Shot Girl

by J. A. Konrath

  “Kay.”

  He opened the lid, and I stuck my hand in and grabbed one.

  “You can have more than that. Look how much I got. I’ll never eat it all. You like sour candy?”

  I nodded, grabbing more and stuffing my face.

  “How was the first night in your new crib? Dope?”

  Marko had a creep factor, but him trying to talk like a plural was extra.

  “Off the shits,” I said.

  “You know how to work everything. Like the gas stove?”

  I nodded again.

  “Take a few more.”

  “I’m set.”

  “Take some for the road. You got your computer with you. You going to school? To work?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t like Marko pretending to be my bestie. And he kept looking @ my mouth as I ate the candy.

  I grabbed more gummy and bounced. “Gotta blast.”

  “I hate to see you go, Guthrie. But I love watching you leave.”

  Whatevs that meant. I walked away, feeling his eyes crawl all over me as I headed toward the car.

  Edgelord.

  In the daylight I didn’t have no problem finding the department store. I bought a gel foam mattress, a better pillow, two towels, shampoo and soap, a fireproof glass bowl that I could eat out of and heat stuff up, aluminum foil, a bottle of cleaning spray.

  What else did I need? I used to keep notes on my cell phone, but I gave that up so Moms couldn’t track me.

  I wandered around the store, feeling myself get overwhelmed, feeling all the stuff on the shelves waving @ me, screaming for my attention, feeling ready to just get the eff out of there without buying anything, and then stopped in front of a huge cardboard display.

  GAMEMASTER 2: THE ULTIMATE GAME MACHINE!

  The drawing of the Gamemaster 2 had legs and arms and a big yellow cape, flying through the air.

  BS. I knew the console couldn’t fly, and didn’t have arms and legs.

  #FalseAdvertising.

  A big sign stuck to the display said TOMORROW!

  I waited 4evs @ the electronics counter for some kid my age to come by.

  “Sup.”

  “You still taking pre-orders for the G2?”

  “No way. All reserved. Maybe we can get you one for next month.”

  “How many pre-orders you have?”

  “Over six hundo, bruh. Fire. City Warriors 2 got a perfect 10 from Gaming Jerk Magazine. We got merch.”

  He pointed to another cardboard display. Rave masks of CW2 characters. I grabbed one of Blorkta, a half-man-slash-half-angler-fish who had a mouthful of wicked blue needle teeth.

  #Perfect.

  Tomorrow will be a good day.

  I paid for my swag, then got in the bucket and headed for the DMV.

  Time to become a legal resident of South Carolina, yo.

  I done the research online, knew I needed my old Driver’s License, Birth Certificate, Social Security Card, and two proofs of residence. One was my lease. The other might need some finesse.

  Finding the place was easy. I parked, saw the big NO WEAPONS sign on the door; a silhouette of a black gun in a red circle with a line through it.

  One of SC’s many gun laws.

  I knew them all. And other laws as well.

  #Google.

  #BillofRights.

  Inside the crowd was low key. Smelled kind of like school. People and paper and anxiety. I spent nine minutes in line, each minute thinking about how the previous minute felt, thinking about thinking about minutes, then thinking about thinking about thinking about them, and then got to jaw with an old lady who worked there.

  “Just moved here from Ohio. Need a new driver’s license.”

  “Welcome to South Carolina.”

  Whatevs.

  I gave her all my credz, and old lady got frowny. “I need two proofs of residence. Y’all got mail yet at your new place? Utility bill?”

  “Yo, I don’t get paper bills. Pollution messes up the planet. Pay direct online.”

  I took my puter off sleep to show her my new electric company account.

  “I don’t know if we can accept proof of residence on a computer.”

  Finesse.

  “They do it all the time in Ohio. I thought South Carolina would be, you know, progressive.”

  She looked @ my Ohio license. “Do you have some kind of eyeglass restriction?”

  Day-am. My blepharospasm.

