by Lev Raphael
I nodded, hypnotized by the way it gleamed under the counter.
“That’s the new Gen 4,” she said proudly, as if she had designed the Glock herself. “The frame has a rough texture that makes for a better grip.” She went on to extoll other features like the dual recoil spring assembly (whatever that meant), but all I could hear was the name “Glock,” and all I could think was, “Juno has one, the cops use them, I want one.” It was that simple, and that primitive.
“How much?”
“Six hundred.”
“Fine, I’ll take it.”
She smiled softly. “But you’ll have to get a permit to purchase the gun, remember—and you haven’t even held it to see if it feels like the right one for you. I remember that other time, you decided a .22 would be a good place to start.”
“And you said I could handle something bigger.”
“Did I? I suppose I did. You probably can.” She eyed me carefully. “Why not try it—hold it, I mean.” She took it out of the case, handed it to me and I pointed it away from us both, surprised at how uncomfortable it felt.
“Wow, it’s heavy.”
“That can be good, it can help you keep your hands steady.”
I handed it back, carefully, even though I knew it wasn’t loaded. “You know, maybe I will go with a .22—to start.” Just as quickly as I’d decided on a Glock, I’d felt repulsed by the idea of arming myself with anything similar to what the police might have.
“Your hands are on the small side for a man your size,” she said. “Here,” she said, pointing to another pistol in the display case. “This is a lovely gun. It’s a Beretta. Not a large gun at all, but effective. It’s safe, simple, practical.” She took it out, demonstrated the tip-up barrel, extolled the materials the Beretta was made of, then handed it to me, and once I held it, I wondered if I’d found my first gun. It felt right. I didn’t tell her that I had always associated the name Beretta with James Bond, even though he switched to a Walther PPK at some point. That might strike her as frivolous. But I liked the association with secrecy, because I wasn’t sure that I wanted Stefan to know I had a gun. Perhaps I’d keep it in our safe deposit box at the bank, or get my own separate box …
“People will tell you that a .22 doesn’t have much stopping power,” she observed. “But if you know what you’re doing and can cluster your shots—” She shrugged.
“I’m not planning on shooting anyone,” I said.
“Most people don’t. But you never know what might happen even when your life is squeaky clean.” She gave me a penetrating glance and for a moment I had the strangest feeling that she somehow knew about the police raiding our house.
“That’s absolutely right.”
She nodded. “You’re different,” she said. “You’ve changed. I remember that look from my patients when I was a nurse.”
“What look?”
“Somebody who’s been through hell. But you don’t worry me. I’m not afraid of selling you a gun. Any gun. Nurses get to be psychologists, too, in a way. You may have suffered, but you’re not a danger to anyone. You’ve been through hell, but you’ve come back.”
“That’s good to know.”
“Don’t be fresh! Tell me what happened to that woman who came in with you that time.”
“Juno’s my boss now.”
“Ah, well … I seem to recall you live north of campus?”
I nodded and she beamed. “You made quite an impression on me, young man! See how much I remember about you? Well, given where you live, you’ll have to go to the North Precinct to start the process of getting a gun permit, and hopefully they won’t try to slow things down. They know you professors can be touchy.” She chuckled, and I said nothing about Stefan’s fears that the local police would never allow either one of us to get a gun permit.
“I would definitely recommend taking instruction at the gun range. It’s connected to the university and there’s a student and faculty discount. Midweek tends to be a slow time for them, generally.” Mrs. Fennebresque handed me a flyer and I thanked her, wished her a nice day, and drove the ten minutes to the precinct building, feeling with each moment I got closer that they would jail me on some phony charge as soon as I walked through the door. “Be calm,” I ordered myself. It didn’t work. I kept driving anyway.
