Profane Men by Rex Miller Page A

hearts and behinds with this shit.”
    D’Allesandro twirls his empty in a tabletop puddle, slowly letting out potent gangster in a stream of gray-green smoke. I pictured him and the cobra eyeballing each other. Paper covers rock. The old man was a tough, hardass spook who’d come from up around the Citadel, where he’d supposedly been running a secret cadre of headhunters near the big CIA station. He had these real hairy South Viets for bodyguards. Not the Marvin the Arvin pussies you hear about. Hard-core.
    The colonel was a genuine field spook and not about to come in from the cold as mythologized in Cornwellian song and story. He was the kind of hardbark-connected fucker who could get you your own personal body bag without much trouble at all.
    â€œUmmmmmm, goddamn.”
    â€œWhatdya think.”
    â€œI think this
is
some righteous shit,” D’Allesandro says, exhaling eighty-dollar Columbian. “Where the fuck you get this shit, roll a supply sergeant?”
    â€œSo goddamn it, what do ya
think,
man? I mean, are we gonna take some names or what? You see those grave makers. Motherfucker.”
    â€œCouple them shines are goddamn big enough, that’s for fuckin’ sure. You check out that goddamn skinny boy? Where’d that ugly fucker come from? Look like they hauled his ass outta some damn garbage heap.”
    â€œI hope you ain’t talkin’ bout my new bes’ friend, Harold Grein. Don’t fuck with me ’n’ Harold, dude.” We laugh.
    â€œHey,” I say, “Howja like the li’l southern boy. Howdja like to kick some of his little booty?”
    â€œHe didn’t took so bad to me, man. I just walked up to his ass and said, umm, let me uh introduce myself, dude. I’m a man of wealth and taste. If you want to live, you be sure not to get in my way, you punk cracker. My name is Jon D’Allesandro.” D’Allesandro laughs.
    He had the mercenary’s obsession with and love for weaponry. He was the type called a “rock ’n’ roll freak,” meaning that some deep inner compulsion, some Fourth of July kind of smoldering firecracker of a lust tucked away down in there really got off on it.
    Just since I’d known him, I’d seen him with a 14, an Uzi, a 16, and his latest close-range pride and joy: a Military Armaments Corporation Model 10 in full auto. This was the original, real McCoy, and Lord knows what goods or services he’d fragged to some company gunrunner for this baby. She was gunsmith-blueprinted, dead bang on, silenced with a Sionics type supressor/silencer, and capable of spitting out a stream of .45-caliber justice with the touch of a trigger finger. In D’Allesandro’s expert hands the MAC/10 was one lethal, motherfucking hose of instant death up close and personal.
    In Jon’s hands, weapons of any kind took on another dimension. Like any craftsman, he always made it look so easy. He had none of the — what’s the word, aversion? — to a tool that dispenses death and destruction that is natural for most men. Even that doesn’t quite nail it down. You had the feeling that he was instantly at home with a slingshot, a .44 Mag, an over-and-under, a LAW, any damn thing from a crossbow to a surface-to-air missile. If you could put your hands on it and fire it, D’Allesandro was in harmony with it.
    But it was one thing to be good with guns, and something else again to watch D’Allesandro with an Ingram. I’d heard he’d taken off two boatloads of Viet Cong with an improbable — hell no, call it miraculous — sequence of fast bursts, advanced algorithmic triggernometry, and watching him perform gave you a tingling feel that was akin to watching an artist at work. I would see him burn the Ingram out at an A Camp up in boonierat land, playing his instrument the way Diz blew riffs, with a totality of sureness and startling economy of energies.