Many Blessings

Chapter Twenty-Six

Sachi waited until Ellis was in the car with her Sunday afternoon and on the way to the skeet fields to ask it. He was glad she’d had enough tact to wait to ask. “Spill it. How come Tarzan looked like he was about to shit bricks when I offered to let him come with?”

“How much did Mandaline tell you about us?”

Her expression turned wary even though she didn’t look away from the road. “Why?”

“Did she tell you Brad was in the Army?”

“Yeah, he was injured.” She thought for a beat. “Ah.”

“His PTSD isn’t as bad as it used to be before the motorcycle accident. Part of his new superpowers,” he joked. “But he doesn’t want anything to do with guns. He knows about my concealed carry permit and that I have one, but he wants nothing to do with them.”

“Did he have to kill anyone?” she quietly asked.

“He doesn’t like to talk about that, but I think the answer is yes. He saw a lot of people die, including some he had to kill.”

“Then I’ll make sure to remember not to tease him about not wanting to shoot skeet.”

“I appreciate that. I’m sure he will, too.”

She looked over at him when they hit a red light. “I might be a snarky, ball-busting bitch at times, but even I have my limits.” She gave him a playful smile.

They reached the skeet field about ten minutes later. It was situated on a large parcel of land bordered by woods he suspected were part of the state forest. As she’d predicted, there were only five other cars in the large parking area.

“Why skeet?” Ellis asked her as he followed her to the office. “Why not pistols or rifles?”

He didn’t miss the way her jaw tightened. “It’s fun,” she said, although her voice sounded a little too tense. “I enjoy it. Been doing it since I was a kid. I’ll be twenty-seven this summer, so over fourteen years.” She turned and flashed him a too-bright grin. “Don’t need a concealed carry permit for a skeet gun.”

“That seems to be a running theme with you. Why is that? Why don’t you get a carry permit?”

She stopped so suddenly he had to side-step to avoid plowing into her. She looked down at her feet for a moment before looking up at him again. He had seen anger on her face, and good humor.

But he wasn’t sure he wanted to try to label the expression she now wore. Somewhere between rage and terror.

“Did Mandaline ever tell you about me? About how I came to live in Florida?” she softly asked, not a hint of snark or humor in her voice.

He shook his head.

She took a deep breath and looked around. “I guess lawyers are used to keeping their yaps shut. Come on.” She abruptly changed direction and headed toward a nearby picnic table, which sat in the shade of a makeshift shelter covered by a tarp.

She sat straddling one of the seats. She waited until he’d sat across from her to start talking. “Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a girl from New Jersey. She was born and raised there, until she was thirteen and her airplane mechanic father decided he’d had enough of The Garden State. Despite his daughter’s objections and tantrums, he packed his wife and daughter up and moved them to Buttfuck Acres, Montana.”

She’d clasped her hands together on the table next to her, her thumbs templed. “Middle school in a hick town sucks when you’re a preteen. Especially when your dad is Jewish and your mom is a first-generation Japanese American. Whatever mean nickname you can think of, the girl was called that by her classmates, and then some. The half-breed girl from ‘Jew Jersey.’”

She looked down again for a moment before continuing. “Wasn’t a really big town. Middle school and junior and high school grades stuck together in the same place. So that just added to the girl’s misery. This went on for a couple of years. The girl had the same social studies teacher for those years. She taught multiple grades. She saw how alone the girl was and sat her down to have a talk with her. Mrs. Ellington. Junior skeet team coach. Asked her to come out that afternoon with her for practice.

“Now, the girl’s parents were dead set against it at first. But the teacher was persuasive, and the girl begged and pleaded until they felt like crap and gave in. Long story short for that section of our tale, the girl loved skeet, and proved to be quite good at it. Which was a good thing, because despite being half Jewish and half Asian, she sucked at both math and science.

