Gun Church (13 page)
Authors: Reed Farrel Coleman
Tags: #Fiction, #Crime, #General, #Mystery & Detective
It was like the rush from a roller coaster ride. When it’s over, you want to go again more than anything else in the world. The rush didn’t last. Nothing good ever lasts. The buzz drained out of me through the bottom of my shoes. Suddenly, my legs were rubbery and everything fell on my shoulders all at once. I was weak and I wanted nothing more than to lie down right there and pass out. Jim picked up on it right away.
“Come on, Kip, let’s get cleaned up.”
He fairly dragged me into the locker room and I lay down on the cold floor. I was vaguely conscious of Jim washing himself. I was utterly spent and my mind was as empty as it had been since the day I was born. My internal voice was asleep and I wanted to be. I think I nodded off there for a few minutes.
“Okay, Kip,” Jim said, lifting me to a sitting position. “Drink this and then wash up.” He handed me a cold bottle of water and pointed at three more bottles on the locker room bench.
I guzzled the water and made to stretch out again. “Just let me die here in peace.”
He laughed. “It happens to everybody. It’s the fear and the adrenalin. It gets to you, but we have to go back inside.”
“Why?”
“We’ve got to watch the others shoot.”
“I’ll read about it in the morning papers.”
He laughed again. I had my moments.
“But there’s someone you’ve got to see shoot.”
“Who?”
“Renee.”
Fallen Queen
The St. Pauli Girl was barely recognizable in her protective gear, but it would have been impossible not to recognize the hulking figure standing across the room from her. Although the helmet and face mask obscured his pocked and scarred visage, Stan Petrovic stuck out like a malignant cyst. For the second time since we met, Renee seemed small and vulnerable. I realize that’s an odd thing to say about someone with a .40 Glock in her right hand, but the menace that Stan Petrovic exuded couldn’t be contained by all the padding in the world. Protective armor is meant to keep things out, not keep them in.
“I don’t like it,” I heard myself say.
“Don’t worry about Renee. She’s good. She can take care of herself.”
“Thanks, Jim, but you’ll excuse me if I find little comfort in that.” I started to get up. The kid held me down in my seat.
Before I could get another word out of my mouth, the chapel echoed with gunfire. The next thing I was conscious of was kneeling over Renee, searching her shirt and suit for where the bullet had hit. I couldn’t find an indentation anywhere. My mind was racing with the illogic of it. She was down, so she had to have been hit, but there was no hole, no blood. She was down, but she wasn’t writhing in pain. The St. Pauli Girl was deathly still, and quiet. Frantically, I ran my hands along the makeshift leg armor. Then a disembodied voice called out: “Headshot.”
And there it was: a thumb-sized hole in the front left side of the thick flak padding glued onto the Army surplus helmet. Before I could move, I was being shoved out of the way and Renee seemed to disappear behind a wall of bodies. They moved around her like worker bees attending their fallen queen. I think I was in shock and just stood there for what felt like hours. Then I heard something else and turned to see Stan getting up onto his hands and knees. He was grunting, struggling to pull off the face mask and helmet. I ran at him, rearing back my leg to kick the cocksucker in the face, but Jim tackled me before I swung my leg forward. He kept me pinned to the floor.
“Stop it, Kip,” he whispered in my ear. “You’re going to fuck everything up. You can’t do that now. You can’t fuck it all up now.” He was almost pleading.
“That fuck shot her in the head. He killed Renee.”
“It was Stan’s first time too, just like you.”
“I don’t give a—”
“She’s okay. She’s okay. Calm down! She was just stunned and knocked her head when she fell back. Look.”
I raised my head up as far as I could against Jim’s mass and saw the St. Pauli Girl smiling at me in that way she had.
“Okay, okay, let me up.”
When everyone was certain Renee was steady on her feet, they moved away from her. She moved toward Stan and repeated the same ritual Jim and I had performed only a half hour before. Then it was Stan’s turn for the beer bath, for the adulation, and eventually for everything else I’d gone through earlier.
“Are you okay? Are you okay?” I was shouting at the St. Pauli Girl.
