I stood up and walked back to his nightstand, where I’d seen a charger. Grabbed it and came out, looking for a plug.
As I moved across the room, I passed a full-length mirror and caught a glimpse of myself. Like Shooter, I was dressed head to toe in black, but my brown hair had gotten wavy and looked unkempt.
“Right there,” Shooter said, pointing at an outlet by the sofa.
I plugged the phone in and sat on the arm of the couch, ten inches to the right of Freddie.
As the phone fired up, Shooter spoke aloud.
“Venera.” She held the handgun in her gloved hands. “It’s a Czech brand, but manufactured in the US. What are the odds you have their production codes memorized?”
Every handgun is imprinted with a serial number, and hidden among those numbers is information about the production date of the weapon.
“One hundred percent,” I said.
The whites of her eyes disappeared, and Shooter fingered the letters and numbers along the gun’s slide. In the dark, her hand moved over the raised ridges of the flat black metal.
“B,” she said, and I pictured the FBI binder on this particular manufacturer. An Excel chart on page 38. Right side.
“April,” I said. The month of manufacture.
Her fingers moved to the next grouping. “HH.”
“Nineteen sixty-five,” I replied.
Shooter’s eyes flicked open, and I realized what I’d just said did not make sense. Venera firearms were not marked this way in 1965. But Shooter did not ask me if I was sure about the numbers. She knew better.
The phone came to life, and I began scrolling through Freddie’s texts.
Where the fuck are you?
This was sent twice, the first one a day ago.
The same number, twelve hours later, showed another message.
Regnar says you missed a drop.
Then there were a series of newer texts from a different number. The area code was 478.
“Macon,” I said to myself, referring to the city southeast of Atlanta. I had committed every three-digit code in the country to memory years ago.
JP said to come down and check on you. Be there by four.
I scrolled to a text sent even more recently from the same person.
An hour out. You better not be dogging us after this drive.
A flash illuminated the mobile home, and I glanced over. Shooter was taking pictures of the firearms.
“He’s not blown,” I said, my voice sounding confused as it echoed off the mobile home walls.
Shooter’s face contorted. “Freddie, you mean?”
“They’re wondering where he is—as much as we are.”
“Sandoval’s guys?” Shooter confirmed, and I nodded.
J. P. Sandoval, the mastermind behind the unemployment scam, owned a series of firearms shops near the Florida-Georgia line. But after hours, we suspected he was connected to two militia groups. Most likely, he was their leader.
