Tales Of The Gun

There I was. One gun in one hand, another in the other. One was pointed at the head of one of the thugs, and the other was pointed at another. They had their own weapons, and I happened to be looking down the barrel of a rather significant looking 9 millimeter pistol. From my vantage point, it wasn't much to look at, just a darker circle in the middle of a square of black steel. They called this sort of thing a Mexican standoff, although I wasn't and still am not really sure what Mexico has to do with anything. I couldn't see the other guy's gun, but I was sure that his little pistol wasn't anything special either. Now my guns, those were works of art. For an industry which operated on the principle of disposable weapons, I was certainly an oddity. Then again, I wasn't really in an industry. I killed people. It wasn't really a living, in that it didn't quite pay the bills. It did pay for itself though. It paid enough to have some rather spectacular guns made.

The one in my right hand was silver with black inlay. The pattern on the right one was absolutely beautiful, it looked like a feathered wing which started at the muzzle and wound back toward the handle. The gun wasn't actually silver, just a good solid silver plating. It was pretty, but it was definitely a functional piece. It was the heavier of the two. I had never really liked mixing ammunition sizes, but it made managing the recoil easier. A .32 ACP cartridge gave a whole lot less kick than the .50 caliber slug that came from the silver gun. The black pistol was the lighter caliber. I actually liked the looks of it a little better. The gold inlay on the black actually gleamed a little brighter in the light cast by the burning gasoline. But in my experience, I had found that the “little” .32 cartridge just didn't make a big enough hole in some of the heavier body armor. I had enough experience with making holes in things to appreciate the extra damage. I also had enough experience to know how much damage a weapon could do to protected flesh. That, and what kind of damage that a weapon could do to unprotected flesh. Namely the skull. I knew what the .32 cartridge would do to the man's skull, and he knew what his 9 millimeter would do to mine. I guess that the Mexicans knew that too. Maybe that was why it was their standoff.

“Well, since I got hired to kill you guys, I suppose that there’s not much chance of either of you walking out of this place alive.” That was me. You have to say something in a situation like that, and since they both knew the guy that had put the contract on them, they weren’t exactly going to put down their guns. Besides, I knew something they didn’t. I had a partner.

She wasn’t exactly the most lovable girl on the planet. She had a sense of humor like a barracuda and was just about as charming as one. Then again, her personality wasn’t why I hired her. I hired her because she could shoot.

Standing there with two guns pointed at me, I was faced with a critical decision. I could pull either trigger, and it wouldn’t make much difference. Even if fired both weapons at the same time, there was a good probability that one or both of the men would still have enough in him to cap me. Since one can’t really enjoy the contract money when one is dead, that wasn’t really an option for me. They were also thinking the same thing, and since they couldn’t exactly shoot me without me killing the both of them, we were at what one might call an impasse.

I did know one thing that they didn’t. She was off there somewhere in the shadows, and I had paid her to cover my back. There was another problem though. She could shoot one of the goons in the head and his partner would probably kill me. She could shoot one of their guns away, but not both at the same time. I had come to a conclusion about two minutes into the encounter. At about that time, I thought that I heard a bolt being moved. Apparently she had come to the same conclusion that I had.

A bright green dot appeared on my chest. Now let me tell you something. The red lasers that you see in movies, those are a bunch of bull. With one of those, unless you’ve got great conditions, you don’t see it. With a green sight-laser, you can put a dot on your target from almost a kilometer and see the damn thing. I knew that on the other end of that laser beam was my sniper, with a FNH Special Police Rifle.

“Shit!” I exclaimed. What else are you going to say when you’re about to get shot? I had half prepared myself for what was going to happen, but that didn’t make it any less pleasant. I don’t remember the crack of her shot. By the time the sound wave got there, I was already on my way down. I fell to the floor, dead for what I think was the fourth time.

I really have to stop pushing my luck with these things. The lady in Soho said that my heart had stopped for about three minutes. I think that counts. Anyway, that had been Number Three, so this had to be Number Four. I really have to stop getting shot.

