Taking Aim

by Michael Cart

  The ratty-haired guy delivered the computer to the van and headed back up the stairs.

  “Keep your friggin’ shirt on,” he yelled as he entered the house.

  Something too big to carry. Something requiring two pairs of hands. And there were only two of them. Even as the door clicked shut, Morley was streaking to the driver’s-side door. Unlocked? Of course. And the keys? In the ignition, ready for a quick getaway.

  Just way quicker than they expected.

  Then just as he was about to slide open the door, there was a loud crash from inside, stopping him cold. He dropped to one knee, his cheek pressed hard against the dirty cold metal of the van. Swearing followed—one of them yelling at the other with the expected volley of curses.

  Now!

  Morley clambered into the vehicle, tossed his ball cap on the seat, and turned the ignition key. It might have looked like a piece of trash but the engine turned over on the first try and leapt ahead when he tromped on the gas. He went careening down the driveway, things crashing around behind him. He barely stopped to check for traffic on River Valley Road, but it was lightly used and empty now. He slammed on the brakes and the wildly swinging back doors crashed shut. Yes! Then he was off again down the hill and up the next, flipping on the lights to cut through the murk and shadows of dusk, until, a quarter mile on, he swung into the Logans’ driveway, which was even longer than his own, so that a veil of trees closed behind the stolen van.

  Mr. Logan phoned 911 while Mrs. Logan fussed over Morley’s bruised face. She thought the thieves had roughed him up. He let her. He tapped his foot anxiously, wanting to get back there—hell, he wanted to run somebody over!

  “Let me call your mom,” said Mrs. Logan.

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “I gotta go.”

  “Not a good idea, son,” said Mr. Logan, but the blood was running in Morley and he sloughed off his neighbor’s hand.

  “The cops should be there by now,” he said.

  “Even so—”

  “It’s okay. I’ll be careful.”

  “Leave it to the authorities,” Mrs. Logan called after him.

  No, he thought. Nothing gets done when you leave it to the authorities.

  He pulled to a stop on the road outside his own driveway but left the engine running. The doors of the vehicle were all locked; he’d thought of that. He revved the engine, pounded on the steering wheel. Where the hell were they? Then a police cruiser came screaming around the curve up ahead, no siren, no flashing red light—nothing to alert the bad guys. The cruiser swung into the driveway, and Morley followed slowly. The passenger cop stepped out, turned to watch him with his head cocked to one side and his hand on the butt of his holstered gun. Morley stepped out of the van carefully, his hands held high.

  “I’m the one who called,” he said. “This is my place.”

  Then he noticed there was someone in the back of the cruiser. He recovered his glasses from his pocket and held them in place. It was Ratty-Hair.

  “That’s one of them,” he said.

  The passenger cop nodded, bent to look into the backseat. Ratty slapped the flat of his hand against the window.

  “Stupid fuck,” said the cop. “He was running down the road, sees us, and takes off into the swamp.” He wrinkled his nose. “He’s gonna pay for the cleanup job, I’ll tell you.”

  The driver had been on the radio. Now he stepped out of the cruiser.

  “You can put your hands down, kid,” said the passenger cop, smiling.

  Right. Morley rubbed his hands on his thighs, took a deep breath. Ratty smacked the glass again, pointed a finger at him, cocked his thumb, and fired.

  They were going to run Ratty in but they wanted the van locked up.

  “What about our stuff?”

  “Stolen property,” said Driver Cop. When they divvied up smiles back at headquarters, Passenger Cop must have taken them all. “It’s not just your stuff, kid.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Morley, hoping the sarcasm in his voice would make his point clear.

  “Somebody’s got to inventory the whole lot,” said Driver Cop, making his own point very clear. Don’t give us any shit, kid.

  “Hey,” said Good Cop. “We’re doing it by the books, kiddo.”

  “Right,” said Morley, but it wasn’t right. It was just one more not-right thing in a not-right day—a not-right day with one shining moment of bravado to make it bearable. The bravado was still humming inside him.

