An Examination of Collegial Dynamics as Expressed Through Marksmanship or: A Ladies' Day Out Read online

  S.L. Huang

  An Examination of Collegial Dynamics as Expressed Through Marksmanship

  or:

  Ladies’ Day Out

  This short story takes place between book 2 (Half Life) and book 3 (Root of Unity), and is best read either before or after book 3. I’d like to dedicate this short to my long-suffering betas, who put up with a lot of whining from me on this one. A LOT.

  “Hey, Cas? Can I ask a favor?”

  I looked up from the file I was paging through. Pilar and I were alone in Arthur’s private investigations office—I was sprawled in a chair checking up on some of the fallout from the Arkacite case, and she, as Arthur and Checker’s newly-minted office manager, was working on some sort of filing stuff.

  Or whatever office managers did.

  But now Pilar had a glint in her eye that made me feel very, very cautious. Not to mention that I wasn’t really the “favor” type.

  “What is it?” I said.

  She bounced in her desk chair and leaned forward on her elbows, her lips twitching upward. “Will you teach me to shoot?”

  “Shoot a gun?”

  She grinned. “I want to learn.”

  I wasn’t sure why the request surprised me. After all, Pilar might look cute and normal, but we’d met her when she’d volunteered to commit corporate espionage and then go toe-to-toe with a Mob boss.

  Still, it didn’t sound like my idea of fun. “You point it and you fire it,” I said.

  “Sure, if you’re a super-powered mathy genius like someone out of the movies!” She leaned on the words meaningfully. “I’m pretty sure if I tried to take that sort of advice I’d end up, like, killing someone.”

  “That’s generally the idea.”

  “Cas!”

  “I have no idea how to teach,” I said. “Why can’t you ask Arthur?”

  “I did.” She dropped her eyes and played with the corners of some papers on her desk. “And he said he would, only he keeps putting it off, and I feel bad about bugging him, because, well, you know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Well, he’s not real fond of the idea of teaching people to use guns.”

  “He isn’t? Why not?” Arthur carried, too. Legally, unlike me. And he liked being all helpful.

  Pilar stared at me. “Because they’re violent. Arthur doesn’t really like guns, you know.”

  “That’s stupid. They’re value-neutral.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  I sighed. “I don’t do that sort of thing. Have Checker teach you or something.”

  She screwed up her face, recoiling. “Checker doesn’t know how to shoot. He hates guns.”

  “What? He does?”

  “How did you not know that?”

  “I don’t—” I didn’t have an answer. How hadn’t I known that? “Well, he’d better learn. It’s not safe for him not to know.”

  “Well, uh, talk to him about it, okay? But will you teach me? Please?” Her mouth twitched toward a smile again. “You’d be doing Arthur a favor.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “But you would be doing him a favor. And me!” She cradled her chin in her hands and widened her expression into what I strongly suspected were supposed to be puppy-dog eyes. “I really want to learn. Please? For Arthur?”

  Dammit, I knew when someone was manipulating me successfully. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  Her whole face lit up. “Right now?”

  “Yes, right now.”

  “Yay! Okay!” She hopped up, grabbing for her sweater. “Where’s the range at?”

  I barked a laugh. “Range? Ha!”

  ***

  I took Pilar out into some desert foothills, to the sort of place I used for meets that were too shady for dive bars and where no one would hear a gunshot. Or, if they heard it, they wouldn’t report it. It was the sort of place I would go to practice shooting, if I practiced.

  We stopped by a storage unit on the way to pick up some more weapons and a trunk full of ammo. Pilar’s eyes popped when she saw what I was packing in, though I couldn’t tell if she was excited or nervous—or which should worry me more.

  “Are you really going to start me off with that?” she asked breathlessly.

  I thunked the Barrett in on top of the ammo. It was almost as long as I was. “Do you want to learn to shoot or not?”

  She just grinned again and stopped asking questions.

  When we arrived, I drew my Colt and pointed at the mountainside. “First lesson: point at what you want dead and pull the trigger. Aim at that bush.”

  Pilar wiped her hands on her thighs and then reached out to take the gun. Her fingers curled around it firmly and instinctively—and with a bang and a gout of flame, it went off in her hands before she could raise it. She yelped and dropped it.

  I swooped and caught it before one-half-g-t-squared equaled rocky ground and fucked up my weapon. “Watch it!”

  “Sorry! Sorry!”

  “This is a thousand-dollar gun,” I said. “You break it, you bought it.”

  “I’m sorry!” she cried. “I didn’t expect it to be so—I mean, that was really, really, really loud!”

  Oh, shit. Right. Normal people usually wore ear protection for this sort of thing. I went to the car and found a napkin in the front seat. After glancing critically at Pilar’s ears, I tore off two little pieces, spat on them, and wadded them in my fingers. “Here you go.”

  She wrinkled her nose but took the improvised earplugs and stuffed them in.

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s lesson number two. Don’t pull the trigger before you’re pointing at the thing you want dead. Do it again.”

