Nikki bounced down the stairs wearing tennis shoes, khaki shorts, and a short-sleeve, lightweight button-up that hid her gun nicely. She’d been tempted to try out a few of the vintage looks hanging around the room, but had realized they probably wouldn’t conceal any firearms. She sat down at the breakfast table, making sure not to catch her holster on the chair. The first few months she’d worn a gun, she’d felt like it had knocked into everything and she’d had to severely adjust her wardrobe to shirts that would drape nicely. These days she barely noticed she had it on.
Her grandmother set a bowl of oatmeal down in front of her and pushed a Tupperware container of cut peaches at her. Nikki took both without a word, respecting her grandmother’s preferred morning mode. After Jane’s Czechoslovakian Incident, she had finally learned that nothing good ever came of speaking to a non-morning person before ten. Nikki finished her breakfast, washed her bowl and then went out on the porch to wait for Peg’s brain to switch back on.
The farm looked mostly like she remembered. Donna, her grandmother’s geriatric gray mare, dozed in the near paddock, one leg cocked, chewing reflexively on some grass. The barn needed painting. There was activity in the peach orchard beyond the paddock. A man on an ATV pulled a trailer full of picked peaches at a snail’s pace through the trees and down toward the barn.
“That’ll be Jorge,” said Peg coming out onto the porch. “He is always so careful when he drives. He never bruises a single peach. His nephew, on the other hand, drives like a crazy man. Might as well make jam by the time he’s done.”
“Did Jorge ever get his work visa settled?” asked Nikki, remembering the drama from last Christmas.
“Sort of,” said Peg pulling a face. “So much damn paperwork these days. This country is fed by the efforts of migrant workers. I fail to understand why we make it so difficult to get work visas.” She waved at Jorge, who waved back.
“Because politicians aren’t farmers and farmers are too busy to be politicians,” said Nikki, repeating one of her grandfather’s stock phrases, which made Peg laugh.
“He was so right. Well, what’s your plan for the day? Are you up for shooting at the quarry?”
“Sure,” said Nikki. “Sounds good.”
“Good. We should get going before the sun gets too high. I’ll get the gun and bullets, meet you at the car in ten.”
Nikki nodded and went to add some extra bullets to her own purse before arriving at the car.
The quarry was an old gravel mine cut into the side of a hill, revealing the hard strata of geologic time. While the mine had been closed for years the road up to it showed that it was clearly still in use and the twinkle of shiny brass among the rocks showed that Peg wasn’t the only one who used it for an informal gun range.
Nikki frowned as she kicked over a rock and dislodged a mid-sized casing. A few feet away, a discarded Wolf 39mm ammunition box fluttered in the breeze, pinned in place by a dead branch.
“Something the matter?” asked Peg, taking her gun bag out of the car.
“What kind of guns do people like to shoot up here? Assault rifles?”
“I suppose,” said Peg, with a shrug. “People have all sorts of things in their gun safes. That’s why home invasions aren’t too much of a problem around here.”
“Hmm,” said Nikki, looking at the spray pattern of spent AK-47 ammo. “Yes, but I thought full-auto was illegal here.”
“Just because it ain’t legal, don’t mean people don’t do it,” said Peg. “What are you looking at over there?”
“Nothing,” said Nikki looking up with a smile. Peg looked unconvinced, but carried some tin cans out to a board that had been placed between two rocks. The board had the sad, chewed look of anything at the wrong end of a gun range. “OK,” said Peg, coming back and opening the bag. “This is what is known as a revolver.”
“Grandma,” said Nikki, trying to stem the tide of “Guns for Dummies” that was flowing at her.
“And that’s because it’s got this little cylinder here that revolves, and that is where you place the bullets.”
“Grandma.”
“Now you’ve got to pay attention,” said Peg. “It’s important to know this stuff if you’re going to be in the house with a gun.”
“Yes, but—” said Nikki.
“No buts,” said Peg. “I hope California hasn’t turned you into some sort of hippie, gun control idiot.”
In response, Nikki flipped up the tail of her shirt and pulled out her SIG Sauer. Walking down the line, she capped the cans one after another. When the slide locked back she dropped the empty and inserted a fresh magazine from her pocket. She stepped back, made sure the situation was secure, and then re-holstered.
“Actually,” she said, turning back to Peg, “I firmly believe in gun control, just, you know, for other people.”
She could see that Peg was stunned, but true to her character, she simply sniffed and struggled to look unimpressed. “I guess you’re not kidding,” said Peg. “What are you carrying?”
Nikki pulled out her gun and handed it to her grandmother. “A SIG Sauer P239. It’ll shoot 9mm or your .357 rounds.”
“Your mother doesn’t know you carry this, does she?”
“Does she know about yours?”
Peg looked guilty. “I think she believes I got rid of it. I just don’t talk about it.” She turned Nikki’s gun over in her hand. “I don’t know about these kind of guns. I like the revolver. Fewer parts. And I can take it apart and clean it and put it back together without screwing it up.”
“I can take this one apart without screwing it up,” said Nikki. “But I know what you mean. I’ll show you how later if you want. Do you want to shoot it?”
“Heck, yeah!”
Peg fired off carefully aimed shots, while Nikki reloaded bullets into her empty magazine.
“It’s kind of fun!” said Peg handing it back. “But more kicky than mine.”
“Yours is heavier,” said Nikki. “The lighter the gun, the more you have to rely on your hands to control the recoil.”
“Huh. Where’d you learn to shoot?”
