B009XDDVN8 EBOK

by Lashner, William

  “Bam. That’s good, Jon. That’s comforting. Bam. And you didn’t think to discuss it with me?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Well, I’m worried. I’m worried that my daughter is going to shoot herself in the face with your fucking gun.”

  “It wasn’t even loaded.”

  “I’m worried that a cat is going to knock over a garbage can and you’re going to start blasting anything that moves. Don’t you know the statistics?”

  “Yes, and I have to say, there are inaccuracies in the numbers that—”

  “I’m not having it in my house.”

  “I’ll put it somewhere safer.”

  “There is no safe place for this in my house.”

  “I can find one, I’m sure.”

  “Are you listening?”

  “I’m trying, but you’re not being reasonable.”

  “About my child playing with a gun? Who are you? I don’t know you anymore.”

  I had wanted to continue arguing, but that final statement shut me up. Anymore? How presumptuous was that? Did she ever know me? Did she ever want to know me, the real truth about me, about what I had done in Pitchford, and what I had done since to protect what I had done? About how she had been able to afford the wonderful house, the wonderful cars, the wonderful hair salon and sparkling tennis club? It was a moment when a real dialogue suddenly loomed, when full disclosure, and all its effects, both putrid and pure, trembled in the gap between us. What would happen to our relationship, to our marriage, if finally I bared it all? The question was its own answer, wasn’t it?

  The gun went. And, a decade or so later, the marriage followed.

  But this was no time to dwell on lost possibilities. This was a time, instead, to look cold-eyed at my options. I had panicked in Vegas and lost the gun, but the time for panic was over, the time to buy a gun was nigh. For a new and very real threat. It wasn’t anymore just a nameless crazy with some fearsome mask, it was death itself with a voice and a name: Clevenger.

  Fortunately we lived in Virginia, where the only impediment to gun ownership is forgetting your wallet.

  There was a shop in Yorktown, a little family-owned joint on Highway 17 that I had passed dozens of times as I avoided crowded Route 64 on the way to Norfolk. I took one more look outside to make sure the road was clear and then headed out, locking the door tight behind me.

  I checked my rearview as I left the driveway and drove to the development’s exit and kept checking as I made my way toward Yorktown. A white van held my interest for a bit, then a black SUV, then a green sedan, then another black SUV. Or was that the first? I barely missed ramming the car in front of me as I looked closer. The driver of the SUV was a woman with Jackie O. sunglasses and the full Chez Rochelle haircut. You could drive around Williamsburg and see hundreds of the same woman in the same black SUV with the very same sunglasses and haircut. Like Caitlin, for instance. A sight for sure, but not a threat. I breathed easier as I charged down Highway 17.

  The store was a standalone mom-and-pop thing, with the family name on the roof flanked by two words, CIGARETTES and GUNS. A neon sign in the window advertised Budweiser, promising the whole Southern trifecta. A little bell rang when I entered the front door.

  Ding-a-ling.

  “Can I help you?” said an old man, all bones and sagging flesh, sitting in a rocking chair behind the gun counter. He wore overalls and a plaid shirt, he spoke as slow as poured molasses.

  I tapped on the counter with my fingertips. “I need a gun,” I said.

  “You came to the right place for that, mister,” he said without getting up. “What kind you looking for?”

  “Something big enough to stop a bear in his tracks.”

  “You’ll be wanting a shotgun for that.”

  “But not that big. It’s hard to hide a shotgun in your belt.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said, rocking back and forth as if in deep thought. “A handgun, then. You got yourself one of them permits to carry a concealed weapon?”

  “No.”

  “Are you an American?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you an unlawful user of a controlled substance or a habitual drunkard?”

  “Habitual is a tricky word, don’t you think?”

  “I always thought so. There was never nothing habitual about my drinking, it was just an everyday thing. If you get yourself a permit, it’ll make things easier.”

  “I might eventually, but I need something now.”