  I thought about a book my school counsellor told me to read, donezo by this clout chaser named Carnegie. How to Win Friends and Shit. Truth, I didn’t have friends, bcuz people were bonked, yo. I didn’t know what any of them wanted, or why they acted all unpredictable and salty.

  This Carnegie bruh broke it down so you could fool cats and get your way. Smile and listen and make them feel good.

  “Don’t need glasses,” I told the old lady. “Just dry eyes. Inherited. You know, you remind me of my moms. She’s all smart and has a good job and she’s got pretty hair like you.”

  “Is that so?”

  I couldn’t tell if the old lady was feeling it or not. Sometimes it looked like every person I met wore a mask.

  “You got kids?”

  “Two kids. Four grandkids.”

  “What they call you? Gramma? Nana?”

  “Mama. They call me Mama.”

  I smiled so big I thought my face would crack. “That’s what I call my moms. Mama. Mama lost her job, bcuz of the cancer. All her hair fell out. I came to SC to work, bcuz you prolly know the jobs in the Midwest all suck.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that—”

  “Guthrie. Name’s Guthrie. People call me Gaff. You know, like the fishing hook?” I tried to go from looking happy to looking sad, but it was hard to do without a mirror so I wasn’t sure I got it right. “You seem real good at your job, Mama, and you can turn me away if you want to, but with my gen it’s all about online docs. We don’t do paper. Your family sends you email, right?”

  “Of course. I have the email. I have the Google account.”

  “Google is hype. Same as paper mail, right? And you’re using a computer right now, right? Well, check my info on the website. You can see the address matches my lease. The electric company don’t send me a paper bill bcuz I pay online. Never gon get a paper bill.”

  “This really isn’t the way we—”

  “I get it if you say no. You got all the power here. You can turn me away. I’m just a kid trying to adult.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Trying to be an adult. Trying to help Mama.”

  She stared @ me. Could go no. Could go yes. Might as well flip a coin.

  Then she stamped a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Bring it to line C to take your picture.”

  Savage level legendary.

  I brought the paper to line C, and while I was waiting I counted the people.

  Sixty-eight. And prolly no concealed carry bcuz of the sign on the door.

  But there were cameras. And it was a DMV, so cops could come in @ any moment.

  I finna stick with my OG plan.

  I got my pic, waited some more, then got the license.

  My pic didn’t look like me. Or maybe it did.

  Random.

  Still warm from the machine, I put it in my wallet and then went back to the car and tried to remember where I was headed next.

  Right. The gun show.

  I moved to South Carolina for several reasons.

  The Carolina Hunting Show Spectacular was one reason. One of the biggest gun shows in the country, running for three days, starting today.

  Another was bcuz South Carolina law allowed eighteen-year-old residents to buy handguns.

  And I was now a resident.

  Snap.

  #WelcomeToSC.

  “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  “I think we ought to r
aise the age at which juveniles can have a gun.”

  GEORGE W. BUSH

  JACK

  I wheeled myself out of the van, my daughter the Transformer gave me a hug goodbye, and Phin kissed me on the head, like I was a child.

  Rolling back into Darling Center, I came across Mrs. Shadid, who appeared to be waiting for me.

  “I was waiting for you.”

  Instincts confirmed. Or how would Sam say it?

  Instincts on fleek.

  Mrs. Shadid skirted the tail end of her seventies, and age had shrunk her to roughly the size of a garden gnome. Today she wore a silver hijab with a Nike swoosh, matching her silver hair and glasses. Her outfit was a silver and purple cloak, or maybe it was a dress, and the wind was whipping it back and forth, outlining her bony body.

  “How can I help you, Mrs. Shadid?”

  “I don’t like you teaching everyone here about guns.”

  Straight to the point.

  “Are you saying that having information is a bad thing?”

  “I’m saying that having guns is a bad thing.”

  I phubbed her, checking my phone. Still forty minutes until my class.

