Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗

Always in threes. When I tried to shoot like a normal person, I couldn’t get more than two shots off before the recoil kicked my aim off the target. But when I turned my brain off, stopped thinking about the muscle movements, and just tried to shoot on instinct — like how I tie my shoes on instinct or throw a Frisbee without thinking about all the different arm and hand movements that come together — three shots in a straight line.

I killed the silhouette guy at least 100 times.

After about two hours altogether Amy had enough shooting, and by the male-female transitive property so had I. We went back into the store and returned the eye and ear protection, and set two emptied handguns on the counter.

“How was it?” the guy asked me. He was a portly guy, had a big gut squeezed between two suspender straps.

“It was… the same as usual,” I said when I remembered that I’d told him before that I went shooting all the time. Keep your lies straight.

“No, I mean the USP. It’s a clean shot, isn’t it?” His accent was a bit thick, didn’t sound like Virginia. Georgian, if I had to guess. The state, not the country.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I took right to it.” Amy smiled and walked past me to go look at the pocketknives. There was another customer, a guy wearing an orange camouflaged hunting coat looking at the knives as well, between squeaky drags through the straw of a Taco Bell cup.

The store owner wiped my gun down with a rag, oiled the slide and cleaned the barrel with a long brush, then affixed a metal trigger lock and placed the gun back in the glass case behind a tag that said,

USED

H&K USP .45

$580

“Is that cheap?” I asked the guy.

“Hell yes,” he said in a snort, “new ones go for over a grand.” I stepped over to look at the unused handguns to verify.

“Why are used ones so cheap?” I asked, “Do they wear down?”

“Naw,” the guy said with a wave of his hand, “People think they gotta buy new so it’ll still be ‘pristine’ or whatever. That’s bunk, though. It’s just like buying cars. You buy a new car just so you can say nobody’s driven it before, but a used car’ll be broken-in a bit but just as good. A brand new gun won’t shoot as good as it could, it doesn’t have the grease worked in and the barrel hasn’t been set from the heat yet.”

“Set?” I said, looking down at the used USP I was using. I wanted that gun.

“Yeah, set. The heat from cartridges firing will make the metal warp a bit, so a new gun is made with the intention of having it do that. Like making a cotton shirt too big because they know it’ll shrink in the wash.”

“So there’s no problem with buying a used gun?” I asked. Amy was still looking at knives. The Taco Bell cup guy was looking over at me now.

“As long as the gun is maintained and there’s no defects. And trust me, I maintain these guns like they were babies.”

Sure, grease them down and scrape out the gunk. Just like a baby.

“So…” I started, trying to shift back into the smooth guy who talked my way into renting a handgun while underage. “Could I buy this one?”

He frowned. “Did you happen to turn eighteen in the last two hours?”

I frowned too, “Even if I pay with a lot of twenties?”

He laughed, “I’d love to, kid, but there’s no way. The age limit for using the range is just a store policy, but the age limit for buying is the law. As lax as the gun laws are here in Virginia, I could still lose my store license or go to jail. Not happening. Shame too, because I have a bunch of accessories for this gun that are on sale this week.”

Well, I hate to pass up a sale. I wasn’t sure how old Amy was; maybe she was eighteen already and I could give her the money so she could buy it. I called her over and asked her if she’d turned eighteen.

“No…” she started.

“You’re seventeen still? Damn.” It was a really pretty gun.

“Actually, no. I’m sixteen still,” she said a bit sheepishly.

“You’re sixteen?” I said a bit too loud, then quieted down. “How are you a senior, then?”

Amy sighed. “My birthday was like the day before the cutoff and when I changed school districts in seventh grade I’d already had a bunch of classes from the seventh grade here, so they put me in eighth.”

Huh.

The storeowner looked a bit annoyed by now. I shrugged at him, and headed for the door with my rolled up paper target. “We can take these, right?” I asked as I walked out the door.

“No matter how old you are,” he said with a stupid little grin.

In the parking lot, we both walked toward my car when over my shoulder I heard someone call, “Hey, kid.” It was the guy with the orange hunting jacket; he’d replaced his Taco Bell cup with a lit cigarette he was puffing ably from. Amy and I stopped, and without thinking I moved my arm around her waist and edged her around so she was behind me.

“What?” I said.

“You said you wanted to buy a used H&K?” he said, then gestured with his head over to his beat-up pickup. I handed Amy my keys and our rolled up target sheets and told her to put them in my car. She looked up at me with concerned eyes for a moment, then took the items from my hands and backed toward my car.

I crossed the parking lot toward the orange jacket guy and when I was close enough said, “Yeah, why? Are you selling one?”

He smiled, “As it happens, I am. I have a USP about two years old that I was going to try to sell here, but he told me he wasn’t buying any because he had one already and didn’t think it’d sell. I was hoping you were going to buy it in there so he’d take mine finally, but I figure if you want one so bad you could buy mine.”

He opened the driver’s side door of his truck and pulled a metal case from under his seat and unlocked it with a key from his chain. In it was a retail box with an all-black USP printed on the lid.

“It’s black?” I asked, trying to keep myself positioned so I could run or kick this guy in the gizmos if he tried anything weird.

He nodded then took a drag from his cigarette, then said, “I just used it for target practice. Cleaned and oiled it regularly. Great gun still, I just don’t use it very much because I like SIGs and wanted to trade it in for a P226.”

He took it from the foam fitted box and handed it to me, unloaded. I looked it over; it was just as slippery as the one I’d used. The sights were in fine condition, and there was no rust under the slide. I dropped out the magazine and pulled the trigger, it clicked normally. The serial number wasn’t scratched off either.

“Hasn’t been used in any bank robberies?” I asked.

He laughed and said, “Nope. I told you, I’m a SIG man.”

It felt the same as the gun I’d just fell in love with, it just didn’t have the Hollywood-favored silver slide.

“How much?” I asked, trying to imagine how much cash was in my wallet.

“How much was the one inside?” he asked, looking at the store’s door.

“Four eighty,” I lied.

“Then how’s four fifty sound? He was only going to give me $400 for the trade in anyway.”

“Does it need a registration or permit or anything?” I asked, hesitating.

“No, man. This is Virginia. Don’t need a permit to carry, a license to own, or a registration to buy. Just need a concealed weapons permit if you intend to walk around with it tucked in your pants or something.”

What a great state.

I paid him, took the gun back to my car and avoided all of Amy’s questions, then walked back into the gun store as the truck was pulling out.

The door chimed behind me as it closed, the owner behind the counter looked annoyed to see me again.

“You said you have USP accessories on sale now? How about I buy some while they’re on sale, and when I come back next month when I’m 18 I’ll be all set.”

Ten minutes later I walked back to my car with a plastic bag filled with five boxes of low velocity .45 rounds, three extra clips, a cleaning kit, and the graphite-handled five inch pocket knife Amy had been looking at, for the hell of it.