“This, you might say, was a good thing, right? The skeet, I mean, not the math-science suckage. Something to do, a team sport, a way to get involved and fit in. And you’d be sooo fucking wrong. Because on this junior skeet team was one Jacob Clary. His father, Jackson Clary, was a Buttfuck Acres, Montana, deputy.

“Jacob was a junior going on senior, on the football team, all the girls loved him, all the boys wanted to be him or secretly fuck him, yadda yadda yadda. Since he was the son of a deputy, he was usually the one getting everyone else into trouble and coming out clean while everyone else wallowed in his shit. Right? Following me?”

Ellis nodded. “Yeah,” he quietly said, his gut tightening as he suspected where this was heading.

“Jacob was also the only kid up until that point to shoot a clean hundred. Some of the other, older kids could shoot twenty-fives on the odd round, but Jacob had the highest overall scores.” She smiled, but it held no humor. “Until guess when?”

Ellis didn’t need any psychic skills. “Until the preteen girl from Jew Jersey started shooting?”

She nodded. “First day out, the girl, who’d never picked up a shotgun in her life, shot in three rounds a fourteen, an eighteen, and a twenty-one, in that order.”

“I take it those are good scores?”

“For a beginner, especially a kid, those are fucking amazing scores. There are adults who can’t even break twenty after months of shooting, much less their first freaking day on the field.

“As you can well guess, Jacob took a little ribbing from his asshole buddies, that here was a girl, a city girl, a girl younger than him and far less experienced, shooting like she’d been born with an over-under in her hands and teethed on 12-gauge shells.”

“He didn’t like it I take it?”

“It cheesed him right the fuck off. Especially when the girl came back every practice and improved her scores. And her father, who was an airplane mechanic making decent money working on bush pilot planes and wilderness guide tour planes, bought her a brand-spanking-new, top-of-the-line Remington 12-guage over-under skeet gun so she’d have her own. A nicer gun than any of the other kids on the team had or could likely ever hope to afford. Some of the kids didn’t even have their own guns, but her dad wanted her to have the best he could afford for her because, for once, she’d quit acting like an unholy fucking brat and was finally enjoying Buttfuck Acres, Montana.”

Ellis smiled. “A bribe?”

“More like ensuring parental sanity. Even bought the girl a full reloader setup, which really made her a cool kid with most of the kids on the team.”

“Except Jacob.”

“You catch on quick, chief.” She looked down at her hands again. “The girl was on the team six months when she won her first state juniors competition,” she quietly said. “Jacob choked. Windy day, he missed two birds in one round, high house four and low six. His father was not pleased.”

“Asshole perfectionist dad?”

“Oh, yeah. With his sights on one day running for the office of sheriff of Buttfuck Acres.”

She looked across the grounds to where someone with a small front end loader was racking cases of clays in a trap house. Her voice turned quiet. “Small town. So unlike New Jersey. The quintessential small town where no one locks their houses or their cars, the one stoplight in the town permanently blinks yellow, and the only likely traffic jam is if someone’s moving stock from one field to another across a county road.

“The girl actually grew to love where she lived. New school year started. She ignored the assholes at school, because at least on the skeet team, she had a place. The others looked up to her, even older kids. Kids were asking her for pointers instead of Jacob, asking her to pull for them if the coach wasn’t there, or they wanted an extra practice, asking her to spot them to see what they were doing wrong, asking her to help them reload or pattern their guns or whatever.”

“Jacob wasn’t cool anymore.”

“Not with those kids he wasn’t.” She went quiet for a moment. He didn’t interrupt her, because despite his certainty what was coming, he hoped he was wrong.

Hoped the ending of the story would turn out better than he suspected it would.

“The girl’s mom went to work as a receptionist at a dentist’s office in a town a few miles away. She got off work fairly early, usually home by three or so. On that day, she’d stopped by the grocery store first. So when the girl got home from school after two o’clock, and it wasn’t a practice day, she had the house all to herself.

“Someone knocked on the door. Girl went to go answer it, found it was Jacob himself. He pushed his way in and…” Sachi took a deep, shuddering breath. “You’re an attorney. You connect the dots.”