  “Would you like to get some coffee, talk it over?” I asked, hoping she’d say no.

  “Very much.”

  That’s what I get for hoping. “Let’s head to the cafeteria.”

  The wind had gotten so bad that when I hit the handicapped button for the automatic door, it stayed open behind us, blowing and shaking. Mrs. Shadid had to grab the handle and put her weight on it to close the damn thing.

  “This will be my first hurricane,” she said.

  “Mine too. Where are you from?”

  I was expecting someplace in the Middle East. She answered, “Rockport, Iowa.”

  Good call, Jack. Lump me in with all the other casual racists who think that any American with an accent is a foreigner.

  I should demand more from myself.

  But that’s a song I’ve been singing for a while.

  “I’m from Chicago.”

  “I could tell. Your accent.”

  Touché.

  The Darling Center cafeteria had tolerable coffee. It wasn’t an exotic dark roast as sold in overpriced specialty shops, but it wasn’t the mud I used to drink all the time at my old job. My ex-partner Herb Benedict truly believed that suspects who wouldn’t talk under interrogation would confess to killing Lincoln if we forced them to drink more than a cup of our District coffee.

  I missed the coffee. And Herb.

  Mrs. Shadid drew two cups from the stainless-steel coffee urn and placed them on a tray with some artificial sweetener and artificial creamer. When I reached into my purse for cash, she graciously waved me off and paid at the counter. We found a table next to an indoor Buccaneer palm tree, which gave me a full view of the café and its two egress points. I did a quick scan of the crowd, and the only mildly suspicious subject was a teenage boy in a leather jacket, his hand jammed in his pocket.

  He was too young to be retired, and too healthy to need rehab.

  Maybe visiting grandparents.

  I kept him in my peripheral vision as Mrs. Shadid doctored her coffee with carcinogens. I sipped mine black.

  “Chicago,” she mused while stirring her brew. “Doesn’t that city have the most gun murders per year?”

  Apparently we were getting right to the point.

  “It depends on how you look at it. In 2018, the Chicago area had over 1500 firearm homicides. That’s about 8 per 100,000 people. New Orleans had fewer deaths, but 16 per 100,000. So Chicago had the most, but not the highest percentage rate.”

  “Is that where you were a police officer? In Chicago?”

  “No.” I didn’t like lying, but I was living a fake identity for a reason. I didn’t want anyone to know who I really was. “Milwaukee.”

  “I’ve read that there are 40,000 gun deaths every year.”

  Statistics were ridiculously hard to come by, for three reasons.

  One, gun lobbyists and privacy advocates felt it wasn’t in the citizens’ best interests for the federal government to know their business, so we had no federal department or system for compiling statistics.

  Two, the organizations that did accrue this data did so in different ways, such as morgue searches, newspaper stories, obits, hospital records, police reports, and polls, and none told the whole story.

  Three, a lot of gun incidents, both crime-related and self-defense related, went unreported.

  I used to teach shooting classes at a local firing range, so I tried to keep up on my numbers because students always asked. Still, I had no real way of knowing if the numbers I Googled were accurate.

  “Forty thousand seems about right.”

  “That’s unacceptable.”

  I nodded. “I agree. But to put it into perspective, that’s about the same amount as people who die in car accidents. And over half of the firearm deaths are self-inflicted. Some were in self-defense. Some were law officers performing admirably in the line of duty.”

  “And some were cops shooting unarmed minorities.”

  I winced at that. “Unfortunately, yes. That’s a problem, and it’s worth discussing why it’s a problem and how to fix it. As far as statistics go, one innocent person dying by the hands of someone sworn to uphold the law is one person too many. It can’t be tolerated.”

  The teenager hadn’t moved. He still had his hand in his pocket. He still seemed out of place.

  “How do we fix that?” Mrs. Shadid asked.