  “Until you get your permit you can carry but you can’t conceal. A holster on the side, like, is okay.”

  “How about at home?”

  “At home you can hide it up your butt hole, all they care. We’re talking out and about, like in church. You don’t want to be taking concealed guns to church without a permit. You go to church much?”

  “Not really.”

  He winked. “Well, then, it should be all right.” He pushed himself off the chair, leaned over the counter, and looked down at the handguns on display beneath the glass. “Revolver or automatic?”

  “Automatic,” I said, “with an extra clip.”

  He looked up at me and squinted a bit. “Any experience?”

  “With guns?”

  “I’m not asking about women.”

  “Not enough with either, I’m afraid, though I’ve been married for fifteen years.”

  He looked down at the display as he considered. “Something simple, then, not too heavy, not too flashy. What about price?”

  “I’m more concerned about it going off when I need it.”

  “That’s what we like to hear. Makes things more civilized. No one bargains over taking out an appendix, but when it comes to guns, some all they think about is price. Try this,” he said as he reached down to unlock the display case and pulled out a medium-sized olive-and-black handgun. “One of our most popular models. Nine millimeter, steady as a hearse, used all over the world.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  “A Glock. Made in Austria. They know their guns in Austria. Their schnitzel, too, but you can’t kill a buzzard at forty paces with a schnitzel. And the magazine holds enough to kill you a sloth of bears.”

  He handed it over. The gun was sharp and solid, and I liked the smell. It smelled efficient. As soon as I took hold of it, something eased in me. Just the way my hand wrapped around the grip gave me a dose of comfort. Like warm apple pie, with a dollop of lead. I waved the Glock around the empty store to get a feel for it.

  “Not as heavy as I would expect,” I said.

  “They use plastic to keep down the weight—imagine that.” He clicked his tongue as he took the gun from me, checked that that it was unloaded, and then cocked the breech. “But still as deadly as a redhead in yellow heels.”

  I looked at the old man as he gave the gun back to me. “I bet you’ve got a story.”

  “Nothing I’m telling with my wife in the back. Five fifty, and I’ll throw in the second magazine.”

  “Bullets, too?”

  “Five seventy-five will get you the gun, two boxes of ammo, and a clip holster. I’ll throw in a case of Marlboros if you want.”

  “Oh, I want. And a six of Bud, too.”

  “Bottles or cans?”

  “Bottles.”

  “Go on, give the trigger a squeeze.”

  I gripped the gun again, aimed it at a cooler filled with beer, pulled the trigger. The click was as satisfying as a steak dinner.

  “Deal,” I said.

  “Credit card or check?”

  “Cash?”

  “That will do,” he said, taking the gun out of my hands.

  As he leaned over and placed my gun back into the display case, I felt suddenly underdressed. The old man slapped some papers on the counter along with a pen.

  “This is your form 4473,” said the old man. “Background check. Won’t take but a minute. And when you’re done, I’ll need to compare it with your ID.” He looked at me like he
was sending a signal. “That okay, son? You’re not wanted or nothing, are you?”

  I looked down at the form. Something federal, like a tax form. That first gun I had, the Smith & Wesson, I bought off a guy named Pete I knew at work. No forms on that one, just the cash. I thought about it for a moment. I didn’t like the idea of my name shooting over the computer lines to the feds, didn’t like the possibility of some alarm somewhere being flipped. But did it really matter anymore?

  “No, I’m clean,” I said.

  “Good. While you fill her out, I’ll go in the back and rustle up your merchandise. Reds okay on the Marlboros?”

  As I started in on the form, the door opened. Ding-a-ling. Startled by the sound, I looked up as a man in a ragged black sport coat stepped into the store. He had gray eyes, an unshaven jaw, and a tattoo climbing up the side of his neck. He looked around the place just as I had when I first walked in, as if he were in a diorama at a museum. He caught my gaze for a moment, smiled, and nodded. I nodded back, like a stranger anywhere would nod, and went back to my form 4473.

