Chapter 2: Suppositions

Calvin Harper leaned against the glass counter-slash-display case and looked at the old man over the top of his glasses. He tugged the cloves off of his hands. He was going to be here for a while. It was a refreshing change to find someone that not only seemed willing to help, but actually might know what he was talking about.

"There's a pot, on the burner, in the back room. Some cups on the counter too," the old man indicated with a snap of his head toward the back of the store.

It was a small shop, but what it lacked in size, it made up for in volume. Glass display cases ran paralel with all four walls, each case neatly packed full of handguns. Rifles and shotguns and semi-automatic sporting carbines, stood at ease in their brackets on the walls, calmly awaiting their inspection and hopeful requisition. A single, wide, double sided isle ran down the middle of the store, its contents a collection of accesories and ammunition.

Calvin shrugged out of his overcoat and laid it across the glass case, at the end of the long row of plastic bindle baggies, each containing a different type of spent casing. Evidence from the alley.

He straightened his silver suit jacket and turned towards the back of the room, his black Italian dress shoes made little "squock-squock" sounds on the highly polished floor.

"You work with Fletcher Gereld?" the old man called after Calvin as he steped through the open door into the back room.

"That obviouse, huh," Calvin called back as he picked up the only mug next to the coffee pot and tipped it over, making sure to knock whatever might be in it, out. Never mind the dried ring in the bottom, the fresh coffee would take care of it. He didn't see any creamer and so didn't bother looking for any. These "chance" encounters where like job interviews: say the wrong thing, make the wrong expression, and it's "Don't call us, we'll call you."

"Gereld always had a nose for the help.

"Where'd you graduate from?"

"Didn't" Calvin replied as he returned to the counter with the mug in one hand and the pot in the other. He held it up and the old man, without looking, reached behind him and picked up an odd, mishapen vessel and held it out for the coffee. "I was homeschooled. My father was a genius, I managed to inherit a couple of his, odder cells, and so I was done with school by fourteen and then we moved overseas, and then it was from town to town to town. Wherever the work was."

"Even after you were old enough to go out on your own?" the old man paused in his inspection of one of the bindle bound casings, and looked up.

"By then I was a full partner in his business. Computers. Oh, I took some classes, when I could. I just took what I needed." Calvin shrugged nonchallantly, the fabric of the suit coat bunching over the roll of his muscular shoulders. "All they tried to do in college was 'educate' me. Also Know As 'indoctrinate.' Little Mind-Numbed Robot Factories. Nothing like going into a place and being told by a moron that you're the stupid one and that you'll 'always be stupid unless you think like me.'"

The old man just grunted in affirmation.

Calvin sipped the black, astringent coffee and watched the shop owner inspect each casing, as meticulously as possible through the plastic baggies.

"Well, Bucko," the old man set the last casing down and straightend up, pocketing the loupe that had been pressed to his right eye, a white ring around his eye was quickly turning to pink, "you've caught a bully this time."

"Oh?" Calvin straightened, his pulse quickening. It had been three hours of, "Who are you?", "Get a warrent", "Sorry, can't help you", "I'm just the hired help, I don't know nothin'" before he had stopped into the this "hole-in-the-wall" place.

"Oh yeah" the old man put his left arm up on the glass for the first time since Calvin had come in. A silver cap covererd the end of his arm where his wrist should have been. "My brother thought it was a quail," he winked and smiled at Calvin's curious expression.

"Half these rounds are stardard, off the shelf ammo. A quarter are milspec only, and the others . . . Home made, is the only word that comes to mind. But you would need fifty thousand dollars worth of equipment to make these casings.

"You say these where in an alley?"

"Yes. About a thousand times what I have here."

"Seriously?"

"Quite."

The old man was quiet, he sipped his coffee from the chipped and cracked and mishapen mug, and looked over the bindle baggies again. Calvin could now see the I Luv Daddy painted on the side.