Colson hit the fence with a steely crash, hit it so hard that Aisha unconsciously staggered even farther back into the gloom of the thicket. Colson went halfway up and then snagged in place.
The Little Mermaid backpack—later Officer Reb Mooney would state that he had believed it was the Hermès purse stolen from the scene of the stabbing earlier that evening—had dropped off Colson’s shoulder as he ran, and by the time he slammed into the fence, he was holding it by just one strap. A bent hook of old steel at the bottom of the fence snared the fabric, and as Colson climbed, the backpack was yanked out of his hand.
Colson glared down at it and grimaced, considered it for an instant, then dropped back down. He sank to one knee to collect Aisha’s backpack out of the dirt.
The police officer came to a stumbling stop eight feet away. That was the first Aisha saw the gun in his right hand. Mooney, a big freckled boy who planned to marry his high-school sweetheart in just two weeks, gasped for breath, red in the face. A cruiser rolled into view, coming around the corner of the Mercantile, lights flashing.
“Down on the ground!” Mooney screamed, coming closer, lifting the gun. “Hands in the air!”
Colson looked up and began to raise his hands. He still had the CD ridiculously stuck to the end of one finger. The kid cop put his boot on Colson’s shoulder and shoved. Colson hit the fence, grunted, and rebounded. He bounced off the fence so hard he almost seemed to lunge at the officer. The CD flashed in his hand.
The gun went off. The first bullet pounded Colson Withers into the fence once more. Mooney fired six times in all. The last three rounds went into Colson’s back, after he had sprawled onto his face. Later both Mooney and his partner, Paul Haddenfield, told the grand jury they’d believed the CD was a knife.
In the aftermath, the night ringing with the echoes of those shots, neither officer heard Aisha Lanternglass fleeing into the Tangles.
The following summer the St. Possenti Players would dedicate that year’s performance of Shakespeare in the Park to Colson’s memory. It was Hamlet.
A white guy starred.
September 2012–December 2012
BECKI AND ROG ALWAYS MET at the gun range. First they’d unload a few hundred rounds, then he’d unload into her in his cherry Lambo.
The very first time they went shooting together, they took turns with his Glock, emptying the thirty-three-round magazine into a human silhouette.
“Goddamn,” Becki said. “Is a clip that big even legal in this state?”
“Honey,” Rog told her, “this is Florida. I don’t know if you’re legal, but the mag is fine.” Like she was still in high school and not taking college courses in business management.
He stood behind her, his crotch pressing against her backside and his arms reaching around her. He smelled good, like lemons and sandalwood and the sea, and when he held her, she thought of yachts and gem-bright waters. She wanted to dive for treasure with him and soap the Atlantic off him afterward in a hot shower.
“One hand cups the other,” he told her. “Press your thumbs together. Keep your feet apart. Just like that. No, not that wide.”
“I’m already wet,” she whispered to him.
She pumped thirty-three bullets into the target, pretending it was his wife’s big fake tits. Afterward her whole body hummed in a nice postorgasmic kind of way. It was always foreplay for them.
She had met Roger Lewis for the first time when she was sixteen. Her father had brought her to the mall, to Devotion Diamonds, so she could pick out a gold padlock on a gold chain, a gift for her to wear to her chastity pledge at church that Sunday. Rog helped her try a couple things on, and she turned this way and that in front of a little mirror on the glass counter, admiring the sparkle around her neck.
“You look good,” Rog said. “Unblemished.”
“Unblemished,” she repeated. It was a curiously entrancing word.
“We’re hiring salesgirls this summer. If you sold a friend a padlock like the one you’re wearing now, you’d get ten percent of the price, on top of your paycheck.”
Becki looked at the price tag on the gold chain and let the heavy weight of the lock fall back against her breastbone. Ten percent of what she was wearing was more than she made in a whole week of packing bags at Walmart.
She wore her padlock out of the store and had an application folded into her clutch. That Sunday she swore to her parents, her grandparents, her little sisters, and her entire church that there wasn’t going to be any man in her life until marriage, except her father and Jesus.
Becki was still wearing her padlock the first time Rog rubbed her off through her panties, in the office in the back of the shop. By then she was out of high school and making almost five hundred dollars a month in commissions alone.
The first few times they went to the range together, they stuck with the Glock. She pulled her hair back in a do-rag to keep it out of her face and to feel more street. Rog was okay with that, but the first time she tried to shoot like a gangster—the gun turned sideways, arm stretched out and wrist bent downward slightly, like she’d seen the bangers do in movies—he let her squeeze off only a single round before he reached in and took her forearm. He forced her to point the barrel at the floor.
“What’s that shit? You’ve emptied a few mags at the range, so now you think you’re Ice Cube? You couldn’t be more white if you were shoved down and drowned in a vat of cream cheese. Don’t do that again. I don’t want anyone here seeing you shoot that way—it’ll make me look bad.”
So she shot the way he told her, feet slightly apart, one a bit forward, the other a bit back, arms outstretched but not fully extended. Becki aimed for the center mass, because Rog told her if you hit the chest, you were going to get something juicy. Pretty soon she was bunching her shots together from thirty feet, grouping them in the area of the heart.
After that he switched things up, met her at the range with his SCAR 7.62mm, loaded with 149-grain full-metal-jacket rounds. She pumped them out in bursts, bap-bap-bap, bap-bap-bap. Becki liked the smell of the propellant even better than Rog’s cologne, liked to smell gun smoke in his clothes, in his thinning blond hair.
“It looks like a machine gun,” she said.
“It is,” he said, and took it out of her hands and swiveled a selector switch. He fitted the extended stock into his left shoulder and narrowed his eyes and pulled the trigger, and it went off in a furious, thudding clatter that made Becki think of someone hammering fiercely at an old manual typewriter. He cut the silhouette in half. She was so eager to shoot it herself that she almost snatched it out of his hands. Becki didn’t know why anyone had to have cocaine when you could just get a gun.
“Don’t you need a special license to blaze away with an automatic weapon?” she asked him.