Dead and Gone

“It’s going to buck, mahn,” Clarence warned me.

I looked over at Max, caught his eye, pointed to my wrist. I made the gesture for firing a gun, showing the pistol kicking, my hand flying up. I opened my hands in a question.

The Mongol nodded. Grasped my wrist with his hand. I flexed the wrist. It was like trying to lift a TV set with the back of my hand. Max shrugged—not sure.

“Okay,” I told Clarence. “I guess I’ll have to try it out. You got a place where—?”

“After dark,” the West Indian said.

Clarence piloted the colorless, shapeless blob of a Toyota through the devastated blocks south of Atlantic Avenue. “I did not want to use my ride, mahn. We still don’t know what they may be watching for.”

“Good,” I said from the back seat, knowing what he really meant. Clarence never brought his beloved British Racing Green ’67 Rover 2000 TC along when he thought there might be shooting. He could live with damage to it— after all, he’d restored it from scrap—but the prospect of police forfeiture made him psychotic.

With a dark-blue watch cap covering my head and an old Army field jacket providing bulk that I didn’t have, I looked like … nobody. But I still looked white. And in that neighborhood, white meant cop, junkie, or victim, so we were playing it safe.

The basement was lined with bags of cement mix, stacked so deep you couldn’t see an inch of the walls, much less a window. The ceiling was thick foam acoustical tile. Even the floor had some kind of rubberized mat over the concrete. Clarence handed me a pair of ear-protectors. “Outside, nobody hears nothing, mahn. But in here, you blow an eardrum for sure, you don’t cover up.”

I slipped the protectors on. Clarence did the same. Then he walked into the darkest corner of the basement and came back with the pistol. I tilted the protector to listen.

“A Python, like I said, mahn. This is standard, all the way around. Nobody’s touched the piece or the ammo.”

“I can just …?”

“Sure. Blast away. We test much heavier stuff down here, no problem.”

I aimed the pistol at the far wall of sandbags, squeezed the trigger slowly. Too slowly. I realized I was even testing the strength of my damn finger, said Fuck it! to myself, and cranked one off.

The gun bucked hard, but I was anticipating the ride and brought it back down into firing position off the momentum. I looked over at Clarence. He nodded approval, flicked his index finger a few times, quickly.

Okay. I snapped out the remaining five rounds, resisting the temptation to use my left hand to steady my right wrist. Felt all right. I gave it a few seconds for the echoes to be absorbed, then I pulled off the ear-protectors.

“How’d it look to you?” I asked Clarence.

“Looked pretty steady, to tell the truth, mahn. Your wrist is strong, I think.”

“Any way to check on a grouping?”

“Sure, mahn. But the longest distance we got here is—”

“—more than I need,” I said.

Clarence found an old newspaper, carefully tucked it in between some of the sandbags. In the dim light, I could only see a faint white rectangle. I stepped closer, looking for a six-to-eight-foot range. Raised the pistol.

Then I stopped. Turned to Clarence. “How far away am I?” I asked him.

“You about, I would say, fifteen feet, mahn. You want me to measure?”

“Yeah.”

Clarence paced it off. “Fifteen and a piece,” he confirmed.

Christ! Just like the damn boxing—I’ll have to be closer than my eyes tell me. I stepped forward, cutting the distance in half. “I want six feet. How’m I doing?”

“You about ten, brother.”

I took another two strides. Looked over at Clarence. He nodded. We both put our protectors back on. I popped the cylinder, turned the gun up, extracted the empty cartridges, put them in my pocket, and reloaded. Then I put the pistol in my belt, made myself relax. When I was calm inside, I took the gun out, aimed it slightly below the center of the white blob even as I was cranking off the first round. I pulled until it was empty.

We went over to look. Clarence took out a pocket flash, inspected the newspaper. It was shredded in the center. He studied the results, professionally objective, a physician seeking a diagnosis. “Looks like four of them within about, maybe, eight inches. One I cannot see, mahn. Perhaps it went … off—that can happen with the first round. The other, it is right here,” he said, pointing to the extreme upper left corner of the paper.

My wrist didn’t throb at all.

I did a half-dozen more full cylinders, then switched to my left hand. Nothing changed much. Maybe I was a touch more accurate with my right hand, but, at that distance, it wouldn’t matter much.

“What do you think?” I asked Clarence.

“I think,” he said, “that you could handle a shorter barrel. Colt makes a two-and-a-half-inch. And Jacques can Mag-na-port it for you.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Revolvers, they blow out a lot of gas, mahn. What Jacques does, he cuts these little slits right along the top of the barrel,” Clarence explained, illustrating with his fingernail. “Some of the gas comes out there, too. So what happens is, it helps bring your hand