  He’d seen this film once where they were running the bulls, some place in Spain—guys racing down the streets with all these longhorns stampeding behind them. That’s what he felt like inside. He raked his hands through his hair.

  “My hat,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s on the seat.”

  Driver Cop frowned and gestured toward the van with vaguely concealed annoyance. Right about then, Ratty started pounding on the window of the cruiser and both cops turned to attend to him. Morley opened the driver’s door. As he reached across for his baseball cap, a voice said, “Pssst!”

  He froze. Had there been someone in the van the whole time? His eyes picked out nothing in the shadows—nothing but stolen property.

  “Pssst!”

  It came again, like air leaking from the seat. He looked down and saw a dark glint, a shining, down the crack of the back of the seat. He dug it out. A gun, its handle covered in lint. A snubby-nosed, little black gun. Before he even knew what he was doing, he’d shoved it in his pocket.

  He closed the van door. “Thanks,” he said, holding up his hat.

  “There’ll be someone here in a bit,” said Good Cop. “They’ll write down what’s taken from the vehicle. No biggie.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “There’s a lot of merchandise in there,” said Driver Cop, aiming his flashlight through the dirty back windows. “We want to make sure it all gets back to its rightful owner.” His voice was testy, distrustful, stressing the word rightful as if Morley was a lot closer to right empty.

  What about quick thinking, kid?

  What about thanks for your help?

  What about society owes you a debt of gratitude, young man?

  Leave it to the authorities.

  “Whatever,” he said.

  Driver Cop looked at him suspiciously in the failing light. “Where’d you get the shiner?”

  Morley’s hand hovered near his eye, not wanting to touch it. He shrugged.

  “Dju have a run-in with these creeps?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You sure?”

  He had a look in his eye as if Morley had made the whole thing up. “Happened at school,” he said. “Murderball.”

  Driver Cop didn’t nod, wasn’t buying it.

  “Yeah, well, when you’re ready to talk, let us know.”

  Morley resisted the urge to ask him what had crawled up his ass and died.

  “Take it easy, son,” said Passenger Cop. “You did good.”

  You did good.

  Morley sat in his bedroom staring at the gun, his trophy. It was a Raven Arms MP25, semiautomatic. He’d already looked it up on Google: a junk gun, a “Saturday night special,” compact and easily concealed. The wooden handle was warmed from holding it. The magazine was empty. No problem. He didn’t need bullets, but he did need the gun.

  “Hey, Bent-dick.”

  Morley stopped. Pushed his glasses up his nose. He had given up trying to figure out why Bish Fox hated him.

  “You got that money we was talking about?”

  Fox sidled in front of him. The busy lunchtime hallway parted like a river around them: Bish, the immovable rock; Morley, the broken stick.

  “Yeah,” said Morley.

  “Good, ’cause I’m sure you’re dying to get your cell back.” He laughed and poked Morley in the sternum. “Downloaded some great porn. I’ll leave it on, no extra charge.”

  “No, you didn’t,” said Morley. He couldn’t resist. “There’s no
t enough memory.”

  “Yeah, but I bet you wish I did.”

  Morley tried to move on, but Bish stopped him with a hand roughly the size of Morley’s chest. “Where you going?”

  “I’m not giving you your money here. It’ll look like a . . . like a drug transaction.”

  “A drug transaction? Did you really say that? ‘A drug trans-action.’”

  “Not here, okay?”

  “Nice try, asshole,” said Bish, pressing his hand more firmly.

  Time to set the hook.

  “Look, I’ll meet you,” said Morley. “Out by the football field, the equipment locker. Half an hour.”

  Bishop’s hand contracted into a fist, containing in it a hank of Morley’s shirt. He knocked on Morley’s chest, three times. “Hello,” he said. Then he bent down to get right in Morley’s bruised face. “You know what happens if you’re not there, right?”

  “Oh, I . . . yeah. I guess so,” said Morley, exhausted by the encounter, rolling his eyes.

  “What’s that?” said Bish. “You giving me lip?”

  Morley sighed, then he grabbed Bishop’s fist and threw it off him. “I’ll be there!” he snapped, and pushed past the bully. Almost. The fist he’d sloughed off grabbed him by the back of his shirt and yanked him so hard the top button popped off.

