Down to the Liar (9 page)

“There is something you are not telling me,” Dani says over the dull roar of the other shooters. She’s leaning against the wall of the booth, her arms crossed, looking relaxed. She always seems most at ease when there’s a gun in the room.

I fire a few rounds into the distant target. It’s hard to tell from the booth, but I may have managed a reliable group. It’s down by the lower left quadrant of the target, but it’s a group.

“Move your right foot back,” Dani says, her expression shrewd and assessing. “Lean more over your left.”

Dani didn’t exactly volunteer to teach me. She prefers to keep me completely separate from her day job as hired muscle for whatever criminal syndicate happens to be shorthanded. Training me in the fine art of killing people is too close to that part of her life for comfort, I guess. But I insisted. Mike gave me exactly one (totally unnecessary) driving lesson during which I nearly booted him from the car for stomping on an imaginary brake pedal on the passenger-side floor every time I rounded a corner. I figured that subjecting myself to his teaching style while I was in possession of a loaded weapon was not the best way to stay out of prison.

Besides, I like being around Dani. She doesn’t push me to be something I’m not. She doesn’t judge me, as long as I’m not acting stupid. And she doesn’t need protecting. I can just
be
with her. No expectations, no apologies, no guilt. She is to me what a gun is to her—I’m most at ease when she’s in the room.

She arches an eyebrow, still waiting for me to spill my secrets. I adjust my stance and my aim. “I’ll tell you later,” I say, because hell if I’m shouting about my mom issues at the top of my lungs.

I take a few more shots, but they end up hitting the same place on the target. Dani leans forward and fixes my grip on the gun, her movements patient but firm, her fingers warm against mine.

“Holding it like this feels clunky,” I say.

“It applies rearward pressure to counteract the forward pressure of your shooting hand. Try again.”

I do as told, and this time my shots end up in the lower right quadrant of the target.

Dani sighs, which I see more than hear, and comes over to stand behind me. She wraps her arms around me, placing her hands over mine on the gun. She still has to shout despite her mouth being right next to my ear, but that’s not as weird as the chill that zips down my spine at the thought of her mouth being that close to my ear. Earth to Julep—you’re supposed to be paying attention.

“You are working too hard to align the sights. You won’t have time to do that in a fight anyway. Focus on the front sight. Now take a breath and let it out halfway. Squeeze the trigger slowly so the movement does not change your aim….”

Bull’s-eye.

She hesitates, and then steps back. The sudden absence of her body heat makes the ambient air that swirls in feel colder than before.

As much as I prefer Dani’s company, I don’t actually
get
her. I’m a grifter. I can usually read people like a shopping list left abandoned in a grocery cart. But Dani’s more like
The Brothers Karamazov,
the nineteenth-century Russian novel Mrs. Springfield bludgeoned us with last semester—all intricate imagery that’s a bitch to decipher. I’m sure it’s because my knowledge of her life is patchy at best. She won’t tell me about her present, and I get only rare glimpses of her past. She keeps too much hidden, like why she goes out of her way to help me.

I freeze my position and fire off another three rounds. All of them end up just to the right of center.

“Better,” she says.

I change the clip and hand her the gun. She pulls the slide back to check the chamber. In one smooth movement, she aims and shoots the target dead center. She waits a breath and shoots another. Then another. The hole in the center of the target widens to an oval.

“Control is everything,” she says. Her ice-blue eyes are set at serious, but then they always are. I’ve seen her laugh maybe three or four times in the eight months I’ve known her. Whatever demons she’s carrying must weigh as much as the cathedrals she has etched into her skin. And I know a thing or two about carrying demons.

I see the moment her thoughts shift from guns to something else. I don’t know what they shift to, but her expression turns bleak. She’s about to say something when Steve bursts through the door, minus headphones and safety glasses. His gaze falls on us like he’s a smoke alarm and we’re on fire.

“You’d better get out here,” he says.

is the author of
Trust Me, I’m Lying
and its sequel,
Trust Me, I’m Trouble.
She contributes to the delinquency of minors by writing books about unruly teenagers with criminal leanings, and has a BA in creative writing from Wells College. Her philosophy on life is “You can never go wrong with sriracha sauce.” She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her wife, their daughter, and their evil overlor—er, cat.