He took our bribe and grunted us through, the reek of pipe tobacco clinging even in the parking lot. The range itself was a concrete bunker punched through a wooded hill—dark, icy, lit by a row of humming fluorescent tubes and the odd patch of weak winter sun threading through cloudy Plexiglas.
Jade looked ready to bolt, but she didn’t. She walked in like it was another seminar, another lab, another room full of unknowable variables. I shrugged the bag off my shoulder and started lining up the hardware: the one I’d kept, plus two from the cache Marco had sewn into the spare tire. I laid out the boxes of rounds with a kind of funereal respect.
She looked at the table, at my hands, then up at me. “So. That’s a lot of gun for a man who claims he’s retired,” she said.
“It’s not for me,” I said. “It’s for you.”
I started her on the smallest—a .380, so gently used it still had the bruise of its last owner’s palm print on the grip. I picked it up, checked it, turned it in my hand, performed every ritual twice so she could see nothing bad would happen unless we made it happen, and then I put it in her grasp. She shivered—not from cold, but from the touch of it.
“It’s heavier than I thought,” she said.
“That’s the point,” I replied. I walked her through the stances, the lines, the process of seeing: see target, see hands, see threat. She nodded, absorbing detail.
“Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot,” I said. “The safety’s here. It doesn’t matter what kind of movie you’ve seen, nobody racks the slide and fires in one motion.”
“What about the squeaky bit?” she said, pointing to the slide, index hovering at a healthy distance.
“That’s muscle memory, believe it or not. Most people flinch when they’re about to fire. You’ll have to trick your hand into not caring.”
We loaded the mag together.
She watched my every move. The tip of her tongue pressed to the edge of her front teeth, eyes narrowed, mind already halfway into the mechanical ballet of what came next. I liked the wayher focus turned everything else down to a background hum, her nerves distilled and weaponized.
I stepped behind her, hands light on her waist, adjusting stance. “Spread your feet. You want to lean rather than absorb.” She did, shifting her center of gravity forward, not so much trusting me but trusting the algorithm of instruction. Her breath hitched in a practiced way—she was managing her adrenaline, running her own biofeedback loop even with a gun heavy in her grip.
“Okay,” she said, almost to herself.
I waited for the wince, the nervous giggle, the break in concentration that meant she was still Jade-under-pressure. It never came. She raised her arms, sighted down the stubby barrel, and for a moment the world was reduced to her, the gun, and the anonymous paper silhouette twenty feet away.
“It’s harder to see than I thought,” she said, squinting, trying to align the dot sight and the printed X center mass.
“You get used to it,” I said. “Take your time.”
I could hear Marco’s voice in my memory, teasing me for the way I always monologued weapons training. But I didn’t apologize; I wanted her to remember every word in a crisis.
She inhaled, held, and squeezed. The crack was loud but not thunderous in the small cinderblock echo chamber. The round bled an ugly hole just above the target’s right shoulder.
“Again,” I said.
She didn’t look at me; just exhaled and went again, this time closer. Two more, then a misfire—her hand jerked, anticipation pulling the shot wide. She set the gun down hard on the bench, brows furrowed, jaw set. “Why’s it so fucking hard to make your body listen?”
“Years of evolution telling you not to make loud noises with fire in your hands,” I said. “You did fine.”
She shook her head, then reset her stance and tried again. Ten rounds, then a reload. Each shot tighter, more deliberate.
By the time we’d run through two boxes, she could keep almost every shot within the black. She watched the target swing back and forth at the end of its wire, face unreadable, and I could see the calculus happening in her head. This wasn’t fun for her. Not sport, not triumph. She was metabolizing the violence into something more useful, more clinical.
“Again,” she said, reloading without waiting for me to prompt her.
She didn’t talk much after that; just shot, analyzed, shot again. The only complaint she voiced was about the taste of gunpowder in the back of her throat, and even that was more observation than protest.
When her hands started to tremble from fatigue, I called a break and steered her to the filthy linoleum bench by the entrance. She sat with her elbows on her knees, head bowed, the gun resting loose in her lap.
“Do you feel safer?” I asked.
She thought about it. “No. But I feel…” She trailed off, eyes narrowed on something I couldn’t see. “I feel less like a victim.”
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s all it’s for. Not to win a gunfight. Just to remind you you’re not helpless.”
