Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 03

Yeah, you get the idea. The heterosexual male is apparently a very endangered species.

For some reason, American women do seem to approve of all of this, at least that's what the government polls say. It's no secret that men will do pretty much whatever a woman wants in order to have a prayer at getting laid... even if it's pretty likely that his wife would wear the strap-on dildo in the family. As for wearing the pants in the family, let alone shorts, no decent respectable American woman would ever be caught in public wearing them. The shape of the feminine thigh is wicked and must be concealed at all times! I don't even want to discuss children's fashions... I'm sorry; there is just something terribly unnatural about dressing boys in pinafore dresses! Being a 'breeder' is becoming so increasing politically and socially incorrect every day it seems that now even the children are now being punished for the crime of being born, accused and already convicted of the crime of ruining the earth by their very presence. No wonder the younger generation seems more than a bit warped!

There are plenty of gays, lesbians, transgenders, bi's, etc., in the GWA and no one much cares. They have the same rights as everyone else (but not more) and the government doesn't care a lick about legislating what consenting adults do behind closed doors. Unlike up here, where sex is just another progressive social policy to be mandated by government. The age-old war between the sexes has gone to DefCon-1 and I doubt that in the end anyone will 'win'. Perhaps the cynics in the CSA are right... when we settle the final score with Deseret it might be time to then turn the tanks east and not stop until we reach the Potomac River. For their own good... so that their own special and very over-ripe forms of insanity don't come and infect us!

***********

The treasonous arms dealer quickly saw through our rather shallow interest in buying any of the minimally legal firearms available in the store since we didn't even have any of our preliminary BoF paperwork, tax stamps, or the federal 'intent to buy' notice, let alone a BoF green card signifying that we'd passed our extensive background check, psych evaluation, anal probes, and paid our final exorbitant application tax fees that could almost buy a car back home. Did I mention that it's outrageously expensive to buy even a shotgun for bird hunting? All of these documents were necessary long before you even get permission to set foot into an evil emporium of un-liberal infernal devices like this one!

This pegged us quick as 'know-nothings', lookers that were just wasting his time. His assistant, whom I could swear was at least a minor level Adept, had one of his mental fingers tapped and ready on that Earth Ley as well, waiting to hit us with something nasty if we so much as blinked sideways. When the boss, obviously Jesse, announced that he was closing shop for the night, Bel and I shrugged. Ok, we'd thought this contingency out too, as something of a last resort, but the tightening of her mouth suggested that she was none too happy about this. I lifted up a hand to tell her to hold up for just a second, while I tried a quick Plan 'Y', better, I hoped, than our Plan Z.

I smiled and flipped Jesse my charmed silver dollars which he caught in mid-air and proceeded to examine it with pleasure as I stepped over towards him.

"Good Texas silver as you can see! And we have quite a lot more. What's the chance of getting an expedited purchase plan? I'm sure it can't be that exhaustive doing all of the Bureau of Firearms paperwork... maybe you'd know a friend in the BoF that could help cut off some of the red tape?" I was 99.9% certain that our information from Stout was accurate, but to confirm it I ideally wanted Jesse to directly point me right straight back to the bent BoF official.

Jesse's brightly red painted lips smiled, but mostly at the sight of my bright newly minted silver dollar now in his palm. Moving up close, so we could whisper in confidence, I noted that his minor protective gizmos were no match at all for my artificed charmed coin. Particularly I noted that he had a personal anti-charm artifice mounted on a gold pendant around his neck, which strictly looked like weak-ass over the counter crap, and it shut itself down tight without a peep when my charm spelled coin overloaded its defenses, and soon our wicked nasty girly-boy traitor was babbling with me like I was an old army friend or suck buddy.

Oh, he had the goodies alright. The mundane crap that I could see in the shop here upstairs was simply for show, as we suspected, and he purred that the much better stuff was stored down below. His stock was a bit low right now, he admitted as he described a few of the more lethal military grade toys that he could readily obtain on fairly short notice... assuming of course we'd pay his crooked BoF friend, our old acquaintance David Stout for greasing the paperwork. Otherwise, for a disturbingly large amount of sweet Texas silver, we could be fixed up with the illegally obtained murder weapon of our hearts' delight, right here and now.

