Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [19]
“How’d it look to you?” I asked Clarence.
“Looked pretty steady, to tell the truth, mahn. Your wrist is strong, I think.”
“Any way to check on a grouping?”
“Sure, mahn. But the longest distance we got here is—”
“—more than I need,” I said.
Clarence found an old newspaper, carefully tucked it in between some of the sandbags. In the dim light, I could only see a faint white rectangle. I stepped closer, looking for a six-to-eight-foot range. Raised the pistol.
Then I stopped. Turned to Clarence. “How far away am I?” I asked him.
“You about, I would say, fifteen feet, mahn. You want me to measure?”
“Yeah.”
Clarence paced it off. “Fifteen and a piece,” he confirmed.
Christ! Just like the damn boxing—I’ll have to be closer than my eyes tell me. I stepped forward, cutting the distance in half. “I want six feet. How’m I doing?”
“You about ten, brother.”
I took another two strides. Looked over at Clarence. He nodded. We both put our protectors back on. I popped the cylinder, turned the gun up, extracted the empty cartridges, put them in my pocket, and reloaded. Then I put the pistol in my belt, made myself relax. When I was calm inside, I took the gun out, aimed it slightly below the center of the white blob even as I was cranking off the first round. I pulled until it was empty.
We went over to look. Clarence took out a pocket flash, inspected the newspaper. It was shredded in the center. He studied the results, professionally objective, a physician seeking a diagnosis. “Looks like four of them within about, maybe, eight inches. One I cannot see, mahn. Perhaps it went … off—that can happen with the first round. The other, it is right here,” he said, pointing to the extreme upper left corner of the paper.
My wrist didn’t throb at all.
I did a half-dozen more full cylinders, then switched to my left hand. Nothing changed much. Maybe I was a touch more accurate with my right hand, but, at that distance, it wouldn’t matter much.
“What do you think?” I asked Clarence.
“I think,” he said, “that you could handle a shorter barrel. Colt makes a two-and-a-half-inch. And Jacques can Mag-na-port it for you.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Revolvers, they blow out a lot of gas, mahn. What Jacques does, he cuts these little slits right along the top of the barrel,” Clarence explained, illustrating with his fingernail. “Some of the gas comes out there, too. So what happens is, it helps bring your hand down, counteracts the buck, see?”
“That sounds perfect.”
“But you have to be very close, now. Especially for that first shot. With this piece, you put one into a man, he will go down.”
“Die?”
“Anywhere in the body or the head, yes, mahn. An arm or a leg, it would … maybe. A solid hit, he would go into shock. But if the paramedics got there quick …”
“Okay. Fair enough.”
“You want hollowpoints? Hot loads on the powder, too?”
“Mercury tips.”
“Mercury tips, I do not like them, mahn. For small slugs, sure. They tear right on through, and the mercury is a good poison to leave behind. But the .357, nobody knows why, exactly, but it has the highest one-shot kill ratio of any of the handguns. There are bigger ones, but this one hits the hardest.”
“Just a little drop,” I told him. “For luck.”
“All right, mahn. So that would be one Python with—”
“Two,” I cut him off.
“Ah,” is all he said, getting it.
I spent every day working. For breaks, I stayed inside my head, trying to connect the dots.
I found out one thing I needed to know. The way I usually learn things—by making someone sad. Only this time it wasn’t me doing it to myself.
If Max or his wife, Immaculata, had any problems with me staying there, or even with the crew coming by all the time, they never let it slip.
I guess they never even said anything about me being there to their daughter, Flower. I’ve known her since the day she was born. The child spoke Vietnamese and French, thanks to her mother, and could sign back and forth with Max even faster than I could. Mama, who insisted the child, being her grandchild,