“You look horrified.”
“Jesus Christ, the squirrel didn’t do anything . . .”
“You feel scared?”
She dropped her arm and turned cold. “Is this some kind of lesson?”
“Yeah,” Lucas said, turning away from the squirrel. “Hold on to that feeling you had. You felt that way for a squirrel. Now think about unloading a thirty-eight into a human being.”
“Jesus, Lucas . . .”
“You hit a guy in the chest, not through the heart, but just in the chest and you’ll blow up his lungs and he’ll lie there snorting out this bright red blood with little bubbles in it and usually his eyes look like they’re made out of wax and sometimes he rocks back and forth and he’s dying and there’s not a thing that anybody can do about it, except maybe God—”
“I don’t want the gun,” she said suddenly.
Lucas held the weapon up in front of his face. “They’re awful things,” he said. “But there’s one thing that’s even more awful.”
“What’s that?”
“When you’re the squirrel.”
He gave her the basics of close-in shooting, firing at crude man-size figures drawn in the sand of the cutbank. After thirty rounds she began hitting the figures regularly. At fifty, she developed a flinch and began to spray shots.
“You’re jerking the gun,” Lucas told her.
She fired again, jerking the gun. “No I’m not.”
“I can see it.”
“I can’t.”
Lucas swung the cylinder out, emptied it, put three shells in random chambers, and handed the pistol back to her.
“Shoot another round.”
She fired another shot, jerking the weapon, missing.
“Again.”
This time the hammer hit an empty chamber and there was no shot, but she jerked the pistol out of line.
“That’s called a flinch,” Lucas said.
They worked for another hour, stopping every few minutes to talk about safety, about concealment of the gun in her studio, about combat shooting.
“It takes a lot to make a really good shot,” Lucas told her as she looked at the weapon in her hand. “We’re not trying to teach you that. What you’ve got to do is learn to hit that target reliably at ten feet and at twenty feet. That shouldn’t be a problem. If you ever get in a situation where you need to shoot somebody, point the gun and keep pulling the trigger until it stops shooting. Forget about rules or excessive violence or any of that. Just keep pulling.”
They fired ninety-five of the hundred rounds before Lucas called a halt and handed her the weapon, loaded with the last five rounds.
“So now you’ll have a loaded gun around the house,” he said, handing it to her. “You carry it back, put it where you think best. You’ll find that it’s kind of a burden. It’s the knowledge that there’s a piece of Death in the house.”
“I’ll need more practice,” she said simply, hefting the pistol.
“I’ve got another three hundred rounds in the car. Come out here every day, shoot twenty-five to fifty rounds. Check yourself for flinching. Get used to it.”
“Now that I’ve got it, it makes me more nervous than I thought it would,” Carla said as they walked back to the cabin. “But at the same time . . .”
“What?”
“It feels kind of good in my hand,” she said. “It’s like a paintbrush or something.”
“Guns are great tools,” Lucas said. “Incredibly efficient. Very precise. They’re a pleasure to use, like a Leica or a Porsche. A pleasure in their own right. It’s too bad that to fulfill their purpose, you’ve got to kill somebody.”
“That’s a nice thought,” Carla said.
Lucas shrugged. “Samurai swords are the same way. They’re works of art that are complete only when they’re killing. It’s nothing new in the world.”
As they crossed the road back to the cabin, she asked, “You’ve got to go?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a game.”
“I don’t understand that,” she said. “The games.”
“Neither do I,” Lucas said, laughing.
He took his time driving back to the Twin Cities, enjoying the countryside, resolutely not thinking about the maddog. He arrived after six, checked Anderson’s office, found that he had gone home for the evening.
“Sloan’s still out somewhere,” the shift commander said.
“But nobody’s told me to look for anything special.”
Lucas left, changed clothes at home, stopped at a Grand Avenue restaurant in St. Paul, ate, and loafed over to St. Anne’s.
“Ah, here’s Longstreet, slow as usual,” Elle said. Even as General Robert E. Lee she wore her full habit, crisp and dark in the lights of the game room. A second nun, who wore conventional street dress and played the role of General George Pickett, was flipping through a stack of movement sheets. The attorney, Major General George Gordon Meade, commander in chief of the Union armies, and the bookie, cavalry commander General John Buford, were studying their position on the map. A university student, who played General John Reynolds in the game, was punching data into the computer. He looked up and nodded when Lucas came in. The grocer, Jeb Stuart, had not yet arrived.
“Talking game-wise,” the bookie said to Lucas, “you’ve got to do something about Stuart. Maybe take him out as a playable character. He keeps getting loose, and when he gets word to Lee, it changes everything.”
Lucas relaxed and started arguing. He was in his place. The grocer arrived ten minutes later, apologizing for his tardiness, and they started. The battle went badly for the Union. Stuart was getting scouts back to the main force, so Lee knew the bluecoats were coming. He concentrated on Gettysburg more quickly than had happened in historical fact, and Pickett’s division—marching first instead of last—brushed aside Buford’s cavalry, pressed through the town, and captured Culp’s Hill and the north end of Cemetery Ridge.
They left it there. Late that evening, as they sat around the table talking over the day’s moves, the attorney brought up the maddog.
“What’s happening with this guy?” he asked.
“You looking for a client?” asked Lucas.
“Not unless he’s got some major bucks,” the attorney said. “This is the kind of case that will stink up the whole state. But it’s interesting. It could be a hard case for you to make, actually, unless you catch him in the act. But the guy who gets him off . . . he’s going to smell like a buzzard.”
“Some of the people playing this game have noticed a buzzardlike odor,” the grocer said. He was feeling expansive. He was rehabilitating old J.E.B. Stuart, making him a hero again.
The lawyer rolled his eyes. “So what’s happening?” he asked Lucas. “You gonna catch him?”
“Not much progress,” Lucas said, peeling a chunk of cold pizza out of a greasy box. “What do you do with a fruitcake? There’s no way to track him. His mind doesn’t work like an ordinary crook’s. He’s not doing it for money. He’s not doing it for dope, or revenge, or impulsively. He’s doing it for pleasure. He’s taking his time. It might not be quite at random—we’ve found a few patterns—but for practical purposes, they don’t help much. Like the fact that he attacks dark-haired women. That’s maybe only thirty or forty percent of the women in the Cities, which sounds pretty good until you think about it. When you think about it, you realize that even if you eliminate the old women and the children, you’re talking about, what, a quarter-million dark-haired possibilities?”
The bookie and the grocer nodded. The other nun and the student chewed pizza. Elle, who had been fingering the long string of rosary beads that swung by her side, said, “Maybe you could bring him in to you.”
Lucas looked at her. “How?”
“I don’t know. He fixates on people and we know the type. But if you put out a female decoy, how would you know he’d even see her? That’s the problem. If you could get a decoy next to him, maybe you could pull him into an attack that you’re watching.”
“You’ve got a nasty mind, Sister,” the bookie said.
“It’s a nasty problem,” she answered. “But . . .”