His car was a late model Subaru Outback in a pretty shade of green. It looked so solid and reliable and practical, I nearly commented, then opted to keep my yap shut. It didn’t matter anyway.
I nervously passed him a sealed envelope. Inside it, I’d carefully placed a dozen one-hundred-dollar bills.
He ripped open the envelope and nodded when he’d finished counting.
“Excellent,” he said, then politely, “Thanks,” while he pulled a bundle out of the back of the Outback.
I peeked inside and saw a gun, a suppressor, and a couple of boxes of ammunition.
“It’s a Bersa Thunder,” he said, clearly reading my hesitation for confusion. “It’s a good gun for a woman.”
I thanked him for his thoughtfulness, then bid him goodbye.
Later, when I felt the heft of it, felt its compact weight in my hand, I could tell he was right. It was a good gun for a woman. I knew I’d be able to kill a man with that.
Once I got it, I didn’t even really know what to do. It made me think maybe I should have somehow gotten my hands on a new gun. Presumably new-out-of-the-box, it would have come with instructions. But this wasn’t that—it had scratches, and I was pretty sure the serial number had been filed off.
I brought the Bersa home and sat and looked at it for a while. It was one thing to think about using a gun. That’s what I discovered. Quite another to actually own one.
After a while, when looking at the gun and poking at it produced no sudden rush of knowledge, I had the idea to see if anyone had made a video about how to operate my purchase. It turned out, there were lots of them online. The videos all made loading and operating the Bersa look pretty simple, plus I learned from watching that it was “high quality and reliable,” which was something of a relief since I didn’t really know what I was doing.
One video showed someone shooting the gun again and again. An intense-looking bearded guy in a watch cap kept shooting and shooting, though the video never showed what he was aiming at or if he was hitting it. After watching the video a couple of times, I had a strong sense that the tidy-looking little gun was very powerful. The guy in the video looked strong and was quite a bit larger than me, but every time he fired the Bersa, I could see the gun jump and buck in his hands. Enough of a jump that I figured you’d have to hold on very tightly with both hands and maybe even expect some bruising after the gun was fired.
It took me a while to figure out where to test the gun. Where would be private enough? Quiet enough? Where could I feasibly practice shooting this gun without anyone seeing me? Somehow this last part—not being seen—seemed very important.
I spent a few days pondering this, meanwhile getting used to some of the mechanics of the beast. I taught myself how to load the magazine. I learned how to screw on the silencer, which the video had taught me was actually called a suppressor. I learned, from watching, that I’d need to hold the gun very tightly when I shot, so it didn’t jump right out of my hands. What I hadn’t learned was where I would get the courage to actually do the deed, but, as I had so many times of late, I put my head down. I moved forward and on.
Finally, right down to the wire and with no more time to waste, I forced myself out the door. I’d done some research. About forty minutes out of town, there was an old garbage dump that had been shut down twenty years earlier when the city added a fancy waste transfer station at one edge of the multiacre property. Now garbage got shipped to who-knows-where instead of getting piled up as it had in the old days.
At the other end of the large property from the waste transfer station, trees had begun to grow up where open pit garbage had once stood. The mountains of landfill had been covered over with dirt and were now home to trees and grasses. The driveway was blocked off by a severe-looking gate, but there was no fence. I figured the gate was to keep teenagers out: no parking or racing. And everyone knows teenagers don’t like to walk.
I’m not a teenager, so I made a hike of it, parking a mile or so away. Once I got to the property, I quickly left behind any signs of civilization beyond the occasional fast-food wrapper and—encouragingly—shotgun shell casings. Clearly, I’d chosen the right place.
Out of sight of the traffic-less road, I sat down on a rock and screwed the suppressor into position. Now that I’d done it a few times, it was pretty easy. I loaded the gun. For the first shot I decided not to worry too much about hitting anything. The shot itself, that was the thing. Getting a round to leave the gun. Seeing how that would feel; figuring at the same time that my management of it would determine if I could go through with this at all.
It took both more and less than expected to pull the trigger. At first I touched it gently, gingerly and nothing happened. Thinking I’d squeeze it harder, the gun jumped and bucked on my way to shooting it, exploding in my hand milliseconds before I thought it would. I managed to hang onto the gun, but I had a vision of it hitting a rock, spinning around, then sitting in the dirt, watching me. Judging me. I packed that vision away and carried on.
Subsequent attempts went more smoothly. Ready for the jump and buck, I held the gun in a firm grip, then squeezed smoothly. By the sixth shot, I was ready to try a target. I sited a tree perhaps twenty feet away.