The two guys who had been pointing their guns at me suddenly had nothing to point them at anymore. They started looking around in shock, trying to find the sniper. After all, for all that they knew, she could shoot them next. They were too busy looking around to see me blink.

The Fabrique Nationale de Herstal Special Police Rifle fires a NATO 7.62 by 51 millimeter cartridge. The round is a little thinner and longer than a standard AA battery, three of which were in my pocket at the time. Long story. The bullet that it fires may seem small, but when one hits you in the chest traveling at a little less than 2700 feet per second, you know that something’s wrong. The force of a normal round is about equivalent to having a one kilogram mass dropped on you from eight meters. Don’t ask me how I know that. That might not sound like a lot, but when you consider that it’s all going against a space about the cross-section of a pencil, that’s something to think about. Luckily for me, she wasn’t using the normal NATO round. That was what the guys who formerly had pointed guns at me didn’t know. She had used a flat “less than lethal” round against me. “Less than lethal” still gets me a laugh. I know that it broke at least three ribs when it hit my body armor. But true to advertising, I wasn’t dead. Being shot still stings though, I don’t recommend trying it.

Anyway, they were looking around for her, their attention focused on everything but what was at their feet. It took me a few seconds to get the wherewithal back to raise the guns. You know, with me being shot and all. I focused on moving the black .32 to its target. She had shot me in the right side, right where it would do the least damage. That did make moving the heavier pistol a little harder. The silver .50 caliber moved a little more sluggishly. The gods of aiming decided to gift me with a perfect shot for my left hand, but they weren’t so forthcoming with my right hand. Then again, that’s why I like my silver gun. It makes big holes in everything.

I pulled both triggers at the same time. The two goons never knew what hit them. The little .32 struck the first one near the base of the jaw on his right side and exited through the top of his skull, leaving a wonderful mess for housekeeping. I wasn’t so lucky with the .50 caliber though. I didn’t have much control over my right arm at that point, so I just kind of pointed it dead center on the other goon and pulled the trigger three times. After all, I was getting paid to make these guys dead. I wasn’t getting paid to make it neat or clean up the mess afterward. The cartridges for the silver gun are expensive, but I was more interested in making sure the guy was dead than worrying about how much money I was wasting on ammo.

I got up then. That’s one of the perks of having died three times is that you can make it look convincing even when you’re not dead. They wouldn’t be getting up. I did still have a couple of broken ribs though. Worse had happened to me. Like dying, but then again I digress. Getting out of there was going to be a little hard though. I hadn’t exactly planned on getting shot. Well, let’s put it this way. There was a plan A and a plan B. Plan A was that I killed both of the targets without getting hurt. Plan B was the one that I was currently working on. It involved a white cleaning van, and paying my sniper an extra ten percent.

That is one of the problems of being an antihero. You may get called when they don’t want the “good guys” messing things up, but it also meant that you didn’t get anything for free. When you wanted a taxi, you paid for one, and right now, taxis were at a premium. That meant that my sniper could pretty much name her price, and that generally meant about ten percent.

In the van, headed back to my “secret lair” which wasn’t so much a lair, and really wouldn’t be much of a secret if anyone wanted to find out, I tried to think of the reason why I had recently killed two men. On the scale of Mother Teresa to Stalin, they were somewhere more near the middle of the “evil” axis, but they were still men. I knew a priest who would probably tell me that I was going to hell for that one. I think it was number six on his list. I really didn’t care. If the city wanted to use me on the sly to get rid of some of their more undesirable elements, all that they needed to negotiate was the price. After all, I didn’t do it for the satisfaction or the glory. I didn’t mind killing things and it paid well. It didn’t completely pay the bills though. I served coffee to do that. I work at the Starbucks on Eleventh and Main. At least there I wasn’t going to get shot.


What I want to know is, can you connect with the character. Is his presentation believable and likable. Do you really care that he just killed two men, or does that not really matter? What about him makes him likable? Or unlikable?