“It’s Chris? You’re calling Senator Colles Chris?” he asked.
“He told me to,” she said.
He glanced at her: “Sure. You guys must be really close.”
She was blunt: “Close enough to get your ass fired if you’re suggesting that Colles and I are sleeping together.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that,” he muttered, rapidly backing off.
“Try harder not to suggest it,” she said; her tone did everything but smear blood on the windshield.
Long, long, long silence, except for the off-road wheels buzzing on the blacktop.
* * *
The shooting range was out in the Virginia countryside, in a low, unpainted concrete-block building; the back of the building dug into a hillside. They got out, Letty carrying her briefcase, her purse over her shoulder. Kaiser led the way to the building, politely held the steel door for her, and they went inside to a narrow room that stretched across the width of the building. The place was the exact opposite of chic: concrete floor, unpainted walls, shelves of shooting accessories on the outer floor, with two locked racks of rifles and shotguns, mostly black.
The wall behind a glass counter had wide, thick windows that looked out on a ten-station shooting range. Three men were on the firing line, their shots audible but muffled, like distant backfires. Shelves of ammo sat below the windows, and the glass counter case was filled with revolvers and semiauto handguns. The air smelled of gunpowder, Rem Oil, and concrete dust, not at all unpleasant, a candidate for male cologne.
A thin man, maybe sixty, stood behind the counter, ropy muscles, hunched over a newspaper. He was wearing a Rolling Stones tongue T-shirt and an oil-spotted MAGA hat. As they walked in, he folded the paper and said, “Special K. How’s they hangin’， man?”
Letty: “Special K?”
Kaiser ignored her and said to the gun range man, “Gotta do some training.” He gestured between the counter man and Letty. “Letty Davenport—Carl Walls. Carl owns this place.”
Walls said, “You’re a regular cutie. You got a gun?”
After a second, Letty asked, “You talking to me or Special K?”
Walls snorted and said, “All right. Well, let’s get you set up. We have guns for rent, or if you’re thinking about buying . . .”
“I’m all set,” Letty said. She lifted the briefcase.
Walls: “You got ear and eye protection?”
“I do.”
“Then you’re good to go,” Walls said. “Since you’re training, I’ll go out there with you, put you on the far end, where you can talk, shuffle some folks down away from you.”
Kaiser said to Letty, “I didn’t know you had a gun with you.”
“You didn’t ask,” Letty said. “Now you know.”
Walls picked up the edge, looked between them: “You guys ain’t close friends, huh?”
“We met an hour ago,” Kaiser said.
Letty: “It’s not looking promising.”
* * *
Walls shifted his shooters into booths one, three, and five, and put Letty and Kaiser in the ten booth. He clipped a target onto a shooting frame and cranked it fifteen yards downrange. As he did that, Letty was digging in her briefcase and Kaiser said, “Wait, wait, wait. Before you start messin’ with a gun, I want to know that you know what you’re doing.”
“I know what I’m doing,” she said. She took out a gray canvas sheath, unzipped it, and extracted a black pistol with a low optical sight.