  “Do not ever do that again,” whispered Bish in his ear. He held on to Morley’s shirt, twisting it in his fist, and Morley cringed, waited, like a dog that had soiled the carpet and was about to get his nose rubbed in it. Then Bish let him go. “Half an hour,” he said.

  Morley didn’t look back. Didn’t nod. He would be there, all right.

  He didn’t know the boy who caught him up a moment later. That is, he’d seen him lurking about but he didn’t know his name. One of those nobodies you compare yourself to when you’re feeling really, really bad and have to tell yourself that at least you’re not that low in the high school caste system. A lurker. A hundred pounds of exposed nerve and bad skin.

  “Don’t you wish you could kill him?” said the lurker. Morley scowled, but it didn’t scare the boy off. “Bishop Fox,” said the kid, as if maybe Morley had forgotten the humiliation he’d just been through. “I’m Zane,” said lurker-boy, holding out his hand. “Zane Prosser.”

  Morley didn’t take the hand. His mind was elsewhere—out there at the equipment shed already, waiting. Besides, he didn’t want to form an alliance with this weird little dude. Didn’t want to touch his hand in case whatever he had was catching.

  “I’d kill him if I could,” said Zane.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said Morley.

  “I would, too. Him and the others.”

  Morley stared at the boy. “You’d piss your pants before you got within six feet of him,” he said. He hoped hostility would drive the kid off, but Zane only nodded solemnly, as if what he had said was nothing short of true.

  “You’re right. Once, after he did that to me—what he did to you, back there, shaking me down—I brought a knife to school.”

  Morley’s smile was condescending. “Really?”

  “Yeah, I know,” said the kid. “You don’t believe me. But it’s true, I did. I thought of how great it was going to be to shove that knife into him, a hundred different ways.”

  “That’s a lot of ways,” said Morley, just for something to say, but he regretted it immediately. It was like an invitation.

  “My dad’s a hunter, see, so this was one honking big blade. A Ka-Bar. Ever heard of them? It’s a combat knife, the ones used by the marines. No kidding. Seven-inch blade, black, very cool. Sharp, too.”

  “Yeah, and you carried it where? In your lunch pail?”

  “Strapped to my leg,” said Zane. “I swear. I wanted to use it so bad. Every day I’d think about it. What I’d say to him as I twisted it and twisted it. How he’d scream and beg me to stop.”

  Morley frowned. The kid looked about twelve, but his eyes looked as if they’d been around a lot longer than the rest of his skinny body.

  “You really hate him.”

  “Damn right,” he said. “All of them.”

  There was that plural again. “All of them?”

  “You know?” said Zane, his eyes dark and way too serious.

  Morley didn’t—or he sort of did but he didn’t want this little freak thinking they shared anything in common, not even enemies. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He said it with disdain—said it the way Bish would have said it to him. Said it as if he was announcing that nothing Zane could say would ever matter to him.

  Zane stopped so suddenly, Morley stopped, too, as if they’d come to some invisible red light. The freak glared at Morley, crestfallen. Then his face shut down. Just like that. The lights in his eyes clicked off. But even in the noisy hallway, Morley could hear the kid breathing through his nose, shaky, as if there was a tornado’s worth of rage inside him but he’d learned to tamp it way down so that there was nothing of it in his expression, only this sound of air escaping like a pricked balloon followed by the hunger to replace it. He looked to Morley’s eyes like a miner trapped under a million tons of coal, waiting in the dark for relief.

  Morley moved on, shaking his head, so he didn’t see the bitterness in Zane’s eyes. Didn’t see him mentally add another name to the list in his head.

  Morley waited behind the shed. He didn’t know what time it was because he didn’t have his iPhone. Soon enough he would get it back. He couldn’t see Bishop Fox from where he was standing, but he heard him, all right, talking with his cronies fifty yards away at the smoking fence. Bish was holding court, his big voice aimed just that much louder for Morley’s benefit. There was laughter. He was making Morley wait. He was getting all the bang for his buck, all he could squeeze out of this latest act of terrorism. The thought made Morley smile to himself.

