On the other hand, how could I just stroll Amy and me into Jim’s game without letting someone else know? To do that would allow Jim to make sacrificial lambs of us all. With us dead, he would just walk away from it, if only temporarily. At the very least, I wanted someone to find our bodies, but I was so stressed and worried about Amy, Renee, and what lay ahead of us that I couldn’t think straight. In the end, I was Prufrock and did not dare to eat the peach. I did nothing and threw the cell phones away as instructed.
About a quarter mile up the crumbling, single-lane road, we came upon the area where the bungalows had once been situated. They had long ago collapsed from neglect or been bulldozed. All that remained of them were the cracked concrete footings on which they once had rested. The slabs were overgrown with blankets of moss and weeds shooting through fissures in the cement. Aligned in rows as they were, they looked like toppled headstones in a long-forgotten graveyard. At least Jim had developed a sense of irony along the way. This was the spot where we were supposed to get out of the car and walk down the hill toward the maintenance shed.
“Last chance, Amy,” I said. “You can take the car and go for help. But if you walk down there with me, he’s not going to let you turn around and walk away. Once you’re in, you’re in.”
She closed her eyes, swallowed hard, paused. “But if you walk down there alone, he’ll kill you and Peter.”
“Probably.”
“Let’s go,” she said. “I can’t have all that blood on my hands.”
During the drive here, I had tried to explain to Amy the series of events that had led us to this place. I hadn’t gotten very far. She was too frightened, too distracted, and it all seemed so absurd. Eventually our conversation was reduced to me giving her false assurances, ones she seemed too eager to believe. Now all of that was done with and there would be no turning around.
The sun had disappeared back behind the clouds and a nasty wind had come out of nowhere. Old leaves and dirt blew into our faces as we walked through a stand of trees. The big pines, oaks, and maples leading down the hill felt oddly familiar. Then, hearing the low rumble and rush of moving water as we came through the trees to a clearing, I saw a small waterfall in the distance. It was no accident that this place felt familiar. It was not so different than the spot in the woods where we used to shoot outside Brixton. Jim had apparently scouted it out-which meant he knew the lay of the land, and that scared the shit out of me.
A mess of flaking paint and rotting planks, the maintenance shed was on a flat spot in a small clearing fifty yards above the falls. It was surrounded by the woods on three sides. Only the spot the shed was on and the broad downhill path to the river had been cleared of trees. A small access road, just wide enough to accommodate a tractor, led out from the shed into the woods. Jim stood with his back to the shed, Renee at his side. He held a Colt Python, the one he’d given me, in his right hand, a Glock in his left. The familiar butt handles of the Smith amp; Wesson.38 and the Browning.45 stuck up from the waist of his jeans. Peter Moreland, his clothes soaked in blood, both hands swathed in gauze mittens, was kneeling in front of Jim. Jim pressed the nose of the Glock to the back of Moreland’s head. Amy made to run to him, but I grabbed her arm.
“Don’t!” I whispered. “He’s an expert shot with every one of those weapons. Don’t give him any excuse to use them.”
As if to prove my point, Jim fired a round into the dirt a few inches from my feet, and we were still a good ten yards away from the shed. The round kicked dirt up onto my pants and running shoes. Amy dropped down and covered her head with her arms. Then, looking up, noticing that I hadn’t even flinched, she stared at me with a mix of awe and horror.
“That’s close enough, Kip. Throw me your car keys.” I did as he asked. “Amy,” he said, waving the big Colt at her, “you come over here by me and see to your husband.”
I helped lift her to her feet, but held on to her arm, and stepped directly in front of her. “She’s not going anywhere, not yet, Jim.” Renee shook her head no at me, but I was determined. “You let Peter, Amy, and Renee walk back to my car and then you can do whatever it is you have planned for me.”
Jim fired a second shot. The round bit into the dirt no more than an inch from my left foot. I may have blinked, but that was about it. Renee shook her head even more insistently. Jim didn’t say a word. Instead, in one graceful motion, he moved the muzzle of the Glock away from Moreland’s head, lowered it, then fired into Peter’s left calf. Moreland convulsed in agony and screamed so that I thought someone had to hear it. Amy dropped to her knees and threw up.