  NAME: I had to think a bit, but the only ID I had on me was for Jonathon J. Willing, so that was it. ADDRESS: I had a post office box in Richmond, but that was specifically barred, so I sucked it up and put down the Patriots Landing address that matched the license. PLACE OF BIRTH: Philadelphia. HEIGHT: Sure. WEIGHT: Okay, so I lied. MALE: Yes. BIRTH DATE: What the hell. SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER (OPTIONAL): Option denied.

  “You buying yourself a gun?” The guy in the jacket was now next to me, leaning on the counter, looking not at me but instead down through the glass at the armaments arrayed there like fruit at a greengrocer: handguns, long guns, knives, brass knuckles. His voice was southern Virginia by way of the Bronx. The part of the tattoo that showed on his neck was the tip of a feathered wing.

  “Nah,” I said. “Guns they just give away down here, but they make you fill these out to buy the cigarettes.”

  His smile widened enough to be almost familiar. “If you got a choice, my advice—go for the cigarettes.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “First, they don’t mentholate firearms,” said the man. “I like menthol, it’s about the closest I get to a vacation anymore. And then, I’ve found that people who don’t know what they’re doing with a gun, they usually end up shooting themselves in the ass.”

  Something about his smile pissed me off. I gave him another look: short and stocky, with spiky blond hair and those pale gray eyes, dangerous eyes. Suddenly I really really really wanted him to stop talking.

  “The owner went to the storeroom,” I said, “but I expect he’ll be right back.”

  The man slid a little closer to me. I could smell his cheesy aftershave. Old Spice, the official scent of high-school freshmen.

  “Look at that little darling,” he said, referring to one of the smaller guns. “Wouldn’t that be sweet in some bastard’s ear?”

  I shifted down the counter away from him and turned my attention back to the form, instinctively shielding my answers with my body like a bratty know-it-all in junior high during a science test. (Of course, at Pitchford Junior High, that bratty know-it-all was me.) After questions about ethnicity and citizenship, form 4473 got to the crux of the matter. ARE YOU THE ACTUAL BUYER OF THE FIREARMS LISTED ON THIS FORM? Yes. HAVE YOU EVER BEEN CONVICTED OF A FELONY? NO. ARE YOU A FUGITIVE FROM JUSTICE? That last gave me a bit too much pause. Was I? Had I been running not from Tony Grubbins but instead from justice itself for lo these many years?

  “And it’s not just your own self you got to worry about,” said the man in the Old Spice.

  “Excuse me?” I said, still working on the form.

  “Once the shooting it starts, you never know who’s getting hit. You pay your taxes? Not all you’re supposed to, I’d bet. Not a guy like you.”

  I stopped writing, looked up at the man, felt something slip inside me. “What kind of guy is that?”

  “I had a pal that tried to get away without paying his taxes. No big deal, we all try to swing it. But when the IRS came after him, instead of just making good on what he owed, he started loading up. Shotguns, scatter guns, pistols out the wazoo. Before he could turn around, the ATF went Ruby Ridge on his ass. He survived, but the wife and one of the kids weren’t so lucky. Things like that happen when you start thinking with the barrel between your legs instead of your brain.”

  I looked down at the form for a moment and then back at the man’s unfriendly smile and hard gray eyes. As pale and as implacable as fate itself. So this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with an insufferable stranger wearing Old Spice. “You don’t know me.”

  “Maybe I don’t,” he said. “But I sure seen your picture.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph, tossed it on the counter. A grainy black and white of a man going through a metal detector at an airport.

  “That’s not me,” I said.

  “Close enough,” said the man, and he was right about that.

  I closed my eyes and took a breath. What I was feeling just then must have been much like the feeling you get when death falls out of the sky and flutters to a landing on your chest. Horror and fear and relief all at once. Whatever it was I had lived through for the past quarter century, it was finally, irrevocably over. Something new was coming hard and fast, and all I could think was that it was about time.

  “What do we do now?” I said.

