Robert Tanenbaum - Falsely Accused

“I shot a man through the lip once with a Constable. It stopped him pretty good.”

The gun dealer gave Bello a look and Bello nodded gravely. The gun dealer shrugged and bent down behind the counter again.

“I don’t carry any Astras, but you want light, this is light.” He put a small, angular pistol on the pad. “It’s a Colt Mustang Pocket Lite in aluminum alloy. Twelve and a half ounces.”

Marlene picked up the gun, worked the action, and squeezed off a dry-fire shot. “Fine. I’ll take it.”

“You don’t want to fire it?” said Arnolfini.

“I’ll trust you it works,” she said.

“Shoot it, Marlene,” said Harry.

She met his eyes and looked away. He was serious about this, and it came from his concern about her safety, which it was not in her heart to despise. She nodded and said, “Okay, let’s shoot.”

Arnolfini led them through a hallway to a firing range, a four-stand affair that took up most of his building. He turned on the lights, a rack of space heaters, and a blower. An icy breeze wafted over them, its chill hardly deflected by the gusts from the heaters. Arnolfini broke open a box of.380 semi-wadcutters, and they all worked silently for a few minutes loading three clips. The gun dealer snapped a silhouette target to a traveler and sent it twenty-five yards downrange.

Marlene bellied up to the barrier, slipped muffs over her ears, and without preamble, in her usual casual way, began firing. She shot two clips of five into the target’s chest and, for a lark, shot the last clip into the head. Arnolfini flipped the traveler switch and brought the target back.

“Very nice,” he said with new respect in his voice. The chest shots fell into two neat patterns, neither larger than a playing card. The five head shots were somewhat more dispersed, but still impressive shooting.

“Of course, it’s a lot different on the street,” he added. “The guy’s moving, it’s dark, maybe he’s shooting back. That’s why you want a weapon that’ll put him down with one hit, which this little thing probably won’t do. It’s really a backup gun.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a sort of a backup person, Frank,” said Marlene lightly. “Harry’s going to do the heavy killing, aren’t you, Harry?”

She saw the shock on his face, and immediately wished she were a thousand miles away with her tongue cut out. How could she have! Bello turned away and walked out of the range.

Back in the office, Marlene took out her checkbook and examined her bill for the Mustang, two extra clips, a nylon belt holster, and a box of Federal 90-grain jacketed hollow points. Arnolfini explained that she was getting the cop discount since she was with Harry. It made her feel worse.

“You want one of these?” the dealer asked. He was holding a shiny.22 revolver. “For the price of a box of rounds? I bought out a guy last month. Made in Brazil. Not a bad little gun for plinking, but I can’t sell ’em.”

Marlene was too tired to refuse. “Yeah, sure,” she said, “throw it in.” But the shiny gun had reminded her of Lucy’s cap pistol-and the reality of keeping weapons in the loft. “Have you got a gun box, a safe, with a lock?”

He had several, and Marlene bought a green one about the size of a file drawer, with a push-button combination lock. Harry helped carry it out to the car.

“I’m sorry, Harry,” she said when they were sitting in the car. “There’s absolutely no excuse for me saying that kind of shit to you.”

“Forget it,” mumbled Harry as he started the car.

“No, listen, you need to hear this! Look at me, Harry!”

Bello stopped the car and looked at her, his face its usual mask. Marlene spoke quickly and in a low tone, as in a confessional. “I have problems with this, Harry. And they’re coming out in sneaky little digs like that in there. It’s driving me up the wall, and I don’t like the way I’m acting and feeling behind it. This gun thing. First, it’s going to drive Butch crazy all over again, having a gun in the house, and I’m going to have to deal with that, and then, for me personally, I don’t like being armed, or maybe it’s I like it too much. Maybe it’s the same thing, if you know what I mean. It was one thing, sort of exciting work, getting Pruitt and stopping the other guys we’ve been handling this past couple of months, but it’s something else completely, dealing with guys who want to kill their girlfriends and we might be in the way, and we might have to shoot them first. I killed one guy, and it almost wrecked me and I had dreams about it for weeks-did I have to do it, did it have to go down that way …?”

“The way I heard it,” said Harry, “was you didn’t have a choice. The guy was shooting at a cop.”

“Right, right, of course, but you always think, maybe you set up the situation. Anyway, that’s the point, what you just said, this business might put you in a situation where you’re getting shot at, and I have no right to be in a position where I can’t help you out. So I’m packing, but …” She shook her head, as if trying to jar sense into it, and then made a gesture of futility with her hands, saying, “It’s a fog, Harry. I mean, what the fuck … what’m I doing? What’re we doing?”

“One day at a time,” said Bello.

“That’s a platitude, Harry,” she snapped.

He stepped on the accelerator and moved the car down the street. They drove back to the runnel in silence. In the roar of their passage through the tube, he said, and his words were low-pitched so that she had to strain to hear them, “You’ll get used to it. You’ll probably never have to use it. Frank, there, the gun expert? Thirty-five years in Bed-Stuy, never shot one. You have to, you’ll do the right thing.”

“You say that, but how do you know that, Harry?”

“I’m here, right?” he said.

The rain did not let up all that afternoon, and when the sun went down it changed to sleet, driven by a nasty east wind. It was, however, positively halcyon compared to the weather within the loft when Karp discovered how Marlene had spent her Jersey morning.

“You brought guns into our home? Guns ?” was his anguished cry. This was at the dinner table. Marlene had made a favorite dish of Karp’s, veal parmigiana, which that barbarian considered the epitome of Italian cuisine and which she rarely degraded herself to prepare, but did this time, feeling queasily like Lucy Ricardo.

“Don’t raise your voice!” she said.

“Why not? You’ll shoot me?” he shouted.

“Lucy, dear,” Marlene said, “if you’re finished, you can go to your room now.”

“Can I see your gun, Mommy?” Lucy asked, her eyes widening.

“ May I see your gun, Mommy?” said Marlene automatically.

“ May I see-”

“No, you can’t,” said Marlene. “What you can do is get ready for your bath, and then you can watch Gilligan’s Island. ”

“Oh, why don’t you show it to her, Marlene?” said Karp nastily. “Let her play with it, even. She will anyway, sooner or later.”

At this Marlene turned upon her husband a look of such bone-chilling malevolence that he shut up. After Lucy had run off, she said, “How dare you suggest that I’m endangering my child! How dare you!”

They locked gazes and ground teeth for an interminable-seeming moment. Then Karp sprang to his feet, knocking over his chair with a clatter. He had his big fists clenched and appeared to be looking for something to break.

“Shit, Marlene!” he shouted. “Why are you doing this? Why are you fucking up our life with this shit?”

“I am not doing any such thing,” responded Marlene in a voice unnaturally calm. While Karp gaped and glared and shot flames from his nostrils, she continued, “You object to what I’m doing. It upsets you. A couple of years ago, you dragged this family off to that hellhole in D.C., taking Lucy away from her friends and her relatives without a moment’s thought …”