“I’m fine. I just feel stupid. Christ, you’d think I’d never done this before.”
“But you’re okay?”
“I’m okay, Ken. I promise,” she said, pecking me softly on the cheek. “You really do care about me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She didn’t answer, instead pulling me over to where Stan was the center of attention, his fat gut wet with beer, a small red mark blooming in the center of his chest. When he looked around, he noticed me at the back of the crowd. I smiled at him as he had smiled at me. Tonight I would make nice like everyone else, but this wasn’t over between us.
The St. Pauli Girl didn’t say a word as we drove back to my house. Maybe Jim was right about her and she could handle herself as well as anyone, but her silence was eloquent. I wouldn’t have known what to say had she spoken. Renee had come very close to dying,
very
close; closer, I suspect, than she thought possible. I was more than a bit lost myself, caught in that post-adrenalin netherworld of my rush-crash-rush cycle and the panic and relief over her close call. I was trying to make sense of it, to filter it; yet I knew that even if I squeezed everything out of the events of that evening, leaving nothing but pith and peel, it wouldn’t have added up. There are some things in life that can be reduced down to their molecules and yet yield nothing of their nature. Maybe it was all too raw.
Finally, Renee leaned over, resting her head on my thigh. I finger-combed her hair and she began softly sobbing.
“Does your head hurt?” I asked.
“That’s not why I’m crying.”
“Why then?”
“Because of what you did back there.”
“I was worried about you.”
“I care about you too, Ken.”
“Shhhh. Relax.”
Her tears dried up and she closed her eyes as if to sleep. As she rested there, an ugly thought came to mind. It was a question, really. One I thought I knew the answer to, an answer that, if correct, was more unpleasant than the question itself. I knew it was a question better left alone and unspoken, but when the St. Pauli Girl stirred it spilled out of my mouth.
“Why did you shoot with Stan?”
“Why do you think?” she said, pushing herself upright. “Why did you shoot with Jim?”
“Jim says the first time you shoot, you shoot with the person who trained you.”
“Then stop asking me questions you already know the answers to, especially if you don’t like the answers.”
“But why would you train Stan?”
“He had to be trained by someone.” Her voice was steady, cool, distant.
“But why you? Who picked who? Did Jim have anything to—”
“You sound jealous,” she said, a mischievous glint in her eyes.
“Maybe a little.”
“Only a little?”
I swung the steering wheel hard right and skidded to a stop on the shoulder. I undid my seatbelt, reached over, pulled Renee to me, and pressed my mouth onto hers, hard. My tongue was between her lips before she had a chance to breathe and my hand was undoing her jeans. She didn’t fight, but she didn’t help either. I didn’t care. Once I got my hand under her panties, she became decidedly less passive.
When we finished, the windows were fogged over and the car smelled intensely of sex. We sat back in our seats, half-naked, taking it all in. In Brixton, we could have been parked in the middle of the road for the lack of traffic. From the time I pulled over until the time I started back to the house, a half hour must have gone by and not one car passed us in either direction.
“I’m the third most experienced person, Ken,” the St. Pauli Girl said as I put the car in gear. “That’s why I trained Stan. That’s all.”
“It’s okay, I was just being an idiot. Who’s the second most experienced shooter?”
“He’s moved on,” she said, “so now I’m next in line.”
We didn’t say much more on the drive, but when we got to the house we let our bodies do the talking until we lost our voices.
I am sorry to inform you that due to a decrease in sales and a lack of demand over the past several years, we find it necessary to reduce and sell off our overstock of inventory of the following titles:
Clown Car Bounce
,
The Devil’s Understudy
, and
Curly Takes Five
. Prior to reducing the inventory, I can make copies available to you at the special rate of $2.60 per unit.
—TRENA KEMPTON, LIQUIDATIONS MANAGER
Gun Cherry
I went back to writing with a head full of plot ideas and a new determination. The story of Terry McGuinn was going to get told regardless of what Haskell Brown had to say about it. It might never get read, but it was going to get written. There was always the option of sending the manuscript out under a pseudonym, though that was much less appealing to me. And if it came down to it, I could always self-publish the thing; but one way or the other I wanted my name on the book as a kind of
Fuck you!
to the critics who had eagerly shoveled dirt on my coffin. After the St. Pauli Girl drifted off, Terry McGuinn was all I could think about: McGuinn dealing with a fool like Stan Petrovic … McGuinn in love with a girl like Renee.
