I said nothing. The room was silent. He leaned forward in his chair.
"You're either with me or against me," he said. "Either way, you're about to prove it. I sincerely hope you choose wisely."
Duke moved against the door. The floor creaked under his feet. I listened to the ocean. Spray smashed upward and the wind whipped it and heavy foam drops arced lazily through the air and tapped against the window glass. The seventh wave came booming in, heavier than the others. I picked up the Anaconda in front of me. Duke pulled a gun out from under his jacket and pointed it at me in case I had something other than roulette on my mind. He had a Steyr SPP, which is most of a Steyr TMP submachine gun cut down into pistol form. It's a rare piece from Austria and it was big and ugly in his hand. I looked away from it and concentrated on the Colt. I thumbed the bullet into a random chamber and closed the cylinder and spun it free. The ratchet purred in the silence.
"Play," Beck said.
I spun the cylinder again and raised the revolver and touched the muzzle to my temple. The steel was cold. I looked Beck straight in the eye and held my breath and eased the trigger back. The cylinder turned and the hammer cocked. The action was smooth, like silk rubbing on silk. I pulled the trigger all the way. The hammer fell. There was a loud click. I felt the smack of the hammer pulse all the way through the steel to the side of my head. But I felt nothing else. I breathed out and lowered the gun and held it with the back of my hand resting on the table. Then I turned my hand over and pulled my finger out of the trigger guard.
"Your turn," I said.
"I just wanted to see you do it," he said.
I smiled.
"You want to see me do it again?" I said.
Beck said nothing. I picked up the gun again and spun the cylinder and let it slow and stop. Raised the muzzle to my head. The barrel was so long my elbow was forced up and out. I pulled the trigger, fast and decisive. There was a loud click in the silence. It was the sound of an eight-hundred-dollar piece of precision machinery working exactly the way it should. I lowered the gun and spun the cylinder a third time. Raised the gun. Pulled the trigger. Nothing. I did it a fourth time, fast. Nothing. I did it a fifth time, faster. Nothing.
"OK," Beck said.
"Tell me about Oriental rugs," I said.
"Nothing much to tell," he said. "They go on the floor. People buy them. Sometimes for a lot of money."
I smiled. Raised the gun again.
"Odds are six to one," I said. I spun the cylinder a sixth time. The room went completely silent. I put the gun to my head. Pulled the trigger. I felt the smack of the hammer falling on an empty chamber. Nothing else.
"Enough," Beck said.
I lowered the Colt and cracked the cylinder and dumped the bullet out on the table. Lined it up carefully and rolled it all the way back to him. It droned on the wood. He stopped it with the heel of his hand and sat there and said nothing for two or three minutes. He was looking at me like I was an animal in a zoo. Like maybe he wished there were some bars between him and me.
"Richard tells me you were a military cop," he said.
"Thirteen years," I said.
"Were you good?"
"Better than those bozos you sent to pick him up."
"He speaks well of you."
"So he should," I said. "I saved his ass. At considerable cost to myself."
"You going to be missed anywhere?"
"No."
"Family?"
"Haven't got any."
"Job?"
"I can't go back to it now," I said. "Can I?"
He played with the bullet for a moment, rolling it under the pad of his index finger. Then he scooped it up into his palm.
"Who can I call?" he said.
"For what?"
He jiggled the bullet in his palm, like shaking dice.
"An employment recommendation," he said. "You had a boss, right?"
Mistakes, coming back to haunt me.
"Self-employed," I said.
He put the bullet back on the table.
"Licensed and insured?" he said.
I paused a beat.
"Not exactly," I said.
"Why not?"
"Reasons," I said.
"Got a registration for your truck?"
"I might have mislaid it."
He rolled the bullet under his fingers. Gazed at me. I could see him thinking. He was running things through his head. Processing information. Trying to make it fit with his own preconceptions. I willed him onward. An armed tough guy with an old panel van that doesn't belong to him. A car thief. A cop-killer. He smiled.
"Used records," he said. "I've seen that store."
I said nothing. Just looked him in the eye.
"Let me take a guess," he said. "You were fencing stolen CDs."
His type of guy. I shook my head.
"Bootlegs," I said. "I'm not a thief. I'm ex-military, trying to scrape a living. And I believe in free expression."
"Like hell," he said. "You believe in making a buck."
His type of guy.
"That too," I said.
"Were you doing well?"
"Well enough."
He scooped the bullet into his palm again and tossed it to Duke. Duke caught it one-handed and dropped it into his jacket pocket.
"Duke is my head of security," Beck said. "You'll work for him, effective immediately."
I glanced at Duke, than back at Beck.
"Suppose I don't want to work for him?" I said.
"You have no choice. There's a dead cop down in Massachusetts, and we have your name and your prints. You'll be on probation, until we get a feel for exactly what kind of a person you are. But look on the bright side. Think about five thousand dollars. That's a lot of bootleg CDs."
The difference between being an honored guest and a probationary employee was that I ate dinner in the kitchen with the other help. The giant from the gatehouse lodge didn't show, but there was Duke and one other guy I took to be some kind of an all-purpose mechanic or handyman. There was a maid and a cook. The five of us sat around a plain deal table and had a meal just as good as the family was getting in the dining room. Maybe better, because maybe the cook had spat in theirs, and I doubted if she would spit in ours. I had spent enough time around grunts and NCOs to know how they do things.
There wasn't much conversation. The cook was a sour woman of maybe sixty. The maid was timid. I got the impression she was fairly new. She was unsure about how to conduct herself. She was young and plain. She was wearing a cotton shift and a wool cardigan. She had clunky flat shoes on. The mechanic was a middle-aged guy, thin, gray, quiet. Duke was quiet too, because he was thinking. Beck had handed him a problem and he wasn't sure how he should deal with it. Could he use me? Could he trust me? He wasn't stupid. That was clear. He saw all the angles and he was prepared to spend a little time examining them. He was around my age. Maybe a little younger, maybe a little older. He had one of those hard ugly corn-fed faces that hides age well. He was about my size. I probably had heavier bones, he was probably a little bulkier. We probably weighed within a pound or two of each other. I sat next to him and ate my food and tried to time it right with the kind of questions a normal person would be expected to ask.
"So tell me about the rug business," I said, with enough tone in my voice that he knew I was saying I assumed Beck was into something else entirely.
"Not now," he said, like he meant not in front of the help. And then he looked at me in a way that had to mean anyway I'm not sure I want to be talking to a guy crazy enough to chance shooting himself in the head six straight times.