  “Honestly? I see it as a multilayered problem. We need a higher police presence in high crime areas, and the majority of the cops should come from the neighborhoods they patrol. We need more money pumped into education and social services in low income areas. We need the police to know and interact with their communities in positive ways. We need to end the war on drugs and legalize, regulate, license, and tax drugs and prostitution. Take away dealing and pimping from the gangs, there won’t be as big a need for guns. And of course, we need to make sure the police we hire aren’t racists or bigots or mentally unstable, and make sure they get regular training and counselling so they don’t slip into the us vs them mentality. Cops are supposed to protect and serve. They aren’t a military unit deployed into a war zone.”

  I was missing some points, but that was the brunt of my grand plan that will never happen because things are far too broken.

  A girl can dream, though.

  “None of those things you proposed has to do with getting rid of guns.”

  The teenager in the leather jacket continued scanning the area. His eyes met mine, and he stared a moment longer than socially acceptable.

  I liked to rate threat levels according to colors. Sitting in bed, watching TV, with nothing suspicious going on, was a green. Seeing someone run into a bank with a shotgun was a red.

  Based on this teen’s appearance and behavior, he had graduated to yellow.

  “I don’t think getting rid of guns is possible,” I answered. “The USA has too many.”

  “What about preventing guns from falling into the hands of criminals? And children?”

  I glanced back at Mrs. Shadid. “There are a lot of laws already on the books that do this. New guns are sold with locks so children can’t fire them, like the trigger lock on my .38 that I showed everyone yesterday. Many states have laws about keeping guns locked, or in a safe.”

  She frowned at me. “The PLCAA.”

  This woman came armed with information. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act prevented gun manufacturers from being held accountable for crimes committed with their products, signed into law in 2005 after dozens of lawsuits. In 1998 in Chicago, Mayor Daley sued gun manufacturers, as did a mosque in Rockport, Iowa after—

  Oh.

  Oh, boy.

  “Mrs. Shadid, were you in Rockport in 2012?”

  Her eyes became glassy, and she nodded. “I was there.”

  “In the mosque?”
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  She nodded again.

  When I realized who I was arguing with in a debate about gun violence, I knew I’d made a huge mistake.

  This talk wasn’t going to end well for either of us.

  “It’s shocking to me that it’s easier to buy a gun at Wal-Mart than it is to buy my record.”

  MARILYN MANSON

  “Gun bans don’t disarm criminals, gun bans attract them.”

  WALTER MONDALE

  GAFF

  Off. The. Chain.

  Everywhere I looked, guns.

  Real guns.

  Fire.

  After paying ten bucks admission, getting a red stamp on my hand, and being asked if I had any firearms on me and saying no—why would you bring a gun to a gun show?—I walked into the Saucer County Fairgrounds and was swallowed by guns. Guns on tables, with steel cable locks stringing them together through their trigger guards. Guns on makeshift wire racks, hanging on hooks. Guns in glass display cases. Guns on racks, guns in boxes, guns everywhere.

  Guns guns guns.

  #HellaGuns.

  I’d never touched a real gun b4. Never even been close to one.

  Being surrounded by so many @ once made me feel like…

  Well…

  It made me feel.

  I walked up to the closest table, which was topped with AR-17 rifles. I’d done my research, so I knew what they were, but seeing them IRL was dope.

  I trailed my fingers along the picatinny rail, and it was like I’d grown taller.

  “Can I pick it up?”

  The dealer was talking to someone else, and he gave me a casual glance and nodded.

  I raised the rifle, the cable running through the trigger guard giving me enough room to bring it to my shoulder and peer down the sights.

  Turned on.

  There was a plastic zip tie around the trigger, looping up behind the charging handle, so it couldn’t be fired.

  Still, my hands shook.

  “Looks good on you.” The dealer grinned @ me.

  “How much?”

  “Six hundred, comes with two mags and a case.”

  A fair price. But it didn’t suit my needs. I needed something concealable, to use up close.

  I set the gun down. “I’ll think about it.”

  I moved along.