The clock doesn’t stop until after the last shot has been fired.
Jimmy has already set up a rack with a half-dozen steel target plates—six inches in diameter, three-eighths of an inch thick—that he’s spray-painted black to more easily determine the location of the hit. The steel is sturdy enough to occasionally withstand a bullet strike without tipping over.
When I leave a target standing, Jimmy usually tells me I shoot like a girl.
“Yeah,” I say. “Calamity Jane.”
It was what my father the ex-Marine used to call me when he started taking me to the range. I’d say it was right after I stopped playing with dolls. But the only way I would have ever played with dolls is if there had been an Officer Barbie. And probably not even then.
As the leadoff shooter, I step back ten yards from the plates—it doesn’t seem like much, but it’s the proper distance to test accuracy with even a fancy handgun—and wait for Jimmy to start the clock.
In civilian shooting competitions, missed shots are awardedzero points. Cops who misslosepoints, then get smack-talked all the way to the parking lot. Or back to the squad room in the old days.
“When cops miss what they’re aiming at,” Jimmy says as he sets the timer, “they might hit grandma by mistake.”
“Or maybe, say, a client?” I ask him, grinning.
“Don’t give me any ideas about that bottom-feeder we’re defending,” he says, then asks if I’m ready.
I take a big deep breath, let the air out slowly, trying to get my adrenaline under control.
“Armed and ready.”
“At least you didn’t give me that cheesy line about being born ready.”
“No effing way,” I say.
I hear the beep and raise the P320 and start firing away.
Six for six.
They all go down.
But even after the last one is down, I want to keep going, reload until I’m out of ammunition and my hand can no longer squeeze the trigger.
I want everything in my life to be this easy. Aim and fire.
I want to stop feeling the way I’ve felt for the past eight months, that I’m the one with the target on my back.
TWO
JIMMY MATCHES ME WHEN it’s his turn, shot for shot, six for six. We’re just getting started. I finally edge ahead of him in the fifth round when he misses the last target.
“Oops,” I say. “Down goes grandma.”
“She had a good life,” Jimmy says.
He’s smiling. So am I.
“You can’t even beat a cancer patient,” I say. “Sad.”
That wipes the smile off his face, but then this particular subject always does.
“You know I don’t like playing that game,” he says.
“Trust me,” I say. “Neither do I.”
Truth is, I had already been having a day, and it isn’t even eight o’clock in the morning. Sometimes I get so sick between rounds of chemo that I’m up most of the night. Sometime around four, I drop off to sleep for a couple of hours, only to be awakened by my alarm at six.
