A semiautomatic pistol, available over the counter in California. I wondered why he had bought them in Reno.

     “You want the other one?” he said.

     “What do you mean?”

     “It shows a second page. Separate transaction, same customer.”

     “Please.”

     The keys clicked a few more times. The next noise in the receiver was a soft grunt.

     “Well,” he said. “Are you ready for sixty units of Zavastas?”

     “You lost me,” I said.

     “Yugoslavian AK-47's. AKM's, if you want to get technical. The Yugos make terrific AK's.”

     “I thought we stopped importing military rifles,” I said.

     “It's a little complicated.”

     “These are semiautomatic rifles,” I said.

     “These are automatic weapons. That's what the code says.”

     “We stopped importing those in ‘eighty-six. And if he's buying automatic, there must've been a background check, a waiting period. He'd have had to pay two hundred bucks each, the transfer fee.”

     “It's a little complicated.”

     I said, “What does a Yugoslavian AK run?”

     “We got six fifty apiece for these.”

     “Almost forty thousand dollars.”

     “Thirty-nine thousand. Ninety cases of ball ammunition, caliber seven-six-two by thirty-nine. That's Chinese manufacture, packed in stripper clips, retails at a hundred and five a thousand, a great deal, we've been moving every bit of that we can get in. And three hundred spare magazines.”

     “That has to run it up near fifty-five thousand.”

     “You're close.”

     “I know he didn't put that on plastic.”

     “Cash. That's what it says.”