“I told you, Kip, no more threats. Amy, come here now unless you want Peter to lose the use of his other leg.”
She didn’t need prompting and fairly ran to Moreland’s side. “You bastard. You fucking bastard!” she yelled at Jim.
He just smiled. “Tell your ex-husband to do as he’s told or your current one is bound to keep suffering.”
Renee removed her hooded sweatshirt and wrapped it around Moreland’s leg above the wound. She used a branch to torque the sweatshirt tight. Amy made a pillow of her coat, resting Moreland’s head on it as she stroked his hair.
“Was that really necessary, Jim?” I said.
“You tell me.”
“What now?” I asked.
“Hard choices.”
“Hard choices?”
“Who lives? Who dies? They don’t get much harder than that, do they, Kip?”
“This isn’t a game.”
“It is if I say it is.”
Amy interrupted. “He’s going into shock. Let me get him some help.”
“It’s not my fault,” Jim growled at her. “It’s him. If he hadn’t ruined things, we could have all been happy. Now, this is all that’s left. So shut up. All of you just shut up!”
Amy didn’t argue, but I could see she was seething underneath the surface. Good, I thought. There was that notorious rage. She wasn’t going to surrender.
“What’s the game, Jim?” I got him to focus on me again.
“Cutthroat meets Fox Hunt, New York-style,” he said, pulling the.45 from his waistband and tossing it at me. “Go ahead, pick it up.”
Fifty-One
Too Damned Smart
As I took slow, steady paces approaching the.45, a hundred things went through my head. Chief among them was that Jim was fucking with me, testing me. Why, of the four handguns he had, did he throw me the one I was least comfortable with? It wasn’t coincidence. I’d lately grown very skeptical of coincidence. No, there was a reason he’d thrown me that gun. I only wished the fuck I knew what it was.
“Go ahead and pick it up,” he called to me when I was standing directly in front of it. “Pick it up!”
I kept my eyes fixed on him as I knelt down and placed my palm around the gun’s grips. I rocked it in my hand to reacquaint myself with its heft. The design was a century old and it was a pretty heavy weapon. I just held it, pointing the muzzle at the ground. I had no intention of provoking him.
“So, it’s going to be me and you,” I said.
He didn’t answer directly. “Somebody’s going to walk out of here alive today. Who that is depends on what you do in the next few minutes.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Again, he didn’t answer. Instead, he bent at the knees and placed the Glock and the Colt on the ground to his left. He took the.38 out of his jeans and dropped it by the other handguns.
I didn’t move. I kept reminding myself that with Jim, nothing was as it seemed.
“What are you waiting for, Kip? Take off the safety. It’s loaded. See for yourself. Go ahead. Do it, Kip, but hurry up. Moreland’s lost a lot of blood and time’s wasting. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock … ”
I undid the safety and racked the slide. A bullet ejected, spinning in mid-air and then, hitting a rock, tumbled harmlessly in the direction of the shed.
“If I go for any of these,” he said, gesturing at the gun
s at his feet, “you’d be able to blow a hole in me before I even got close.”
“Probably.”
He smiled. I really hated Jim’s smiles. “You were asking about how you determine who gets out of here alive,” he said. “This is how. You have the edge now and you better use it. You won’t have it again, Kip, not ever.”
“Shoot him for chrissakes!” Amy shouted, jumping to her feet. “Shoot the crazy motherfucker. Peter’s dying. What are you waiting for?”
I looked to Renee for a sign, for some indication of what I should do, but she kept mute and noncommittal and that scared me. Did she know something that she couldn’t say or wouldn’t say?
Just as I put my finger on the trigger, Jim grabbed Amy by the hair much the way Stan Petrovic had done to Renee that last night in the chapel. He twisted it so hard that Amy fell to her knees. She was clawing at him, flailing at his legs. When one of her wild punches landed too close to his groin, he tugged her hair harder, snapping her head back. She stopped flailing and screamed in pain.