  And then, there he was, as big as a Coke machine in his red Warrior jacket, which hung open to reveal a gray hoodie with the same Warrior logo on it, a bit of a gut already stretching the fabric. He’s a cliché, thought Morley. Does he know he’s a cliché? He’d stay in town, get a job on a road crew or at the 3M plant, if he was lucky. He’d get married and make some woman’s life miserable. Meanwhile, Morley would go off to college, move to the city, get a life—a large one. None of this matters, he told himself.

  Big picture: none of this matters one bit.

  But the small picture was too much on his mind. Being here, right now in the middle of it, alone with this bully, it mattered.

  “So, Bent-dick, what’d we decide your phone was worth?” He pulled it from his jacket pocket and held it up to refresh Morley’s memory.

  “Fifty bucks,” said Morley.

  “Hmm. I seem to recall a hundred.”

  “It was fifty, yesterday.”

  “Yeah, well, you pissed me off today, so I’ll take the fifty now and you can go round up another fifty.”

  Morley frowned as if he was giving Bishop’s suggestion some thought. Then he shook his head. “Actually, a hundred isn’t even enough, Bish. The new iPhone is worth more than seven hundred dollars, unless you’re on a plan.”

  Bishop’s eyes grew large. “Woo-hoo! Now you’re talking.”

  “But you see, I’m on a plan and with my plan the phone’s free.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” said Morley, slipping the gun out of his pocket and pointing it at Bishop Fox’s gut. For a fraction of a second, the big guy’s face clouded over. Then he jerked his head back and chuckled. “Whoa, playtime.”

  “No,” said Morley. “It’s real.” Morley watched Bishop’s face, saw the smile fade. “Do you get it, Bish? You brought this on.”

  “You’re telling me that’s real?”

  “It’s an MP25, semiautomatic.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t got the balls to do nothing with it.”

  Morley lowered the gun until the oily black snout was pointing directly at Bishop’s genitals. “I want my phone bac
k. Or you won’t have any balls at all.”

  “Eat me, Bent-dick.”

  “And I want you to stop saying that. And I want you to leave me alone, okay? And I want you to fucking die, actually, but I don’t want to have to be the person who does it. Which is not to say that I won’t.” His voice had climbed to cracking level. He took a deep breath. “I’m tired. I can’t take any more.”

  Bish shoved the cell phone back into his pocket. Left his hand there. Stuck his other hand in his pocket, too. Then he looked back in the direction of the fence where his posse would be hanging, waiting to hear the punch line of the joke. You couldn’t see them from here. No one could see what was going down, which was the way Morley wanted it. He could see the calculation on Bishop’s face. He was nervous and trying not to show it. He looked back at the gun leveled at him. He was thinking about newscasts, Morley guessed. He was thinking how these kinds of lawless things really did happen and it was happening right now to him. It wasn’t some Tarantino movie. There was no denying the gun was real. It wasn’t big or fancy. It wasn’t some badass Glock. It was a nasty little piece of metal garbage. But it wasn’t a toy and it wasn’t a starter pistol. It was hard to tell why but you couldn’t mistake it.

  Morley remembered the first time he saw a wolf out near the house. It ran across the road and was gone in a matter of seconds but you knew without knowing why that it was not a dog you had just seen. It was something feral and mythical.

  “You are so going to regret this, Morley.”

  He’s using my real name. Progress.

  “This is so fucking not funny,” said Bish, raising his voice. But there was apprehension mixed in with the anger. It gave Morley heart.

  “You’re right,” he said. “There is nothing funny about it.”

  Suddenly Bish stepped toward him, and Morley thrust the gun forward, his arm straight but shaking—shaking like a twig in a windstorm. He grabbed his elbow with his left hand trying to steady himself. “Not one more step, Bish. I mean it.”

  Bish seemed to calm right down. “You stupid a-hole,” he said, and took that one more step.

  Which is when Morley fired.

  And the gun went off.

  And a ragged hole appeared in the aluminum siding of the equipment shed.