Immoral Certainty (20 page)

“What was the other?”

“They were all four of them white. Harps in fact, from the neighborhood, local hard boys. Honest to Jesus that was the first thing through my mind after they hit the floor. Mother of God, make these mutts not brothers or PR’s!”

“Are you serious?”

“Baby, those guys’d been black, I’d be holding down a security guard job right now.”

“That’s bullshit, Raney.”

“Yeah? I’m glad I didn’t have to find out. Come to think of it, I probably would of had other opportunities if they’d of canned me. I got other kinds of fan mail too. Nice people, congratulating me for killing scum, wanting to meet me, you know? Job offers. And women. Funny how some chicks get turned on by that shit. Incredible offers I got.”

“If you took up any, I don’t want to hear about it.”

“I could’ve guessed. That’s also the movies, you know. That Dirty Harry crap—he’s eating a hot dog and kills a guy and finishes the hot dog. Afterward, when the blue-and-whites and the cameras got there, the big hero here was out in the parking lot puking his guts and crying like a baby. Petey was there too. He had to hold my head out of it. Little do they know.”

“Little indeed,” said Marlene. She lit a cigarette and Raney did too. They were silent for a few minutes as Raney cruised down Seventy-ninth Street and turned south on Central Park West. “What I think is,” she said, “is that that was a good story, and you’re a good guy.”

Raney flashed his old grin at her. “No kidding? You mean there’s hope for me yet?”

“That depends on what you’re hoping for,” said Marlene lightly.

“Maybe I’m hoping that if I came on to you, you wouldn’t laugh in my face.”

“Get out of here, Raney!” Marlene said, coughing on her smoke. “Give me a break! I’m practically a married woman.”

“True, and what could be better than one last fling?”

“Change the subject, Raney,” said Marlene, with a curtness she did not really feel. She glanced out the window. “Hey, where are we?”

“The Police Academy. The thing of it is, Marlene, I got a slot reserved on the range and I got to qualify this month. I haven’t qualified indoor since the bakery, so you can come in and watch, or split, or wait. It’s up to you.” He went around to the front of the Ghia, unlocked the trunk and took out an aluminum case. He looked at Marlene expectantly.

“If I come in, will you promise no gun bore talk? No hollow-point muzzle velocity crap?” she asked.

“You got it, counselor,” said Raney, his eyes throwing blue sparks.

The ranges were in the basement of the Academy building. Through a thick glass window Marlene could see that all the lanes were full of men firing pistols at man-shaped silhouettes. Raney shook hands with a fat uniformed sergeant with a large red nose and long, unfashionable sideburns.

“Marlene,” said Raney, “I want you to meet Sergeant Frank McLaughlin, runs things around here. Frank, this here’s Marlene Ciampi. She’s the head coach at Sacred Heart. I brought her along ’cause they’re thinking of starting a pistol team for the girls.”

“No kidding?” said McLaughlin. “Sacred Heart, huh?”

“Yes,” said Marlene. “We think it would be very beneficial, with the City like it is nowadays. We think it might be a good idea if all the girls started carrying too. Like Sister Marie Augustine says, ‘Trust in God, but pack a rod.’”

“Is she serious?” asked McLaughlin with an uncertain smile.

“Could be,” said Raney. “Strange times we got now.” He winked at Marlene, and led her by the arm into the range proper. The noise was a continuous harsh crackling, an immense popping of corn. Like most people in the City, Marlene had never heard a pistol fired at close range before and she was surprised at how different—punier and less dramatic—the sound was than its simulacrum in the movies. The air was unnaturally cool and stank of burnt powder.

She adjusted her ear protectors and watched Raney as he set up to shoot. He opened his aluminum case at the shooter’s table, revealing a foam bed neatly cut out to hold three pistols and their associated ammunition and equipment. Raney removed a large blue revolver and began loading it with fat, shiny cartridges.

As he did, Marlene noticed some of the uniformed officers waiting to fire nudge one another and look at him. Olivier drops in at the summer stock theater, she thought. He’s famous in the pistol world.

McLaughlin shouted at Raney over the din, “You still using that old piece of shit?”

“It’s a good gun,” said Raney flatly.

“Yeah, thirty years ago it was. Whyn’t you get a Cobra? Or something with a little stopping power there.”

