Upgunned (33 page)

*   *   *

By the next session with Cap, it was obvious that he could read me like a billboard. He slapped one of his swill beers into my grasp and gave me that look like my father used to give me when I'd screwed the pooch.

“I was hoping you'd tell me now,” he said evenly. “About what all this bullshit is
about
.”

To cut sharp to a gang of prefabricated excuses would insult this man.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I'll tell you a little story. Then you decide if you really want to talk to me.”

The implication was clear:
if you don't, no more free lessons
. I had advantaged his love for his profession, something about which he had been more than willing to speak freely, to impart information to demonstrate his expertise. That honeymoon was done.

He dug around in the footlocker he called his “war box” and handed me a revolver—rather, the remains of a revolver that appeared to have exploded. The top of the frame between the sights had broken and peeled upward like parentheses reversed, burned and ragged. The cylinder, too, had butterflied open as though pried apart with pliers.

“Fella I knew had this gun on a range,” said Cap. “Fired it. Next thing he knew he was on his back with a broken nose, seeing stars. Care to guess what happened?”

“Gun blew up?” I said, knowing Cap would wait patiently for me to get to the why. “Wrong bullet?”

“Wrong load. Probably double-charged a reload. Some of the fast-burning powders don't take up much space in the cartridge case. That's why I use bulkier powders. No shifting problems, and if I were to ‘accidentally' double-charge a case, it would overflow.”

“You have completely lost me,” I said.

“Look, not that it matters to you, but here's a bullet.”

“Cartridge,” I said, remembering my argot fest with the late Joey.

“You fill the casing with ingredients, just like a recipe. Some brands of powder don't fill the case all the way and you get wildly varying velocities depending on where the powder is inside the case. Like, if you point the muzzle down, then raise the gun and fire it, the powder will slide to the front of the case—against the bullet. So it's a good distance from the primer, see? Like sand in an hourglass. If you raise the gun up and then bring it down to fire, the powder slides up against the primer instead. Bang—much higher velocity.”

“So you … don't do that?”

Cap directed me again to the sundered metal of the revolver. “This guy should've used a Hogden 110—that's a slow-burning powder that completely fills the case. Instead, he blew up a .44 Magnum, bludgeoned his own face, and nearly blew several fingers off. You get less of a pressure spike with slower powder. And that guy thought he knew what he was doing. He was not an amateur. So my question to you is: Do you know what you're doing, or do you just
think
you know, or are you making it up as you go along?

Cap was always rigorous with the tough love. He had caught me eyeing his arsenal when I thought he wasn't looking.

“Because if you only
think
you know what you're doing … in fact, if you were to be inspired to, say, lift a piece from my truck to go collect yourself some frontier justice, I would advise a rethink.” He popped another racing-striped can of swill and drank half. Two pulls per can was his average.

I had to be exacting about what I said next.

“I have to be able to defend myself,” I said.

“So you're in some kinda trouble I reckon is not quite legal.”

“Yes.”

His expression was that of a man who has received an enormous bill for something he did not order.

“Listen,” he said. “I can show you how to shoot, but I can't Rambo you up, if that's what you're fantasizing. Close-quarter battle is a unique environment. It's what I call the cop problem: cops qualify on a range, with eye and ear protection, shooting at paper targets. No gunfight will ever require those skills. The paper target doesn't move. It's in full light. It doesn't shoot back. What about your stance? No stance in a gunfight. Fights involve movement. Safety on a range means you stay inside the shooting carrel. How many armed confrontations are cops going to experience while standing inside a phone booth?”

“They don't even make phone booths anymore,” I said with a cheesy half-grin, with nostalgia for my long-lost pay phone, my ally, probably already uprooted from the beach on the other side of the country.

“Fights are about time and stress. Your adrenaline races. Hormones kick up your heart rate. You start panting; lower oxygen level. Your movements get clumsy. As one guy I know said, ‘Try to thread a needle in an emergency.' You wind up with too little finger on the trigger. Tunnel vision. A thousand things. And here's what happens: guys have emptied pistols at point-blank range and not hit a single thing, once. I'm talking about firing six to nine shots at arm's length, at a person … and
missing
, due to all those factors.”