  She took the weapon too gingerly this time, and I had to shove her fingers and hands around so she’d be pressing on the grip safety and giving the recoil enough brace. When she fired, the shot went haywire, the lines of her stance and grip and aim all at cockeyed angles like the mathematics was a stepped-on hedgehog.

  Well. I say the shot went haywire. It really went exactly where her front and rear sight pointed.

  “Did I get it?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “In fact, that was terrible.”

  Her face fell. “Oh.”

  “It’s not your fault. I’m a terrible teacher,” I said. “Okay, you see these things? These are your sights. You need to look at them. Two points define a line. Whatever line you draw through your front and rear sight, that vector is the trajectory of your bullet.”

  “So I should line them up, is what you’re saying.”

  “They’re always in a line. You need to line them up with what you want to hit.”

  “You know, sometimes I can’t tell if you do that on purpose,” Pilar said, raising the Colt again.

  “Do what?” I said.

  ***

  I really was an awful teacher, but one thing that was blazingly clear to me with each shot was exactly what Pilar was doing wrong, which I supposed gave us an edge. We didn’t get to even the most basic rifles that day—or the Barrett—but by the time the sky started dimming into twilight Pilar was at least hitting within twenty centimeters of where she was trying to with the pistol.

  She transferred my Colt to her left hand for a moment, shaking out her right. “It’s tiring, isn’t it?”

  “Only when you’re weak,” I said. “Those muscles will build up.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Thanks.”

  “You should have your own weapon,” I said, “and carry it. Some o
f the cases we’ve gotten involved with, it’s a good idea.” A gun wouldn’t help if Pithica came knocking again, but it was the only thing that would give Pilar a chance against armed robots or Mob hitmen.

  “You mean some of your cases,” Pilar corrected. “Arthur’s cases are usually, um. Not that. But point taken,” she added hastily. “What are the laws and stuff about owning one? Do I have to, like, register or something?”

  “Define ‘have to.’”

  “Uh, on second thought, never mind. I’ll ask the Internet.”

  I stepped back over to the car. “Here, try some of the other handguns before it gets dark. You need to know how to handle all of them. And then guess what?”

  “What?” she asked raptly.

  “You’re going to clean them for me.”

  ***

  I didn’t know how it became a thing, but Pilar started bugging me to take her out shooting a few times a week. If I didn’t drop by Arthur’s office, she’d text me.

  “I don’t usually work for free,” I groused the third time.

  “Oh!” Her eyes flew wide. “Shoot. I’m sorry. Do you want me to pay you?”

  “You couldn’t afford me,” I said. “Besides, I’ve got an ongoing gig right now. I’m just killing time during the day.” Come nights, I was at the docks watching for a certain very specific shipment. A lot of other people were watching for it, too, including the rightful owners and the U.S. Coast Guard, but I had no doubt I’d beat them all to it.

  “Oh,” Pilar said. “Anything exciting?”

  I frowned at her. “You really want to know the details?”

  Her expression froze. “Um, probably not. I was just making small talk.”

  “Well, stop it.”

  ***

  Truth be told, I didn’t have many details to share. The client was one I’d never worked for before, and all he had was a description of the couriers he wanted me to play pirate with and approximately where in Mexico they’d be coming from.

  After poring over a map of currents, I’d been able to calculate their approximate necessary timing to reach Los Angeles under cover of darkness, but one thing my dear new client didn’t have was the date. Only that they were definitely coming, and it would be at night, and it was sometime in the near future.

  He’d given me a reasonably large retainer that made me overlook the lack of information—but only just.

  On the plus side, this job was keeping me employed. My brain wasn’t good to me when I didn’t have work going on. And lately my brain had been worse and work more scarce.

  I tried not to think about it.

  Even work had been depressing me lately, though. I was on a fourteen-month streak of a ridiculous challenge Arthur had goaded me into, and the whole thing was starting to feel frustrating and pointless. As the time lengthened, I’d gone from being impressed with myself and entertained by the game to well, tired.

  I was tired of making things harder for myself. Sometimes I just wanted to do things the easy way.

  Pilar, of course, started asking if something was bothering me. Stupid small talk. Stupid perspicacious people.

  “I’ve just been trying to live a little more by the book lately,” I said, grumpily and non-specifically. “I’m sick of it. Sick of always having to think about it.”

  She nodded sagely. “Like when you’re on a diet, and you just want one day where you stuff your face with pizza and don’t count a single calorie.”

  I gawked at her.

  “Okay,” she amended. “Maybe not like that. What is it you’re sick of thinking about all the time?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s this thing I’ve been doing for Arthur. I might stop.”

  “Oh, the not-killing-people thing,” she said. “Yeah, I’ve heard you guys talking about that. You’re in murder rehab.” She giggled.

  “What?”

  “It’s from a TV show,” she explained. “I’m a sucker for British television, especially shows with very pretty boys in them.”

  I grunted. I wasn’t in the mood for humor.

  Pilar seemed to catch on, her expression straightening and sobering. “Yes. Not funny. Sorry. I think it’s great, Cas—really admirable. Good for you.”

  Good for me.

  I was waiting to fail. Waiting, and meanwhile wondering why I was still going through the motions.