Raney didn’t answer. He bellied up to the lane barrier, clipped a silhouette target to the traveller and sent it twenty-five yards down the lane. Assuming a rigid two-handed stance, he fired six spaced shots. Then he brought the target back and scored his hits. Marlene came forward to look.

“Did you get him?” she asked.

“You could say that,” said McLaughlin. He put out a hand and covered all six of the holes that Raney had put in the chest of the target. “Six in the five. Nice pattern, Jim. OK, do your rapid.”

Raney qualified easily on rapid fire and at longer ranges. McLaughlin signed the qual sheet and went off to observe the other shooters. Raney popped the cylinder of his revolver open and dropped the spent shells into his hand.

Marlene said, “Nice gun, but no stopping power.”

“You heard that?” Raney said, smiling. “Yeah, this is the classic police .38 revolver. Smith and Wesson Model 10. They started making them back in the twenties and must have sold a zillion of them. Now out of fashion among the young gun-slingers on the job. They all want fucking cannons, like Clint. This particular one belonged to my dad, and I humped it when I was in the blue bag. Pretty touching, huh?”

“I’m dabbing my eyes—it’s like the Waltons.”

“Just. Thirty-four years on the hip and never fired a shot in anger. Typical.”

He put the revolver away in its hollow and brought a Browning Hi-Power nine millimeter automatic out of his shoulder holster. He set up another target and shot it into rags.

“Very impressive,” said Marlene. “Is that it?”

“That’s it. Unless you want to try.”

“What, shoot?”

“Yeah.”

“Am I allowed?”

“No, but go ahead. I’ll say you overpowered me and tore the gun from my hand.” He reloaded the Browning and held it out to her, butt first.

She took it from him and her hand sagged with the weight of it. “It’s heavy,” she said, as a peculiar and unwelcome thrill began to rise through her middle. I can kill people now, she thought inanely, and then suppressed the thought, as one suppresses the unbidden thoughts of horrible death that afflict one on the subway platform or on a high roof.

Raney clipped a fresh target to the traveller and sent it out to the twenty-five yard mark. Then he came back and stood close to Marlene.

“OK, tiger,” he said, “let me show you how this works. Push the little button there and hold your left hand under the butt. That’s the magazine. It holds fourteen shots. Nine millimeter Parabellum rounds, hollowpoints, so I got the feed ramp throated out so it won’t hang up and jam. It’s got a four and a half pound pull—”

“Snore,” said Marlene. “You promised. Where does the bullet come out? This little hole here?”

“Yeah, OK, I’ll skip the gun-nut talk. But the fact is it’s a lot easier to hit something with an automatic than with a revolver. OK, slam the magazine back in hard so it clicks. Now hold it in your left hand and pull the slide all the way back until it locks.”

Marlene did so and the gun’s snout emerged from the cover of the slide. “It looks like an excited Doberman,” said Marlene, with a nervous giggle.
What is this
thing
doing in
my
hand?
she thought. Her breath was coming shorter and she was suddenly conscious of her heart.

Raney was standing behind her now, with his arms around hers guiding her hands over the pistol. He was warm and smelled of gunpowder. Marlene’s uncomfortable feelings intensified. Her stomach rolled and the backs of her hands prickled with sweat. She saw her hands under Raney’s push the slide forward. He said into her ear, “Pushing the slide home strips the top round off the magazine and chambers it. This is a single action gun, so you’re already cocked and ready to fire. It’ll fire the same way every time you squeeze the trigger.” He continued to talk softly about the stance and the trigger pull and other gun stuff. It was like a seduction, and she didn’t want to hear it.

Abruptly, Marlene stepped away from Raney, faced down range, looked down the barrel with her good eye, pointed it at the target and emptied the pistol as fast as she could pull the trigger. She dropped the weapon on the shooter’s table with a clunk and turned away, feeling giddy and slightly sick, like a kid after the first fumbling experiment with sex.

Raney touched her arm. “Hey, are you all right?”

She swallowed hard and said, “Sure. Fine … but, I don’t know, it had an effect on me I didn’t expect.”

“Death in my hand,” Raney said quietly.

“What?”

“The feeling. That you could really kill a bunch of real live human beings right now, no more trouble than ringing up an elevator. Plus yourself. Some people have it, some don’t. I never had it.” He reloaded the automatic, put it back in his holster and shut his aluminum case. Then he brought Marlene’s target back to the rail. Marlene sagged against the wall. “Raney, I could use a drink. Let’s get out of here.”