He nodded.

“The girl had tried to run. Made it as far as the dining room in the back of the house. It was right at the end of the attack that the mother showed up, but Jacob had been too busy…doing his thing that he hadn’t heard her.”

Sachi’s face paled. “She started screaming,” she quietly said. “Dropped the groceries she had in her arms and started beating on his head. The mother was a tiny woman. He shoved her against a wall and started hitting her. They both fell to the floor, him on top of her. He was three of her. He had his hands around her neck to choke her. Wouldn’t stop.”

She took another deep breath. Her gaze dropped to her hands. “The girl picked up the first thing she laid her hands on, which was a large can of baked beans that had fallen from the grocery bags.”

Her hands clenched into trembling fists as her voice dropped to a whisper. “And she hit him in the back of the head as hard as she could to get him off her mom. Again. And again. And again. Even when he rolled off the mom and his arms and legs started jerking, she hit him again. And again. And again. And she screamed. Then finally the can was so dented and slick from blood that she lost it and it rolled across the floor.”

She wouldn’t look up, her face tortured agony. “The girl finally managed to call 911. Guess who the responding officer was?”

“Oh, shit.”

She closed her eyes for a minute. “Autopsy said Jacob broke the mother’s neck. Jacob’s father tried to make it look like we…like the girl and the mother had attacked his son, who was still alive, by the way. But the EMTs who responded immediately called for more law enforcement backup. Fortunately, they could tell what really happened. Especially when they caught him in the act of trying to choke the girl.”

When she looked up, Ellis saw her blue eyes were too bright, as if unshed tears lurked near the surface. “Jacob lingered on life support for nearly a month. The father was fired and brought up on an array of various charges, including assault, attempted murder, all those lovely things. Jacob’s mother finally had life support pulled because he was brain dead and being kept alive on a ventilator. Jacob’s mother went home after she did it and took a hot bath, a full bottle of Valium, a quart of vodka, and a couple of razor blades across her wrists. People say it was a moving double funeral, as far as those things go.”

Her gaze drifted past him, to a distant point in time. “At Jackson Clary’s trial, the attorney tried to plead temporary insanity as his defense. That he just snapped when he arrived on the scene. Fortunately, the jury saw right through it.”

She returned her gaze to his. “The girl’s father moved them to a different town, across the state line to Idaho. He petitioned a family law judge to let her change her name and seal the files, because there were rumors that maybe friends of Jackson Clary’s might try something. So she took on her mother’s first name, and her paternal grandmother’s last name. She cut her hair short and died it blonde and her dad enrolled her in a private Catholic school of all places, this non-practicing, half-breed girl from Jew Jersey. She gave up shooting skeet with a team, but once she was old enough to get her driver’s license, she’d drive an hour away to a skeet field in Spokane and shoot several rounds at least once a week.

“And the day she turned eighteen, which was a month after she graduated, her father gave her the money from her mother’s life insurance settlement and she bolted for literally the farthest state she thought she could go and still be in the continental US. She packed up her truck, her gun, and her reloader, and boogied with her father’s blessings.”

“And that’s how she ended up in Florida?”

She nodded. “Yep.” She sat up straighter and picked at her cuticles. Her voice returned to normal, albeit a little more subdued in tone. “Enrolled in community college to get an AA and worked several jobs until she…I got my skeet instructor certification. In the meanwhile, I developed the other gifts I knew I had, the less profitable metaphysical ones, and eventually ended up on Julie’s doorstep one day while I was still in school. She took one look at me and hired me on the spot even though I was only in there to look at Tarot decks. She insisted. Who was I to refuse her?” She sadly smiled. “I loved that witch. So, so much.” She sighed. “Got to the point where I quit looking over my shoulder, quit dying my hair, let it grow out again.” She shook her head. “Ironically, most of my ‘gifts’ came out after the attack. Julie’s theory was maybe during the choking, or when Jacob hit me…” Her voice trailed off as she studied her hands. “Something taken away, something given.”

