TWELVE
When they got to the house in town, Vito told Gabriella to get things together, that they were going to go stay out at the cabin for a time. She asked why, what had happened, and what about school.
“Nothing much,” he told her. “Angela was jumped by three bigger girls and she defended herself. I thought it would be safer if I pulled her out of school for a week so things can cool down.”
Once they got to the cabin, her grandparents went into the bedroom and shut the door. She could hear them calmly discussing something, but she didn’t know what. Her grandparents were very close. They shared everything. Sometimes it seemed they could have an entire conversation just by looking at each other. Angela suspected that Vito was telling Gabriella about the girls who had attacked her, and what she had done to one of them.
When they came out, instead of going hiking or fishing, her grandfather pulled a small handgun out of the cabinet where he kept his guns. He checked that it was empty and then handed the gun to Angela.
“This is a Walther P22. You’re plenty old enough to start learning to use it. I realize, now, that I should have been teaching you all along how to defend yourself.
“You did good, this time, Angela, and you weren’t hurt, but when I looked at you sitting there next to me as you told me about how you had been jumped by those bigger girls, I was struck by how small and vulnerable you still are. Not just to bigger kids but to people like …”
Frankie.
He didn’t say it, but that’s what he meant.
Frankie had vanished, but that didn’t mean that men like him were no longer a threat. She knew there would always be men like him. She’d heard the police tell her mother on more than one occasion that she needed to stop hanging around with the wrong crowd.
To Angela’s mind, her mother wasn’t hanging around with the wrong crowd. Her mother was the wrong crowd.
“Anyway,” her grandfather went on, “you’re growing up fast and one of these days you’ll be on your own.” He put four boxes of ammunition in her other hand. “I won’t always be there to watch over you and help you out.”
Angela didn’t like that thought.
She had watched him practice shooting a number of times, but he mostly did it when she wasn’t there. She always thought that it was a grown-up thing. She was growing up and ready take on more responsibility. Growing up also meant she understood dangers she had never grasped as a little girl. With her grandfather wanting to teach her to shoot, she suddenly felt older, more mature, and acutely aware of the dangers not just at her mother’s trailer, but out in the world—even at school.
“We’re going to shoot those four boxes today, and we’re going to try to shoot every day until you can shoot the wings off a gnat. That will take time and a great deal of practice, but it will be worth it to have a skill you will carry with you your whole life. Do you think you’re up to the challenge?”
Angela smiled up at him. “Yes.”
She liked how well the Walther fit in her hand. She’d seen her grandfather use bigger guns. She liked this one.
“Is this gun big enough? I mean, you know, to protect myself?”
“Assassins of every stripe use a twenty-two as their gun of choice.”
“Really? Why?”
“Because it’s a smaller bullet so it won’t overpenetrate. It won’t go through people and then through walls. But to be fatal it has to go in the right place. If you put a twenty-two in the right place it kills instantly. Shot placement is more important than the size of the bullet. That’s why assassins are so successful with it—because they’re expert shots.
“Putting the bullet where it needs to go takes a lot of practice. Is that something you think you’re ready to take on?”
With a serious look, Angela nodded.
“You be careful,” her grandmother said as they headed for the door. “You do as your grandfather says so you will be safe.”
“I will, Grandma.”
Her grandfather gave her a set of electronic ear-protector headphones that shut out the sound of gunshots, but not the sound of talking. That day she shot all four boxes of ammunition. Loading bullets by pushing them into magazines left her thumb sore, but the excitement of learning something new, something so serious and adult, made it more than worth it.
They spent that first day and many a day after that practicing nothing but holding the gun rock steady as she fired it into a cliff as a backdrop. Her grandfather wouldn’t let her aim at anything. She had trouble holding the gun still, and she flinched in anticipation of the recoil.
It was months before he was satisfied with the way she could unfailingly fire off rounds, fast or slow, with the gun remaining dead still until the round fired, and then after the recoil it immediately returned to the ready position.
Her grandfather told her stories from the news about people, mostly young women, who had been abducted, and how their remains had been found after they had been held captive, tortured, and murdered. These were real people it had happened to.
She knew that he wasn’t trying to scare her. He was trying to make target shooting relevant. He was trying to impress upon her the importance of practice. Angela took everything her grandfather said seriously.
Once she learned to hold the gun rock steady he started having her shoot at a paper target tacked to a stump. She shot countless paper targets to pieces.
Once she could reliably hit the bull’s-eye, he brought out something she had seen him use a few times in the past when he practiced. It was a target contraption of some kind he had made himself out of parts from junkyards.
The target machine had a heavy metal base with gears and a coil spring. A metal rod stuck up from that heavy base. At about eye level there was a metal triangle welded to the end of the rod. When he wound it up with a key in the base, the rod would wobble and swing from side to side, and back and forth, over an area of several feet.
“There’s a reason the target is a triangle,” he told her. “Do you know the reason?”
Angela squinted up at him. “To make it harder to hit?”
“In a way,” he said. “A twenty-two can easily kill a man, even a big man. Remember when I told you that shot placement was important?”
Angela nodded. “I remember.”
“Well, you see, if you hit a man with a twenty-two at the top of his forehead, or off to the side, the bullet will likely glance off the hard bone of his skull without doing much harm. That won’t stop him.”
“So, you need to aim for his heart?”
