by SL Huang
“Oh,” Pilar said. “Anything exciting?”
I frowned at her. “You really want to know the details?”
Her expression froze. “Um, probably not. I was just making small talk.”
“Well, stop it.”
♦
Truth be told, I didn’t have many details to share. The client was one I’d never worked for before, and all he had was a description of the couriers he wanted me to play pirate with and approximately where in Mexico they’d be coming from.
After poring over a map of currents, I’d been able to calculate their approximate necessary timing to reach Los Angeles under cover of darkness, but one thing my dear new client didn’t have was the date. Only that they were definitely coming, and it would be at night, and it was sometime in the near future.
He’d given me a reasonably large retainer that made me overlook the lack of information—but only just.
On the plus side, this job was keeping me employed. My brain wasn’t good to me when I didn’t have work going on. And lately my brain had been worse and work more scarce.
I tried not to think about it.
Even work had been depressing me lately, though. I was on a fourteen-month streak of a ridiculous challenge Arthur had goaded me into, and the whole thing was starting to feel frustrating and pointless. As the time lengthened, I’d gone from being impressed with myself and entertained by the game to…well, tired.
I was tired of making things harder for myself. Sometimes I just wanted to do things the easy way.
Pilar, of course, started asking if something was bothering me. Stupid small talk. Stupid perspicacious people.
“I’ve just been trying to live a little more by the book lately,” I said, grumpily and non-specifically. “I’m sick of it. Sick of always having to think about it.”
She nodded sagely. “Like when you’re on a diet, and you just want one day where you stuff your face with pizza and don’t count a single calorie.”
I gawked at her.
“Okay,” she amended. “Maybe not like that. What is it you’re sick of thinking about all the time?”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s this thing I’ve been doing for Arthur. I might stop.”
“Oh, the not-killing-people thing,” she said. “Yeah, I’ve heard you guys talking about that. You’re in murder rehab.” She giggled.
“What?”
“It’s from a TV show,” she explained. “I’m a sucker for British television, especially shows with very pretty boys in them.”
I grunted. I wasn’t in the mood for humor.
Pilar seemed to catch on, her expression straightening and sobering. “Yes. Not funny. Sorry. I think it’s great, Cas—really admirable. Good for you.”
Good for me.
I was waiting to fail. Waiting, and meanwhile wondering why I was still going through the motions.
♦
Somehow, despite my lack of pedagogical skill, Pilar’s marksmanship improved. After some trial and error, we’d found which grips and stances worked best for her, and she was getting to the point where she could draw and fall into them immediately and easily. I set up obstacles and moving targets for her, forcing her to pull her sidearm, assess threats, and then fire and reload and keep firing. (She’d started bringing her own earplugs. Along with eye protection, which I’d utterly forgotten about.)
I knew Pilar well enough to have an idea how tenacious she was—heck, she was the person who’d mastered Arthur’s filing system so well he couldn’t tell the difference between his work and hers, and that was saying something—but she still managed to surprise me with the intensity of her dedication. It was slightly annoying, given that I was the one getting dragged along with it.
I wasn’t about to admit that her enthusiasm was kind of…well, likeable. Every time she nailed a new course of fire she would literally squeal. “Did you see that!”
I usually gave her a sarcastic response. She always just laughed.
Eventually I decided that instead of random pieces of cardboard and two-by-fours, I should give Pilar a human-shaped target. I stuck a six-foot piece of plywood leaning against a large rock and drew an outline on it in a fat black permanent marker.
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t usually go in for the center-of-mass nonsense, because a head shot is way more likely to be deadly. But you’re nowhere near accurate enough for the probabilities to work out in your favor with going for the head all the time.” Working with Pilar, I’d started reluctantly realizing why people used firearms the way they did. Conventional wisdom being wise, who’d have thought. “Point at the biggest, most central chunk of bad guy you can see. Usually that’s going to be the torso.”
For the first time since I’d begun teaching her, Pilar hesitated. “What if—I mean, I want to be able to defend myself. But if I have to, I only want to shoot to wound, you know?”
“What?” I said, spinning from the plywood to face her. “Are you high?”
Her expression went slack and shocked. “What—what do you mean? Isn’t that what you’re doing for Arthur right now?”
“Because I can hit what I aim at. Shooting to wound is not a thing. Unless you’re me. Otherwise, no.”
“But why not?”
“Your error margins are just—they’re just way too fucking big,” I said. “And I don’t mean because you’re still a bad shooter, but because everyone’s error margins are too big. If you try to do something as ridiculous as shooting to wound, there’s an excellent chance you’re either going to miss completely or kill the person anyway.” And here was another bit of conventional firearms wisdom I was suddenly and viscerally seeing the point in. “Once you decide to fire, you go for your very best chance at stopping your target, or else it defeats the whole fucking point. And if you don’t want someone dead, you don’t shoot.”
Pilar’s eyebrows had drawn together. “But I don’t want anybody dead.”
“Even someone who’s about to kill you?”