  “First of all, we don’t buy no gun. I already got enough steel for both of us.” He pushed away his jacket to reveal a holstered pistol.

  “Okay.”

  “Then you give me your cell phone.”

  “Why?”

  “Just give it up,” he said, reaching out his hand. I took my cell out of my pocket, put it in his open hand.

  “BlackBerry, huh? Old school, with a keyboard instead of the touch screen. Nice. How’s your reception here?”

  “Fine.”

  “I don’t get crap. I’m stuck with AT&T. I want to go Verizon, but with the contract they got me by the balls, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I bet you do at that.” The man stuffed the BlackBerry in a jacket pocket. “Now we go outside and I follow you back to your house.”

  “You’ll follow me?”

  “What’s the Beemer worth, even used, twenty, thirty? No need to leave that here. At your house, we collect what’s left of the cash.”

  “It’s gone. I spent it all.”

  “Yeah, yeah, so you say. But still I got my orders to give the house a shakedown, like we did with your pal in Vegas. And then we’ll sit around the dining table with you and your family and figure something out.”

  “They’re not part of it.”

  “They are now.”

  “You stay the hell away from them.”

  His pale gray eyes stayed calm at my outburst, but it was a calm that slapped me into silence. It was all there, in that stillness, not just the violence he was undoubtedly capable of, but also that he just might enjoy it.

  “There’s a way this can go,” he said, slowly, patiently, as to a child, “in which the damage is kept to a minimum. There’s also a different way this can go. I don’t care; for me it’s just a job and most of my jobs are messy. So the decision is yours. How do you want to play it?”

  “Clean.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “And if I run?”

  He reached over and pulled the form from beneath my hand. “First I’ll catch you,” he said calmly as he gave the paper a scan. “And then I’ll hurt you. And then we’ll still head on over to that fancy development where I picked you up. How’s the wife, she a looker? If she is, that will make things more pleasant.”

  “Look, I’m sure you and I, we can work something out. Off the record. How much to walk away?”

  “You want to pay me off.”

  “That’s the way it works, isn’t it?”

  “You see, this is the thing that
got you in trouble in the first place. You have no idea who you are dealing with. Go on, now.”

  He jerked his head toward the door, and I stood there for a moment, my eyeballs spinning as I considered my options. Then my posture slumped, as if my spine had been extracted, and I headed for the exit. I had just opened the door—ding-a-ling—when the old guy in the overalls came out of the back room with a large brown box.

  “Mister,” he said, “where you going? I got your merchandise.”

  “He won’t be needing that pistol no more,” said the man in the black jacket. “But if you don’t mind, I sure could use a carton of Newpees for the road.”

  21. Chandler Court

  IT WAS A long, elegiac drive back to Patriots Landing, as somber as a sprinter’s funeral. Our small procession, my BMW and the blue rental Ford following close behind, was marking the death of an era. For a quarter of a century I had been on the run, taking wild gambles, devising devious strategies, plotting exits, racing ecstatically around the whole of the country to keep the wolves at bay. It had become not just a path of prudent precaution, it had become the richest part of my life. My past was painful, my present was confused and disappointing, yet no matter how life batted me about, I always had the warming knowledge that I had gotten away with something, something huge. Now, having finally been caught, I felt bereft, pale, weak, and useless, as if meaning had been bled out of my very existence.

  My life as I had known it was over; all that was left was managing the aftermath. And even that was too optimistic a pronouncement, as if there were any managing I could actually do.

  A cop car approached from the other direction, and I had the urge to flag him down with my lights. That would put an end to the immediate threat to my life—and with the statute of limitations having passed on the Grubbins caper I wouldn’t even end up in jail—but then what? What could the police actually do about my problem? The bastard with the Old Spice would be gone before I even pulled over to the side of the road, and while I was still trying to explain the whole story to the incredulous officer, Old Spice would be wreaking havoc on my house, and maybe on my family. No, I had to keep him as close as he had to keep me.