I thought it was impossible to miss if you were close enough. The only “close enough” that existed was to jam the gun down someone's throat. It wasn't the size of the gun or the number of bullets; it was the mind-set operating the tool. My action-hero report card had just gained a fat, red F.

As though he was reading my thoughts—somewhat like Lyle had, back at Salon—Cap added, “Just because you know how to point it and make it go
bang
doesn't mean you're ready to use it.”

“I know.”

“I don't think it's sunk in yet. And if you bring me trouble, I'll give you back ten times the trouble. If there is gunfire, I don't know you, you don't know me, and we've never met except for you taking pictures.”

It was a tough call. Moments after I had gushed my drama all over Char in the city, she had died.

“Is this one of those ‘I could tell ya, but I'd have to kill ya' things?”

“Yeah. More or less.”

“Tell ya what: you think about it. You come back and give me a decision, and I'll see what I can do. No explanation, no help. Lessons done, photos taken, payment accepted in the form of the Kimber. Yes?”

“I just need some time to sort it out.”

“I can't let you walk around packing otherwise.”

It really was quite like talking to my dead father. Cap did not say he would or would not enable me, but let the suggestion float. It occurred to me that Cap had faced similar trials before. I needed this man.

“I have to shoot at Salon tonight. After that, I'll come back here.”

Cap nodded as though that was the answer he needed. “Not here. The company's getting ready to move to Arizona.” He let me know where I could find his truck. Even when locked up, there was a Fire When Ready man on graveyard shift sentry duty. Always. Cap made sure I had his cell number but I had stopped carrying mobile devices around—too risky. Better a gun than an iPhone.

Maybe I could just join Salon and run away with the sideshow.

The payoff to
Vengeance Is
was the usual kick in the teeth. Walker, the dumb sonofabitch, crawls up after a century of torment in hell to reap six escapees for the boss, who promises Walker will be reunited with his wife, who would otherwise have died of tuberculosis—they called it consumption back then—in 1848. Except the way the boss saved the fulsome Marianne was by making her his own immortal concubine. When Walker completes his mission, the bedraggled last man standing, his still gorgeous, still twenty-year-old wife wants nothing to do with a hick like him. His vulture overseer wings off into the setting sun, back to the hanging tree. Walker is alone. Fade out.

The final showdown was to take place in the jackstrawed remains of Boot Hill Cemetery, part of the Arizona leg of the shoot that included the period 1848 parts—nearly the entire first act—to be shot at Old Tucson, a standing Western backlot used since 1939, when it was built for the movie
Arizona
, with William Holden and Jean Arthur. It became a bona fide production studio entity in the late fifties, about the time it began to degenerate into a theme park and tourist attraction. If you have seen a shoot-out in a Western, chances are you've seen Old Tucson's main drag.

In the back of my mind I had already accepted the idea that Julian Hightower would face his fate on a Western street in Old Tucson, facing off with Gun Guy for some climactic exchange of hostilities. One bites the hardpan and one survives. The chase would end on a fake cowtown street where the running could stop at last. Ready clichés massed toward such a climax. Slap leather and draw guns, moving from Peckinpah slow-motion to Walter Hill sharp focus. Pure horse opera melodrama. Suddenly and unbelievably proficient, all manly and upgunned, I would rise to defeat a superior opponent against all odds by cutting Gun Guy down with his own weapon in a cleansing blast of powder, cordite, and hot lead, reclaiming my stolen existence through the hard rules of the equalizer, the last man standing. Cut, print, wrap, fade-out for real.

I could not have been more wrong.

 

PART ELEVEN

JACK

Most people spend their lives just waiting to die; to them, life was a crossword puzzle, a time killer. Most of the same people desired to feel special and apart from the herd. They craved a windfall of money or the benediction of popular culture. They prayed for a transformative event beyond their control and outside their own selves. For a select few, in this life, I was that event. If their life before me was dreary or unremarkable, I changed them. I gave them importance. At least, somewhere, somebody thought they were worth the kill.

