by SL Huang
Rio steps back and admires his work, drinking in his own artistry. He is suffused with contentment, as he always is when such a job pleases him—this night may have started in catastrophe, but it has ended satisfactorily. He will bask in that satisfaction now, and pray later. He would say cleanse himself, but there is no cleansing possible for him, not until he meets God’s justice beyond this world.
That will be a glorious day.
He lays out his knives and other implements on the table all in a row, a row of shining metal now mottled with a sticky red gleam. The cleaning has a ritual to it too, a sense of the ephemeral, as he erases the trail of his craftsmanship to leave only the masterpiece.
A noise makes him turn.
The puppy has snuck out from…wherever it was; he wasn’t paying attention. It approaches the living corpse on the floor in a crouched wriggle, a growl emanating from its tiny throat. Before Rio can wonder what its aim is, it leaps forward and snaps its jaws down on one of the Handler’s mangled calves and shakes it with the same vigor it applied to the towel.
Rio hadn’t thought his subject could speak anymore, but a high-pitched keening echoes threadily from somewhere, a sound of raw agony. The puppy lets go and hops back, then pounces on the ankle that still has Rio’s knife through it, its tiny claws digging in, and alternately gnaws and licks at a bit of exposed white bone. Its fuzzy face has become smeared with scarlet, blood speckling its fur and painting its paws.
It gives Rio an unexpected thrill to see. He watches, transfixed, as the puppy starts to tug at bits of flesh and jerk them free of their erstwhile owner.
Maybe he should keep this dog.
The implications of that thought slam down on him so hard and fast that he flinches, and he crouches and sweeps the puppy away from the dead man’s still-living flesh with a swiftness that makes the creature yelp in surprise. He shoves his knives to the side—some of them clatter to the floor—and puts the dog on the table again.
Away from the floor. Away from everything.
He breathes.
The puppy whines.
“Hindi,” he says aloud, a harsh whisper. Whether he says it to himself or to the dog or to the Lord, he’s not sure. The word repeats itself over and over again, in the polyglot mix of all the languages he thinks in and some he doesn’t. Hindi. Nie. Hayır. Nu. Hapana. Aniyo. La. Tidak. Nyet. Nein. Nunca. No.
Putting a knife in an innocent creature is not the only way to harm it. Remaking the animal in his own corrupted image would be a thousand times worse than dispatching it—a thousand more sins, each a thousand times more mortal.
He has to remove this pup from himself.
He shudders, deep and visceral, and the rhythm of another prayer starts up in the back of his mind. He’s not sure he hasn’t committed such an evil before, with someone he was bound by God to protect. He’ll never know where the line was—and is, the one between ensuring she had the ability to survive and twisting a susceptible mind toward his own corruption. He’s not sure he didn’t trample that line beyond question.
And it would have been so easy to do to her what he suddenly so desires to do to the dog. A brain and personality for his own molding. To carry on his legacy. She trusts him completely, falsely, and he knows why it was necessary—but the power of it, of holding someone’s soul in his hands, was a heady temptation. Is a heady temptation.
He tells himself he resists it, but how well, truly? How much does his influence taint her?
Ako’y nagsisisi ng buong puso at nagtitika na di na muling magkakasala sa tulong ng Iyong mahal na grasya. Amen. The prayer slides into another one, then another. Rio wipes off the dog’s fur and shuts it in another room while he cleans up.
♦
It takes Rio another nine days to complete his work here to his satisfaction. He keeps the puppy shut up the whole time, with adequate food and water and some papers to make its messes on. It whines at him when he comes in to change the papers or its water bowl, but he ignores it.
On the tenth day, Rio leaves behind what he’s wrought in Hanabe and carries the puppy in a small crate onto a cargo plane. He lands in the town of Tali Kha in the foothills of some of the tallest mountains in the world and acquires a rickety truck.
