No one was allowed inside, not even the few men his father counted as friends. But Gideon was always standing nearby, waiting for his father to enter or exit, in order to glimpse the mysterious interior for the brief moment when the door was open. Day after day, Gideon inhaled the sharp smell of Hoppe’s No. 9 bore solvent that wafted through the open door and peered inside until he’d memorized every inch of the room. Its walls were mahogany paneled, decorated with the mounted heads of deer and elk and even a brown bear. The guns were lined up in a long glass-fronted cabinet—shotguns first, then rifles, oldest to the left, newest to the right, starting with a twenty-bore Holland & Holland hammer gun, and ending with an AR-15 chambered in .223. A wooden rifle cleaning rest, worn with age, sat on the spotless workbench next to a reloading press.
Other than the occasional addition of a new firearm, nothing ever changed in the room. Gideon’s father was a man of rigid habits and fixed ideas. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Any variation from routine drove him into an immediate and merciless fury. You didn’t knock on the door—or even make loud noises—when Father was in the gun room.
Gideon was given his first firearm, a Marlin .22, when he was five years old. He learned early that one thing, and one thing only, could ensure his father’s affection. That one thing was good shooting. When you went to the range with Father, you didn’t mess around, you didn’t talk, you didn’t smile, you didn’t shuffle your feet. You simply loaded and fired. With precision and accuracy.
From the moment he touched the Marlin .22, Gideon knew he had a gift. Trap, skeet, air pistol, bench rest, offhand, prone, practical handgun shooting—no matter. He had it—that magical trick of eye and brain and finger that allowed him to aim a gun and hit what he wanted to hit. Kill was the word that Father used.
For the first three years, his father taught him. After that, all his father had to do was man the spotting scope and let the boy work. “Good kill, son,” he’d whisper. “Good kill.”
Tillman, on the other hand, struggled to keep up on the range. Compared to any other kid, he was excellent and could drive tacks with a rifle or run clays set after set. But he did it through gritted teeth, flinching under his father’s perpetual scrutiny. Every near miss, every stray shot earned him an ear-ringing slap on the back of the head, a pinch on the inside of his upper arm, or—worst of all—a few cutting words. These ranged from “useless fool” to “you’re no son of mine, boy.” Always whispered softly. Even at his most violent, Father never raised his voice.
But the violence was always there. When the dark rage came on him, he struck out at anyone within reach. Anyone except Gideon. While their mother sometimes absorbed his wrath, Tillman was always their father’s main target. It had taken a long time for Gideon to see it, but Tillman hadn’t absorbed the belittling and the beating and the abuse by accident. As the older of the two, Tillman had rou220±€tinely stood between their father and Gideon—deflecting his anger, absorbing his blows, protecting the younger boy. In fact, Tillman had been his protector throughout his childhood—whether it was from bullies at school or opposing linemen on the football field. Thanks to Tillman, nobody messed with Gideon Davis. People came to understand that if you put a late hit on Gideon Davis, when the next play rolled around, Tillman Davis was going to cut you off at the knees.
It was only as he grew older—and increasingly estranged from his brother—that he began to understand what that protection had cost Tillman, how much pain he had absorbed on Gideon’s behalf. The realization came only slowly and grudgingly. But eventually Gideon realized that only through Tillman’s self-sacrifice had Gideon been given the space to grow into the man he had become.
It was a debt that Gideon knew he had never adequately repaid.
There had been a time when Gideon’s forebears owned half of Yancey County, Virginia, a rural county to the west of Washington. But a succession of poor business decisions had stripped the family of their land, until Gideon’s father had been left with nothing but their house and the small plot of land around it that he hadn’t sold off. In the early 1970s, Gideon’s father sold what was left and invested the proceeds in a final speculative venture, which quickly failed.
The week before Gideon’s fourteenth birthday, the entire thing had caved in.
The day the bank seized Father’s office, Father came home, parked his Cadillac outside the house, unlocked the gun room, took out the old Remington 10, walked into the bedroom, and shot Gideon’s mother in the chest. She was a beautiful woman, and being a vain man who prized her face as one might prize a good setter or a matched pair of Purdeys, he had not wanted her spoiled. Then he went into the gun room and ended his own life.
Gideon came running after he heard the first shot and found his mother lying in a blooming pool of blood. His desperate attempt to keep her alive was interrupted by the familiar sound of the door slamming shut on his father’s secret room. Then Gideon heard another shot.
When Sheriff Wright came, he found the gunroom unlocked. He just turned the knob and walked in. Gideon’s father lay dead on the floor, the back half of his head gone. There had been no investigation, no securing the crime scene, no bits of evidence collected and stuck in numbered plastic bags. After all, it was obvious what had happened. So the sheriff had simply called the funeral home and had the bodies carted away.
A few weeks later, when he and Tillman finally returned to the house to gather their personal possessions, Gideon found himself piling his father’s guns on a blanket, dragging them down to the pond behind the house, and throwing them into the water, one by one. The Holland & Holland, the matched pair of Purdeys, the Weatherby double rifle, the Kimber 1911, the Luger, the K-frame Smith, the Model 70—the only things his father had ever really loved. And now all Gideon cared about was knowing that none of those guns could ever be fired again.
After he was finished, he walked to the front porch steps and sat down next to Tillman and said, “Why do you think he did it?”
Tillman snorted but said nothing.
That was it. Since that day, neither of them had ever said another, ±€r word about what happened. And since that day, Gideon Davis had never touched a firearm.
The AK-47 is not an especially precise rifle. But in the right hands it can cut a man in half, and Gideon could tell that the man shooting at him knew how to handle his weapon. The next burst would take his head off. So he did the only thing he could, bounding from his hiding place and sprinting for the river, hoping that his movement would throw off the shooter’s aim.
In front of him were three turbaned young men on the quay. One held his gun by the barrel, the butt hanging over his shoulder. The other two had leaned their guns against creosote-smeared mooring posts.
Gideon had no choice except to keep going.
Hearing the gunfire, the men whipped around and saw him, before noticing the man from the alley pursuing him and firing at him. None of the bullets found Gideon, but a stray slug hit one of the three jihadis, opening his neck in a spray of blood and gristle. Before the two surviving jihadis even had a chance to level their weapons, Gideon blasted between them and rocketed off the quay and into the brown water. He swam underwater as far from the quay as his lungs would allow until finally he had to come up for air.
The moment he cleared the surface, he heard sharp snapping noises all around him. Bullets, slapping into the water. Some of them ricocheted off into the air and some tore down into the water.
He turned and looked back. He was about forty yards out. Gideon counted seven turbaned men gathering at the edge of the water, blasting away, as he sucked in as much air as his lungs would hold and dove again, this time heading for cover behind an ancient teak river barge.