Terrified, Will stepped back, a reflex.
But then, in the next second, he felt something he’d never felt before. His fright, his fear of the maddened raccoon, abruptly turned into outrage, a kind of indignation, an anger that this beast had dared to launch at him.
And Will leapt forward and swung the shovel with a strength he didn’t know he had. It clanged against the oil-stained concrete of the garage floor. Then he swung again, with a force even greater, and it hit the raccoon in the head.
The raccoon screamed, and a spray of blood spurted into the air. The blade of the shovel, Will saw, had sliced into the creature’s head or neck.
Yet it was still alive, and it kept screeching and hissing, its claws flailing around, gouging the air.
Will lifted the shovel to take another whack, but the raccoon’s body lifted along with it, as if it had attached itself. He was disgusted and horrified, but his heart was still skittering along and he had superpowers. He slammed the shovel’s blade against the floor, and then something repulsive happened: the creature’s head came off its body, rolling a few inches away, into a little greenish puddle of transmission fluid.
He had beheaded the animal. Gagging, he dropped the handle. It clattered on the concrete.
Clay took a few tentative steps and said, “Cool!”
At supper, Clay told the story of Will’s heroism, and Will kept himself from making fun of the way Clay screamed like a silly little kid. Will shrugged modestly, said it was no big deal, even though it had been the most intense thing he had ever been through.
And he never forgot what he’d learned that day, about the way his deep terror of the raccoon had transmuted into outrage and bravery and a wild, intoxicating fury.
And about how a frightened person could become a brave one.
60
The man Will Abbott hired to give him a gun lesson was a mountain of a man, a retired DC cop with a deep, rumbling voice that seemed to vibrate the card table they were sitting at.
“You ever shoot a gun before?” the man asked. He was a black man in his sixties with a large domed head and close-cropped white hair.
Will nodded. “One lesson, once. A while ago. So let’s start from the beginning.”
“First thing is, treat all guns as if they’re loaded.”
The cop, named Joe Randall, shoved a revolver across the table at Will. Joe Randall was an employee of this gun range, an indoor range in northeast, close to the National Arboretum.
“Go ahead, pick it up.”
Will considered interrupting his rap and telling the guy to speed it up. He didn’t want to learn safety and handling and all that crap; he wanted to learn how to shoot to kill someone.
He knew that if he focused on logistics, the how-to, he could distract himself from his terror of getting caught. And getting caught was unthinkable. There would be no explaining himself without dragging in the boss.
Will picked up the gun as if it were loaded and he planned to kill Joe Randalclass="underline" he gripped it in his right hand and poked a finger into the trigger.
“No!” Randall said. “Jesus, no. Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. You have no idea if that thing’s loaded or not!”
“You’re right,” Will said meekly, and set it back down on the table. “But can you teach me on a semiautomatic pistol instead of a revolver?”
“You start with the alphabet. The basics. A revolver is more basic.”
“Okay, sure. You’re the boss.” Will said it lightly, but it sounded off, condescending. He knew he had that tendency, which he’d have to moderate if he was going to make it to the big white house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the center of the universe, as far as he was concerned.
“You want to learn on a pistol, I’ll teach you on a pistol. But for the license you got to know both.”
“I understand.”
Randall slid another gun over to Will, a Smith & Wesson nine millimeter. He taught Will to load bullets, which he called “shells,” into the magazine. Will paid close attention. He figured he’d have to do this just once, anyway. He’d figure it out when he had to. He wanted only to make the shot, make it once, kill the guy, and get out. Without being connected to it.
Will learned how to load the magazine into the magazine well, which was in the handle of the pistol. How to grip the slide overhand and pull it back and let it go. That was how you inserted the first cartridge. Will was unclear about the difference between a shell and a cartridge and a bullet and a round; Joe Randall seemed to use them interchangeably.
Will started paying closer attention now, even though his mind was, at the same time, thinking about a couple of e-mails he had to write. Work stuff. He felt bad leaving work as early as he had, at five, and he knew he’d have to spend at least an hour at the computer at home before he went to bed. And he knew that Jen would want him to take over with Travis the second his feet touched home. Sometimes she’d almost shove the baby at him, a live grenade.
“You got me?” Randall said. “You just inserted the first cartridge into the chamber. Your gun is now loaded, right? It’s loaded. You are packing heat. Keep that thing pointed in a safe direction, and do not point this at anything you don’t want to blow clean away. Right?”
“Right.”
“Point that thing downrange.”
Will fumbled for a moment.
“That way.” Randall pushed the muzzle of the gun away. “Every time you fire, this pistol ejects the old round and loads a new one until your magazine is empty.”
“Okay.”
Will sat up straighter. He was excited. His phone, in his coat pocket, rang. He let it go, even though he suspected it might be Susan. He wasn’t all that far from Capitol Hill; he could return to the office quickly if he had to.
Randall put out both hands, palms up. “May I have your weapon, please?”
Will handed the gun back, carefully pointing it off to the side.
Randall did something complicated and quick to the gun, and suddenly he’d taken it apart, or at least separated the business part of the pistol from the magazine full of bullets, or cartridges, or whatever.
“I want you to load the next magazine,” Randall said.
“Okay,” Will said. “But really I need to learn how to aim halfway accurately and, you know, shoot. Actually shoot.”
Will felt sick to his stomach all of a sudden. Joe Randall was a retired policeman, for God’s sake. Which he hadn’t known until he arrived at the gun range this afternoon. He would never have knowingly taken shooting lessons from an ex-cop. That was just asking to get arrested. “I’m going hunting with my brother-in-law,” he said. “I just need to not make a total fool of myself.” He chuckled.
“Then you want to learn on long guns! I can teach you that, but not here, it’s gotta be outside, and—”
“I just need to learn how to shoot. You know, hit the target.” He pointed to a battered old paper target pinned to the wall, a black silhouette of a man with arms at his sides. In the middle of the man’s chest was a neat round hole, and around it were decreasing numbers in concentric oval rings. The hole was probably where ten bullets had punched through, one right on top of the other. A bull’s-eye.
“How far you gonna be from the target?” Randall asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe five or ten feet?”
“That close? What are you hunting?”
“I–I have no idea. Game, probably.” He didn’t know if game meant birds or all animals. “Just need to learn how to shoot.”
Will’s mind wandered briefly. He thought about Gary Sapolsky’s flushed face, the way he carried that sad little box of his earthly possessions. How bad he felt about it, but how, at the same time, proud. He had set this in motion skillfully. Gary had to go. The FBI and the NSA were probably already combing through Gary’s articles for his college student newspaper, whatever the Wesleyan paper was called, looking for a radical anti-American bias. That was the thing about federal investigations: they went on forever, moved lumberingly, and never seemed to end.