“I…” She looked down doubtfully at the Colt in her hands, her mouth pulling miserably. “I want to have the skill to protect myself, I do—it’s why I asked you to teach me, you know? And this has been, like, it’s been so much fun, and I guess I wasn’t really…”
“You’re not making any sense,” I said.
She handed the gun back to me. “I’m sorry. I should probably—I should think about this more.”
♦
I didn’t particularly invest myself in whether Pilar wanted to continue our shooting lessons or not. If she did, fine, and it was probably a good idea for Arthur and Checker’s office manager to carry. If she didn’t—well, then I got out of a time-consuming obligation.
Win-win.
Some nights later, my mobile buzzed in my pocket while I was busy steering a speed boat through the pitch black, crossing the currents in a modified spiral that would take me in a pursuit curve, if there happened to be anything to intercept tonight. I pulled the phone out one-handed and wedged it in against my shoulder, impressed I had cell service this far out. “Hello?”
“Hi—Cas?” said Pilar’s voice, surprising me—she usually texted.
“What’s up?”
“I—uh,” she said.
“Form words, Pilar.”
“I totally understand if you say no, and I think it’s possible this might be a stupid idea, and I know I said I had to think about things and stuff, but, um, can I—can I borrow a gun? Just for a little while. There’s this situation with—”
“Sure,” I said.
“It’s my roommate. Her ex is stalking her and—”
“I said sure.”
“And she has a restraining order, but he keeps violating it and he’s been making threats for a while now and—”
“Okay.”
“—and we’ve already spent a lot of time couch-surfing with friends, both of us, but it’s been going on forever and the police say they don’t have enough evidence to do anything, but he posted t
hese new messages to her wall online last night that make it seem like—”
“Do we have a bad connection? I said okay about a million years ago. I’ll bring one by tomorrow.”
Pilar didn’t seem to know what to say. “Really? You don’t mind? I mean, I promise I’ll use it only as a last resort, ’cause if anything happened the police would want to know where I got it and everything, and that seems, um, bad, but—”
“There are plenty of legal unregistered guns in California,” I said. Besides, Checker could always fake the paperwork if we needed him to. “I’m not going to give you one that’s been used in a crime. Just say it got passed down from your family if anyone’s nosy.”
“Oh. Uh. Okay. I mean, I don’t want to use it, but this guy, he had someone post this picture on her page that—”
“Pilar.”
“Yeah?”
“I really don’t care.”
♦
Three days after dropping off an old but well-functioning revolver with Pilar, I climbed out of the water an hour on the wrong side of dawn with a tiny bag of very valuable cargo in my pocket. The Coast Guard was still chasing the wrong boat, and the erstwhile couriers of the tiny bag were clinging to some wreckage far out in the Pacific. I’d ridden the vectors of the ocean’s flow on a chunk of fiberglass hull, jumping from one current to the other like I was skipping between conveyor belts.
I was cold and drenched and my throat was sore from the lungfuls of seawater I’d gotten during the fight, but I was very, very satisfied.
My sopping clothes dragged at me as I hiked down the shore, the salt tightening my skin. Fortunately, I’d projected my travel into land almost perfectly during prep—the knapsack with my phone and a dry set of clothes was in a hollow only a few hundred meters down, and I had a car parked just up on top of the bluff.
I reached the knapsack and dug out my phone to call my client and report on a successful retrieval, only to find I had two missed calls from Pilar—one near midnight and another two hours later. I hit the button to dial her back immediately. “What’s going on?”
“Cas? Oh my God—Cas—he came, he came after us—”
“Your roommate’s ex?” The knapsack hit the rocks and I raced up the incline for the car, normal force and loss of friction flickering through my brain and guiding my wet boots, my waterlogged clothes slapping. “Are you okay?”
“Yes—yes, we’re both fine. I…he came and started pounding on the door, and he was shouting so loud, and such horrible—he was so obscene—and I kept yelling I had a gun, but I don’t think he heard me, and then he came around to our window and he smashed it in with a bat—I think he was drunk; it was terrifying—”
“What happened? Did he hurt you?”
“No, I—Ilsa ran into her room calling 911 and I came right into the living room across from the window and I pointed—I pointed the gun at him. I was shaking so hard I thought I would drop it, and I was screaming at him, and he was screaming at me. And he said something like, ‘are you really gonna shoot me,’ only with more cuss words, and I screamed yes at him, and I took a few steps forward and he ran away shouting. And I thought I was going to faint, or maybe accidentally shoot myself in the leg or something, but then the police came, and they took our report and then went and tracked him down. We just got word they arrested him.”
I’d slowed down as she reached the end of her tale and relief replaced my adrenaline; I loped the last few steps to my car and leaned against it. My clothes and hair were sticking to my skin, and a wind had picked up, cutting through the wet and freezing me to the core. “Good. That’s good,” I said to Pilar. “The cops give you any trouble?”
“No. I just told them what you said to say, that the gun was my grandfather’s from the war. They told me to stay where they could reach me but they didn’t even confiscate it or anything.”
