsheets, possessively. Nostalgically.
The old man pulled her away.
Schaltin didn’t need money, or to absolve himself. He just wanted to kill someone and for it to feel good again. Like it used to.
