“This has got to be a lightsaber,” said Pauletta, picking up another and holding it like a shocking pink banana.
“Let me see. No. It’s meant to be a katana.”
“A what now?”
“Katana. Japanese sword.” A hollow plastic imitation of the one I had at home, with a braid-wrapped ray-skin hilt and signed tang and a blade that shone like watered silk.
“I think I’m pretty safe in saying that is not a sword.” Nina pointed at the white polystyrene cooler.
“Take a look inside.”
She toed off the lid and peered in. “Water pistols.”
“Unfilled,” I said. “Two volunteers to fix that.” Suze and Christie won the privilege and practically ran from the room. “And a volunteer to kick the cooler to bits.”
Katherine and Tonya decided they could manage that between them, and did. The polystyrene squealed and squeaked. I half expected Nina to say, “Scream, sucker,” in an action-hero voice but she just watched. Perhaps she didn’t like mysteries, perhaps it had been difficult for her last week admitting, even to herself, that she’d been assaulted.
“Everyone else, stretch out and warm up.” They were doing that, and the cooler was a pile of jagged polystyrene splinters by the time Suze and Christie got back with the loaded guns. Christie’s hair was wet and the back of Suze’s T-shirt was sticking to her spine. Clearly they’d felt obliged to test-fire a couple.
They settled into stretching with the rest. “Today we’re going to talk about weapons: guns, knives, sticks, and swords. What they can do, what you do if faced with one.”
Several laughed, some nervously. Weapons weren’t made of Day-Glo plastic; plastic couldn’t hurt them. Right?
I picked up the shocking pink katana, twirled it like a baton, then balanced it on my index finger, thinking. “Who thinks they can stab my hand with this?”
“Me. You bet,” said Kim. I tossed it to her. She caught it on the blade. A martial arts class would have stopped everything to explain about taking the weapon seriously, treating it with exaggerated respect, but that was not what I was after.
From the bag I took two large white T-shirts, a sponge, and a bottle of red ink. I pulled one of the T-shirts over my head, then poured a little red ink into the sponge. “Give the sword back a minute.”
I squeezed the wet sponge around the sword below the hilt and pulled the blade through my fist so that it gleamed redly. I gave it back to Pauletta, then wrapped the second T-shirt around my hand like a cartoon bandage and held out my hand.
“Stab this. Leave a big bloody mark in the middle.” I stepped back a little. She edged forward. I edged back.
“No fair. Keep still.”
“If someone was standing opposite you with a sword, or a knife, or a gun, would you stand still?”
“Then how can I stab you?”
“Good question.”
She charged, stabbing madly, and I moved away, and she missed. She looked mortified.
“It’s very hard to hit a moving target—with a blade, or a bullet.”
I gestured for her to give me the sword. The ink was dry; I leaned it against the wall, picked up a water pistol.
“Who wants to have a go at shooting my hand with the gun?”
“I’ll do that,” said Suze.
“Choose your weapon.”
She picked an orange-and-red ray gun and held it in two hands, like a TV cop.
“What kind of gun is it?”
“A big one,” she said with relish.
“Anyone, give me the name of a handgun.”
“SIG-Sauer P210,” Therese said. “Or a Smith and Wesson 627, if you prefer revolvers.”
Everyone looked surprised, or perhaps impressed. I certainly was.
“That’s a heavy gun,” I said.
“Nearly three pounds, unloaded. But it takes eight rounds.”
“How many’s the other one got?” Suze asked her.
“The Sig? Eight in the magazine, one in the chamber.”
“Then that’s what this is.”
“All right,” I said, and stood about ten feet away. “Shoot me.” I sounded like something from a bad porn film.
Suze took a wide-legged stance, aimed, and I waved the T-shirted hand very slowly to one side just as she began to squeeze.
“Shit.” She squirted again. I made the wave a lazy, three-dimensional figure eight. She began to swear and pump furiously with her index finger and I simply walked up to her, still waving one hand, though a little more randomly, and took the gun away.
“Of course,” I said to the class, “I doubt I’d be as calm if that were a real gun. Then again, with the noise and the weight and only nine bullets, she probably wouldn’t have been as accurate.”
“She missed!” Pauletta said.
“Yes. Most people do, most of the time.”
“Handguns are more accurate than water pistols,” Therese said.
“In the hands of an expert, and on the range, wearing ear protection and aiming at a stationary target, yes. In real life, no. A shooter will hit a running target only four times out of a hundred—and even then the bullet is extremely unlikely to find a vital organ. You can improve even those overwhelmingly favorable odds by not running in a straight line.”
“But…” Nina said, and couldn’t think of anything to add.
“If someone pulls a weapon on you, keep breathing and start thinking.”
“Start running.”
“Yes, if you can. If you can’t, start asking yourself questions. What weapon is it? What kind of person is holding the weapon?” They all looked monumentally blank. “Ask yourself what they want. If you know what they want, you can make some good guesses about what happens next, where your advantage might lie. So, what do they want?”
“To hurt you.”
“Sometimes.”
No one else had anything to offer. I decided to approach from another direction.
“Remember that they can’t hurt you with a stick or a knife unless they can touch you with it. They can’t hurt you with a gun unless they can hit you. That means stay out of reach, and start moving.”
“What if he’s already behind you in the car?”
“He won’t be, because you will have parked in a well-lit spot, and before you get in the car, you have looked through the window.”
“I will?”
“Yes. As you approach the car, you have your keys ready. You are not overburdened by bags. You examine the car by eye as you get closer, noting whether there are any extra shadows under or inside the vehicle.” Why didn’t they know this?
“Underneath?”
“Attackers have been known to hide there.”
“Jeez, I never thought of that.”
If they spent time worrying about being attacked in the first place, why didn’t they spend time considering realistic possibilities and responses?
“So what do we do if there’s someone under the car?” Jennifer said.
I looked around with raised eyebrows and waited. “Leave?” said Christie.
I nodded. “If he can’t touch you, he can’t hurt you.”
“Unless he has a gun.”
Either they were unable to listen or they couldn’t connect the dots. “The hit rate of four times in a hundred only applies under usual circumstances. If the assailant is squeezed under a car I imagine the number is even smaller. Also, as we’ve learnt before, you can use almost anything as a weapon. You could throw your groceries at him before you run. A can of tomatoes makes a formidable weapon.” Or a cup of hot coffee. Or a good yell. Or a spray of oven cleaner.
Nina made a rock, paper, scissors hand. “My tomato beats your gun.” They all laughed.
I wasn’t in the mood for it today. “I’ve given you statistics,” I said. “Now you tell me what it is about guns and knives, even toy ones, that makes you all so nervous.”