by James Grady
They should be: after all the after’s, Security Protocols stashed handguns all over this new house, weapons easy to use after a quick grab, and since—no denying it—Condor was not as young as he used to be, and since Merle’s firearms training after they’d survived Justin’s attack consisted of two range sessions he’d barely coaxed her through, logic dictated that the weapons stashed for quick grabs should be as easy to use as possible.
Hence the revolver in a holster clipped under the dining room table.
No safety. No complications of cock the hammer first, then fire—though you could, and a cocked hammer made it easier to lock the gun bore on its target. The revolver Merle held was the model issued to millions of American cops before the late twentieth-century dawn of everybody’s armed with rapid fire, high capacity killing machines.
Six chambers. Six bullets. One would be enough. Especially at close range.
She grinned: “Surprise!”
A naked old man and a naked old woman. Sagging skin with brown age spots. Muscles flat. Bones weary. Smelling of. Sitting at the dining room table in a house on Shelby Road, night after Christmas 2016. Staring into each other’s eyes over the barrel of a revolver.
In her hands.
“My turn,” she said again.
Condor’s aged heart slammed against his ribs, but he kept his voice calm.
Said: “Your turn for what?”
“To be the game master—mistress, actually. After all, life is a game, yes?”
“No. Life is what we’ve got and what we make it.”
“Ah.” The revolver in Merle’s hand waved in a gesture to take in all of that night after Christmas. “Which of those is what’s going on here?”
“You tell me. You’ve got the gun.”
She waggled the revolver in her hand: “Oh, yes I do.”
“But it’s not enough.”
“Still, like you said,” smiled Merle with her blood red lips, “it’s what I’ve got.”
She leaned forward over the white table, the gun wandering this way and that but always less than a blink from dead zero on Condor. “Don’t you want to know why?”
“Right now, I’d rather know what. I can guess a lot of your ghosts of why.”
“Don’t you wonder about the ghosts to come?”
He sat there. Waiting.
The woman initialed M.M. said: “All I wanted was a shot to be free to be me.”
She stared at the revolver. “But—looks like this is the gun I got.
“You gave it to me,” she said. “You and your V and all this.”
“And all that’s out there, too,” said Condor, nodding to the windows. “Don’t forget that.”
“But it was your gravity, your momentum that brought me here.”
“I can’t apologize any more than the thousand times I already have.”
“Who the fuck believes your apologies? You won. You got what you wanted.” She waved the gun toward the stairs leading up to where they’d just been. “Remember?”
“Your choice, too.”
“Really. Choosing from what the guns give you isn’t being free, it’s guessing how you can stand to be fucked.”
“What are you going to do,” he said, knew she rightly heard it as both question and creed.
“Fuck it,” she said.
Stabbed the revolver at him, that black steel wobbling in her fist.
Screamed: “FUCK IT!”
Even A.I. Bonnie knew better than to react.
Burning red rage flowed from Merle’s face. She settled back in her dining room chair.
The revolver calmed. Heavy in her hand, she rested the butt on the table. Kept the barrel pointed at him. Kept her finger on the trigger.
“Was this last time,” she said, “what made me get it to get us here was the Russians.”
She waved the revolver: “Don’t you get it yet?”
Her right finger came off the trigger but stayed in the gun’s steel trigger loop.
Her left hand swooped her palm along the revolver’s cylinder of bullets wheel.
Whirring clicking of bullets spun through the firing line.
“Saw that in a movie,” said Merle.
The gun barrel pointed at him as her words fired the what of their here and now:
“Russian Roulette. Six chambers of fun. Six bullets in the gun. What a game.”
Merle aimed the gun at Condor, said: “Pow!”
Pressed the gun barrel to her own skull: “Or Pow!”
“One shot,” she said, “don’t you always say we only get one shot at this life?”
“This isn’t how Russian Roulette works,” said Condor. “There’s supposed to be only one bullet in the six chambers. You take turns spinning. You get a click—empty chamber, you live. You pass the revolver, maybe that person gets to spin the cylinder to give them back the odds of one-in-six, maybe they don’t. And if they don’t, if they get a click, you don’t get to spin either when it’s your turn to pull the trigger. That’s Russian Roulette.”
“So call this is American Roulette,” said Merle. “All our chambers are loaded.
“Or are they? Are some chambers filled with those dummy rounds you made me use to practice loading? Those dummy rounds, in the snapped shut cylinder and from where you’re sitting, they’d look totally real.”
She pointed the gun with its full chambers cylinder at Condor: “Is what you see real? Or are you just stoned?”
She laughed at him, laughed and laughed and laughed. At him. At them. At this.
Condor waited until her laughter had to breathe.
Said: “If you’ve got six full chambers of real, there’s a lot of ways this could go bang.”