He still wouldn't name his other buyer, but he as much as gleefully announced that he'd delivered an entire truckload of weapons to his biggest regular customer last month, and soon he'd have enough for another big shipment. With a bit more pressure, he remembered that the delivery was handled by the usual joes, the Clinton Street gang (yes, they did wear yellow striped jackets), and the name of their small time criminal boss, Daniel Ramirez, now appeared. This gave us some information coin in trade to deliver to the big crime boss, Sebestyen Dénes, assuming that Bel heard back from her contacts.

The only other useful piece of info, gleamed after a bit of frankly excessively hard pushing, was the off-hand comment that the gun smugglers and their huge monthly shipment were soon heading out of town to somewhere near Rockford. Names and locations otherwise unknown, and he liked it that way. He laughed that he didn't want to be on the receiving end of a mindwipe.

While this information might have made us all nice and tingly inside, his assistant, the minor mage, decided that he'd heard far too many beans casually spilled, and he rushed over to take charge. Unfortunately for us, he had more than enough practical experience to detect our massive personality charms that were affecting his boss and he loaded up his magical juice to give us a blast. Bel beat him to it, sending a rather impressive earth-force shockwave towards him. Oh, I definitely could have more than matched its power, but she'd crafted it textbook perfect and the busybody flew across the rest of the showroom to loudly crash against a wall showcase, shattering the glass and knocking him quite for a loop. It was surgically precise and didn't crater the floor or knock down the walls or ceiling, a very real danger with using earth energy offensively. I considered adding a sleep spell, but I never could do those worth a shit... more Mentalist magic that I had absolutely no aptitude for. For now, the minor Adept was in a daze and more or less out of our hair and I decided not to try and layer anything else on him.

"Laddie, you'll never know until ye try!" Sean helpfully suggested. "Aye, ye'd be as subtle as subtle as a moose in a nail salon, but your will would be as strong as any's if put to the test. Think grand!"

I thought about it, and for once Sean didn't giggle any jokes about my lack of razor sharp wits, and how I'd sprain something and hurt myself trying to think. Bel had a simpler and much more direct solution and gave our dazed opponent a sharp heavy rap upon the top of his head with the butt-end of the grip of a revolver, knocking him out cold. Now we could fix our attention back upon the boss, who was still stuck in a charm-fog staring at us.

"I've put a jinx upon their surveillance cameras and a back-room recorder, so they'll a notta' record your faces. Now give the bad man a wee bit of corrective suggestion and perhaps your visit here might not go totally awry. Get-a-going!" Sean whispered as he gave the back of my head a little bit of a wee kick to prod me. That's the trouble with inter/intra-dimensional 'visitors', they just don't know their place!

He did have a point. I don't like making helpful 'suggestions' to overly heavily charmed individuals, and in fact the textbook I'd recently read warned specifically against doing this. And did I also mention that it's very much illegal, not to mention horrifically immoral? A hint tends to turn into a compulsion, and often dangerously so. Oh, I so hoped so! This guy wasn't ever going to enjoy a long happy life and die of old age in bed while being fucked to death by his barely teenage girl or boyfriend if I had anything to say about it!

"Jesse," I whispered as I held his hand holding the coin, and forcing my will once more into the coin and into him. "You will love this coin as your greatest treasure and keep it forever hidden and your personal secret, but you will only vaguely remember the man who gave this to you and forget our conversation and my companion as both being unimportant, except that I will return very soon to buy guns and I can be implicitly trusted, even with your life. You will remember me, but if questioned even under truth-spell, you will remember and describe me as a fairly small and thin man, definitely local, probably a low street ganger looking for a gun so that he build up his street cred. Be instead much more worried about your assistant - he tried to cheat you, wanting to send all of your guns instead to another gangland buyer and not your biggest customer. His masters in Deseret want him to arrange another street war between the gangs, so he's using you... while laughing at you behind your back and telling you lies. Oh, he pretends loyalty, but he had a charm on you, bending you to his will, but your discovery of his treason, his backstabbing has freed you. You caught him in the act and you fought and knocked him out, with our help. Your life is now in terrible danger from him and you'll need to make him disappear, now and without a trace. Your big buyer and their masters in Deseret will get nervous because their disloyal agent, your treacherous witch, will have disappeared and they will want to mindwipe you, but we can trick them when I return tomorrow, and then you'll be safe and secure -- for now. Now let's go downstairs and you can show me all of the weapons that you have stored for your buyer so we can find a way to keep you safe, my old friend!"

