“Because this is America,” Uncle Hugo said, “and sooner or later there’s going to be another mass shooting and what happens after every mass shooting? The gun control nuts come crawling out of the woodwork talking about banning this and banning that and the next thing you know everybody and their cousin wants a gun. Well, if they can’t afford a new one I’ll sell them an old one. Something for everybody.”
Many of the preowned guns hadn’t been inventoried yet so it was easy for Magnus to borrow a few. He’d hike into the desert and try them out. What he discovered was that he had an honest-to-God talent for shooting things. He could pick lizards off a rock at fifty feet, hit a rabbit on the run, and shoot crows right out of the sky with a pistol. The Colt Delta Elite was his favorite. It shot a 10mm FBI load that had a flatter trajectory and longer range than a 9mm. Magnus set up his own shooting range and could have passed the Marine Corps’s rifle and pistol tests and been certified by the American Sniper Association.
But what was the point of being good with all those cool guns if nobody knew? He started showing the guns off to the Caltrans workers and truck drivers behind a strip club in Redlands. Sometimes he’d take a bunch of guys out in the desert to shoot watermelons and soda bottles. It was a hoot but afterward nobody wanted to get a beer.
Magnus started selling the guns. His prices were low and he had a lot of customers. He traded a Heckler & Koch submachine for a six-year-old pit bull named Carver’s Lucky Seven. The dog had a long pedigree of game-bred fighting dogs. Magnus and Lucky slept in the same bed and took showers together. Magnus ate fast food but Lucky got grass-fed organic beef, free-range chicken, and low-glycemic vegetables. In the evenings they’d go hunting for coyotes, Magnus shooting them and Lucky finishing them off. Magnus stopped going to the movies because he didn’t want to leave Lucky alone for three hours, and he only had sex with a hooker if Lucky liked her. Uncle Hugo loved the dog, saying it was the perfect mascot for a gun store.
Things were going good until Debbie Bellweather, the busybody bookkeeper, noticed a mismatch between the number of preowned guns purchased and the number waiting to be put in the system. She told Uncle Hugo, who put two and two together and called the police. Magnus was convicted of grand theft and selling guns without a license. He took a plea deal, got a ten-thousand-dollar fine and an eighteen-month sentence at CSP Solano. First day in, he mouthed off to a guard named Studdard and got the shit beat out of him.
While he was inside, Magnus boarded Lucky with Al Gunderson at Sentinel Pit Bulls in Fergus. He called every chance he got but the old man wouldn’t accept the calls because they were collect.
Magnus’s cellmate at Solano was Jimmy Bonifant, a drug dealer based in LA. Magnus told Jimmy everybody called him Skip and he explained about getting busted by Uncle Hugo and Debbie Bellweather and how they’d be sorry once he got out. He told Jimmy about the guns and how good he was and how he could have passed all the Marine Corps tests and could shoot crows out of the sky with a Delta Elite that shot 10mm rounds that had a flatter trajectory and longer range than a 9mm. He gave Jimmy his email address: [email protected]. “Easy to remember, right?” Magnus said. He asked Jimmy for an email address but Jimmy said he didn’t have one.
When Magnus got out of prison he couldn’t pay Lucky’s boarding fees so Gunderson let him work it off. He was in poor health and needed some help. Magnus cleaned the kennels, fed and exercised the dogs, helped train them, and prep them for shows. When Lucky died of canine hepatitis, Magnus had him cremated and put some of the ashes in a sniper shell that he carried around his neck.
During his months with Gunderson, Skip got a PhD in pit bulls. The old man had been in the business for thirty-five years and knew everything there was to know about the breed. His dogs had won dozens of titles for conformation, weight pulling, jumping, and agility. Elsa, Gunderson’s wife, hated the dogs and said if she had to dust one more trophy she’d kill herself.
When Gunderson died of a brain tumor, Elsa wanted to sell the property and live with her sister in Pasadena. A place that wasn’t a hundred degrees every day and you could look out your window and see actual human beings. But the real estate agent told her nobody in their right mind would buy a run-down house in the dead center of nowhere saturated with dogshit, so Elsa quit-claimed the property over to Magnus. With her life insurance money she bought a new Buick and left everything else behind, telling Magnus there wasn’t anything she owned that didn’t have dog on it.