Raised his right hand in the shape of a pistol with his thumb cocked straight up.
Pointed his barrel forefinger at the woman who pointed a revolver at him.
Condor fired his finger gun: “Bang!”
Pointed his finger gun at his own skull: “Bang!”
Aimed back at Merle “Bang!” double-tapped the finger gun back to his skull “Bang!”
Held his finger gun out trembling and shaking so it would miss target her: “Bang!”
Pointed his finger gun to the ceiling and the night’s starlit sky beyond: “Bang!”
“Plus,” said Condor, “not every shot is a killer.”
“Aren’t you going to say we should just walk away like this never happened?”
“We can walk away, but not into that lie. That would be fake news.”
“What’s real?”
“Nobody knows the whole of what’s real, we just know the hole we’re in.
“Like the chamber of a gun.” Merle lifted her revolver-heavy hand: “American Roulette. We all gotta play. The only thing you don’t know is where the bullet is going to go.”
The room breathed deep.
Condor said: “Take your shot.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A fact’s a fact and that is that, but in 2016, that became more important than ever, so to underscore reality, plus to honor, recognize and credit sources and inspirations for this of course fictional story, thanks to: Henry Allen, Anne Applebaum, Matt Apuzzo, Devlin Barrett, Charles Blow, The Beatles, Kate Campagna, Lou Campbell, Michael Carlisle, Richard Condon, David Corn, Elvis Costello, Philip K. Dick, Jackson Diehl, John Dos Passos, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Bob Dylan, Nicholas Fandos, Henry J. Farrell, Adam Goldman, Amy Goldman, Bonnie Goldstein, Joseph Goldstein, Mathew Goldstein, Harry Gossett, Nathan Grady, Tom Gray, The Guardian, Ben Guarino, Jeanne Guyon, Maggie Haberman, Harpers, Rob Hart, Michael V. Hayden, Daniel Hoffman, Sari Horwitz, Stephen Hunter, Aldos Huxley, Michael Isikoff, Andrew Kramer, Walter Kirn, Joe Lansdale, David Lynch, Kristen Mallette, Ron Mardigian, Michael McFaul, Louise Mensch, Mother Jones, Newsweek, The New Yorker, T
he New York Times, Roy Orbison, George Orwell, Evan Osnos, Kathleen Parker, Otto Penzler, Rick Perlstein, John “Jack” Platt, Politico, Quarry House Tavern owners and managers and staff, David Remnick, Johnny Rivers, Tony Romm, Matthew Rosenberg, Vladimir Sakharov, Michael S. Schmidt, Michael Schwirtz, Scott Shane, David Hale Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Stein, John Stewart, The Rolling Stones, Richard Thompson, Anton Troianovski, Karen Tumulty, Kenneth P. Vogel, The Washington Post, Tim Weiner, Joshua Yaffa, Yahoo! News, The Yardbirds, Warren Zevon.
About the Author
James Grady (b. 1949) is the author of screenplays, articles, and over a dozen critically acclaimed thrillers. Born in Shelby, Montana, Grady worked a variety of odd jobs, from hay bucker to gravedigger, before graduating from the University of Montana with a degree in journalism. In 1973, after years of acquiring rejection slips for short stories and poems, Grady sold his first novel: Six Days of the Condor, a sensational bestseller that was eventually adapted into a film starring Robert Redford.
After moving to Washington, DC, Grady worked for a syndicated columnist, investigating everything from espionage to drug trafficking. He quit after four years to focus on his own writing, and has spent the last three decades composing thrillers and screenplays. His body of work has won him France’s Grand Prix du Roman Noir, Italy’s Raymond Chandler Award, and Japan’s Baka-Misu literary prize. Grady’s most recent novel is Last Days of the Condor (2015). He and his wife live in a suburb of Washington, DC.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by James Grady
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5649-6
Published in 2019 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
JAMES GRADY
FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.
Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.
MysteriousPress.com. offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
FOLLOW US:
@emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom
MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
The Mysterious Bookshop, founded in 1979, is located in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. It is the oldest and largest mystery-specialty bookstore in America.
The shop stocks the finest selection of new mystery hardcovers, paperbacks, and periodicals. It also features a superb collection of signed modern first editions, rare and collectable works, and Sherlock Holmes titles. The bookshop issues a free monthly newsletter highlighting its book clubs, new releases, events, and recently acquired books.
58 Warren Street
[email protected]
(212) 587-1011
Monday through Saturday
11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
FIND OUT MORE AT:
www.mysteriousbookshop.com
FOLLOW US:
@TheMysterious and Facebook.com/MysteriousBookshop
SUBSCRIBE:
The Mysterious Newsletter
Find a full list of our authors and
titles at www.openroadmedia.com
FOLLOW US
@OpenRoadMedia