This was overkill and even a hint of this sort of outrage would have caused my own mind to be wiped clean back home, as a public safety measure that I could even consider doing this sort of action, let alone willingly performing this kind of mind-rape. On the other hand, short of a covert late-night expedition (not my forte), there was no other way our wicked arms dealer was going to pop open his secret staircase and give us the complete four-star tour of the hidden underground weapons storage rooms and the maze of dark tunnels that went onwards in at least three different directions under the city. Even Bel was stunned by the vast arsenal, untold crates of military and hunting rifles and a vast assortment of handguns from innumerable sources and tried to film as many details as possible with her video recorder. Some of the weapons were smuggled into Chicago from either the GWA or Canada, but apparently entire underground armaments factories existed secretly under the city, manufacturing brand new and apparently quite respectable quality versions of several classic military grade firearms... and in industrial quantities! The FBI was going to cream their collective frock coats when they clasped eyes upon this place!

*************

Bel just looked at me hard as we made our escape. "I'd like to go find a dark bar somewhere to drink heavily and forget this encounter ever occurred. You are very scary man, Zak Zephyr, and if I had any sense at all I'd be running away screaming just as fast as I could. What you just did was... appalling."

"Quite. What I did was profoundly and wickedly evil, and entirely beyond the pale... and absolutely necessary. I wouldn't be surprised if our secret smuggling leaders don't mind-wipe our insecure friend tomorrow as well, as a security measure once they know that Mr. Stout has been compromised. I wouldn't be surprised if our other gun dealer isn't also taken care of even before we get a chance to speak with him tomorrow, after our stakeout of Stout's house tomorrow morning. If not, it's likely we'll have to do that exact same thing to him as well."

She didn't disagree.

***********

We weren't in the mood for the big speakeasy nightclub just down the street so she drove me off to her favorite neighborhood dive bar in dead silence. While there over a great number of drinks we wrote out a status update containing a barrel full of lies with just enough subtle truth to barely cover our asses for the major investigations that were sure to follow. Namely, that we'd kept to the official Action List and we had stayed quite safely on the reservation, except for a casual reference to a BoF official... which was probably trivial and unrelated to the case, but that we intended to follow up on this lead later, in a day or two, after all other previously documented leads had been exhausted. Included was a hint that perhaps we'd take some time for some sight-seeing, since this case was obviously heading nowhere. Nice and misleading, but mostly true information that Probert would be happy to read. With luck, our surveillance team might even take the day off tomorrow as watching us was clearly wasted time and effort.

The battle plan for tomorrow was pretty simple. In the morning, we were going to pay Mr. Stout a very early visit at home, and obtain a carefully orchestrated recorded confession. Then we'd phone in our morning progress report to the FBMR office and reference our fuller written report which Bel would have buried in the middle of her boss's inbox. Now with our prey subtly alerted, like mighty hunters on safari, we'd sit back with some cameras to see who showed up to put out the fire, and silence the loose lips. With an arrest (hopefully) in hand, we'd then dash off to the FBI to obtain a strike team to take out Jesse's gun shop and subterranean weapons depots. The shit would hit the FBMR fans afterwards, but Bel and I should end up smelling like roses.

The plan sounded ok, and after four or five good drinks I couldn't find any potential flaws with it. If the drinks were good, then the companionship was even better. By the time she dropped me off at my hotel she had quite forgiven me for blatantly consigning at least two individuals to a violent and messy death, albeit by other more malevolent hands. She almost leaned forward for a kiss, but we'd both had a half-snootful and I wanted her to cross that bridge dead cold sober. Besides, starting a romantic attachment with a partner was always bad news and trouble, and worse up here where the word 'sex-crime' wasn't just a fictional concept from George Orwell. Even a rumor of an inappropriate sexual relationship placed into her federal personnel folder would kill any slim hopes she would ever have for promotion, and excessive dalliance with a known troublemaking magician from Texas wouldn't help her career in the slightest.

I was going to return that kiss... but well after I'd put this case to bed!