He made a face as he considered. “If you had a bigger-caliber gun, certainly. But a twenty-two could glance off the rib cage and not get to his heart. If the guy is big and tough, a twenty-two going into his body without hitting something vital like his heart probably wouldn’t stop him. With someone on drugs they probably wouldn’t even feel it. They might die in a few hours from internal injuries, they might even live for a few days, or they might even survive.
“But if they’re coming to do you harm and you shoot them somewhere nonvital, it isn’t going to stop them fast enough. You might not get another chance. That means you will be dead and your death may be horrific.”
Angela looked down as she thought it over. She looked up.
“Well, if you put a bullet in their brain, that would stop all brain function. That would stop them.”
Her grandfather smiled. “Exactly. But the human skull is extremely thick. A twenty-two will penetrate that hard bone if the bullet strikes it at a right angle. But if it isn’t straight on, it’s liable to ricochet off the guy’s skull. You don’t have much time to stop him. If the bullet ricochets off, you may not get a second chance to put him down.”
He held his first two fingers in front of her eyes, one in front of each eye. He put his thumb on the tip of her nose.
“This area, this small triangle from eye to eye, to the tip of the nose, is the most vulnerable part of the human skull. If you put a twenty-two into that triangle, the bullet will easily enter the skull. It’s instant death.
“If a guy is coming at you and you put a bullet into that triangle it will destroy his motor function so fast that even if he’s pointing a gun at you, he won’t be able to pull the trigger.
“The base of the skull is another vulnerable spot. Assassins often shoot a person at the base of skull in the back. It destroys the medulla oblongata. It’s lights out. But it’s virtually impossible to shoot someone there if they’re attacking you. The ear is another vulnerable spot, but neither of those spots do you much good if you are being attacked head-on.
“If some guy is attacking you, and your life is in imminent danger, then you must put a bullet in that triangle. If you do, they die and you live. Simple as that.”
Angela looked over at the target he’d made. “So that’s the reason for the triangle at the top of the rod.”
“That’s right. It’s the size of the kill zone in an average man’s head. I made it so that it would move because when someone is intending to abduct you or murder you they’re moving as they come at you. If they see you have a gun they might even bob and weave. So, I made a moving target for practice.
“You’ll know when you hit it because the bullet will make a sharp ping against the steel.”
Angela let out a deep breath. “I don’t know if I can hit it when it’s moving.”
“You have to,” he said. “You’re going to practice every day until you can hit that wobbling triangle with every shot.”
“Every shot?” She shook her head. “I don’t know, Grandpa, if I’ll ever be able to do that.”
“If it’s ever necessary, your life will depend on you making that kill shot first time, every time.”
Angela nodded her determination. “All right. I’ll practice until I can hit it. Well, at least most of the time.”
“Every time,” he repeated with stern finality.
Angela looked at him for a long moment. “Every time,” she said with resolve.
Angela was determined not to quit. After a lot of practice she could hit the triangle every once in a while—when it was still. But once he wound up the device and it started wobbling around, it seemed hopeless. She missed the triangle every time. It was frustrating trying to follow the target and fire off rounds.
He urged her to settle down and not to fire until she was on target, but it was always gone before she could pull off the shot. She didn’t see how she was ever going to get good enough to hit it, much less good enough to hit it reliably.
It was several months and tens of thousands of rounds before she hit the wobbling triangle for the first time. When she heard the ping, it surprised her. She stood staring as the sound echoed back from the forest. She wasn’t sure if it had been by chance or intent.
Over the months that followed, she would shoot every day they were at the cabin, usually for hours at a time. There was little hiking or fishing, which she regretted, but the shooting had become important to her. It was a challenge, but also fed an inner yearning to do better. The effort of concentrating so hard often left her soaked in sweat at the end of a session.
One autumn night, as her grandfather was taking a shower, Gabriella sat on the edge of the fold-out bed as Angela snuggled under the covers. The fire in the woodstove was low, and the woodsmoke smelled good.
“Can I ask you a serious question, Grandma?”
“Of course. You know you can always talk to me.”
Angela turned her head, listening to the shower run through the closed bathroom door. She turned back.
“Why is he doing this? This isn’t just teaching me to shoot a gun. This is something different, I can feel it. There’s something serious about this, but I don’t know what it is.”
Her grandmother looked off in thought for a time.
“We think that maybe you’re different, Angela.”
Angela’s brows drew together. “Different?”
“Yes, piccolo.” “Piccolo” meant “little one” in Italian. It was a term of endearment her grandmother used on occasion.
“I don’t understand.”
She finally looked down at Angela. “We have long suspected that you’re different—special. You’ve shown it in a thousand little ways that we can’t really put our finger on or explain.
“But then, when you did what you did to that girl who hit you, we knew. It may seem like you simply defended yourself, and you did, but there was more to it. You’re not like other girls, other people, Angela.”
“I know. I don’t know how to explain it either, but I know I’m different. Sometimes it makes me afraid. Sometimes it makes me glad. I don’t know what it is, but I know I’m different than other people.”
“We think you are. We think you’re meant for something.”
“Something? Like what?”
Her grandmother shrugged. “We don’t know. But we think you have some purpose to your life. When you put that girl down the way you did, we knew. It was the first sign we could point to. You’re different. Your life will be different. We decided that your grandpa should start teaching you what you need to know for that life, for that person you will become.”
Angela made a face. “I don’t understand.”
Her grandmother smiled a sad smile. “I know, child. But one day you will.”
“What person will I become?”
“It’s too early to say for sure. Have patience and keep being yourself and you will grow into that person you’re meant to be. Now, get some sleep.”