“Because you didn’t do anything wrong. Any chance this guy will get out on bail?”
“I—I don’t think so? Apparently he went berserk on the arresting officers with the bat when they tried to take him in, and he’s not exactly an…employed sort of person. It doesn’t look like he’d be able to afford it, unless someone helps him out, and Ilsa says his parents are the sort of military tough love sort. She doesn’t think they’ll post his bond.”
“Good,” I said again.
Her voice went small. “Cas, I was so scared.”
“I’m told that’s normal when someone busts in your window with a baseball bat.”
“I always thought—I kept thinking if something happened it would be, like, because of one of Arthur’s cases, or maybe a random mugging. I never expected—Ilsa’s just, she’s normal. She just dated a really, really, really bad guy.”
“There are a lot of bad people in the world. At least you were able to defend yourself.”
“I—I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I didn’t—I didn’t like it.”
“You’re not supposed to like it,” I said. “You’re supposed to stay alive.”
She was silent.
“Hello?”
She cleared her throat. “When can I meet you to give the gun back?”
“I’ll swing by this evening. Around six or so. You should really get your own.”
She didn’t say anything.
♦
When I arrived at Pilar’s apartment building, she was sitting on the steps outside. One of the first-floor windows behind her was boarded up above the hedge, crisscrossed with blue masking tape.
Pilar had her head down with her face somehow both long and scrunched, like she wanted to cry.
“Shit, did he get out?” I said. She hadn’t called me; I’d had my phone on me all day—a very frustrating day, going back and forth with a client I suspected was about to try to stiff me, but that was neither here nor there. Pilar appeared to be in one piece, no blood or bruises or bullet holes…“Did he come back? What happened?”
“Huh? No, no. He’s still very much in jail.” She reached behind her and handed me the case with the revolver. “I just, I’m still—Cas, I almost shot someone. I could have killed him.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Can I ask—” She rolled her lips together. “Do you ever…think about it?”
The glib answer was that of course I thought about it, because I hadn’t killed anyone in four hundred and fifty-one days. But the truth was…
“No,” I said.
“Not ever?”
“Not usually.”
“How?” she pleaded. “There are times I don’t know if I’ve chosen the right pair of shoes in the morning. This is, it’s so much power—how can you always be sure you’ve decided the right way?”
“You can’t,” I said. “That’s why I don’t think about it.”
Pilar stared at me. “That is literally the worst thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
I shrugged.
She slumped and blew out a long breath. “I keep flashing back to that instant. I don’t know if I would’ve done it. I don’t know. And what about next time? What if he gets out, or what if…”
“I keep telling you, you should get your own sidearm,” I said.
“That isn’t—Cas, you know that isn’t what I’m talking about.”
I shifted my weight from foot to foot, wondering if I could go. People didn’t usually use me as a sounding board for personal problems—probably because I was crap at it. “Do you want me to shoot him for you?” I finally offered.
“What?” Pilar popped up straight. “No! No no no no, Cas, no. No, I do not want you to go shoot the guy the police already took to jail—oh my gosh, I can’t even tell if you were kidding. You were kidding, right? Wait, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know!” She threw her arms dramatically over her head, covering her ears.
My mouth quirked in something like a smile. “Well, if you change your mind, just text me.”
She dropped her arms and heaved a sigh. “You know what the craziest part of all this is?
I’ve honestly been enjoying learning it all. The part that isn’t at people, I mean—all the lessons we’ve been doing and stuff. I’ve really liked it. But if I’m going to carry like you and Arthur, I have to think about all the rest of it, and…I just, I don’t know.”
“You realize I’m not the best person to ask about all this, right?” I said.
“Yeah, I do,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Hey, um. Will you take me out again tomorrow? Just to…I want to see how I feel.”
“Sure,” I said. “Are we done now? I have to go threaten someone.”
Pilar made a face and shooed me away.
♦
My client didn’t allow anyone to go before him armed. I’d balked back when he’d first asked to meet, but he’d been offering a lot of money. A lot of money.
And now I needed to get in front of him again to make him pay it. This time, after I made a few creative threats regarding what I would do if they didn’t let me in to see him, his goons not only took my Colt but marched me in at gunpoint. That was not a good sign. They did miss the knife in my boot, though, so “unarmed” was a relative term.
I stood in the center of the room, surrounded by six goons and facing where my client was seated in an absurdly large chair. He was an extremely small man, so I wondered if he did that on purpose, to rub it in people’s faces that he didn’t care.
“I got you your gemstones,” I said, skipping the pleasantries. “And now you’re dodging me. We had an agreement.”
He twiddled his fingers.
“They’re nearby,” I said. “You show me the money and we can walk there.”
“Well, see,” he said. “You don’t have my gemstones, actually.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“I might have let your ego think you were the only one working for me, but you were not. I told you how savvy this family is. They used several couriers, by sea and land and air. Only one transferred the real stones, the rest traveling with fakes, so the ones you have are worth…perhaps fifty dollars.”
