“This isn’t a game.”
“It is if I say it is.”
Amy interrupted. “He’s going into shock. Let me get him some help.”
“It’s not my fault,” Jim growled at her. “It’s him. If he hadn’t ruined things, we could have all been happy. Now, this is all that’s left. So shut up. All of you just shut up!”
Amy didn’t argue, but I could see she was seething underneath the surface. Good, I thought. There was that notorious rage. She wasn’t going to surrender.
“What’s the game, Jim?” I got him to focus on me again.
“Cutthroat meets Fox Hunt, New York-style,” he said, pulling the.45 from his waistband and tossing it at me. “Go ahead, pick it up.”
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.”
Fifty-Two
Frozen for a moment, I rushed at Jim, but I didn’t get two feet before he’d picked up the.38 and drew a bead on me.
“That’s not how this is going to play out. No, sir.”
I stopped dead in my tracks and threw up my hands. “Okay. Okay, but let me check on Amy.”
“Go ahead, but don’t get any ideas.”
Keeping the.38 on me the entire time, Jim collected the guns he’d placed on the ground and stepped away. By the time I got to Amy, all the fight and hysteria had gone out of her. She was done, spent, in shock. I used my sleeve to wipe the blood off her face. She barely noticed. Her eyes were so distant I wasn’t sure she even recognized me. If things turned worse than they already were, that distant place was probably a better place for her to be.
“Jim, how could you do that, shoot him like that?” Renee asked, still wiping blood off her own face.
“Ask your boyfriend. He had a clean shot at me. He had the chance. I gave him a chance. It’s his fault, not mine.”
“Amy’s done, Jim. Let Renee take her somewhere and you can do with me what you want.”
Renee agreed. “Let Amy go. This is about the three of us anyway.”
“She stays. And you’re wrong. This isn’t about the three of us. It never was. It’s about me and Kip, about him pissing away all the good things I gave him, you most of all.”
“This isn’t a game,” I said.
“But it is, just like in Gun Church with McGuinn. He wanted out and to save Zoe. I don’t see that happening today, Kip.”
Jim maintained a safe distance from us. He tucked the Glock in his pants, took the.38, unhinged the cylinder, spun it, then snapped it shut. When that was done, he did the same thing with the Colt. He tossed the.38 at Renee and the Python at me. He put the Glock back in his shooting hand.