The northern precinct of the Michiganapolis Police Department was like a small private college. Five low redwood buildings with deep overhangs faced each other around a circle of grass with a huge American flag flying at its center, all of this nestled in the middle of several acres of lawn studded with evergreens and lined with rose bushes. Paths of glazed red brick connected the buildings, and the whole setup reeked of pre-recession spending. And for a public place, it looked awfully secretive and private.
One sign pointed to the fire department, another to service, whatever that meant, and the next to the police. I followed that one to a small public parking lot surrounded by an ornamental four-foot black cast iron fence. The lot was uncrowded and I parked right by a walkway. Getting out of the car I felt grossly conspicuous and wondered if surveillance cameras were monitoring me. And if they were, was the building already on some kind of alert? Wouldn’t they assume I was a threat, even though the raid had not panned out? And was this where the SWAT team was based, or did they have their own HQ?
It was hot, and I forced myself to slow down as I walked from my car. I felt lost in some Kafkaesque living nightmare, about to be accused of crimes I hadn’t committed but couldn’t defend myself against. I remembered every damning and disparaging thing Vanessa had said about the Michiganapolis police. These were not people I could trust, but how else could I get a gun and make myself feel safe?
The entrance was framed in more of those glazed bricks and when I walked into the lobby, I was surprised to see how small it was, and how few chairs were lined against a wall. Maybe they’d changed things since 9/11. “Security,” I thought. The smaller the lobby, the fewer people could congregate there and cause trouble, the easier it was to defend the building.
I had remembered it as bigger and less bland, less like a linoleum store. But I’d been there once before to apply for a permit, the last time I’d gone to the gun shop, and backed off after I’d gotten it. Would that count against me somehow? Did they keep records of indecisive people?
“What are you here for?” A portly, sour-faced cop in his fifties was studying me with his blank brown eyes from behind the long security window opposite the door. We were separated by what I assumed was bullet-proof glass, and plenty of steel.
“I want to register a gun. I mean, get a permit for a gun. I don’t have a gun. I mean, I don’t own one, not yet. That’s where you come in,” I added inanely, and there was a sigh from the cop that clearly expressed not just disgust with local citizens but all humanity.
“Driver’s license?”
I managed to get out my wallet and license without dropping either one, and I slid the license through a small security grill opening in the glass window. My hands were sweaty and I could feel sweat dotting my hairline despite the air conditioning. The cop checked the license as carefully as if I were crossing a border during World War II and he was on the lookout for traitors or spies. Then he studied my face.
“Is this your permanent address?”
I nodded, and he handed me a pamphlet to read, slipping through a door behind him with my license. At that moment I started to panic, thinking they’d never give it back to me, that I was trapped, but rather than sit down and even look at the pamphlet, I waited at the window, and he was back sooner than I expected, slipping the license back to me. He nodded at the wall and I went to sit on one of the hard plastic chairs with a hole low in the back uncomfortably close to the butt. They were all like that. Imagine designing something that awful, or buying it.
The grim lobby was well-covered by visible surveillance cameras and I tried not to look at them or anything, anywhere. Then I thought it would seem suspicious if I kept my
head down because that’s what criminals do to avoid their faces being seen. But how else was I supposed to read what I saw was an official publication about gun safety, just like the one I’d re-read last night at home, and that lay in stacks at Mrs. Fennebresque’s gun shop? I skimmed the contents, reminding myself about gun safety in crowds and alone, gun cleaning, storage, and transportation.
The quiet in the lobby was intimidating, and made me almost doubt I was in a police station at all. The cop’s phone rang several times, but I couldn’t hear anything he said in his cage. I returned the pamphlet when I was done and in return got a quiz on a white sheet of paper. My first time here, I had been surprised to get the pamphlet on loan, so to speak, and to take the quiz on gun safety so soon after reading it.
