Gun Church

Fifty-One

As I took slow, steady paces approaching the.45, a hundred things went through my head. Chief among them was that Jim was fucking with me, testing me. Why, of the four handguns he had, did he throw me the one I was least comfortable with? It wasn’t coincidence. I’d lately grown very skeptical of coincidence. No, there was a reason he’d thrown me that gun. I only wished the fuck I knew what it was.

“Go ahead and pick it up,” he called to me when I was standing directly in front of it. “Pick it up!”

I kept my eyes fixed on him as I knelt down and placed my palm around the gun’s grips. I rocked it in my hand to reacquaint myself with its heft. The design was a century old and it was a pretty heavy weapon. I just held it, pointing the muzzle at the ground. I had no intention of provoking him.

“So, it’s going to be me and you,” I said.

He didn’t answer directly. “Somebody’s going to walk out of here alive today. Who that is depends on what you do in the next few minutes.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Again, he didn’t answer. Instead, he bent at the knees and placed the Glock and the Colt on the ground to his left. He took the.38 out of his jeans and dropped it by the other handguns.

I didn’t move. I kept reminding myself that with Jim, nothing was as it seemed.

“What are you waiting for, Kip? Take off the safety. It’s loaded. See for yourself. Go ahead. Do it, Kip, but hurry up. Moreland’s lost a lot of blood and time’s wasting. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock … ”

I undid the safety and racked the slide. A bullet ejected, spinning in mid-air and then, hitting a rock, tumbled harmlessly in the direction of the shed.

“If I go for any of these,” he said, gesturing at the guns at his feet, “you’d be able to blow a hole in me before I even got close.”

“Probably.”

He smiled. I really hated Jim’s smiles. “You were asking about how you determine who gets out of here alive,” he said. “This is how. You have the edge now and you better use it. You won’t have it again, Kip, not ever.”

“Shoot him for chrissakes!” Amy shouted, jumping to her feet. “Shoot the crazy motherfucker. Peter’s dying. What are you waiting for?”

I looked to Renee for a sign, for some indication of what I should do, but she kept mute and noncommittal and that scared me. Did she know something that she couldn’t say or wouldn’t say?

Just as I put my finger on the trigger, Jim grabbed Amy by the hair much the way Stan Petrovic had done to Renee that last night in the chapel. He twisted it so hard that Amy fell to her knees. She was clawing at him, flailing at his legs. When one of her wild punches landed too close to his groin, he tugged her hair harder, snapping her head back. She stopped flailing and screamed in pain.

“Shoot!” he said.

I raised the muzzle, aiming at the center of his mass.

“Come on, Kip. Amy’s right, what are you waiting for? You’re not very good with the Browning, but you’re good enough. You couldn’t miss me from here … or could you? What if I moved suddenly?” Mocking me, he feinted his shoulders left, then right. “What if you flinch? What if the wind comes up?”

“Shoot him! Shoot him!” Amy was unraveling. “Shoot him, please. Get this over with. I can’t take it anymore. Shoot him, for chrissakes! I don’t care if you hit me.”

Jim said, “But Kip does care. Don’t you, Kip?”

I lowered the gun. “Sorry, I’m not playing that game.” I put the safety on and tossed the Browning back to him. “You just wanted to see if I would shoot, whether I would risk Amy’s life. Besides, the rest of the clip is either empty or loaded with blanks. You chambered one live round as a decoy. Well, I’m a little bit brighter than Stan was, Jim. I won’t let you screw with me the way you did him. What was supposed to happen? I pull the trigger, you get a big laugh, and then what? You pick up the Glock and pump one into my kneecap?”

“You’re a smart man,” he said, dragging Amy with him to collect the Browning. “That was one of the things I admired about you and your writing. Your protagonists were really smart. They could figure out all the angles, but by the end of the book they were always victims of their own overthinking. They were too smart for their own good. Like in that chapter from Flashing Pandora when Kant schemes with Harper Marx to win back Pandora. He doomed himself. You’re just like that, Kip, too smart for your own good. You should have taken the shot when you had it. He who hesitates is dead. Blanks? Empty clip? Let’s see.”

My guts churned as Jim pushed Amy face-first to the ground, turned to his right, and, without a second’s hesitation, put two bullets into Moreland: one in the chest, the second shot blowing off part of his skull. Blood, shards of bone, and clumps of tissue sprayed all over Renee and the shed. Renee fell back, horrified. She furiously wiped the tissue and blood off her face. Amy raised herself up, turned to see the damage, and completely freaked. She was crying madly, pulling at her own hair. As she crawled over to Moreland, her hands slipped on his blood and she toppled forward onto his body. Her face was covered in blood and viscera.

“Now it’s empty, Kip,” Jim said, the slide locked in the open position. He hurled the empty Browning over the shed and toward the falls. “Like I said, too damned smart for your own good.”