McGuinn could sense their eyes on him as he and the lovely Zoe made their way along the street. He’d only spotted the one, the acne-faced boyo, in the bar proper. McGuinn’d kept an eye on the lad. The others, he supposed, must have laid in wait outside Ralph and Jim’s. He was being set up for sure, but for what? If this had been the Brits or Prods, if this had been some of his own come for him, Jesus would have already let go his hand that he might fall to hell. He would have been dead the second he walked out of the pub or into a shadow.
The fair Zoe stopped, turned, and kissed McGuinn hard. Her tongue was dancing inside his mouth, his in hers. It was soon hard to distinguish the one from the other. She stood back, took his hand, and led him down an alley. She stopped only a few meters in, pushed his back against a steel door, kissed him again, then dropped slowly to her knees. Ah, this skirt is a sharp one, McGuinn thought, smart enough to know he would never have followed her to the end of the alley where he would easily be boxed in.
As she undid him, he reached his right arm around behind him to where the Sig was stashed against the small of his back. He worked his fingers around the grip and slid the 9mm up from between his shirt and the waistband of his pants. He kept his gun hand behind him and waited for the ambush to be sprung. He didn’t have but a few seconds to wait.
There were three of them surrounding Zoe and McGuinn, men all: the trouble boy, another lad of pale complexion—as fierce looking as a cripple-winged sparrow—and a well-built fellow with the look of an American footballer. McGuinn recognized the footballer’s face from the slaughterhouse. Didn’t know him by name, but had seen him about. He was the leader, this one, with bright copper eyes and a shrewd mouth.
Oh, and there was something else—each of the lads held 9mm’s aimed squarely at McGuinn’s head and torso.
“Seem’s you lads have caught me with me pants down,” he said to distract them.
It worked, for as they smirked, they relaxed their gun hands just enough to give McGuinn the time he needed. In a blur of lightning quickness, he pulled Zoe up from her knees, spun her around, and put the Sig Sauer to her neck. When he spoke, McGuinn spoke directly to the footballer, ignoring the other two.
“I don’t know what you’re playin’ at, fellas, nor who you’re accustomed to playin’ with, but I’d advise ya to drop yer weapons and let me be on me way. And do me the courtesy, will ya, of not pretendin’ the fair Miss Zoe is not a part of this? It will save us all a lot of bother.”
“There’s three of us,” the footballer said, his voice cool as a late fall evening. “I like our odds.”
“Then ya don’t know shite, lad.”
And with that, McGuinn shoved Zoe at the trouble boy, who stumbled backwards, shot the sparrow in his gun shoulder, and wheeled on the footballer. The footballer placed his automatic on the cobblestones and kicked it away, but as he did, he smiled the most disconcerting smile that McGuinn had ever seen.
“Well done,” he said to McGuinn. “You’ve passed your audition.”
“Now what kind of shite are you talkin’?”
“We’ll be in touch,” said the footballer.
“Like fook you will. Ya aren’t goin’ anywhere.”
“Okay, Irish, have it your way. We’ll wait for the cops and you can explain Joseph’s bullet wound away and tell the cops all about who you are and where you come from.” He smiled that smile again. The footballer had McGuinn and he knew it. “All right, son, take the juicer, yer wounded, the girl, and be gone.”
“No,” said the footballer, “I think we’ll stay. I don’t like being told what to do. Those sirens are getting louder, Irish. If there’s any running to be done, I think you’ll do it.”
One of the ways McGuinn had managed to survive this long was by knowing when defeat was at hand. He didn’t hesitate. He ran, hitching up his trousers as best he could while still holding on to the Sig. He turned to look back. They were nearly gone, but he did catch the briefest glimpse of Zoe. There was a sadness about her as disconcerting as the footballer’s smile.