Fifteen true or false questions covered the identical material I had just read. Was this really how they checked people’s gun safety knowledge? It seemed too easy, more like a test of short-term memory, but then as I read the questions, I found the phrasing so convoluted that each one felt like a trap. When I was in junior high school, I’d often had test anxiety, my mind going blank during algebra and other subjects aside from English, and I could feel that incipient blankness and panic returning. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply a few times, and started over. This was not junior high, this was not one of those anxiety dreams where you wake up late and unprepared for something crucial like an interview or a theater performance. I knew I could take the test over another day if I failed this one.
Finished, I brought it up to the counter gingerly and the cop checked the answers right then on his laptop screen. “You got ’em all right.” He sounded disappointed. “Okay, now you get some different questions. These are required by law.”
I nodded, trying not to appear nervous.
“Do you have any criminal convictions?”
“No, sir!”
He peered at me as if suspecting mockery, but then made a mark on some form. “Are you the subject of any restraining orders?”
“No.”
“Okay, that’s it, call here this time tomorrow. We issue you the permit, you can buy your gun, and then you register it here. You’ll have ten days, then the purchase permit expires.” He added as an unconvincing afterthought, “Have a nice day.” It sounded more like “Scram!”
15
So what was I supposed to do now that I had crossed a serious boundary in my life I’d never expected to cross? I went to the gym. I didn’t need to stop at home first because I always kept an extra set of workout clothes in a small gym bag in the car just in case.
Michigan Muscle was heaven or hell depending on your perspective. Veterans loved it, newbies were overwhelmed and sometimes panicked. It was just so damned big. Over the years it had expanded to over half a million square feet in a weird boxy mix of brick, steel, glass, and concrete. It had no real style, either inside or outside, but it reeked of money spent on the latest equipment, luxurious locker rooms, and an extravagantly severe black and chrome pro shop with matching restaurant.
It was surrounded by parking lots like a mall, indifferently landscaped, and inside, the club revealed itself in stages on many different levels because the site was so sloped and uneven. Pools led to racquetball courts which led to locker rooms which led to offices which led to walkways which led to yoga and Pilates studios which led to cardio rooms which led to stationary biking rooms, all of it seeming to radiate out from the several enormous areas with free weights and up-to-date weight machines. You were always walking up or down or circling back somewhere, and Michigan Muscle could feel like an Escher drawing. Even the profusion of signs didn’t help because the additions had been so haphazard. Add to that the relentless neon lights, the wilderness of mirrors and glass doors, and you had quite a bizarre package.
Many people started there and quit, opting for smaller local health clubs where they didn’t feel so exposed, so much on stage, or so lost. Some even went to private studios. These tended to be people who had begun working out at their doctor’s urging after a heart attack or some kind of accident, and initially thought the supermarket abundance of the club was just right, but eventually found that fine-tuning their needs led them elsewhere, away from the hordes that filled the place most mornings and evenings. I liked it because I could run on the indoor track, swim, bike, do whatever felt right for that day.
I wandered down to the locker room I liked best (there were three each for men and women), trying to decide what exactly to do, when I passed Lucky Bitterman leaving that locker room on the way to—I think—one of the free weights areas. He glared poisonously at me but kept going. Was he following me and pretending not to? Had he somehow gotten inside and changed quickly, or had he arrived in workout clothes?
In the locker room, whose walls had recently been painted lime green to cheer people up, according to the management, I felt my heart beating faster. There were three rows of wooden-doored lockers back-to-back, and lockers along the back and sides of the room forming a U. Facing all of that was a lounge area with widescreen TV, coatracks, counters for towels, and two doors leading to the showers and the adjoining sauna, steam room, and whirlpool beyond. It was a companionable enough place when lots of people were there chatting and changing, but eerie in its own way when almost empty. Noises seemed magnified, so you could be easily startled by a sneaker falling onto a bench, or somebody’s belt rattling as he hung his pants inside a locker—and you couldn’t be certain where the sound was coming from. Even the silence was ominous. Full-length mirrors studded the locker rooms, and sometimes someone you saw in a reflection was much farther away than he looked—or much closer. Thefts happened now and then, but to my knowledge nobody had ever been mugged in any of the locker rooms at the club. Still, it wouldn’t be hard to do. And of course there was the dead body I’d discovered in the sauna years ago, so even worse was possible.
