Gun Church

woods somewheres. You say no and I’m gonna blow her tongue out the back of her neck. Then we’ll shoot anyway. Now step out there and wait for me.”

I didn’t have much choice.

I went to tell Jim to take care of Renee as soon as Stan let her go, but he seemed to have vanished. He was probably so embarrassed by his cowardice that he couldn’t face me. For him, I guessed, it was the Colonel all over again.

Then I stepped out towards the back of the chapel near where the beer cans had been lined up. I waited for Stan. It didn’t take long for him to stand opposite me, but the deputy stood between us.

“Look,” the deputy said, “make sure you want to go through with this before-”

“Get the fuck out of the way, asshole,” Stan barked.

But the deputy didn’t move, not immediately. “First, you both put your weapons down by your thighs. You’re going to do this, you’re going to do this fair. Now put your weapons at your thighs.”

We did as we were told. I focused all my attention on the area of Stan’s right shoulder. Sure, I wanted to kill the motherfucker and I wanted him to die slowly, but I didn’t want to go to prison or get treated to a lethal injection courtesy of the state. And while everyone here liked talking about the rules of the chapel and how they all knew the risks they were taking, I didn’t want to test the strength of their convictions.

“I’m going to step aside,” said the deputy. “When I say go, the rest is up to you. Agreed?”

Stan nodded his head yes as I did the same. The deputy sheriff walked backwards towards the others. He took careful, measured steps, never turning his head.

“Go!”

It all happened in a single excruciatingly slow breath. I went deaf as we raised our arms. Then the silence was broken by Renee screaming. My muzzle coughed out smoke. I was not conscious of what Stan’s Beretta did. My arm flew up so fiercely that I could feel the blowback in the hairs on my forearm. I suppose I might have squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for a bullet to cut through me. I breathed out. Something Stan Petrovic would never do again.

Even at thirty feet you could see he was dead. Everyone else was deadly still, the whispering of their rapid breaths like a hushed declaration of disbelief. But there is a vast ocean between stillness and death, and Stan-his shirt soaked with blood, his gun arm curled over the top of his head, his left leg twisted under him, his left arm and right leg splayed at ragdoll angles-was on death’s distant shore. Only when I felt the ache in my hand from squeezing the Python’s grip so tightly did I unfreeze and step forward.

Kneeling over him, I could see my shot had ripped through his chest where his heart once beat. I’d been focused on his right shoulder. I’d missed. Was it my rage or that I was scared? Was it that the ammo was different or that I had too much to drink or that Renee cried out just before I fired? I would never know. What hit me next was the awful cocktail of odors coming off his body: the metallic tang of spent gunpowder and blood, the sour must of sweat and scotch.

Then, as I breathed his death into my lungs, I saw it: that look of confusion and shock. That now too-familiar this-wasn’t-supposed- to-happen-to- me expression that had been Frank Vuchovich’s death mask. Though in life Stan Petrovic and Frank Vuchovich shared not a single similar feature, in death they were twins. I could make no more sense of it than either of them. They had to know there was a chance they were going to die, yet when death came they both seemed so utterly perplexed and disbelieving.

Someone, Renee, touched my shoulder and I crashed, inside and out. I swooned, nearly falling face-first onto Stan. I managed to veer to the side, my hands cushioning my fall. When I got back onto my knees, a wave of nausea slammed into me. I thought I might never stop throwing up. I was sick with terror, my panic spinning completely out of control. It was one thing to fantasize about killing a man. It was something else to do it. I was barely conscious of Renee holding on to me, her touch only faintly registering. I was soaked through, shaking with chills, still spiraling downward. I turned and looked up to see Jim standing over me, an open beer cooler in his hands. He’d dumped the ice and melt on me. He put the cooler down and lifted me up. He brushed back my wet hair and stared straight into my eyes.

“Forget this. We’ll handle it. No one will ever find him or know what happened to him. You were home with Renee tonight. All night. She’ll swear to it. Take these,” he said, closing my hand around his truck keys. “I’ve already got the keys to your car. Go home, Kip. Leave for New York in the morning and never think about this again. We know the rules here and we’ll stick to them. And I’ll never forget what you did for me. Go.”

“Okay,” I said robotically, reaching out for Renee.

Jim stepped between us again. “She stays and helps. It’s the rules.”

“But-”

“No, Kip, go ahead home,” she said. “It’s easier this way.”

“Are you okay? I mean, he-”

“I’ll be fine. Please, just go.”

I didn’t have anything left in me to argue with. I was spent. I walked through the slit between the mattresses. GOOD LUCK IN THE BIG APPLE was the last thing I saw as I left. I didn’t look back.

Thirty-Six

Auto-Mythology

One morning I woke up and Stan Petrovic wasn’t the first thing on my mind. The man I thought of as McGuinn had written about it in the notebook: the process of forgetting the worst of things. He’d written that it got easier and easier each time he killed. I had no desire to find out if that was so. I was sure I’d done all the killing I was ever going to do. What did I know?

The month that passed since I’d arrived in Brooklyn had been the weirdest month of my life and, given my life, that was saying something. From one moment to the next, my guts churned with terror and relief, paranoia and calm, rage and regret. I couldn’t see an NYPD cruiser on the street without sweating through my shirt. Each time the phone rang or my landlord knocked at my door, I jumped back down the rabbit hole. I relived my last night in Brixton over and over and over again, killing Stan Petrovic a hundred times, a thousand times. I’d second-guessed myself at every turn and there were days my complete inner monologue consisted of two words: What if. About the only emotion I hadn’t suffered was guilt.

Harder to get out of my head than the image of Stan’s bullet-fucked body was the image of Renee. I still seethed, recollecting the terror in her eyes, her helplessness, and the dark humiliation of her urine-soaked jeans. No, I was without guilt over killing Stan. If ever a man was born deserving of a violent death, it was him. It was kind of hard to argue that the universe wasn’t a better place without the belligerent prick. His death fueled my work. Whenever I found myself panicking, I would go back to reread or tweak some of Gun Church. Whenever I found myself missing Renee, there was one scene I would reread over and over again:

Everything was different tonight. Not because the world had changed, but because it hadn’t. She had. Tonight would mark the sixth time she would lure someone to their death.

Cosmo’s was different in name only from the other two bars in which Zoe had trolled for her prey: dark, smoke-filled, and crowded, with plank flooring rank with spilled beer, and the stink of toilet backwash. Good, she thought. Her aim was to attract attention without being at its center. She could not afford the spotlight and had so far been able to avoid it. The descriptions in the papers were always pretty vague. It was amazing what different color wigs and makeup could do.

Someone once wrote that God was his most cruel in his use of imperfection, in that he used it to such varied ends. So it was for Zoe-a dollar-store demigoddess with electric blue eyes, but unruly blond hair; pleasing curves, but a slightly thick waist; long legs, but one just slightly longer than the other. Yet her imperfections made her alluring in a way that unadorned beauty could not match. Unwanted attention and unwanted touches had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember. She didn’t like thinking about that, about her father putting