Killer Instincts v5 (11 page)

"I'm assuming you mean that figuratively?" I joked.

"Kid, I'd clock you with this thing, but I don't want to damage it."

The last weapon was something I finally recognized from countless ‘80s action movies; the Uzi. Although my parents had never approved of mindless violence on television, they were gone from the house so often that as a teenager I absorbed more than my fill of Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone mowing down bad guys by the dozens with Uzis. My recognition of the gun was immediately obvious to Richard.

“I’m guessing you already know what this is; the Uzi nine-millimeter submachine gun. This weapon is blowback operated, fires from an open bolt, with a thirty-two round magazine and a folding stock. The design may be fifty years old, but this little chatterbox can still be found all over the world, burning brass and filling graves.”

“Not that I care, but isn’t illegal to own one of those?” I asked.

Richard shook his head. “It’s not illegal as long as you’ve got the right paperwork filled out and you meet all the other requirements and pay the proper fees. Of course, this beauty has never been seen by a U.S. government official; she was smuggled into the States probably twenty or thirty years ago. Been living in a crate ever since.”

I pointed at the suppressors for the two pistols, as well as the DeLisle and the foot-long suppressor for the Uzi.

“All of those, they’re also illegal, aren’t they?” I asked.

Richard shook his head again. “They can be owned legally, with the right forms. They’re almost impossible to regulate, anyway. Any half-decent machinist with the necessary tools could make the parts needed to construct a suppressor. There's dozens of little garage businesses around the country that could make one with a little work. That's how I got these," he explained.

"Those people can’t get away with it, can they?" I asked.

Richard shrugged. "It's a big country and the sorts of people who do this for a living have a dim view of Big Brother and its habit of covering everything in red tape. Besides, these guys are the same sorts who take pride in living off the grid if possible, folks whose granddaddies ran their own backwoods moonshine stills and fought it out with the revenue bureau. Mostly a law-abiding sort, but the law they abide by isn't always the same law as the government wants them adhering to, and that's when you get into some sticky situations."

"So there’s a whole black market being supplied by backwoods gun factories building these things?" I asked.

"You got it. God bless capitalism and free-market enterprise.”

SEVEN

The next morning, I was up at five o'clock. It was pitch black outside, and I dressed swiftly in just a tee shirt and a pair of running shorts. I ate a few pieces of dried apple and drank some water, and then we went outside in the first murky light of dawn. Richard wore a pair of running shorts as well, and led me through a series of stretches and cardio exercises. I had been on the track and field team in high school, but since going to college I hadn’t engaged in more than the occasional jogging stint or a little basketball at the athletics center. Now, I knew I would pay the price.

"You're in half-decent shape, but you don't have any real tone. Working alone like you're planning, you absolutely have to be in better shape than the opposition. Going up against a bunch of easy-living mobsters, that's not too hard, but if they ever decide to bring in contract muscle to sniff you out, you might fight yourself having to outrun some ex-Army ranger who jogs ten miles a day out of habit."

"What about strength training? I'm never going to get all that strong, I'm just not built for it,” I said.

"That's what guns and judo are for, to make up the difference. But I don't have time to teach you both guns and judo, so we're going to work on the guns and make sure you can run like hell when the devil starts chasing you, because trust me, in this line of work he surely will. Besides, as you become more toned and build your endurance, you're going to develop strength anyhow; your body is going to learn how to use everything it's got more efficiently than ever before, including your muscles. More importantly, in an urban environment the fast man on foot can get away from almost anything; the key is winning the race early on, before they close the net with the black and whites and the helicopters. If you can get three blocks away before the cops arrive on scene, you're home free."

While we warmed up, I got my first good look at what a life of hard violence had done to Richard's body. Although he was in excellent shape for a man of his years, seemingly without an ounce of fat on him, and ropes of corded muscle evident in his arms and legs, he was a roadmap of scars from his ankles on up. Light lines of scar tissue ran criss-cross patterns here and there, little nicks and gashes that didn't heal without leaving a mark. Other scars told of burns, bullets, bomb fragments, even bite marks, both human and animal. It was the clearest evidence you could face that no matter how good you are - and I was confident Richard was one of the best - it didn't mean you weren't going to bleed in order to get the job done and survive afterward.

