Reed Coleman - Gun Church

“Weiler, what’s going on?” McDonald shouted in my ear.

“Just a second.”

I forced myself to kneel down and scoop it up. This envelope was thinner, lighter, with nothing written on it. The flap was taped shut. I tried to pull it open, but that didn’t work. I retreated to my desk to find scissors or a letter opener.

“Hey, Weiler.”

“Sorry, McDonald.”

“About the gun,” he said.

“What about it?”

“Why did you mention a.25?”

“I don’t know,” I lied, finding an old X-ACTO knife. “It was random. Why?”

“Lead detective says your vic was killed by one shot to the back of the head. The bullet was pretty smashed up, but they’re pretty certain it was a.25, probably from a Ruger or a Beretta.”

My head was pounding, sweat once again rushing through my pores, my world wobbling severely on its axis. None of this, the toll bill or the caliber of the bullet, proved anything for certain. I told myself-even if I didn’t quite believe it-that Jim could simply have stolen my toll pass and run up my bill. That the police holdback wasn’t top secret. Hadn’t I just found out what caliber bullet had killed Haskell Brown without much trouble? Jim was a resourceful kid, more resourceful than me. I’m sure he could have found out the holdback information.

“Weiler!”

“Give me a second,” I barked, emptying the contents of the envelope onto my desk. And when I saw the item the envelope held, my world stopped wobbling and spun off into the void. It was the front page of the Brixton Banner and the headline read:

MABRY LURED TO DEATH BY DARK-HAIRED BEAUTY

“Weiler! You okay?” I could not find it in me to answer. “Weiler, are you all right?”

“Far from it. Get Amy out of her apartment. Get her the fuck out of there right now and take her someplace safe.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Everything.”

McDonald told me to sit tight, that he’d get back to me with their location after they’d gotten Amy safely away from the loft. I asked if he wanted me to call her to warn her he was coming.

“No, for chrissakes!” he screamed. “You’d only scare the shit out of her and make my job ten times harder. I’ll handle it. Go take a cold shower or knit a fuckin’ sweater and wait for my call. Should be a few hours.”

In spite of wanting to crawl out of my own skin, I heeded some of his advice and took a shower. Afterwards, I sat in the living room of my lightless apartment, waiting for whispers of dawn to shine through my windows-whispers that came as dark clouds and the pinging of rain drops. I barely moved. My mind raced. I’d been so diligent at rationalizing away the obvious that I never let myself fully entertain the possibility that what Jim had said on the boardwalk might actually be a factual accounting of what had happened. Addicts are superb at denial, but there was no denying it, not any of it, not anymore. The bloody symmetry of it came crashing down on my head.

If it was true-and it was-that I had been remade as a person and as a writer, it had been largely at Jim’s hand. There was no escaping it. I may have started the change to win back Amy’s respect of my own accord, but the rest of it was more easily traceable. All the red lines led back to that September day when Frank Vuchovich came to my desk to retrieve his first assignment and stuck a Colt Python in my face. Or did they? Did they lead back to the day Jim found the Pandora chapter or did they lead back to me, to my writing it? Were my ideas the blueprint for the nightmare that ensued? Was Jim simply the Oracle of Brixton, deciphering the signs, making my wishes come true? Did it matter? The net result was the same. Did the body count stop at two or three or four? Jim’s question about killing Mabry rang in my ears: “ Did you plant that idea in my head or did I plant it in yours ?” The incidents leading up to Stan Petrovic’s death no longer seemed random or unconnected. I could see Jim’s hand in everything.

I was going mad, waiting, raking myself over the coals for my blindness about Jim, worrying about the bodies left in my wake that could be tied to me. I’d had it up to my eyeballs and retreated to the safest place I knew: Gun Church .

McGuinn had had his fill of blood: blood in the name of a cause, blood in the name of boredom. None of it seemed to matter to anyone. He took ice cold comfort in that he could nigh count the bodies he left behind him at home, but he could well count the bodies he and those of the church had snuffed out like the lit ends of still-burning fags over these few short months. There was Old Jack, of course, the two black footballers, the cop … He’d once read a book where the writer wondered what was the cost of another body or two in a world awash in blood. Amen, brother. Amen. So it was that McGuinn threw his gun in the river and tightened the tourniquet around the jumpy bollix’s leg wound.

“Listen, to me, boyo,” McGuinn said, putting his face up close to the wounded man’s. “Yer friends are dead and it stops here. Do you catch my meaning?”

He nodded yes.

“You let Zoe be or I’ll come back here and kill ya so slowly you’ll beg me to murder yer whole fookin’ family just so’s I’ll kill you. Ya getting’ me?”

He nodded again.

“I’m takin’ that van and I’ll call fer help as soon as I can. Any questions, boyo?”

He shook his head.

“Good. Now, ya just lay there quiet and still fer help to come.”

McGuinn stood, turned, and walked back to the van. He was tempted to fetch Zoe, whom he’d left unconscious on the other side of the river, but decided against it. No good would come of that, he thought, the mating of two spiders with nary a human soul between them. He certainly had nothing of his remaining and he’d no notion of where Zoe’s soul had got to. She wasn’t one for talking about such things and McGuinn wasn’t sure he would have believed what she told him in any case. A lot had passed between them in these last months, even something akin to love, but very little truth.

As he drove out of the woods, away from the church, McGuinn looked in the rearview mirror. He feared all he’d see there were the faces of the dead he’d left in his wake. What he saw instead was the inky blackness of an unlit road. If blackness was all that lay behind him, he supposed he could make do with that.

Bleary-eyed and nearly spent, I closed my computer on Gun Church and Terry McGuinn for the last time. Then, at about 6:15 A.M., the phone rang.

“She’s safe, but she’s pretty pissed and not a little freaked.” It was a voice I didn’t recognize.

“Who is this?”

“Tony Dee, Mr. Weiler. I work with Tommy Mac.”

“She’s upset?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“I guess. Where are you guys?”

“Check your email.”

“What?”

“Just do what I tell you.”

“Okay.”

“And, Mr. Weiler … ”

“Yeah.”

“However you get to where you’re going, keep alert that you don’t have company. You notice anything or anyone suspicious, you turn in the wrong direction and call this number. Got it?”

“Got it.”

The line was already dead before I could think to say anything else. When I checked, there was an email waiting. They were keeping Amy in the Whitestone section of Queens. I didn’t know that part of the city very well and hoped Jim didn’t know it at all.

God knows why, but my landlord, Isaac, let me borrow his car. I think maybe he knew I’d once been a famous writer. Even if I were still famous, I thought, who would care? In a country that values the ballroom dancing talents of washed-up actors, writers were less than afterthoughts. At least Amy was safe. That was the most important thing, but I couldn’t quite see my way to making sense of all this for her and I didn’t have much more time to figure it out.