by Max Barry
She had six Butterscotch Cream Oreos left and she ate them one after the other. Percival nosed her ribs. “You love me,” she said, scritching his skull.
* * *
—
It was Monday. She was expected at work, presumably. She didn’t have to go—didn’t have to do anything—but she had a few half-baked ideas, which would be easier to develop with the newsroom’s resources. She packed her laptop into her bag.
The lobby was the same. The elevator smelled the same. As she approached the newsroom, the absence of the clock grew in her ears. When she stepped inside, she craned her neck to look at bare white ceiling with—maybe?—a slightly darker, uneven patch that suggested remedial work. For nearly a year, she had sat beneath that clock. It had invaded every moment. She had dreamed about it.
She set her bag on her desk, which did genuinely seem to be her desk, right down to a set of AA batteries she kept and never needed. She opened her laptop. Maddie’s headshot was on the website she’d found before: Tagline Artists Group. She had an abandoned Instagram account that implied she worked in a coffee shop.
“Cute,” Levi said, startling her. He peered over her shoulder. “Friend of yours?”
She closed the laptop. Levi was unchanged, as far as she could tell. Maybe some people were invariable: destined to be just who they were. “Can I ask you something?” she said, because she needed him for one of her half-baked ideas. “Do you shoot?”
“Do I shoot?” He glanced around. “Guns?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you asking?”
“It’s for a story,” she said, which was a good answer to anything. “I need to learn to shoot.” She detected reluctance in his silence, so added: “I’m thinking of getting a gun for protection.”
“Oh,” Levi said, “thank Christ.” He pulled a chair from the adjoining desk and dropped into it. “Sorry. I do shoot, but I don’t advertise it because I work for a bleeding-heart New York newspaper. What’s prompted this? Everything okay?”
“I just thought I should learn.”
“You should. I recommend it. I can even take you to a range and put you through your paces. Help you figure out what kind of weapon suits you.”
There was a phrase she hadn’t encountered before: what kind of weapon suits you. Something simple and deadly, she suspected. Something light, easy to carry, and fatal to Clayton Hors. “That’d be really helpful. Tonight?”
He shook his head. “Can’t tonight. I’m dating twins.”
She blinked. That was different. “Tomorrow?”
Levi burst out laughing. “Thank you for humoring me. Sure, tonight. I have nothing else going on.”
“Okay,” she said, catching up.
“There’s a range in Woodhaven. Looks like a death trap from the outside, it’s good. Open late Mondays, too. How’s seven o’clock for you?”
“Seven’s perfect.”
“All right, then,” he said. “I’ll see you there.”
* * *
—
The range was a low, wide brick building squatting beneath the elevated tracks with a single recessed door. Inside was a cramped space with fluorescent lighting and the lingering scent of oil and sweat. Levi was lounging in a brown chair with two cases stacked on his lap. The cases contained guns, she supposed. Handguns.
There was a sign-in process, which involved Felicity fitting herself into a grimy pair of goggles and earmuffs. A man in a tucked-in polo shirt took her through a short but emphatic safety briefing and had her sign a piece of paper to confirm that this had occurred. Then she and Levi entered a cavernous concrete space with dingy booths. At the other end of the space hung human-shaped targets, like laundry.
Levi unpacked a case and laid a gun on the counter, a solid black thing. “Now, ninety percent of this is learning how not to shoot anyone by accident. The rest is basically stand . . .” He shuffled his feet to shoulder width. “Sight . . .” He raised an imaginary gun and looked down the barrel. She had thought the sight of Levi with a weapon might be comical, but it wasn’t. “And squeeze. Pow, pow.” He lowered his hands.
“Okay,” she said.
“That’s it. Keep your gun locked up, keep it unloaded, and don’t ever point it at anyone you don’t mean to kill. If you do, squeeze and keep on squeezing. You have a model in mind?”
“Of gun?”
He nodded. “Gun, yes, that’s what we’re talking about.”
“Then no.”
“Some only hold five or six bullets. You don’t want those. You want a Walther M2 or a CZ 75 with a magazine that gives you fifteen, eighteen shots.”
“That sounds like a lot.”
“It sounds like a lot because you’re thinking it’ll be like a TV show. In reality, you could miss him a whole bunch of times. But let’s say you make two hits from your first six. What then?”
“He falls down?”
Levi shook his head. “Wrong. You didn’t get any vital organs. He’s spiking adrenaline. He’s angry. He’s hurt and scared. What did you shoot him with? A six-shooter?”
“No, I got a bigger gun, because I listened to my friend Levi.”
“If you had a six-shooter, you’d be out. Not many shots, was it?”
“No,” she said.
“So you have ten remaining. What do you do?”
“I keep squeezing.”
“Right. You hit him in the chest a bunch of times. He goes down. Is it over?”
“No?”