“How long will Jackson Clary be in jail?”

She snorted. “They paroled the fucker six months ago. ‘Compassionate release’ they said. He was supposedly diagnosed with inoperable cancer. My dad sent me an e-mail about it. He doesn’t send me anything by snail mail unless he drives a ways to send it.”

“He stayed out there?”

“Lots of small airports, bush pilots, lots of work for a certified aircraft mechanic out there in that region if you know your stuff and can get planes back in the air fast.”

He let the silence lay between them for a moment, broken only by the sound of a dog barking off in the distance and cars over on US 41. “But why no concealed carry permit? I’d think you of all people would want one.”

“I can’t risk them running my prints and background check and it tripping a flag somewhere about my past, in case he or one of his asshole buddies is still in a vengeful mood. He might be a convicted felon, but he had a lot of friends.”

“Don’t you think that’s paranoid?”

A sad smile curved her lips. “I did naïve once, chief. I won’t do it again. Ever. Kind of had it beaten out of me.”

Sachi led him to the pro shop. An older man stood behind the counter. He smiled when she walked in. “There’s my favorite instructor.”

Ellis was a little surprised to see Sachi look…embarrassed? “Hi, Bob. He’s a total noob. Can you get him set up with paperwork, charge him for two rounds, get him a vest, and the Lanber twelve-gauge rental gun? He’s got ear and eye protection of his own. I need to hit the john.”

“Shells?” Bob asked.

“Nope. I’ve got reloads.”

“You pulling for him?”

“Yeah, if you’ll get me the key to the shed to get the remote. Unless it’s already out there on field one.”

“I think it’s out there. Alex was out there earlier.”

“Cool.” She headed around the corner.

Another man appeared from a back office as Ellis was filling out standard liability waiver paperwork. “Was that Sachi?” he asked Bob.

“Yeah.”

The man turned to Ellis. “Ah, so you did catch up with her, I take it?”

“Excuse me?”

The man looked confused. “John said there was a man in here earlier looking for Sachi. You aren’t him?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Sachi’s a friend. She works for my girlfriend. She offered to bring me out and let me try skeet.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Bob looked at the man. “Didn’t John take a message for her?”

“Guy didn’t want to leave one.” He shrugged. “I suppose he’ll come back or call. John said he took a card.” He looked at Ellis. “She’s our most popular instructor. People usually have to wait weeks for her to have an opening.”

“Really?”

Bob snorted. “Heck, yeah. And the juniors love her. The kids would lynch us if she wasn’t their coach. Never seen anything like it. We’ve got parents bring their kids all the way up from Tampa to be coached by her.”

Sachi and kids wasn’t a mix Ellis could easily envision. “Does she compete?”

“No. We’ve tried. She could probably make nationals if she wanted, maybe even the US Olympic team, but she says she’s too busy. Just wants to teach.”

Ellis would have wondered about that statement if Sachi hadn’t confided in him just a few minutes earlier.

When Sachi finally returned from the bathroom, Ellis wasn’t sure, but he thought she looked like maybe she’d been crying.

He was also more than smart enough to not mention it.

She slipped her sunglasses on and adjusted the brim of her baseball cap. “Ready?” Before he could answer, she’d grabbed the shotgun from the counter and balanced it on her shoulder.

“I can carry that,” he said.

She smiled. “I know.” She headed out the door, leaving Ellis to gather up his vest and follow her.

They stopped by her car, where she popped the trunk for him. “Grab that black bag for me, please.” She walked over to the shelter by the first skeet field, closed the gun’s breech, and put it in the gun rack.

“Rule one,” she said as she walked back to the trunk. “Gun stays open and unloaded until you step up to the station. You don’t load shells into it until you’re ready to call for a bird. One for singles, two for doubles.”

He nodded.

She reached into the trunk and unzipped a padded rifle case. From it, she pulled a shotgun.