Richard saw me looking at his old war wounds and chuckled. "That’s forty years of abuse, but it's been a long and interesting road."

"Looks like the road had its fair share of bumps,” I said.

"Bumps and more. But I'd have hanged myself in the sort of life most Americans lead, stuck in a nine-to-five job, going from cookie-cutter condo or white picket jailhouse to a small office box inside a bigger office box. And once you’re there, someone tells you every day they can hire some poor schmuck in India to do your job for a tenth of what you earn. I might have lived through four decades of hell to get here, but by god I was my own man, earning my own way, and beholden to no one who didn't pay for it in the end."

"So it was worth all the blood and pain?" I asked.

Richard paused in the middle of sitting and stretching out to touch his toes, leaning with his elbows on his knees and looking out into the brightening skyline.

"The only worth a life has, is what you accomplish during your time here. If it wasn't for me, and the guys I fought and bled with over the years, the world would be a much meaner place, and I'm not just speaking in hyperbole! That, at least, makes it all worthwhile."

After we completed our stretching routine, Richard and I went through a full complement of gymnastic exercises. Push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, jumping jacks, back-bridges, leg-lifts, an extensive routine that had me breathing hard and feeling my muscles burn as the sun peeked over the horizon.

And that’s before we started running.

"We're going to keep the runs short this week, but we'll be extending the distances over the course of the month. Your body needs to be toughened. We have to burn away the fat and leave just the rawhide and steel springs behind."

Richard's "short run" took us across the desert rocks and sands, over three dunes and through two valleys separated by long stretches of blasted nothing. Finally, at the top of the third dune, we looked back. The cabin was a fleck of dust on a small flat bump far out by the horizon. I stood there, sucking wind and soaked in sweat, bent over with my hands braced against my thighs. Richard wasn't even breathing hard. We had covered perhaps two miles.

"I never run any further than this," Richard explained, "I always want to keep an eye on the cabin. I won't get lost out here - you can always backtrack if you need to - but I never want to let the cabin out of my sight long enough for someone to deliver a hit-squad and depart."

"So what would you do if that happened? You're not exactly ready for a gunfight right now."

"Follow me and learn, Grasshopper," Richard said with a sly smile.

We walked down the back slope of the low hill we stood on, cutting to the right and running along the shallow valley. After ten minutes, we came across a small gnarled bush clinging to the side of the hill. Richard stopped next to the bush, looked at me, and then crouched down, digging into the rocky, sandy soil next to the bush. In a couple of minutes, he had dug free a white PVC plastic tube about four feet long and about nine inches in diameter.

Unscrewing one end, Richard slowly removed the contents one by one; a tightly-folded backpack, two plastic one-quart bottles of water, several packages of dried meat, fruits, and nuts, a long-barreled Colt .45 automatic with a box of fifty cartridges and three magazines, a compact pair of binoculars, a set of lightweight desert cammies, a long-bladed knife, and a partially disassembled bolt-action rifle, with two boxes of twenty cartridges and a scope.

"Food and water, long-range rifle, mid-range handgun, fighting knife, camouflage, observation equipment. If I can't deal with some armed squatters with this goodie bag, I've grown too soft anyhow."

I looked at Richard in near-wonderment. "Is this really how you live your life?" I asked.

Richard nodded. "Keeping two moves ahead in the game, just like chess."

"Remind me never to play against you,” I said.

"I shouldn't have to remind you. There's a reason you hired me."

We alternated between running, jogging, and walking back to the cabin, because at that point I was utterly winded. After some water and a set of light stretches to keep from tightening up, Richard and I began the business of getting to know my newly-acquired arsenal.

"You're going to start with the long guns first. You need to know them better than you know the handguns, because a novice like yourself should make up for a lack of skill by using superior firepower, against targets who will almost exclusively be using handguns," Richard explained.

"Do you really think Paggiano's goons will be that good?"