Would Lucky double back and sneak up on me from behind one of the ranks of gleaming wooden lockers?
There weren’t many people around anywhere in the gym today. I had decided on weights, because I had this terrible paranoid image of Lucky trying to drown me in the pool, or at least hurt me there.
I didn’t see him anywhere, and nodded to the few regulars and trainers I did run into while I worked shoulders and arms, breathing deeply, concentrating. I was able to let go so completely that for half an hour I forgot about the SWAT team and everything that had followed afterwards like a ghastly plague of misfortune. But when I was done, and back in the locker room, I thought I saw Lucky in a towel, reflected in a mirror, going into the shower area that adjoined the sauna, steam room, and whirlpool. Should I leave and shower at home? That suddenly seemed cowardly. I got undressed, slipped on the Adidas slides I wore in the shower, wrapped a big white towel around my waist, and locked my locker with my combination lock.
The sky-blue tiled shower area had ten curtained stalls, but all of them were empty, and I was relieved. When I finished showering off, I headed for the whirlpool and just as I hung up my towel and eased down into the hot, bubbling water, the sauna door banged open and Lucky stomped over. In his towel, he reminded me of Sean Connery in one of the early James Bond films: hairy, fit, devilishly handsome, and dangerous. I may have been able to subdue Stone in Ludington, but Lucky could easily take me down and nobody would know. He was big enough and powerful enough to hold me under the water till I stopped trying to escape. The thought paralyzed me, but even if I wasn’t unable to move, I was sitting opposite the metal-railed stair out of the whirlpool, so there was no chance I could have gotten away from him. You just can’t make a speedy exit from a whirlpool with the water dragging at your legs.
The showers formed the long part of a capital L and the sauna, steam room, and whirlpool were around the corner in the short part, with the whirlpool all the way at the end. It was too private, too secluded. My breath stopped for a moment as he dropped his towel and stomped down into the water, stood dead center in the whirlpool, the water flowing around t
he top of his red Speedo, which stretched across his flat, veined belly.
After a moment, he said, “Why the hell are you following me? You drove by my house twice and I never see you in the gym this time of day and suddenly you show up?”
“I’m a member. I’m here all different times.”
“And driving by my house? Don’t tell me you’re thinking of moving and wanted to check out the neighborhood.”
“I’m not following you.”
Something about the way I said it gave me away; his sour face brightened and he started to laugh. “Wait a minute. You think I’m following you, right? Oh my God, that is too funny.”
I had never seen him smile like this before, or smile at all except contemptuously. He sat down in the water beside me as cheerful as if he were going to give me a hug or at least slap my back like I’d told him the best joke he’d heard in years. Hell, maybe I had. I tried not to recoil and show how he had creeped me out. Up close, the resemblance to Sean Connery was even stronger, and I wondered, trivially, if he had any Scotch ancestry.
“So, why would I stalk you?” he asked companionably. “Because I’m a serial killer who targets bibliographers? Because I hate gay people? Oh, don’t tell me, because I’m a general asshole.”
I may have turned red.
He was enjoying himself, crossed his arms like a school teacher catching a pupil in an obvious lie. “What, you think I don’t know that? I’ve always been like this, always been a loner. I was an only child, I always got my way, my parents let me flatten them.” He shrugged his muscular shoulders. “And now, my career sucks, I’m stuck in Michigan, and I have lymphoma.”
I gaped at him. “You look fine, you don’t look sick at all.”
“On the outside, maybe. My father died of it, so did my uncle.”
“But you’re young …” Between the heat of the whirlpool, the fatigue of my workout, and my impending gun purchase, I felt overwhelmed, which made me even less prepared to sort out Lucky’s admissions. Was he bullshitting me? He seemed authentic.