A cold shiver raced through his stomach as he recognized it from the one in his dreams. Straight down to the engraving on it and the customized stock. He couldn’t take his eyes off it as she broke it open and carried it that way until she got to the gun rack, where she closed it and stood it next to his.

“Where do you want this bag?” It was far heavier than it had looked.

“Just sit it on the bench.” She fastened a belt around her waist, from which hung a leather pouch.

“Where’s your vest?” he asked.

She snorted. “You kidding? It’s too freaking hot for a vest out here.” She grinned.

He looked down at his. “Then why make me wear one?”

“Because I said so. Duh.” She cocked her head. “And they have extra padding in the shoulder. I don’t need it for my gun. I have a recoil reducer on it. I don’t even feel it anymore. You, however, are shooting a shop gun and might want the extra protection.”

“Ah. Okay. Thanks.”

She closed the trunk and walked to the bag. Inside, plastic boxes held twenty-five shells each. She handed him one. “These are lead shot. There are a couple of fields I shoot at around here where you have to shoot steel because of environmental regs, but here we can shoot lead.”

“Is there a difference? I mean,” he quickly added when he saw her winding up for a snarky comment, “I know the difference between lead and steel. But I mean how you load them.”

She smiled and pointed a hand at him and mimicked shooting a gun. “Smarty pants. You catch on quick. Yes, I have different calibrations for whether I’m shooting steel or lead. Different shot and powder bushings I use. I’ve got everything written down at home, spent hours patterning the gun and with the chromographs to make sure the mix is just right. Not something we need to get into today. If you decide you like doing this, we can talk about teaching you that.” She shrugged. “Or you can just buy boxes of shells from wherever you shoot.”

Once they were ready, she swapped out her sunglasses for shooting glasses and put her ear plugs in. Once he was similarly equipped, she handed him his gun, grabbed hers, and led him to the far left end of the field.

She quickly oriented him, pointing as she talked. “High house behind us. This is station one. Left to right, it’s stations two, three, four, five, six, seven by the low house, and eight in the middle. Got it?”

He nodded.

She grabbed a remote control connected to a long cable snaking from a bunker at the middle of the field.

“I’ll throw you a high and a low first, just to show you.” She did and he watched as the orange clay disks zoomed over the field.

“They move fast,” he said.

She grinned. “You ain’t seen nothing yet. They seem to move a lot faster when you’re trying to shoot them. Hold this. Don’t hit the buttons yet.” She swapped places with him on the small concrete pad. “When I call, hit the button for the high house.” She showed him which button. Then she popped a shell into the lower chamber, closed it, and took her stance.

He watched as Sachi seemed to change into another person. A quiet calm overtook her. “Ha!”

He hit the button. Above them in the high house, he heard the machine cycle as a clay launched.

She fired, the disk exploding into a fine, powdery cloud over the center stake by the bunker.

She broke the gun open and removed the spent shell, dropping it into the other part of her pouch. “Save the hulls, by the way. Stations one and seven are usually easiest for beginners, because the birds are flying either toward or away from you, not across.”

She shouldered her gun and took the remote control from him. “Your turn.”

“I thought there were more shots.”

“There are. I’m just showing you. High and low singles, then doubles.” She grinned. “But I’ll pull on rapport for you since you’re a noob.”

He laughed at her good-natured smile. “Awfully nice of you.” He started to load the gun but she stopped him. “What?”

“Close it and show me your stance.”

He did.

She laughed. “Nope. You won’t hit shit like that with a shotgun. She corrected his form. When she was happy with his stance, she had him load the gun.

As he sighted across the field where she said, he asked, “Why’d you say ‘ha’ instead of ‘pull’?”

“Just what I was taught. Say whatever you want, as long as you say it so whoever’s pulling knows it’s your call.”

“Oh.” He took a couple of breaths to settle his mind. “Pull!”

Her finger was far faster on the button than his had been. The bird immediately appeared. He tried to find it, lost it when he raised the barrel too high, then found it again and fired.

It dropped unbroken to the far end of the field, where it shattered as it hit the ground.

She patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll just shoot stations this time around, no score. Try again.” It took him four more attempts to break the high house. Three to break the low.

She skipped on rapport and moved him to station two, where it took him three attempts to hit the high house and another three to hit the low.

“I’ve got to tell you,” he said, “I feel humbled.”

She snorted. “You really want to feel humbled?” She handed him the remote again and led him back to station one. “High, low, doubles,” she said, pointing to the buttons. Then she loaded a shell. “High house… Ha!”

The clay exploded before it even crossed the bunker in the center of the field. He’d yet to make one shatter so eloquently. His had either split into a few pieces, or broken, but not into a cloud of literal dust.

She reloaded. “Low house. Ha!”

That one broke as well.

She didn’t miss a shot until station six, where she missed the low house double. “Dammit,” she said as she unloaded. “Good thing we’re not playing for money.”

He laughed. “Yeah. And yes, I’m humbled.”

“Good.”

She walked her gun back to the gun rack at the shelter before rejoining him. “Let’s finish up that first box of shells and then we’ll try you on a real round.”

Nearly an hour later, he had a sore shoulder and a score of twelve for his first official round of skeet.

He also felt closer to Sachi than he had before. He felt he’d finally been allowed a glimpse behind her wall. He saw another side of her, the confident woman at home here, the encouraging, positive instructor who didn’t tease him in a bad way or make him feel inept for his lack of skill.

If she acted a fraction of this way around her other students, he easily saw why she was such a popular and successful instructor.

He also saw the dedication she had for the science of the sport, from the way she helped him correct his form to discussions about reloads. Even though being a serious skeet shooter seemed to fly in the face of her reading Tarot and teaching chakras or whatever it was she did at the store, he felt far more respect for her than he did when they’d started.

The metaphysical stuff she and Mandaline and even Brad were into no longer provided the mental block it had before this whole experience started weeks earlier with walking into Julie’s store and making the appointment.

“Thank you for this,” he said as he helped her put everything away and they walked his rental gear back to the pro shop.

She shrugged, her sunglasses and hat once again hiding her features. “You’re a good guy. Both of you are.” She turned to him and looked up. He saw himself reflected in her glasses. “Don’t hurt her,” she whispered. “Please. Don’t screw it up again. It was a huge leap of faith for her to trust you.”

He stuck his hand out. “I promise. You can shoot me if I screw up.”

She looked at his hand before shaking it. She grinned. “I will hold you to that.”

“I know you will. That’s why I said it.”

Mandaline nervously looked for any sign of a problem when they returned to the store.

Sachi laughed. “Don’t worry, boss. I didn’t scare him.”

Ellis gave Mandaline a hug. “I had a lot of fun. Sachi’s a great teacher.”

Mandaline knew her relief almost palpably washed off her. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“You know,” Sachi said, “I can go to a hotel—”

“No,” all three of them said.

Mandaline couldn’t get over her feeling there was more to this than just a break-in. “You are staying here, with us, and that’s it. When they get the alarm in, then you can go home.”

Sachi cocked her head. “You don’t think you’re being a little paranoid?”

She struggled to keep the shrill tone out of her voice. “After what we just went through, I’m not ignoring a bad feeling ever again!”

Sachi hugged her. “Okay,” she softly said. “I’ll stay. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for you to worry.”

“You can’t leave here and not have an alarm!”

“Shh, it’s all right. I won’t. It’s okay.”

She didn’t want to cry. Not after she’d made so much progress. Ellis and Brad walked over and joined their group hug.

“It’s really okay,” Ellis assured her. “We don’t mind you being here, either. We’re with Mandaline, we’d rather have you here and not have to worry about your safety.”

When they finally broke apart, Mandaline wiped at her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she told Sachi, “but I’m now officially a worrywart.”

Sachi smiled. “That’s okay,” she gently said. “For you, I’ll make an exception. Although I suspect I’ll be sleeping with my shooting muffs on tonight.” She grinned.