He arrives at his destination just before sundown. The rural village is a picturesque handful of buildings rooted in the emerald meadows blanketing the mountainside. It’s chilly here, a crispness in the thin air and the smell of snow on the wind. Ice blue peaks pierce the sun’s rays into stripes overhead.
There’s no sign now of the blood that soaked into this mountainside so many years past.
Rio hikes around the outskirts of the village, to the far end, avoiding the locals. Two children playing go still and stare at him with unabashed curiosity, their dark eyes wide in their brown faces. The village doesn’t get many strangers these days, he is sure.
The path up the mountainside behind the village is steeper than he remembers, or perhaps there’s been some erosion. But the garden at the top is just the same. Or at least, back to just the same, with no sign now it ever burned among panicked screams. Rio steps around the decorative stone wall and among the flowers and vegetables.
A woman is on her knees in the dirt, digging at the soil with a trowel. Her head comes up as Rio’s shadow crosses her, and her face goes slack with surprise for a moment before she smiles.
Rio wasn’t sure she’d still recognize him. Her face is older than he remembers, a light spiderweb of wrinkles netting her skin under her cap of gray hair, though most of those wrinkles show years of laughter instead of pain. Thanks be to God, runs the disinterested mantra in his head.
“Sister,” he greets her, the local dialect falling off his tongue as easily as if he’d been here for longer than one bloody conflict more than a decade past.
“Rio.” The sister wipes muddy hands on her clothes. She’s dressed like her fellow villagers, her head uncovered, but the only times he’d seen her wear a veil anyway were when she was meeting with Westerners—begging, pleading with aid organizations, petitioning foreign politicians for anyone to turn their eyes toward what was happening in this place.
She’d called on the righteous to help and gotten Rio.
“How are you?” she asks, stepping closer to him. She’s such a small woman. She comes near and stares up at his face, her eyes penetrating, and he knows what she is asking.
“The same,” he answers.
She still thinks he can be saved. It is, perhaps, a mark of how good a person she is, to believe something so impossible.
“I need you to take this,” Rio says, and holds out the crate with the puppy. Inside, the animal whines and thumps its tail.
She’s confused, he can tell, and probably reading an incorrectly flattering context into this interaction—she takes the crate from him with the start of a smile, and the image comes to him unbidden of what he could do to that smile—how he could make it scream forever—
He turns away and heads back toward the path.
“Rio,” the sister calls after him.
He stops. Turns.
She puts the crate with the puppy in it down gently in the garden and comes after him. She touches his arm. Not many people are brave enough to do that, or want to. He shifts an inch away so her hand no longer makes contact, and she lets it drop.
“He always has room for you in His love,” she tells him. So earnestly. “If you repent, you can be forgiven. It is still possible.”
He repents all the time.
Then he sins again.
“Take care of the dog,” he says, and leaves her standing in her garden on the mountain.
Epilogue
Rio drives back to Tali Kha. It’s long after dark when he arrives, so late the owners of the small local hotel snipe at him in irritation and balk at giving him a room. But he unfolds a few more bills onto the counter, and they say they suppose they can clean one up.
He uses the hotel phone to check the various places he maintain
s for communication, and finds no messages. He hasn’t planned where he’s going next, so when morning comes he goes to an Internet café and reads deep into the news, past the mainstream articles and into the bits and pieces most consider too exhausting to be newsworthy. Brutality exists everywhere, and if repeated often enough becomes unsensational.
He’s moving from one news site to another when he catches a brief mention of recent upheaval in Los Angeles.
He reads the article. Reads another one.
Before he turns to his next crusade, he has a duty. There’s no evidence she was involved, but…he has an intuition born of experience.
He considers calling, but perhaps it’s past time to assess in person.
♦
She hasn’t hidden herself from him. He wonders if that would ever occur to her. Whether it should disturb him that it might not.
He leans against the doorframe and watches her approach. Her arm is in a cast and sling, but a broken arm catalogues in Rio’s mind as a minor injury, and other than that she appears to be fine.