“Shoot!” he said.
I raised the muzzle, aiming at the center of his mass.
“Come on, Kip. Amy’s right, what are you waiting for? You’re not very good with the Browning, but you’re good enough. You couldn’t miss me from here … or could you? What if I moved suddenly?” Mocking me, he feinted his shoulders left, then right. “What if you flinch? What if the wind comes up?”
“Shoot him! Shoot him!” Amy was unraveling. “Shoot him, please. Get this over with. I can’t take it anymore. Shoot him, for chrissakes! I don’t care if you hit me.”
Jim said, “But Kip does care. Don’t you, Kip?”
I lowered the gun. “Sorry, I’m not playing that game.” I put the safety on and tossed the Browning back to him. “You just wanted to see if I would shoot, whether I would risk Amy’s life. Besides, the rest of the clip is either empty or loaded with blanks. You chambered one live round as a decoy. Well, I’m a little bit brighter than Stan was, Jim. I won’t let you screw with me the way you did him. What was supposed to happen? I pull the trigger, you get a big laugh, and then what? You pick up the Glock and pump one into my kneecap?”
“You’re a smart man,” he said, dragging Amy with him to collect the Browning. “That was one of the things I admired about you and your writing. Your protagonists were really smart. They could figure out all the angles, but by the end of the book they were always victims of their own overthinking. They were too smart for their own good. Like in that chapter from Flashing Pandora when Kant schemes with Harper Marx to win back Pandora. He doomed himself. You’re just like that, Kip, too smart for your own good. You should have taken the shot when you had it. He who hesitates is dead. Blanks? Empty clip? Let’s see.”
My guts churned as Jim pushed Amy face-first to the ground, turned to his right, and, without a second’s hesitation, put two bullets into Moreland: one in the chest, the second shot blowing off part of his skull. Blood, shards of bone, and clumps of tissue sprayed all over Renee and the shed. Renee fell back, horrified. She furiously wiped the tissue and blood off her face. Amy raised herself up, turned to see the damage, and completely freaked. She was crying madly, pulling at her own hair. As she crawled over to Moreland, her hands slipped on his blood and she toppled forward onto his body. Her face was covered in blood and viscera.
“Now it’s empty, Kip,” Jim said, the slide locked in the open position. He hurled the empty Browning over the shed and toward the falls. “Like I said, too damned smart for your own good.”
Fifty-Two
Ice Cream
Frozen for a moment, I rushed at Jim, but I didn’t get two feet before he’d picked up the.38 and drew a bead on me.
“That’s not how this is going to play out. No, sir.”
I stopped dead in my tracks and threw up my hands. “Okay. Okay, but let me check on Amy.”
“Go ahead, but don’t get any ideas.”
Keeping the.38 on me the entire time, Jim collected the guns he’d placed on the ground and stepped away. By the time I got to Amy, all the fight and hysteria had gone out of her. She was done, spent, in shock. I used my sleeve to wipe the blood off her face. She barely noticed. Her eyes were so distant I wasn’t sure she even recognized me. If things turned worse than they already were, that distant place was probably a better place for her to be.
“Jim, how could you do that, shoot him like that?” Renee asked, still wiping blood off her own face.
“Ask your boyfriend. He had a clean shot at me. He had the chance. I gave him a chance. It’s his fault, not mine.”
“Amy’s done, Jim. Let Renee take her somewhere and you can do with me what you want.”
Renee agreed. “Let Amy go. This is about the three of us anyway.”
“She stays. And you’re wrong. This isn’t about the three of us. It never was. It’s about me and Kip, about him pissing away all the good things I gave him, you most of all.”
“This isn’t a game,” I said.
“But it is, just like in Gun Church with McGuinn. He wanted out and to save Zoe. I don’t see that happening today, Kip.”
Jim maintained a safe distance from us. He tucked the Glock in his pants, took the.38, unhinged the cylinder, spun it, then snapped it shut. When that was done, he did the same thing with the Colt. He tossed the.38 at Renee and the Python at me. He put the Glock back in his shooting hand.
