The thing that drew her to guns was their precision, lethality, and simplicity. Aside from the gun, her entire life was chaotic—she often missed school when her mother was too drunk in the morning to take her, was often late with schoolwork because of the missed days, sometimes had an exceptional load of muskrats and no time to both get them to the buyer and go to school on the same day.
Guns represented order and life. They were simple, clean, understandable, useful. She knew that her .22 was a piece of junk, perhaps seventy years older than she was, with a stock that had split and had been poorly repaired, but she cared for it as though it were her first piece of jewelry. That feeling had never gone away.
* * *
“Here we go,” Kaiser called to Letty from across the rack of long guns. “It’s not a rifle, but it’s probably what we need.”
The floor clerk was keeping an eye on them and Kaiser waved him over. Kaiser touched the barrel as Letty joined them and said, “Used Remington 870 shotgun, it’ll take rifled slugs. Magazine-loaded. Decent sling, not great, but we’re not going to be marching across Texas.”
The clerk said, “Rifled slugs are fine. So is buckshot, if you’d prefer that. And any other shot loads, as far as that goes.”
“I’ve never been much into shotguns,” Letty said.
“Not much to know,” Kaiser said. “The thing is, with this version you can change loads in a hurry and those slugs will knock the crap out of anything they hit. Up close, the buckshot . . . number-three buckshot has about twenty pellets at about .25 caliber each . . . Doesn’t have the range of a rifle, but for our purposes, last chance self-defense . . .”
“Perfect for that,” the clerk said.
Kaiser looked at Letty. “You think a twelve-gauge might rock you back a little too much? Gonna kick like a horse if we’re shooting slugs.”
“I’ve shot skeet some, so . . . no. On the other hand, I was shooting light loads.”
“If you got in a position where you had to shoot it, I doubt you’d much notice the recoil,” Kaiser said. “Besides, I sorta think it might be my gun for the time being.”
Letty said, “If that’s your pick, you’re the combat guy.”
Then Kaiser and the clerk got involved in a protracted discussion of condition, with the clerk arguing that the gun was used only by a little old lady on weekends during deer season, while Kaiser suggested it appeared to be a worn-out competition shooter that could blow up at any minute. Kaiser got the gun, an included hard case with a TSA-approved lock, four boxes of shells and three extra magazines, for $660, which Letty put on her American Express card.
“I’m going to keep it,” she told Kaiser, as she carried it out to the car. “I always knew I should have a shotgun, but I never got around to it.”
Kaiser was exceptionally pleased with himself. “I stole this sucker. It’s damn near new. I bet it hasn’t had a hundred shells run through it.”
“So you took advantage of that poor sales clerk?”
“The thing had a layer of dust on the trigger guard. I bet it was in that rack for two years, nobody even picked it up. For law enforcement kind of stuff, it’s better than a rifle.”
“You think there’s a range where we could shoot it, around Midland?” Letty asked.
Kaiser glanced at her.
“Just kiddin’。”
* * *
They found a sporting clays place out in the countryside where Letty could spend time working with the gun. Like Kaiser said, the shotgun rocked her back on her heels; half a box of slugs and half a box of buckshot left her with a sore shoulder. And it was heavy: she wouldn’t have wanted to carry it around the fields in the Red River valley, but if she had to shoot it in self-defense, it’d work fine out to perhaps sixty or seventy yards with slugs, forty or fifty with buckshot.