Gun Church

Seventeen

I went back to writing with a head full of plot ideas and a new determination. The story of Terry McGuinn was going to get told regardless of what Haskell Brown had to say about it. It might never get read, but it was going to get written. There was always the option of sending the manuscript out under a pseudonym, though that was much less appealing to me. And if it came down to it, I could always self-publish the thing; but one way or the other I wanted my name on the book as a kind of Fuck you! to the critics who had eagerly shoveled dirt on my coffin. After the St. Pauli Girl drifted off, Terry McGuinn was all I could think about: McGuinn dealing with a fool like Stan Petrovic … McGuinn in love with a girl like Renee.

McGuinn could sense their eyes on him as he and the lovely Zoe made their way along the street. He’d only spotted the one, the acne-faced boyo, in the bar proper. McGuinn’d kept an eye on the lad. The others, he supposed, must have laid in wait outside Ralph and Jim’s. He was being set up for sure, but for what? If this had been the Brits or Prods, if this had been some of his own come for him, Jesus would have already let go his hand that he might fall to hell. He would have been dead the second he walked out of the pub or into a shadow.

The fair Zoe stopped, turned, and kissed McGuinn hard. Her tongue was dancing inside his mouth, his in hers. It was soon hard to distinguish the one from the other. She stood back, took his hand, and led him down an alley. She stopped only a few meters in, pushed his back against a steel door, kissed him again, then dropped slowly to her knees. Ah, this skirt is a sharp one, McGuinn thought, smart enough to know he would never have followed her to the end of the alley where he would easily be boxed in.

As she undid him, he reached his right arm around behind him to where the Sig was stashed against the small of his back. He worked his fingers around the grip and slid the 9mm up from between his shirt and the waistband of his pants. He kept his gun hand behind him and waited for the ambush to be sprung. He didn’t have but a few seconds to wait.

There were three of them surrounding Zoe and McGuinn, men all: the trouble boy, another lad of pale complexion-as fierce looking as a cripple-winged sparrow-and a well-built fellow with the look of an American footballer. McGuinn recognized the footballer’s face from the slaughterhouse. Didn’t know him by name, but had seen him about. He was the leader, this one, with bright copper eyes and a shrewd mouth.

Oh, and there was something else-each of the lads held 9mm’s aimed squarely at McGuinn’s head and torso.

“Seem’s you lads have caught me with me pants down,” he said to distract them.

It worked, for as they smirked, they relaxed their gun hands just enough to give McGuinn the time he needed. In a blur of lightning quickness, he pulled Zoe up from her knees, spun her around, and put the Sig Sauer to her neck. When he spoke, McGuinn spoke directly to the footballer, ignoring the other two.

“I don’t know what you’re playin’ at, fellas, nor who you’re accustomed to playin’ with, but I’d advise ya to drop yer weapons and let me be on me way. And do me the courtesy, will ya, of not pretendin’ the fair Miss Zoe is not a part of this? It will save us all a lot of bother.”

“There’s three of us,” the footballer said, his voice cool as a late fall evening. “I like our odds.”

“Then ya don’t know shite, lad.”

And with that, McGuinn shoved Zoe at the trouble boy, who stumbled backwards, shot the sparrow in his gun shoulder, and wheeled on the footballer. The footballer placed his automatic on the cobblestones and kicked it away, but as he did, he smiled the most disconcerting smile that McGuinn had ever seen.

“Well done,” he said to McGuinn. “You’ve passed your audition.”

“Now what kind of shite are you talkin’?”

“We’ll be in touch,” said the footballer.

“Like fook you will. Ya aren’t goin’ anywhere.”

“Okay, Irish, have it your way. We’ll wait for the cops and you can explain Joseph’s bullet wound away and tell the cops all about who you are and where you come from.” He smiled that smile again. The footballer had McGuinn and he knew it. “All right, son, take the juicer, yer wounded, the girl, and be gone.”

“No,” said the footballer, “I think we’ll stay. I don’t like being told what to do. Those sirens are getting louder, Irish. If there’s any running to be done, I think you’ll do it.”

One of the ways McGuinn had managed to survive this long was by knowing when defeat was at hand. He didn’t hesitate. He ran, hitching up his trousers as best he could while still holding on to the Sig. He turned to look back. They were nearly gone, but he did catch the briefest glimpse of Zoe. There was a sadness about her as disconcerting as the footballer’s smile.

I was feeling so good about myself, about the chapel, about getting back to work, about the St. Pauli Girl. But when Jim came by for our morning run it was like he was determined to test my resolve, like he wanted to make sure I knew my place.

“We’re not shooting today,” he said almost before he got out of his truck.

