Tilley was jumping up and down, hands up: Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!

Bly and Holdstock stumbled through the open doors and fell into shooter stances.

In the abrupt silence, a girl screamed from the darkness beyond the wall.

So I’m sitting at my desk on the third floor of Pace Arms and studying the guy across from me. He says his name is Bradley Smith. He’s even younger than me, which pleases me because I think the young should grab what’s left of this world before the old piss away every last bit of it.

“Your company is French?” I ask.

“The management is French. I already told your secretary that.”

“With how many armed employees?”

“Two thousand.”

“That’s a lot of armed guards.”

“We’re international. I told your secretary that, too.”

“ Sharon relayed everything to me with perfect accuracy, Mr. Smith.”

“She has nice paint, as the Mexicans like to say.”

I smile at this. “No kidding. And she composes letters, figures out my calendar, and keeps the assholes out of here.”

“Quite a woman.”

“She’s engaged,” I say, wishing it were to me.

“I am, too.”

“Really? I wouldn’t mind that someday.”

“What kind of thing is that to say? You get what you take, my man.”

I nod and silently cede the point. I look out the window to the mild Orange County morning. The blinds and the glass are dirty because we quit paying the custodial contract ten months ago, not long after Pace Arms was sued into bankruptcy. But to the east I can still see the swirl of concrete where the 405 meets the 55, and the malls stretching into the distance, the mirrored corporate buildings, the Performing Arts Center and the evangelical Christian broadcasting compound. Uncle Chester showed me pictures of that land when it was still bean fields, and gave me a stern warning that laziness never turned a bean field into a shopping mall. I was six. And Chester said if I wanted my piece of the American dream someday, it was going to take energy, vision, balls. It would take Pace. He usually smiled after saying that, not a pleasant thing. He’s huge but his teeth are small and even, like infant teeth. Back then, Pace Arms was making 145,000 handguns a year, right here in Orange County, right here in this building. Hardly anybody knew what we did. The guns were semiautomatic, semidependable, and dirt cheap. The workingman’s equalizer was what Chet called them. Most everybody else called them Saturday Night Specials. Uncle Chester is a lecher and a bore, but he knew how to make a buck on cheap guns.

“Okay, Bradley Smith,” I say. “Director of North American operations for Favier and Winling Security of Paris, France. You made this appointment. You were late. You tell me my secretary is stupid but hot. You tell me I’ll get what I take, my man. Maybe you should tell me something that might be worth my time, like, for instance, what do you want?”

“Time? You’ve got time. You’re bankrupt. But maybe I can help you with something else.”

“Help away.”

Bradley gets up and goes to the dirty window and looks out. He’s wearing the five-hundred-dollar Jimmy Choo boots I tried on a few months ago but had to get less expensive ones. And pricey jeans and a white shirt that’s cleaned and pressed, and a leather vest. He’s got long dark hair and a goatee and something about him besides his attitude bothers me but I don’t know what.

“You ought to get these windows cleaned.”

“We fired the custodians.”

“They fired you, actually, because you failed to pay them. Look, Ron, I did my due diligence on Pace Arms. I always liked your products. The twenty-five Hawk was decent, and the twenty-two LR was better. The nines weren’t bad, either. If you’d have gotten the design on the forty caliber right, your gun wouldn’t have killed the little boy, and Pace Arms would still be cranking out guns, money, and happiness. But… well, no need to rehash all that.”

“No.”

“So. In the course of my research, I reviewed the court transcripts and the financial declarations and the terms of the corporate dissolution. And I got out my trusty calculator and pushed a few keys, and guess what I saw.”

“Numbers?”

“Inventory still unsold.”

I figured this was where Bradley Smith was going. “And you’re going to help me by taking it off my hands.”

“Maybe I should know what it is.”

“Maybe I should know what you want it to be.”

“We’ve got two thousand men on the business end of things, all over the world. Some are in the most vile places on earth, some are in the most beautiful. Some in cities, some in mud. They go where they are needed. And what they all need is short-range stopping power, concealability, and one-hundred-percent reliability.”

“That would be the Hawk nine. We have a few. Thirty or so.”

“I need a thousand.”

My heart does a quick little somersault. “That’s quite an order for a bankrupt company, Mr. Smith.”

“And if the Hawk nines do what they’re supposed to do, we’d like to have all our people carrying them by the end of next year. So, a thousand more.”

Now, I attended church this last Sunday. I’ll admit it was to meet available women in the singles ministry, but it was church nonetheless. Thank you, God in heaven is all I can think.

I nod and push back in my rolling chair and glide across the carpet protector. “Come with me.”

I raise my eyebrows at Sharon on the way to the elevator. She smiles at Bradley Smith in a way that she has never smiled at me. But I knew she would smile at Smith that way because Smith has the thing that most women can’t resist. The thing. I’ve been trying to develop it for my entire adult life but I can’t even define it, so there’s no place to start. I once reverse-engineered an Egyptian submachine gun, and it was easy compared to developing the thing. You can’t reverse-engineer what you can’t define. Maybe it’s his goatee. I don’t know.

The elevator takes us down to the basement. The door opens and it’s dark. The basement is almost wholly below ground level, so the only natural light slips in through the long narrow windowpanes up top. I step out and key on the lights. I light only the lobby and part of the third floor these days. No use wasting money. My secretary, Sharon of my heart-Sharon Rose Novak is her full name-is my last pretense at solvency. Last week she actually braced me for a raise to help her pay for her wedding, which is set for next month. I haven’t met the groom, though I dislike the way he talks to her on the phone. She’s normally talkative but during their calls there are long silences on her part, then short, quiet replies. He takes something out of her. They registered at Bloomingdale’s and I bought them all twelve of the requested service settings, a Wedgwood design that was not cheap. Maybe they’ll have me over for dinner someday. She’s a blue-eyed blonde and has the prettiest face I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, I’ve spent almost all of what little money I had on keeping the doors open here at Pace Arms. Eighteen months ago when we correctly foresaw the courtroom mud bath, Chester got some building department friends to fast-track a city permit for a small penthouse up on the third floor, making the building a residence, which is outside the terms of the settlement. So I sold my home and bought the penthouse from Chet and I live here now. Chet holds the deed on the office footage. He left the country before the judgment and there have been only three postcards from him since- Thailand, Berlin, and Tahiti. They were addressed to “All” at Pace Arms. He took the last of the company cash with him, thirty grand. I pay his property taxes. Before leaving, he told me that any dreams of saving Pace would be foolish pride, but I still think there’s a way to salvage the business.