“Good. Even if he has a fatal wound, he might not bleed out for two or three minutes, which is plenty of time for him to kill you. And he might not have a fatal wound. You put a lot of kinetic energy into his body; maybe he just lost his balance. Now he’s trying to stand up. He looks like he wants to run away. What do you do?”
She squinted. “He’s running away?”
“He looks like he wants to run away.”
“Well . . .” she said.
“You squeeze,” Levi said. “You already decided to kill him. Finish the job.”
“But—”
“Too late. He wasn’t running away. You’re dead.”
“Come on,” she said.
“You think this doesn’t happen in real life? You make the decision to kill him before you pull the trigger, not afterward.”
“But if he wants to run away—”
“You don’t know what he wants. Is he close enough to kill you? If the answer is yes, keep squeezing.”
She took a breath.
“Make sense?”
“Yes, Levi,” she said.
He nodded. “Now let’s see you squeeze.”
He showed her how to hold the Walther M2 and she lined up its black barrel with the paper target forty yards away. The first shot was much more jarring than she’d expected, jolting her arms down into her shoulders. And she did indeed miss the target. After thirty rounds, her wrists ached, her arms burned, and she was sweating around her goggles. At least she was hitting the target fairly consistently, which pleased Levi. They returned their gear and trooped out to the parking lot, where she watched him load his cases into his trunk.
“So where should I buy a gun?” she said.
He shut the trunk. “Do you have a permit?”
She shook her head.
“Well, you’ve got a six-month process ahead of you. You start with a permit.”
“Six months?” she said, dismayed.
“New York gun laws are no joke. It’s more paperwork than you can imagine.”
“What if I want one sooner?”
He eyed her under the sodium lights. “Well, that’s too bad.”
“But people get guns all the time. How do they do that?”
“Like you’d expect. Person A has a gun. Person B wants it. They arrange a private transaction and n
o one’s the wiser.”
“How does that work?”
“I did a big story on it last year. Didn’t you read it?”
“Sorry,” she said.
He shook his head. “This is why no one likes the political reporters. You think you’re writing about the only thing that matters.”
“We don’t think that.”
“There are two channels. One, the dark web. Which isn’t as dark as it used to be, or as popular, but it’s still a thing. Two, listings sites. Legal because they’re not selling anything. They’re just connecting interested parties and telling them to obey their local laws. So what happens is one of these parties asks the other if they could see their way free to parting with their gun for a few extra hundred dollars and without the hassle of paperwork. And if they agree, they meet in a Walmart parking lot and it’s done.”
“Huh,” she said.
“But don’t do that. You’ll get yourself into all kinds of trouble. Wait your six months and buy a piece through a licensed dealer.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
He was silent. “You sure everything’s all right?”
She smiled, like: What a silly question. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. You seem different.”
That was interesting. “Different how?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Like you might want an illegal gun.”
She laughed. “Levi, that’s crazy.”
“Right,” he said.
* * *
—
Before she left, she sat in her car and used her phone to find a site just like Levi had described. She entered the details of the gun Levi had recommended, tapped the first result, and then a button that read: contact seller. It opened up a message box right away, above two checkboxes that wanted to opt her in to promotional mailing lists. She didn’t even need to verify her email. She wrote:
Hello, I’m interested in your gun for home protection. Can you please confirm it’s still available? Thank you. Felicity S.
It might take a while to find someone willing to skirt the law. And she would have to be careful: Anything that smelled off, she would have to abandon. She sent almost a dozen more inquiries before deciding to do the rest on her laptop from home, which had an actual keyboard. She put down her phone and reached for the ignition. A man was standing outside her window. She jumped. A noise popped out of her.
It was only Levi. She wound down the window. “You scared me.”
He didn’t smile. “What are you doing?”
He’d seen her phone, she realized. “That’s none of your business.”
“Are you in trouble?”
No, she was going to say, but his face was full of concern and she couldn’t lie to him. “Levi,” she said, “it’s none of your business.” She started the engine.
“Felicity—” She drove away before she could hear the rest of it.
* * *
—
As she drew closer to home, she felt uneasy. She’d figured she had a day or two before she had to start worrying about the blond man catching up with her. But she didn’t know that. Now, driving through the night, it began to feel like a gamble. A stupid, reckless chance. Crawling along Fulton Street, she saw a motel, a shitty seventies red-brick disaster, and, on impulse, turned the wheel. She checked in, and, two hundred bucks lighter, sat on a garish bedspread with TV sounds coming through the wall. Then she wondered what she was doing. Because this, right here, could not be a long-term solution.
She dialed Cheating Gavin. When he answered, there was music in the background, a song that her Gavin had liked, which momentarily threw her. “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
She hadn’t thought this through. She hadn’t thought through any of it. “I’m going to be stuck at work all night. So don’t wait up.” Then she closed her eyes, because how could he react to that.
A short, surprised silence. “All right. No problem.”
She waited. But that was it. “That’s okay?”
“Sure.”
