“And you make sure to give my best to your grandma,” he says. “Hear?”
The Crocketts drive away with the rest of them, their truck in the lead, like it’s some kind of goober parade.
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?”
