Chapter 12 #2
Fifteen rounds. Brass, blunt little cartridges, stubby and unimpressive next to the long elegant .338s in his wooden box.
Eleven left in the magazine. The young man with the red scarf had fired three, and Isaiah had fired two, and one of those had been from this gun, and Liam did not think about that.
He worked the slide.
A round jumped out of the chamber and clinked on the concrete and he picked it up and looked at it and set it aside.
Then he sat and stared at the thing in his hands.
"You've got no idea what you're doing," Isaiah said.
He had come and sat down across the stove without Liam noticing, which meant Liam was more tired than he had let himself believe.
"No," Liam admitted.
"Give it here."
Liam handed it over.
And then he watched Isaiah Macklemore take that pistol apart in about four seconds.
He pulled the slide back a fraction, rotated a lever on the right side of the frame with his thumb, and the whole slide assembly came forward off the rails and into his hand. He turned it over, lifted out a spring, drew out the barrel, and laid the four pieces down on the blanket in a neat row.
Liam stared.
"How," he said.
"Because I fix things," Isaiah said.
"You've never seen one of these."
"I've seen a diagram of one." Isaiah did not look up.
He was turning the barrel in the lamplight, squinting down it.
"There was a book at the camp. Old gun book, in the box of stuff from the sporting store, nobody wanted it because it was all handguns and we didn't have any handguns." He shrugged. "I read it. It was there."
"You read a gun book."
"I read everything, Liam, there was nothing to do." He held up the barrel. "This is filthy, by the way. Whoever had this before did not love it."
Liam picked up the frame.
"So it goes back the way it came off," he said.
"Slide on the rails. Push it back till the lever lines up. Turn the lever." Isaiah handed him the pieces one at a time. "Do it yourself. You'll only learn it if you do it."
Liam did it.
He did it wrong twice and Isaiah let him, and the third time it went together with a solid metal snick that he felt all the way up his arm.
He racked the slide.
It ran like water.
"It's beautiful," he said, surprising himself.
"It's Italian," Isaiah said.
"What?"
"It says it on the slide. Made in Italy. Beretta's the oldest firearms company on earth, it's five hundred years old, they were making gun barrels for the Republic of Venice."
Isaiah was warming up now, and Liam let him, because it was the first time in three days he had seen his friend look like himself.
"That's a fine piece of Italian steel you've got there."
Liam turned it over.
"A fine piece of Italian steel," he repeated.
"Which is funny," Isaiah said, "because it's also the most American gun in the world."
Liam looked up.
"What?"
"That's an M9." Isaiah pointed at it with the screwdriver he had ground from a nail two thousand miles ago and had somehow never lost.
"Or it's the civilian twin of one, same gun. Beretta 92FS. The U.S. military adopted it in 1985 and it was the standard issue sidearm of the entire American armed forces until 2017. Thirty-two years. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines.
Every soldier in every war this country fought for a generation carried that exact pistol on his hip."
Liam looked down at the thing in his hand.
"Huh," he said.
"So don't feel bad about the Italian part," Isaiah said. "You're carrying a patriot."
Liam laughed.
It came out of him before he could stop it and it was cracked and wet and it hurt, and it was the first time he had laughed since a woman had died in a street two hundred yards from here, and Isaiah watched him do it with an expression of enormous relief.
The holster was in Liam's pack.
He had taken that too. He had not remembered doing it, but it was there when he emptied the pack out, black leather, an old thumb-break belt rig gone soft and supple with years of wear, and the leather was stiff at one edge where it was stained dark.
Liam looked at the stain.
He knew what it was.
He sat there a long moment.
"You could get another one," Isaiah said quietly.
"There isn't another one."
"Doyle'd give you one. Doyle would give you anything right now."
"That's not the point."
Liam picked up the holster and turned it over in his hands.
"The man who wore this killed Nell Rook," he said. "And you killed him. And I'm going to wear his rig on my hip and carry his gun, and every time I put my hand on it I am going to remember exactly what it cost to get it, and I'm not going to let myself forget."
He looked up.
"Tom told me the same thing about the rifle," he said.
"He said twenty-seven times in your whole life you get to reach out and take something out of this world, and that's a sacred number, and you treat it like one."
He threaded his belt through the loops. "I've got four left. Four rounds in a rifle I've fired twenty-three times, and I am about to walk into a war on a waterfront, and four is not enough."
"So now you've got eleven more."
"Now I've got eleven more."
He stood, and settled the belt, and let the weight of it hang on his hip, and it felt wrong and heavy and strange.
He would get used to it.
That thought frightened him more than the gun did.
"Liam," Isaiah said.
"Yeah."
"Sit down. There's something I need to tell you and I've been putting it off for two days."
Liam sat.
Isaiah reached into his coat.
And drew out a pistol.
It was not Rennick's. Liam had assumed, since the street, that it was Rennick's, that Isaiah had taken it out of the longboat, and he had built a whole story about it in his head.
He had been wrong.
It was flat and black and squared-off, a chunky slab-sided thing with no shine on it anywhere, and the grip was textured like sandpaper, and along the slide it said Smith & Wesson.
M&P.
.40 S&W.
"That's not Rennick's," Liam said.
"No."
"Where did you get it."
Isaiah did not answer right away.
He sat there with the pistol flat on his palm and looked at it, and the stove ticked, and out in the dark the twenty-two people of Willow Landing slept on a concrete floor under a broken market roof.