This was Cheating Gavin, she reminded herself. It was probably a great opportunity for him. Once she was off the phone, he would dial his girlfriend, Vanessa, or Beth, or whatever her name was, she didn’t want to know, and say, Guess what? She’s out for the night.
“Just thought I’d let you know,” she said.
“I appreciate it.”
He was being unperturbed, a thing he did that always made her irrationally angry, because there was a time for being perturbed. And when she said she wasn’t coming home for mysterious reasons, that was one of those times. He should be a little fucking perturbed. She had been trying to think of Cheating Gavin as a different person, not someone she knew, but this was very Original Gavin, and it broke her compartmentalization for a minute.
Would my Gavin have grown a beard, given the right circumstances? she wondered. Would he have cheated?
Potentially they were all her Gavins. Maybe the only reason this one seemed different was that he’d finally gotten tired of pretending he couldn’t tell she was keeping one eye open for something better.
“Well, if things change . . .” he said. “You know where to find me.”
She nodded, although, of course, he couldn’t see her. She didn’t think he was going to call a girlfriend. She wasn’t even sure he was cheating, all of a sudden. How had she concluded that? From one rushed breakfast? She didn’t know anything. “Good night,” she said, and hung up.
* * *
—
She slept terribly and woke with the conviction that she had to find them, Hugo and the blond man and whoever else there was. She had to negotiate an arrangement. She parked three blocks away from her building, resisted the urge to check on the egg she’d hidden in Prospect Park, and caught the train into the city. She had four replies from gun sellers on her phone, so tapped out the next part of a serial fiction in which she’d been abandoned by her boyfriend of three years and found herself unexpectedly alone, in a bad neighborhood, in which there had been break-ins. Of course she was prepared to go through the proper process for a permit, but was there any way the seller could help her feel safe now? Did they have any thoughts on that?
The Gothic tower on West 50th was edged in orange morning sun. A million years ago, in another place, she’d seen Hugo emerge from this building. She went right up to the revolving door and pushed through.
Inside was a cool lobby with a round chandelier, curving walls, and a wide desk. Two men in muted yellow uniforms regarded her. “Hello,” she said, because she was aiming for directness. “I’m here for the Soft Horizon Juice Company.”
“Yes, ma’am. Shall I call up for you?”
“Please. I’m Felicity Staples.”
In less than a minute, the elevator chimed. The doors parted. Hugo rolled from between them like a truck. He crossed the lobby while she resisted the urge to turn and run, then glowered at her like she was a disobedient child. “Do you have it?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Nothing,” she said, because she was startled. But she did actually have a plan. “I want to talk.”
He exhaled derisively.
“I’ll give it to you,” she said. “But first I want to talk to your people.”
He walked away. Not the reaction she’d anticipated. But when he reached the elevator, he turned and gestured. “Coming?”
She hesitated. But why else was she here? She crossed the lobby and stepped into the elevator. The doors closed. The car hummed.
“How was Sing Sing?” she said.
“I never made it there. They got me out first.”
“Oh,” she said. She wondered how that worked. But she had more pressing concerns, like who she would see when the doors opened, and whether it would inclu
de the blond man. “I want to help you stop Clay,” she said, in case she didn’t get a chance to explain herself later. “I already did it once. When you couldn’t.” The elevator panel lit on 12. The doors opened. Beyond was a wood-paneled space with vases of flowers. Hugo led her to a sun-filled expanse of rich floorboards and white furniture where several people were lounging, all of them older than Felicity, all well dressed. They were conversing in low, musical tones, but broke off as she and Hugo entered.
Hugo gestured shortly. “She wants to negotiate.”
The blond man was at the far end of the room. Sitting in a chair, staring at her.
An older man with glasses and thick eyebrows rose. “Fantastic,” he said. “Well done, Felicity.”
A woman approached her with rakishly thin arms outstretched, an awkward smile across her face. “Felicity? I’m Henrietta.” She clutched Felicity’s hands. “We’re so glad you’ve come.”
The blond man said, “Did she bring it?”
“No,” said Hugo.
“That’s fine,” said Henrietta. “You’ve come to talk? That’s wonderful. I know you’ve had some uncomfortable experiences.” This might have been a reference to the blond man, or to Hugo, or perhaps to the entire fucking ordeal; Felicity didn’t know. “Will you come this way?” She took a few steps toward a hallway. “If you wouldn’t mind?”
* * *
—
The hallway was a checkerboard of black and white tiles, with sunlight streaming through glass at the very end. Henrietta closed the door behind them, reducing the conversation to a murmur. “Are you all right? Is there anything I can get you?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
Henrietta smiled quickly, in a way that left Felicity wondering whether it had happened. “You must have so many questions. I know you’ve spoken with Hugo, but he’s not a talker. You end a conversation knowing less than when you began.” She gazed at Felicity. She was around forty, Felicity thought, but it was difficult to pinpoint. “I must ask. Is the token safe?”
