Sixty-One
“YOU HATED GUNS when we were growing up,” I say to Taylor McCarter Webb.
“What can I tell you?” she says. “I was a good girl, and then I turned.”
“Blame me,” Burt Webb says.
The three of us are at the Cross Rivers Gun Club, out on Larrabee Road. The three of us. Like we’re back in high school, just with pistols.
“Considering what I do for a living,” Burt says, “I need to know she can protect herself if it ever comes to that, God forbid.”
He turns to look at me. “And after what Roof Crockett said to us, and to her, the other night, it’s not like I’m second-guessing myself.”
It’s been a good long while since I’ve fired a gun.
The last time had been when I was twelve—one of the handful of times my father had brought me with him to this same club.
He’d just gotten started teaching me to shoot, thinking I would hunt with him someday, saying that when he’d grown up, guns were something that got passed down.
His father had taught him. He was teaching me. Simple as that.
A few months later, a gun killed him.
When he was gone, I hated guns.
Any kind of gun, for hunting or anything else.
But Burt had talked me into coming here today with him and Taylor. He wanted to be secure in the knowledge that I knew how to use a gun, same as he was secure in the knowledge that his wife could handle one if it did ever come to that.
“I don’t even have a permit,” I say.
“You’re going to get one,” he says, “as soon as I fast-track the process.”
“Isn’t that kind of fast-tracking against the law?” I ask.
“Not when you’ve got the law on your side,” he says. “And you sure do.”
He’d loaned me a Glock today, one of his own and one he said he planned to sell to me for a dollar once I did have my carry permit and all the other necessary paperwork.
Taylor was using her SIG Sauer P320—also a gift from her husband. It was the one she’d had in her purse at the parish hall, when she’d informed me she was armed.
And it becomes very clear, very quickly, once we start shooting that she truly does know what she’s doing, even though Burt has set us up at what he calls the kids’ table at the very end of the range.
I’m shooting at an FBI-Q target, Burt tells me, one in the shape of a bottle standing upright.
Taylor is set up in front of a B-27 target, that one in the shape of a man, with five concentric circles, getting smaller until they’re at center mass.
After a few shots, Taylor’s groupings are center mass, every single time.
“Did Burt teach you to shoot like that?” I ask when we take a break.
“He got me started,” she says. “Then I took a basic defense pistol class.” She turns to face me and winks. “Turns out I was a natural.”
“I can see that.”
“Not only am I finally better than you at something,” she says, “I’m a better shot than my husband the chief.”
“Wait,” I say to Burt. “Is that true?”
“I let her beat me from time to time when we turn it into a competition,” he says. “You know what they say, Silas. Happy wife, happy life.”
“When did they say that, exactly?” she says. “When President Eisenhower was saying that about Mamie?”
“Who?”
“Eisenhower or Mamie?” Tay asks.
Burt finally leaves to go back to work. Tay and I keep shooting. She stops occasionally and comes over to where I’m standing and gives me tips on form and balance. After a while, I feel as if I’m getting better as I go, even though I still feel as if I’m on training wheels.
“I still don’t like guns,” I say.
“You think I do?” Tay says when we’re finished. “Burt just feels very strongly that owning one, and being proficient with one, is the cost of doing business around here.”
“His business, or Briar Crockett’s?” I ask.
“Both,” Taylor McCarter Webb says.
There’s a small coffee shop that’s part of the club. We sit down at a table there and are served coffee that isn’t very good. But I remember my father always saying that bad coffee is better than none.
“I’m worried about Burt,” Taylor says. “More than I ever have been before, even though I try to keep it to myself. I’m exactly like that woman at the parish hall talking about being fearful for her daughters. I’m scared now every time he walks out the door.”
“Come on,” I say. “It’s not just my life I trust with Burt, or yours. I trust his, too.”
“But he’s put himself and his face right out front in this war,” she says. “And you know this is a war we’re starting. My husband’s face is totally out front just as much as Helene Mayes’s is. People still don’t know her around here. But they sure know Burt.”
Taylor drinks some of her coffee and winces. “Wow,” she says.
“Right?”
“They must have missed the memo here on good coffee being easier to make than ever,” she says.
I’m scheduled to go from one kind of workout here to the one I’ve got back at home with Vince, but I don’t get up to leave just yet.
We sit in silence for a couple of minutes, the muffled sound of guns being fired from inside making its way all the way out here.
Finally, Taylor says, “What if all of this doesn’t work, Silas? What if, no matter what everyone tries, the other side wins in the end?”
I smile at her.
“You’re sitting across from somebody who’s made a career out of his side winning,” I say. “At least until lately. And my face is on this as much as theirs are.”
“Promise me something,” she says. “You’ll look out for Burt every chance you get, as much as he’s looking out for you.”
“You know I will.”
She reaches down for her purse, next to her on the floor, her face serious, almost solemn. This is the purse with the SIG Sauer inside, the one I’d seen her firing like a pro for the past hour.
She pats the purse, and I know what she’s really doing is patting the gun.
“I wouldn’t just use this to defend myself,” she says quietly. “To be the defensive shooter I was taught to be.”
I wait, knowing she’s not done.
“Silas, I’m worried about you,” she says. “In a way I haven’t worried about you since you nearly died in that accident.”
She pauses again and takes a deep breath. Her eyes are suddenly very big, very bright.
“Burt knows how to take care of himself,” she says. “Taking care of himself is part of his job. It’s not just what he does, Silas. It’s who he is.”
I wait, sensing she’s still not through. She’s not.
“But you’ve gone out of your way to put a target on yourself as sure as you were a target inside this range,” she says.
“You told me what Briar Crockett told you about this not being a game. Well, the bastard was right. It’s not.
And if he continues to be a threat, I believe that he’s going to come at you first.”
“I know what I’m doing,” I say.
“Sometimes I worry that you don’t,” she says. “That you’re in a game with no rules. Or maybe that the other side is the only one making them, whatever Helene Mayes and Burt say.”
She pauses one last time. Suddenly, I think she might cry.
“I’ve loved two men my whole life,” she says. “I love my husband the way I do, with all my heart. And you know I love you.” Another deep breath. “If anything ever happens to you, and I know who did it, there’s no doubt in my mind that I would have it in me to kill that person. One hundred percent.”
One more time, I am back on the porch with EJ, listening to her tell me why she believes in her heart that Roof Crockett killed my father, all because my father flunked him out of school and off the football team.
“You know you’d do the same thing if it was you,” she says.
“Hundred percent,” I say.