“Are you kidding me? After last night, I am totally juiced to-”

“We’re taking the day off. It’s the rule.”

“Your rule?”

“The rules aren’t mine, Kip. Like I told you before when we were at the chapel and I was walking you through things, stuff will get explained to you as you earn the right. Last night you earned a ticket inside the chapel, but not the keys to the kingdom. The chapel isn’t a game to us or a diversion. It’s our thing. I know how excited you are to shoot again and to know everything, but it’s not how it works. Like any discipline, there’s stuff you’ve got to do first before you understand it. You either have to trust me or turn away. It’s your choice.”

He knew I wasn’t going to turn away. I felt like the kite on the end of his string. He was a smart kid who knew a lot about me. Give the junkie a taste and then hold the prize just out of reach. Watch him jump, beg, and crawl. I knew how that worked, but I didn’t like it. Still, I knew there was a single word I could say that would chaff his ass. So I said it:

“But-”

“Your choice.” He didn’t like being challenged, especially by me, and his expression showed it.

I hid my smile from him, but he had another surprise for me.

“There’s something else. Next time we shoot, you have to pick a new gun.”

“I was just getting good with the Beretta.”

“Good isn’t the point,” he said. “The chapel isn’t about simply being competent. It’s not a gun range. The chapel is about the essential nature of the gun and how we can use it to elevate us.”

Christ, I thought, here we were again, back to that metaphysical bullshit. I wasn’t happy about it or about switching guns, but I didn’t want to push back too hard. We didn’t talk much during the run. I knew I was being an ungrateful prick, that without Jim and the St. Pauli Girl and the chapel, I’d still be staring at those seven first lines, but I was disappointed. Oddly, that’s when Jim chose to ask me a favor.

“Kip, um, I’m kind of embarrassed to ask … Oh, forget it.”

Whatever anger I had for Jim seemed to vanish. It was easy for me to forget that in spite of his big talk, Jim was such a kid. He was so tongue-tied, so pathetic trying to ask me whatever it was he wanted to ask me that I felt sorry for him.

“Just ask, Jim.”

“Can I borrow your Porsche this weekend? There’s this girl I used to date who went away to school upstate and I’m going up to see her tonight-”

“Sure, Jim, anytime. Better an old red Porsche than an old F-150.”

He blew out a big breath of relief. “I’ll take good care of her. Fill up the tank and everything.”

“Don’t worry about it. I trust you, Jim.”

I went inside and retrieved my car keys. When I handed them to Jim, he got that Gee-can-I-blow-you look on his face. Instead, he just thanked me and swore I wouldn’t regret lending him my car.

I guess my generosity was good karma because things went wonderfully with Renee that evening. She’d spent the day getting things ready for a special meal to celebrate me losing my gun cherry-her phrase, not mine. Three things I already knew about her: she could cook, she could fuck, and she could shoot. What else could a man ask for in a woman? It had also dawned on me recently that she was a lot smarter than I’d given her credit for. Well, maybe smarter isn’t the right word. She was smart. That much was clear early on, but more than that, the St. Pauli Girl was wise. She was the one who talked politics, and world affairs in a reasoned, nuanced manner. I really enjoyed listening to her. I’d stopped thinking about the world around the time it stopped thinking about me, but later that night Renee wasn’t interested in the state of the world.

“What was Amy like?”

“Where’s this coming from?”

“You can’t blame me for being curious,” she said. “Do you think about her?”

“Funny, I used to think about her all the time. Less so since … since September. At the end there, our marriage was just a massive compound fracture. That’s when things were really bad for me.”

“Bad with her?”

“Bad with everything. I was getting kicked to the curb by my publisher. Not that I didn’t deserve to lose my contract. At least when Amy cut me loose, she told me to my face.”

“What did your publisher do?”

“The liquidations manager sent me a letter offering me my novels at a heavily discounted rate before they sold off the remaining stock to clear space in the warehouse. Nice, huh? Not a word from my publisher or my editor. Not a ‘thank you’ or a ‘fuck you.’ Not even ‘goodbye.’ It was like getting a Dear John letter from your fiancee’s third cousin.”

Renee looked hurt on my behalf. “How could they do that to you?”

“I did it to me. Then I called my agent and she told me what I already knew. She’s tough, Meg, and didn’t sugar coat it. No velvet glove on her iron fist. I’d made her life pretty miserable with my bullshit. That’s what I do to women, I make them miserable. Maybe you should run.”

She ignored that last part. The St. Pauli Girl no longer seemed much in the mood for talk after that. Both of us were tired and after dinner, we went to bed. Neither one of us slept very long and for all the right reasons. In fact, we spent the entire weekend sleeping very little and in our own very little world.