Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [43]
When the phone rang, Williams told his wife to tell whoever it was that he was busy—a response he should have held to.
His wife returned. “It’s Nicholas again.”
Nicholas. Everyone called him Nicholas, never the jauntier Nick, a reflection perhaps of his generally serious demeanor.
Williams felt sympathetic. The kid had few, if any, friends and spent most of his time with his birds. The boy was at loose ends. What would it cost to talk to him?
They exchanged greetings, then Nicholas begged him to take him to visit a gun store. Williams had put him off before and now felt guilty about it. He thought it over, again asking himself what harm it could do. It would lighten the boy’s day. He could take him out for a quick trip, maybe to Bob’s Gun Shop. Bob’s was close, an easy shot downtown. They could hop in the car, spend a couple of minutes at the store, and then come back. It would be a nice break from Williams’s work on the floors, and something nice for the boy. Williams could finish the floors when he returned.
When he picked Nicholas up, however, he realized Nicholas had a more elaborate expedition in mind.
“He wanted to go to Guns Unlimited,” Williams testified. “At that particular time I didn’t know where it was, but when he said Carrollton, Virginia, by me being a truck driver, I knew where Carrollton, Virginia, was.”
What it was, was too far. A lot farther than Williams wanted to go. Carrollton was little more than a wide space on Route 17 in Isle of Wight County, a rural wedge of land bordered on the north by the James River and on the east by the Portsmouth-Norfolk metropolitan area. It was a long drive, easily forty-five minutes from Nicholas’s house on Colon Avenue in Campostella. Ninety minutes minimum, back and forth. Extra time at the gun shop. Altogether, Williams suddenly faced an expedition that would take at least two hours.
Williams tried halfheartedly to put Nicholas off: “I don’t have much gas. And besides, I’m broke.”
“I’ll put gas in your car. Here.” Nicholas passed Williams $20.
Again, Williams gave in. “Won’t take twenty dollars to get there. I’ll take ten. About ten dollars will do it.”
They stopped at an Amoco gas station on Wilson Road, not far from Nicholas’s house, then set out for Guns Unlimited, most likely taking Interstate 264 under the southern branch of the Elizabeth River into Portsmouth, then picking up 17 for the rest of the drive. On the way, Nicholas talked about a gun he had come to admire, the Cobray M-11/9 made by S.W. Daniel.
“Man,” he said, “you’ve got to see that; it’s a nice gun.”
The easy, fluid commerce of guns embraced them the moment they entered the shop. An elderly couple browsing in the store approached almost immediately and offered to sell Williams a gun in a private sale. Such transactions escape federal scrutiny altogether. In principle, the owner of a gun cannot sell it to a juvenile or out-of-state resident. In practice, however, federal law doesn’t require the private seller to ask for any kind of identification or even to record the transaction.
“My husband has plenty of guns,” the man’s wife said. “He’ll sell you a gun, if you want to buy one.”
Williams declined.
He and Nicholas approached the display counters.
“Can I help you?” a clerk asked.
“We’re just looking around,” Williams replied.
Williams led Nicholas to a case containing a number of small, low-caliber revolvers and then did ask the clerk for some help. He asked to see a .38-caliber revolver. The clerk opened the case and passed the weapon to Williams, who then showed it to Nicholas. As the clerk watched from just across the counter, Nicholas said he wasn’t interested in seeing that particular gun.
“After that,” Williams testified, “Nicholas started talking, so I thought I’d let him do most of the talking to the gun salesman.”
Nicholas and the clerk, Tony Massengill, a firefighter and former policeman moonlighting as a gun salesman, talked about different