“Sure, right away, Marlene,” said Raney, examining the target. He whistled softly through his teeth. “Hey, don’t you want to see how you did?”

She walked over to him. “I missed every shot, right?”

“No. You hit fourteen times and all on the money.” Marlene saw that the head and trunk of the silhouette were riddled with holes. She felt sick again. “How could that be,” she asked weakly, “I wasn’t even aiming.”

“That’s why. You didn’t worry or get nervous about your score. Just pointed and shot. It’s the latest training theory anyway. You ever shoot before? A pistol, I mean.”

“No, and never again’ll be too soon.”

“Too bad—it’s a major talent down the tubes. I think you’re what us gun-nuts call a natural shot.”

Marlene laughed heartily and started singing “You Cain’t Get a Man with a Gun,” at high volume, attracting many odd looks until Raney hustled her unceremoniously out of the range.

He took her to an Irish place on Second Avenue in the Seventies, a place with dark wood but no ferns, where the bartenders were middle-aged and had slicked-down hair and the customers were mostly serious men who drank neat whiskeys with beer on the side.

They each tossed down a Jameson’s and ordered another. Raney lit a cigarette and lit Marlene’s. She relaxed and smiled at him, reflecting on how long it had been since she had come to a decent saloon. That tune came into her head again:

Broken hearted I’ll wander

Broken hearted I’ll remain

For my bonny light horseman

Will n’er come again.

Karp did not take her to saloons, she reflected, not without a momentary twinge of shame for this disloyal thought. Karp’s idea of a good time was a pizza and a movie, or a long walk across the lower East Side to Yoineh Schimmel’s for a knish. Marlene had nothing against the knish, but she liked bar-hopping and she didn’t like Karp’s unspoken disapproval when she drank and smoked. She glanced at Raney, who was deep in his second drink. He must have lots of bad points, too, and they were probably nasty and macho ones.

“Raney,” she said abruptly, “that gun I shot … was that the one that you used in the bakery?”

“The murder weapon? No, I didn’t bring that to the range. I usually wear the Browning if I got a jacket on, like now, but if I’m in a T-shirt, or I’m just running out for a couple of minutes I got this little Astra Constable automatic I throw in a pocket. It’s a .38 double-action, so you can keep a round in the chamber and the safety off. I had it in my raincoat that night. It’s not what McLaughlin would call a man-stopper, unless you shoot the man in the head. Then it stops them pretty good.” He threw back the rest of his drink and studied the baseball game playing on the TV above the bar.

Marlene tried to imagine what it would be like never to go out in the street without the ability to deliver instant death to other people. Although she had worked with cops for years, and had been on good terms with quite a few, the issue had never come up. She wondered why it was coming up now.

They watched the Yankees play for a couple of innings in companionable silence and then went into the restaurant part of the saloon. They had steaks and salads and finished up with coffee and Hennessey. It was not a cheap dinner. When it was over, Marlene started to take out money, but Raney insisted on paying.

Marlene shrugged and put her wallet away. “You throw money around like that, Raney, people are gonna think you’re on the wire.”

“Hey, I don’t do this all the time. You can’t take a Sacred Heart girl to Nedicks.”

She looked at him sharply. “That’s like the fourth time you’ve dragged that out, son. Are we playing out some boyhood fantasy here? Do we see some wistful Irish lad of humble means on some Queens street corner gazing raptly at the unobtainably classy girls trooping toward the IND line and the Mesdames? Learning how to become yet more unobtainable? OK, Raney, you got my attention. What is it now, a dance at the Legion on Queens Boulevard? Are you blushing, Raney?”

Raney laughed and said, “Nah, let’s skip the dance. How about we go out to Kennedy and park somewhere along Race Track Road and watch the jets come in. We could get into the vibrations when the big ones come over at thirty feet.”

“You don’t have a back seat, Raney.”

“I got a blanket in the trunk,” he shot back, and then added archly, “And what does a nice Italian girl like you know about back seats out by Kennedy?”

“Raney, don’t kid yourself. I spent so much time out at the runways, I had reviews in the in-flight magazines. It’s true. The pilots used to point me out: ‘Folks, passengers on the left side of the aircraft will be able to see Marlene Ciampi getting her rocks off while remaining technically a virgin in that green ’57 Mercury.’”