“Um, my work offers courses on shooting,” said Nikki. Which was true. True-ish anyway. “We travel a lot and they want us to be safe and prepared for any situation.”
“I thought you were a project coordinator for a make-up company,” said Peg, looking puzzled.
“For the Carrie Mae Charity Foundation, yes,” said Nikki.
“Need a lot of guns working for charity work, do you?” Peg looked skeptical.
“Charity goes to the people in need,” said Nikki. “And frequently the people in need live in dangerous situations. Carrie Mae likes its ladies to be well-groomed, well-spoken, and well-prepared.”
“Sort of a Boy Scout philosophy, I guess,” said Peg. “Let’s shoot some more. I want to see how you do with mine.”
It was close to noon by the time they quit and Nikki sank into the cloth seats of her grandmother’s Ford, happily cranking the air conditioning.
“I love the Impala,” she said, flapping her hands into the breeze from the vent, trying to channel more air to her skin. “But I do miss modern air-conditioning.”
“When did you get that car? I can’t say that I would have picked it out for you.”
“I wouldn’t have picked it out for me either,” said Nikki. “It belonged to a co-worker of mine who died. She really loved that car, and I didn’t have the heart to let it go out to auction.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. How’d she die?”
The thumping blades of the helicopter were close and Nikki glanced over her shoulder. The helicopter was holding steady at road level, with Ellen leaning out the door, aiming her rifle past Nikki at Val. She didn’t hear the gunshot, but she saw Val jerk and fall over the railing. Nikki ran forward, catching Val’s hand as it slipped from the edge of the bridge.
“Val!” yelled Nikki.
Val’s hand was sliding from her grasp, it was wet with blood. Nikki leaned further over the railing, feeling a precarious shift in balance. Val looked up, her naturally pale face even paler. Behind her, Nikki could hear the helicopter settling onto the bridge.
“I take it back, Nikki.”
“What? Val, hold on!”
“I take it back. I’m not sorry I bought you shoes.”
“I lost those shoes! It doesn’t matter! None of it matters!” Nikki was screaming now. “Just hold on to my hand!”
Val looked down at the water. Nikki could hear the pounding of feet on the bridge behind her.
Val looked up into Nikki’s face and smiled. Then she let go.
“Val!” screamed Nikki as her friend tumbled into the turgid water of Chao Phraya.
Nikki paused, absorbing the memory like a blow, before answering her grandmother. Talking about Val Robinson, her first partner at Carrie Mae, had gotten easier, but she still never quite knew what to say. Ellen shot her, and then I dropped her off a bridge? That wasn’t going to go over well.
“She drowned,” said Nikki. You know, eventually, if the fall from the bridge or the bullet wound didn’t kill her first.
“Wow, that’s too bad. Was it an accident?”
“Well, no one drowns on purpose,” said Nikki.
“I don’t know—could have been suicide.”
“It wasn’t,” said Nikki. “She just got careless.” She tried to smother the bitterness in her tone, but didn’t succeed. Val’s betrayal still stung and she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she should have been able to talk Val into coming back to Carrie Mae. No one else shared that view. They all said that killing Val had been the only solution, but on sleepless nights Nikki found herself replaying the incidents in Bangkok, trying to figure out what she could have done differently.
“So you keep her car to remind you not to be careless, too?” asked Peg, and Nikki froze in her seat. She could feel a trickle of sweat roll down into her cleavage.
“Shh,” said Nikki. “No one’s supposed to know that.”
Peg laughed, then she put out her hand and patted Nikki’s knee. “We all got secrets, honey. But believe me, they’re never as big as we think they are. Because, and don’t take this the wrong way, generally speaking, no one cares about us as much as we ourselves do. If you don’t want to talk about this Val woman, that’s fine. I won’t push it. But really, whatever you’re not saying probably isn’t that big a deal. It’s not like you killed her.”
“Right,” said Nikki. It was really more of a joint effort. “Speaking of things that weren’t my fault, I should probably tell you something before you hear about it around town.” Nikki briefly filled her grandmother in on the events at the Kessel Run. “And then less than an hour later, I saw one of the guys walking down the street!”
“That sounds like Merv,” said Peg, shaking her head. “Thinks a sheriff’s badge gives him the right to run things however he wants.”
“You don’t like him?” asked Nikki.
Peg shrugged. “Not really, and I trust him only about as far as I can throw him. He keeps offering to buy my farm. Frankly, I’d rather let the vultures at the bank have it than sell it to him.”
“Is bankruptcy a possibility?” asked Nikki, startled.
“Eh, no more than any other year,” said Peg. “It’s farming. You know, you just get along and hope the crops come in and if they do, it all works out, and if they don’t then you have to get creative. But my advice is to stay out of the sheriff’s way. Nothing good can come from hanging around him.”
“I didn’t intend to hang around him last time,” said Nikki.
“Well, then you’d better stay out of bar fights,” said Peg, tartly.
“It wasn’t a bar fight,” protested Nikki. “At least not much of one. They were drunk and stupid.”
“Well, it’s a good thing Jackson was there then, in case things had gotten dangerous.”
“Uh, yeah,” said Nikki feeling annoyed. She had downplayed the bar fight quite a bit, but she didn’t think she’d made it sound like she needed help.
“He’s such a sweet boy. I don’t know why your mother never liked him.”
“He’s from Kaniksu Falls,” said Nikki with a shrug. “She never likes anyone from Kaniksu Falls.”
Peg grunted, but didn’t refute her statement.