The real tragedy of human interaction was that people don't automatically die when you're finished with them. If the divide was bloody, they never go away and they never mind their own business. If they feel hurt, they log you away for some future vengeance that never happens, but feeds their self-pity. They're better off dead, and you're better off, too. They long for some exterior happenstance to make them “right” … just so long as it involves no personal risk or culpability. They're the people who call the police to clean up after them, and make them right. A professional adventurer named Jean-Jacques de Mesterton once said, “If you have a problem, you go to the cops. If they can't help you, you go to the FBI. If they can't help you, you go to the CIA. If they can't help you, you come to me.”

Nobody has heard of Jean-Jacques, but everybody has heard of Britney. Nobodies spend their lives worrying about cash flow and style blunders.

Which is why the general public's idea of the ice-cold robotic assassin is just as wrong as everything else they cherish and have been programmed to believe. In a world where most people wish most other people dead (remember that the next time you're stuck in traffic), it's not complicated to kill for pay or practicality. We're all at war from birth. The head of a penis is that odd helmet shape because it evolved to scrape out enemy sperm. Spooky laughed when I mentioned that, and she should have. She knew our collision had the half-life of a typical set romance, and she was right about that, too. I did not want her to fret or suffer, so I used her pills. Spoor expunged.

Somebody like that Artesia Savoy hottie I saw on the movie set could reap jobs by simply unveiling “accidental” cleavage or a length of leg. Spooky had it tougher but she knew the truth: all's fair. I probably saved her a lot of emotional pain.

Elias McCabe was another one whose ego bruises would never fade. He could never make himself unaware of the degradations inflicted upon him. He would spend the rest of his existence sniffing for a payback opportunity, even if it never arrived, even if he could never muster the backbone to do anything but run. So far, he had run pretty well—better than I expected. Plus, the little weasel had my Kimber. If I allowed him to slip into anonymity, he would resurge, perhaps years later, in an ugly and inconvenient way. That's when you usually take the worst hits: years later, when you thought the file was long closed.

Assassins cannot change the laws of physics, either, despite what the movies may have told you.

I got a beard trimmer and shaped what I had spent the last two weeks growing. My new hair color was, what? Auburn? Dark mocha? I dug the box out of my hotel bathroom trash bin to remind myself what the manufacturer called it.

That's when I discovered I could not read the fine print on the back of the box. The text was blurred hash, like the back cover copy of a bootleg DVD. I held it further away from my eyes and squinted down, the way I'd seen people do when I had dismissed them as “getting old.”

Don't panic
.

I couldn't read the goddamned room service menu, either.

Don't panic
.

I shucked Bulldog's
SIG
from its scabbard and sighted it. The front ramp sight was dissipate, blobby. I tried it with my bad eye shut. Same deal. And I was accustomed to sighting with both eyes open anyway.

Time to panic
.

My defocused reflection in the mirror suggested that I now resembled Elias McCabe, before he had disguised himself.

My eyes were going. My sight was becoming a handicap. I had already noticed—and denied—that my nighttime vision was becoming hazy. This was an unexpected drawback; it emphasized how narrow my work window had become. I needed to run Elias to ground, and let Evil Me off the chain … and soon.

But not if I needed a Seeing Eye dog and a white stick. The prop glasses I had used as Jack Vickers now seemed too cruel a joke.

At a twenty-four-hour pharmacy on First Avenue I discovered that a simple pair of x1-power reading glasses could snap my close-up vision back into focus. I almost felt like celebrating, as though some governor had phoned in a last-minute stay of execution. But it was at a Home Depot on the East Side that I chanced across what I
really
needed: bifocal safety glasses in strong acrylic. They hugged my head (no slippage) and provided side panels to shield my eyes. Look through the uppers for a normal view; tilt head slightly to engage the lenses for close-ups. They were almost identical to shooting glasses, and perfect for gun work. Here were glasses that could not only augment my need to disguise the planes of my face, but were functional. Not a prop. Even better, anyone who glanced at me would only remember the glasses—they were just odd-looking enough.