Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

Another thing gone. I’d never been much of a power puncher, even when I boxed all the time. Finesse was what I’d finally learned. And now it was useless.

That was the day Max started showing me places to touch a man that would paralyze—nerve clusters, pressure points, arterial junctions. It was tricky—you had to hit at least two of the points at the same time, and I’d probably never be able to do it in hand-to-hand fighting. But if I could get someone into a grapple …

“I want to help, too, mahn,” Clarence said one day.

“I need your help,” I assured him. “You still tight with Jacques?”

Jacques was a Jamaican gunrunner Clarence worked for a long time ago. Before the Prof became his father, as he had once become mine.

“I get you whatever you need, brother,” he said, his blue-black face calm as still water.

I needed something that matched what was left of my body. The nine-millimeter Clarence carried was a precision instrument, its bullets like wasps, fast and sure. But if you missed a vital spot, a man could take a hit from a nine and keep coming. I needed something for close-ups. And I needed whatever I hit to go down .

“Three fifty-seven,” I said.

“Colt Python is best, mahn. Four-inch barrel?”

“Unless you can get one shorter.”

“Jacques can fix your trick,” the Prof put in. “The factory don’t make it, he’ll fake it. But you know the score—custom costs more.”

“A nice wide hammer-spur,” I told Clarence, holding my hands about three feet apart so there’d be no mistake. “And no front sight.”

“It’s going to buck, mahn,” Clarence warned me.

I looked over at Max, caught his eye, pointed to my wrist. I made the gesture for firing a gun, showing the pistol kicking, my hand flying up. I opened my hands in a question.

The Mongol nodded. Grasped my wrist with his hand. I flexed the wrist. It was like trying to lift a TV set with the back of my hand. Max shrugged—not sure.

“Okay,” I told Clarence. “I guess I’ll have to try it out. You got a place where—?”

“After dark,” the West Indian said.

Clarence piloted the colorless, shapeless blob of a Toyota through the devastated blocks south of Atlantic Avenue. “I did not want to use my ride, mahn. We still don’t know what they may be watching for.”

“Good,” I said from the back seat, knowing what he really meant. Clarence never brought his beloved British Racing Green ’67 Rover 2000 TC along when he thought there might be shooting. He could live with damage to it—after all, he’d restored it from scrap—but the prospect of police forfeiture made him psychotic.

With a dark-blue watch cap covering my head and an old Army field jacket providing bulk that I didn’t have, I looked like … nobody. But I still looked white. And in that neighborhood, white meant cop, junkie, or victim, so we were playing it safe.

The basement was lined with bags of cement mix, stacked so deep you couldn’t see an inch of the walls, much less a window. The ceiling was thick foam acoustical tile. Even the floor had some kind of rubberized mat over the concrete. Clarence handed me a pair of ear-protectors. “Outside, nobody hears nothing, mahn. But in here , you blow an eardrum for sure, you don’t cover up.”

I slipped the protectors on. Clarence did the same. Then he walked into the darkest corner of the basement and came back with the pistol. I tilted the protector to listen.

“A Python, like I said, mahn. This is standard, all the way around. Nobody’s touched the piece or the ammo.”

“I can just …?”

“Sure. Blast away. We test much heavier stuff down here, no problem.”

I aimed the pistol at the far wall of sandbags, squeezed the trigger slowly. Too slowly. I realized I was even testing the strength of my damn finger, said Fuck it! to myself, and cranked one off.

The gun bucked hard, but I was anticipating the ride and brought it back down into firing position off the momentum. I looked over at Clarence. He nodded approval, flicked his index finger a few times, quickly.

Okay. I snapped out the remaining five rounds, resisting the temptation to use my left hand to steady my right wrist. Felt all right. I gave it a few seconds for the echoes to be absorbed, then I pulled off the ear-protectors.

“How’d it look to you?” I asked Clarence.

“Looked pretty steady, to tell the truth, mahn. Your wrist is strong, I think.”

“Any way to check on a grouping?”

“Sure, mahn. But the longest distance we got here is—”

“—more than I need,” I said.

Clarence found an old newspaper, carefully tucked it in between some of the sandbags. In the dim light, I could only see a faint white rectangle. I stepped closer, looking for a six-to-eight-foot range. Raised the pistol.

Then I stopped. Turned to Clarence. “How far away am I?” I asked him.

“You about, I would say, fifteen feet, mahn. You want me to measure?”

“Yeah.”

Clarence paced it off. “Fifteen and a piece,” he confirmed.

Christ! Just like the damn boxing—I’ll have to be closer than my eyes tell me . I stepped forward, cutting the distance in half. “I want six feet. How’m I doing?”

“You about ten, brother.”

I took another two strides. Looked over at Clarence. He nodded. We both put our protectors back on. I popped the cylinder, turned the gun up, extracted the empty cartridges, put them in my pocket, and reloaded. Then I put the pistol in my belt, made myself relax. When I was calm inside, I took the gun out, aimed it slightly below the center of the white blob even as I was cranking off the first round. I pulled until it was empty.

We went over to look. Clarence took out a pocket flash, inspected the newspaper. It was shredded in the center. He studied the results, professionally objective, a physician seeking a diagnosis. “Looks like four of them within about, maybe, eight inches. One I cannot see, mahn. Perhaps it went … off—that can happen with the first round. The other, it is right here,” he said, pointing to the extreme upper left corner of the paper.

My wrist didn’t throb at all.

I did a half-dozen more full cylinders, then switched to my left hand. Nothing changed much. Maybe I was a touch more accurate with my right hand, but, at that distance, it wouldn’t matter much.

“What do you think?” I asked Clarence.

“I think,” he said, “that you could handle a shorter barrel. Colt makes a two-and-a-half-inch. And Jacques can Mag-na-port it for you.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Revolvers, they blow out a lot of gas, mahn. What Jacques does, he cuts these little slits right along the top of the barrel,” Clarence explained, illustrating with his fingernail. “Some of the gas comes out there , too. So what happens is, it helps bring your hand down , counteracts the buck, see?”

“That sounds perfect.”

“But you have to be very close, now. Especially for that first shot. With this piece, you put one into a man, he will go down.”

“Die?”

“Anywhere in the body or the head, yes, mahn. An arm or a leg, it would … maybe. A solid hit, he would go into shock. But if the paramedics got there quick …”

“Okay. Fair enough.”

“You want hollowpoints? Hot loads on the powder, too?”

“Mercury tips.”

“Mercury tips, I do not like them, mahn. For small slugs, sure. They tear right on through, and the mercury is a good poison to leave behind. But the .357, nobody knows why, exactly, but it has the highest one-shot kill ratio of any of the handguns. There are bigger ones, but this one hits the hardest.”