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Cartwright, who’d taken a chair next to Letty, leaned over and muttered, “She’s poked more holes in paper than a Swingline punch.”
“Dissing another member?”
“She’s not a member,” Cartwright whispered.
When the lecture was over, Letty turned to Cartwright and said, “Listen, unless the Unspecified Agency keeps you penned up in a gopher hole somewhere, and you get the time, we ought to hit a range together. Piss off some goobers. Get a couple of margaritas after.”
Cartwright peered at her for a moment, then nodded and said, “That could happen.”
As Letty was leaving, Longstreet came over to say good-bye, and Letty asked, “Why isn’t Elaine a member?”
Longstreet took Letty by her elbow to walk her to the steps and said, “Being a good shot is not enough. None of us are... what you’d conventionally call criminals, sugar, although, mmm...” She stopped to gather some words. Her eyes were black as coals. “We’reallgood with guns and we’reallkillers. Elaine is good with guns.”
A week later,as Letty was getting ready for work, she was buzzed from the lobby of her apartment building by a red-shirted courier-service deliveryman. She buzzed him in, and at the door signed for a heavy, rectangular package wrapped in brown paper.
Inside, she found an envelope and a dark wooden box. The envelope contained an invitation for the November shoot, a key card for the entry gate, and a Yale key for the Quonsets. A note said she was invited to shoot anytime she wished, day or night. If at night, be sure to turn off the range lights when she left. Dues were one thousand dollars a year, payable when convenient.
Inside the wooden box was a new Colt Single-Action Army revolver, in caliber .45 Colt, as well as six cartridges, each in its own slot. She took the gun out and rolled the cylinder, feeling the weight in her hands, the smoothness of the action.
She was a Peace-Maker.
Of the .45-caliber kind.
Two
Over the next four months, Letty went to the monthly shoots and began to learn about the other members, and she and Cartwright hooked up a half-dozen times in the evenings, to shoot at a local gun range, to talk circumspectly about their jobs and less circumspectly about men—Cartwright, at thirty-two, was twice-divorced, Letty had no ongoing relationship.
Her first marriage didn’t count, Cartwright said, as she’d been a teenager and had moved out after three months to join the Army. The second marriage, to a man who also worked at the Unspecified Agency, had lasted a bit more than five years and had ended because of infidelity.
“Mine, not his,” Cartwright said, wryly. “How come you’re not hooked up with somebody? You’re not gay...”
Letty tugged at an earlobe for a moment, then said, “I have a lot of first and second dates, but... I think I might be too harsh for most guys. My father...”
“I looked him up,” Cartwright said. “I mean, Jesus Christ...”
“He and I are a lot alike. Uh... My mom says we both look at the world through untinted glasses. We don’t think about what it might be, or should be, or used to be, only what it is. Most guys have a hard time with that. Being seen for exactly what they are.”
“I’d say mostpeoplehave a hard time with that,” Cartwright amended.
On two occasions,they’d driven together to the clubhouse to work out with rifles. Cartwright was better with a rifle than Letty, especially at longer ranges, with the ability to judge, offhand, bullet-drop and wind drift. Cartwright shot an accurized and scoped Remington Model 700 in .300 Winchester Magnum, and Letty a high-end AR-10.
“Yours is a gun you’ll never need,” Cartwright said. “It’s a rapid-fire combat-style weapon, too big and powerful for self-defense in an urban area, not accurate enough for sniping. Shoot that off in Arlington and it’d go through three apartment buildings and a beer truck.”
“You shoot a heavier cartridge...”
“Only one at a time and very carefully. If you want to pick off Mr. American Asshole during the International Asshole Pageant, you need a sniper weapon, not something that kills all the innocent bystanders.”
In February, on Valentine’s night, with a cold, heavy rain falling outside, they were sitting in a dark political bar a few hundred yards from the Capitol. They’d hung their rain jackets on the back of their chairs; whisky and a whiff of illegal cigar smoke were in the air and middle-aged guys in expensive suits were ignoring them. For some people—many in DC—politics was better than sex.
Like Letty, Cartwright had an apartment in Arlington, across the Potomac from the District, and, like Letty, would be taking a train home and walking from the station. They’d traded life histories, which were roughly similar. Letty’s father had abandoned her and her mother when she was a toddler. Her mother had been a helpless alcoholic, and Letty had been the adult in the family from the time she was in grade school.
Cartwright’s parents, she said, hadn’t wanted her. She had been an unplanned baby, the fifth borne by her mother, and been looked upon as one mouth too many.
“My old man was a tree-shade mechanic, had a few acres outside Sulphur Springs. I had an uncle with a shithole ranch and he and my aunt sort of adopted me when I was a year old or so, and I never went back to my real folks,” Cartwright said. “My aunt died of cancer when I was twelve, and my uncle hanged himself a couple years later. After that, I was on my own.”
“I never go back to my hometown,” Letty told her. She’d been born in a particularly bleak stretch of the Red River Valley in Minnesota. “Too many bad memories. I like the people, though, most of them.”
Cartwright nodded. “My cousins own the shithole ranch now,” she said. “I go back, because I like my cousins.”
