After his family went to bed that night, Vaughn climbed the stairs to the study above the garage and stayed awake for a long time, keeping a vigil, staring out at the street, looking for any sign of the assailant.
At three A.M. or so he fell asleep with the Memory prominently sitting in his thoughts.
And the next morning he awoke with it.
Vaughn forced himself to relax and, even though he was groggy from lack of sleep, he made breakfast for the family, spent a cheerful half-hour with them, and then headed off to work.
But the good mood didn’t last. The Memory kept coming back. He replayed the incident a hundred times that day. He regretted not fighting back, not grabbing the man and wrestling him to the ground, pinning him there until the cops arrived. He felt he was a coward, a failure.
He was so distracted he missed the lunch he’d set up to woo the big client that his rival was after.
Over the next six weeks things grew worse. Several times on the way to work he spotted cars that might have been the assailant’s, and skidded off the highway, desperate to escape. Two weeks ago he’d nearly slammed into a woman’s SUV in a grocery store parking lot while staring at a car behind him. And another time, leaving a local bar, he’d seen a man in sunglasses across the street; Vaughn believed he looked like the assailant. Panicked, the businessman leapt back inside the bar, knocking into several people and spilling drinks. He nearly tripped down the back stairs of the bar as he fled.
All of these incidents turned out to be false alarms-the men he’d seen were not the attacker-but he couldn’t shake the fear that consumed him.
Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. One morning Vaughn canceled a meeting at work and drove to a building outside of town, a place he’d found in the Yellow Pages, a gun shop and shooting range. There he bought a 9mm semiautomatic Glock pistol and enrolled in the course that would give him a Class A firearm permit, allowing him to carry a concealed weapon.
Today, at lunch, he was going to complete the course and get the license. From now on he could carry the gun wherever he wanted to.
Jamie Feldon woke up at nine on Friday, well rested and ready to get started on his new life.
Unlike the typical evening from his past, last night he’d slept in his bed, under clean sheets, wearing clean pajamas, and, even though he’d had a beer with dinner, he’d gone to sleep sober. He’d also stuck to his rule of only two cigarettes for the entire evening. He brushed his teeth for a full minute.
Now, eating a modest breakfast, he looked over the notes he’d taken about Charles Vaughn. The businessman lived in Lincoln. But Jamie wanted to see him without his family around, so he’d Googled the name and found him mentioned on some computer industry websites. He learned where the man worked, an Internet company about ten miles away.
Jamie decided to take something along with him, and after some thinking he had a brainstorm: Champagne. Vaughn, he recalled, was a man who dressed well and would probably have good taste.
After washing his breakfast dishes, Jamie jumped in his car and headed off to the nearest wine store, figuring he’d spend some serious money on the bottle. You can’t scrimp when you’re working on a new life.
“Good shooting,” the man said.
He was a well-toned fifty-year-old with cropped gray hair. Tendons and muscles were prominent in his arms and neck. His name was Larry Bolling, and he was the senior instructor at Patriot Guns and Shooting Range, where Charles Vaughn had been taking his lessons.
Vaughn pulled his ear protectors off. “What?”
“Good shooting, I said.”
“Thanks.” Vaughn put the black semiautomatic pistol down on the bench in front of him as the instructor reeled the target back in. The eight shots were grouped tight in the silhouette’s chest.
The shooting wasn’t competition-level but he was satisfied.
The idea that Charles Vaughn would be spending any time at all thinking about grain weight of bullets and the advantages of a SIG-Sauer safety (a thumb lever) versus a Glock (a second trigger) was hilarious. Here was a man who made his living with credit reports and product-spec sheets, and yet he was spending his lunch hour shooting at images of Bin Laden and John Q. Thug.
But even more ironic was that Charles Vaughn had turned into a pretty damn good shot.
At first he’d held the gun stiffly, in a way that seemed to mimic what he’d seen actors do in the movies.
“Now, sir,” Larry Bolling had explained at the first lesson, “you might not want to do that.”
“What’s that?”
“Hold your weapon that way.”
“Okay. Sure. Why not?”
“Because when you pull the trigger, the slide-See that part there-is gonna fly back at, oh, about a thousand miles an hour, and it’ll take a portion of your thumb with it. What you do is just rest one hand on the other. Sorta like this.”
“This?”
“That’s right. Now let’s go put some holes in a target.”
Well, at first he hadn’t put a lot of holes in anything but the bullet trap at the back of the range. But today he’d been rewarded for his skill.
Good shooting…
After the lunch-hour lesson today, Vaughn dismantled the gun, then cleaned, reassembled, and reloaded it.
He found Bolling in the front office, hunched over some papers. He motioned Vaughn to take a chair.
“So, I get my ticket?” the businessman asked.
“Not quite yet, sir.”
Vaughn frowned. He’d passed all the tests with perfect scores. He’d also passed the background checks. He’d attended all of the video and live-instruction sessions, had done all his homework.
“I thought that was it.”
“Nope,” Bolling explained. “There’s one more thing that I include in my classes.”
“Okay, what’s that?”
“You need to answer a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why do you want a carry permit? You never told me.”
“I’m a wealthy businessman. I’m concerned about my family. There’s a lot of crime in Boston.”
“That’s all true-at least I can attest to the last one of those, and the other two are no doubt right, as well. But why don’t you tell me the real reason?”
Vaughn could only laugh. He shook his head and explained about the attack on St. Patrick’s Day.
“Okay, sir, I understand that was upsetting. But that’s not a good reason to carry a weapon.”
“But he was dangerous.”
“Let me ask: That was six weeks ago, give or take; you seen hide or hair of that man since then?”