Better, even. More relaxed. Happier.
He supposes that’s a good thing.
He’s right to stay out of her life. Just as he was right to give away the dog.
Guide my choices, Lord. If he is too weak to stop himself, at least when he takes lives he must also save them. He knows this. Guide my hand.
She looks up. She sees him and half-smiles. That’s wrong, but there’s nothing he can do about it.
Except leave again, soon.
He’s feeling the itch again anyway.
THE END
An Examination of Collegial Dynamics as Expressed Through Marksmanship
or
LADIES’ DAY OUT
A Russell’s Attic Interstitial
“Hey, Cas? Can I ask a favor?”
I looked up from the file I was paging through. Pilar and I were alone in Arthur’s private investigations office—I was sprawled in a chair checking up on some of the fallout from the Arkacite case, and she, as Arthur and Checker’s newly-minted office manager, was working on some sort of…filing stuff.
Or whatever office managers did.
But now Pilar had a glint in her eye that made me feel very, very cautious. Not to mention that I wasn’t really the “favor” type.
“What is it?” I said.
She bounced in her desk chair and leaned forward on her elbows, her lips twitching upward. “Will you teach me to shoot?”
“Shoot a gun?”
She grinned. “I want to learn.”
I wasn’t sure why the request surprised me. After all, Pilar might look cute and normal, but we’d met her when she’d volunteered to commit corporate espionage and then go toe-to-toe with a Mob boss.
Still, it didn’t sound like my idea of fun. “You point it and you fire it,” I said.
“Sure, if you’re a super-powered mathy genius like someone out of the movies!” She leaned on the words meaningfully. “I’m pretty sure if I tried to take that sort of advice I’d end up, like, killing someone.”
“That’s generally the idea.”
“Cas!”
“I have no idea how to teach,” I said. “Why can’t you ask Arthur?”
“I did.” She dropped her eyes and played with the corners of some papers on her desk. “And he said he would, only he keeps putting it off, and I feel bad about bugging him, because, well, you know.”
“Know what?”
“Well, he’s not real fond of the idea of teaching people to use guns.”
“He isn’t? Why not?” Arthur carried, too. Legally, unlike me. And he liked being all helpful.
Pilar stared at me. “Because they’re violent. Arthur doesn’t really like guns, you know.”
“That’s stupid. They’re value-neutral.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
I sighed. “I don’t do that sort of thing. Have Checker teach you or something.”
She screwed up her face, recoiling. “Checker doesn’t know how to shoot. He hates guns.”
“What? He does?”
“How did you not know that?”
“I don’t—” I didn’t have an answer. How hadn’t I known that? “Well, he’d better learn. It’s not safe for him not to know.”
“Well, uh, talk to him about it, okay? But will you teach me? Please?” Her mouth twitched toward a smile again. “You’d be doing Arthur a favor.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“But you would be doing him a favor. And me!” She cradled her chin in her hands and widened her expression into what I strongly suspected were supposed to be puppy-dog eyes. “I really want to learn. Please? For Arthur?”
Dammit, I knew when someone was manipulating me successfully. “Fine. Let’s go.”
Her whole face lit up. “Right now?”
“Yes, right now.”
“Yay! Okay!” She hopped up, grabbing for her sweater. “Where’s the range at?”
I barked a laugh. “Range? Ha!”
♦
I took Pilar out into some desert foothills, to the sort of place I used for meets that were too shady for dive bars and where no one would hear a gunshot. Or, if they heard it, they wouldn’t report it. It was the sort of place I would go to practice shooting, if I practiced.
We stopped by a storage unit on the way to pick up some more weapons and a trunk full of ammo. Pilar’s eyes popped when she saw what I was packing in, though I couldn’t tell if she was excited or nervous—or which should worry me more.
“Are you really going to start me off with that?” she asked breathlessly.
I thunked the Barrett in on top of the ammo. It was almost as long as I was. “Do you want to learn to shoot or not?”