“See,” he said, “Amy’s going to stay here with me while you and Renee go into the woods. Only one of you is going to come out alive. Then you or Renee gets to go back in there with me. If you or Renee gets lucky, Amy gets to go home. If it’s me that walks out of there, I’m going to kill her and I’m not going to do her the kindness I did her husband. I’m going to kill her an inch at a time, piece by piece.”
I didn’t move. “I’m not McGuinn and I’m not playing.”
“Well, I am,” Renee said, placing her fingers around the.38’s handle and standing up. “I want to live and I’m tired of sacrificing for you, Ken Weiler. I loved you even before I met you and all you’ve ever done is hurt me and shit on me. You never once asked me about where I came from or my family or anything. You never even asked me what my major was or if I wanted to go on with school after I got my degree. The only thing you know about me, I mean really know about me, is that I shave myself instead of wax and I spasm when I come. You think you’ve changed, but you haven’t. You’re worse now than you used to be.”
“That’s not true,” I said, even though most of it-maybe all of it-was.
“Okay,” she said. “If you answer this question right, I won’t play either. I’ll toss the.38 away and die right here with you. In your arms, if you want.”
“What question?”
“What’s my favorite flavor ice cream?”
Jim’s smile grew broader and smug. “Yeah, Kip, what flavor? I know Renee’s favorite. I know her parents’ names, where she grew up. Someone’s favorite flavor isn’t the kind of thing you should have to think about if you love somebody. I bet Amy knows your favorite flavor.”
“Butter pecan,” Amy said in a voice as far away as her eyes. Then, thankfully, she seemed to retreat back to that distant place.
“See. Go on, answer Renee. You don’t know, do you?”
“I don’t. You’re right, I should, but I don’t.”
“It’s strawberry,” Jim said. “Now pick up the Python and let’s get this over with.”
I reached for the Colt. “You won’t get away with any of this. Even if you kill all of us, you’ll get killed yourself or spend the rest of your life in prison.”
“Getting away’s not the point anymore. I’ll give myself up. I’ll be alive and you’ll be dead. Gun Church will be published and the only one left to tell the tale of how all this came down will be me. I will be your legacy and you’ll be mine. Our names, our lives, and our blood will be bound up together forever, Kip. Gun Church will be as much mine as yours … maybe more.”
“Yo
u’re assuming a lot, Jim.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. Step away from Amy. Now! You too, Renee. I’m tired of talking.”
We did as he asked. As we stepped away, he came toward Amy, the Glock aimed at her head. When he reached her, he gently pulled her to her feet, keeping her between us and him.
“Both of you have two live rounds.” Jim looked at Renee and then at me. “It’s Kip versus Renee, just like Cutthroat. Only this is the real thing. Only one of you is coming out of those woods alive and don’t think you can fool me. I’ll be counting shots, so don’t get any fancy ideas about combining forces. Just remember, as good as you are with those weapons, you know I’m better with this.” He waved the Glock. “And I’ve got a lot more ammunition. The one of you who gets out of the woods alive takes their chances against me. It’s not much of a chance, but it’s something.” He checked his watch. “You’ve got one hour starting now. Kip, you go that way.” He pointed to his left. “Renee, that way.” He pointed to his right. “Remember, you try and fuck around with me and Amy suffers the consequences. Begin.”
I walked back into the thicket of trees to my right. As tempted as I was to turn around to look, I couldn’t risk it. Jim had gone over the edge. It wasn’t that he had so calmly and coldly murdered Peter Moreland. I think I accepted that Jim had the potential for violence in him that very first night in the chapel. His potential violence was part of my rush and what inspired Gun Church. No, what let me know he was really gone was his talk of blood and legacy: my blood, his legacy. When I was several yards into the woods and protected by shadows, I dropped to my belly and looked back. Renee was gone, and Jim and Amy were nowhere in sight. Only Peter Moreland’s wrecked body remained, but even as I got up and ran deeper into the woods I knew that Peter’s body would have others to keep it company. It was only a matter of who, how many, and when.
Gun Church Page 29