  ***

  Somehow, despite my lack of pedagogical skill, Pilar’s marksmanship improved. After some trial and error, we’d found which grips and stances worked best for her, and she was getting to the point where she could draw and fall into them immediately and easily. I set up obstacles and moving targets for her, forcing her to pull her sidearm, assess threats, and then fire and reload and keep firing. (She’d started bringing her own earplugs. Along with eye protection, which I’d utterly forgotten about.)

  I knew Pilar well enough to have an idea how tenacious she was—heck, she was the person who’d mastered Arthur’s filing system so well he couldn’t tell the difference between his work and hers, and that was saying something—but she still managed to surprise me with the intensity of her dedication. It was slightly annoying, given that I was the one getting dragged along with it.

  I wasn’t about to admit that her enthusiasm was kind of well, likeable. Every time she nailed a new course of fire she would literally squeal. “Did you see that!”

  I usually gave her a sarcastic response. She always just laughed.

  Eventually I decided that instead of random pieces of cardboard and two-by-fours, I should give Pilar a human-shaped target. I stuck a six-foot piece of plywood leaning against a large rock and drew an outline on it in a fat black permanent marker.

  “Okay,” I said. “I don’t usually go in for the center-of-mass nonsense, because a head shot is way more likely to be deadly. But you’re nowhere near accurate enough for the probabilities to work out in your favor with going for the head all the time.” Working with Pilar, I’d started reluctantly realizing why people used firearms the way they did. Conventional wisdom being wise, who’d have thought. “Point at the biggest, most central chunk of bad guy you can see. Usually that’s going to be the torso.”

  For the first time since I’d begun teaching her, Pilar hesitated. “What if—I mean, I want to be able to defend myself. But if I have to, I only want to shoot to wound, you know?”

  “What?” I said, spinning from the plywood to face her. “Are you high?”

  Her expression went slack and shocked. “What—what do you mean? Isn’t that what you’re doing for Arthur right now?”

  “Because I can hit what I aim at. Shooting to wound is not a thing. Unless you’re me. Otherwise, no.”

  “But why not?”

  “Your error margins are just—they’re just way too fucking big,” I said. “And I don’t mean because you’re still a bad shooter, but because everyone’s error margins are too big. If you try to do something as ridiculous as shooting to wound, there’s an excellent chance you’re either going to miss completely or kill the person anyway.” And here was another bit of conventional firearms wisdom I was suddenly and viscerally seeing the point in. “Once you decide to fire, you go for your very best chance at stopping your target, or else it defeats the whole fucking point. And if you don’t want someone dead, you don’t shoot.”

  Pilar’s eyebrows had drawn together. “But I don’t want anybody dead.”

  “Even someone who’s about to kill you?”

  “I ” She looked down doubtfully at the Colt in her hands, her mouth pulling miserably. “I want to have the skill to protect myself, I do—it’s why I asked you to teach me, you know? And this has been, like, it’s been so much fun, and I guess I wasn’t really ”

  “You’re not making any sense,” I said.

  She handed the gun back to me. “I’m sorry. I should probably—I should think about this more.”

  ***

  I didn’t particularly invest myself in whether Pilar wanted to continue
our shooting lessons or not. If she did, fine, and it was probably a good idea for Arthur and Checker’s office manager to carry. If she didn’t—well, then I got out of a time-consuming obligation.

  Win-win.

  Some nights later, my mobile buzzed in my pocket while I was busy steering a speed boat through the pitch black, crossing the currents in a modified spiral that would take me in a pursuit curve, if there happened to be anything to intercept tonight. I pulled the phone out one-handed and wedged it in against my shoulder, impressed I had cell service this far out. “Hello?”

  “Hi—Cas?” said Pilar’s voice, surprising me—she usually texted.

  “What’s up?”

  “I—uh,” she said.

  “Form words, Pilar.”

  “I totally understand if you say no, and I think it’s possible this might be a stupid idea, and I know I said I had to think about things and stuff, but, um, can I—can I borrow a gun? Just for a little while. There’s this situation with—”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “It’s my roommate. Her ex is stalking her and—”

  “I said sure.”

  “And she has a restraining order, but he keeps violating it and he’s been making threats for a while now and—”

  “Okay.”

  “—and we’ve already spent a lot of time couch-surfing with friends, both of us, but it’s been going on forever and the police say they don’t have enough evidence to do anything, but he posted these new messages to her wall online last night that make it seem like—”

  “Do we have a bad connection? I said okay about a million years ago. I’ll bring one by tomorrow.”

  Pilar didn’t seem to know what to say. “Really? You don’t mind? I mean, I promise I’ll use it only as a last resort, ’cause if anything happened the police would want to know where I got it and everything, and that seems, um, bad, but—”

  “There are plenty of legal unregistered guns in California,” I said. Besides, Checker could always fake the paperwork if we needed him to. “I’m not going to give you one that’s been used in a crime. Just say it got passed down from your family if anyone’s nosy.”

  “Oh. Uh. Okay. I mean, I don’t want to use it, but this guy, he had someone post this picture on her page that—”