"Of course not. Do you think these guys belong to a rod and gun club, go shooting after brunch on Sundays and then retire for cocktails? These idiots don't know the first thing about real pistol-craft."

"So a few weeks of training from you and I should be able to shoot circles around these guys. Where's the problem?"

"The problem is, these are stone-cold murderous thugs who think beating two women to death and riddling daddy dearest with slugs, then burning down the scene of the crime, is of no more difficulty than you or I changing a flat tire. Behind the slick suits and the gold watches and the Italian sports cars, these guys are all bloodthirsty savages. What they lack in skill, they make up in their willingness to inflict extreme violence without the slightest provocation.

“When you draw down on one of these guys for the first time, no matter what you do, there are going to be lingering moral doubts floating around in your mind - is this the right thing to do, should I turn the other cheek, am I lowering myself to their level - all things that don't even occur to these dummies. Until you can purge yourself of these concerns, they will always have the advantage because they won't hesitate to blow you into corpse-land the moment they realize you're coming for them."

"So what you're saying is, I should make up for the fact that I'm really a bleeding heart pussy by bringing a machine-gun to a pistol fight."

Richard grinned. "I believe the term is, 'peace through superior firepower'."

The first weapon of the day was the Uzi. We went through the basics of operating the weapon; a loaded magazine goes into the receiver, the bolt gets cocked back, trigger pull lets bolt move forward, stripping a cartridge from the magazine, pushing it into the chamber, and as the bolt hits home, the firing pin strikes the primer, and the gun goes bang. Once the cartridge is fired, the recoil pushes the bolt back, the extractor pulls the shell casing free, the recoil spring pushes the bolt forward again, and the whole process repeats itself until the trigger is released or the Uzi runs out of ammunition.

"The blowback-operated submachine gun is one of man's greatest military achievements," Richard said. "The process is utter simplicity, and it gives a single man an immense amount of close-range firepower in an extremely small package. You could carry enough ammunition to kill a hundred people stacked in a few magazines and tucked into your back pockets. Ten men could turn a Greek phalanx into a corpse-pile in seconds."

"So much for man's other achievements, like the Mona Lisa," I said.

"Da Vinci would've been better off getting his tank to work,” Richard replied.

Richard handed me seven empty magazines for the Uzi, each capable of holding 32 bullets. We sat and talked about how the weapon worked as we loaded each mag, and by the end, the tips of my thumb and forefingers were raw and sore.

"By the end of the month, you'll have calluses just from loading magazines," Richard told me.

Once all the magazines were loaded, Richard and I drove the Suburban down the hill a short distance from the cabin to where the desert flattened out. From the back of the Suburban we unloaded six five-gallon white buckets Richard had packed full of loose sand. Each bucket had a foot-tall number painted on it, from 1 to 6. Walking away from the vehicle, we placed them in a deep semi-circle, an inverted U twenty feet wide and thirty deep, with the opening facing us. I stood ten feet from the opening of the U.

"We're on a timetable, and don't have the luxury of having you fire at paper targets for weeks at a time. The point of this exercise is, to teach you to engage multiple random targets at different ranges. When you're ready, I'm going to call out a number. You fire on that bucket in bursts of two to four shots until I call out another bucket, at which time you shift fire to that target, and so on. When you run dry, reload and keep firing on that target until I say otherwise. Understood?"

I nodded and slapped a magazine of thirty-two cartridges into the receiver of the Uzi. I pulled back the cocking lever, felt it catch, and then brought the weapon to my shoulder. It was such a crude weapon, all stamped steel and flat black finish, but I felt a sudden love for the thing. It was all fucking business. No engraved walnut stock, no nickel plating, no pearl handles, just a bare minimum of parts and lots of bullets ready to go down the barrel. I pictured Chuck Norris in
Delta Force
or Arnold Schwarzenneger in
Commando
blazing away with an Uzi in hand, killing terrorists or pissant soldiers, and suddenly all my nerves and anxiety melted away. I straightened up, leaned into the target a bit, and snugged the extended stock against my shoulder.