She just grinned again and stopped asking questions.
When we arrived, I drew my Colt and pointed at the mountainside. “First lesson: point at what you want dead and pull the trigger. Aim at that bush.”
Pilar wiped her hands on her thighs and then reached out to take the gun. Her fingers curled around it firmly and instinctively—and with a bang and a gout of flame, it went off in her hands before she could raise it. She yelped and dropped it.
I swooped and caught it before one-half-g-t-squared equaled rocky ground and fucked up my weapon. “Watch it!”
“Sorry! Sorry!”
“This is a thousand-dollar gun,” I said. “You break it, you bought it.”
“I’m sorry!” she cried. “I didn’t expect it to be so—I mean, that was really, really, really loud!”
Oh, shit. Right. Normal people usually wore ear protection for this sort of thing. I went to the car and found a napkin in the front seat. After glancing critically at Pilar’s ears, I tore off two little pieces, spat on them, and wadded them in my fingers. “Here you go.”
She wrinkled her nose but took the improvised earplugs and stuffed them in.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s lesson number two. Don’t pull the trigger before you’re pointing at the thing you want dead. Do it again.”
She took the weapon too gingerly this time, and I had to shove her fingers and hands around so she’d be pressing on the grip safety and giving the recoil enough brace. When she fired, the shot went haywire, the lines of her stance and grip and aim all at cockeyed angles like the mathematics was a stepped-on hedgehog.
Well. I say the shot went haywire. It really went exactly where her front and rear sight pointed.
“Did I get it?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “In fact, that was terrible.”
Her face fell. “Oh.”
“It’s not your fault. I’m a terrible teacher,” I said. “Okay, you see these things? These are your sights. You need to look at them. Two points define a line. Whatever line you draw through your front and rear sight, that vector is the trajectory of your bullet.”
“So I should line them up, is what you’re saying.”
“They’re always in a line. You need to line th
em up with what you want to hit.”
“You know, sometimes I can’t tell if you do that on purpose,” Pilar said, raising the Colt again.
“Do what?” I said.
♦
I really was an awful teacher, but one thing that was blazingly clear to me with each shot was exactly what Pilar was doing wrong, which I supposed gave us an edge. We didn’t get to even the most basic rifles that day—or the Barrett—but by the time the sky started dimming into twilight Pilar was at least hitting within twenty centimeters of where she was trying to with the pistol.
She transferred my Colt to her left hand for a moment, shaking out her right. “It’s tiring, isn’t it?”
“Only when you’re weak,” I said. “Those muscles will build up.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Thanks.”
“You should have your own weapon,” I said, “and carry it. Some of the cases we’ve gotten involved with, it’s a good idea.” A gun wouldn’t help if Pithica came knocking again, but it was the only thing that would give Pilar a chance against armed robots or Mob hitmen.
“You mean some of your cases,” Pilar corrected. “Arthur’s cases are usually, um. Not that. But point taken,” she added hastily. “What are the laws and stuff about owning one? Do I have to, like, register or something?”
“Define ‘have to.’”
“Uh, on second thought, never mind. I’ll ask the Internet.”
I stepped back over to the car. “Here, try some of the other handguns before it gets dark. You need to know how to handle all of them. And then guess what?”
“What?” she asked raptly.
“You’re going to clean them for me.”
♦
I didn’t know how it became a thing, but Pilar started bugging me to take her out shooting a few times a week. If I didn’t drop by Arthur’s office, she’d text me.
“I don’t usually work for free,” I groused the third time.
“Oh!” Her eyes flew wide. “Shoot. I’m sorry. Do you want me to pay you?”
“You couldn’t afford me,” I said. “Besides, I’ve got an ongoing gig right now. I’m just killing time during the day.” Come nights, I was at the docks watching for a certain very specific shipment. A lot of other people were watching for it, too, including the rightful owners and the U.S. Coast Guard, but I had no doubt I’d beat them all to it.
