It begins in the bullet shop. One step at a time.
The bullet shop used to be the Parcel Pickup for the block; the wall behind the counter is a grid of locked letterboxes, each cubby hidden behind a numbered brass door. Ting, ting, ting! Next to the cash register, the slugmonger sits at his anvil, reshaping a bullet with a tiny hammer. In an open toolbox beside him are a series of surgical implements—a speculum, a pair of pliers, needles and thread—that appear designed to remove shrapnel from wounds as painfully and unhygienically as possible.
“Show me where it hurts,” he says amiably, not bothering to remove the loupe from his screwed-up eye. Ting, ting!
“I’m buying, not selling,” Swanny says, breathless. She takes her mother’s sidearm out of her pocketbook and hands it to him. “Do you have any ammunition that would fit one of these?”
The slugmonger jumps down from his forging stool with unaccustomed eagerness: it’s been a while since he’s had a shopper. He’s Swanny’s age, a runt with all hope for growth behind him—why are all the storekeepers so very short? He wears a dickey in place of a shirt and fingerless leather evening gloves, presumably to protect his arms from powder burns.
“Double-action, semiautomatic, top of the line, vintage 301999 AF! Haven’t seen one of these in years. Where’d you get it?” he asks, dropping the magazine into his palm with an eager click.
“It was my mother’s.”
The slugmonger sifts through a ring of keys slowly, thoughtfully—too slowly, too thoughtfully—before finally opening one metallic square in the grid. Number 66.
“I’ve only got two,” he says, loading the gun. He casually levels the weapon at her, looking down the sights. “What’s it worth to you?”
Swanny realizes too late she’s put herself at a lethal disadvantage. She’s armed a stranger with her one necessary possession. “Mr. Sharkey’s good for it.”
The loupe magnifies his scrutiny. “Does he know you’re here?”
“Of course.” Swanny prays it isn’t true; she snuck out while Sharkey was in a meeting with his swillers, the backroom door shut and locked to her. But she can imagine him getting a whiff of her disobedience, following her scent through the criminal maze of lanes and back paths she took to find her way here. How strong are his powers of presentiment? She doesn’t know. She can imagine him finding her anywhere. “We have no secrets from each other. I’m sure you take my meaning.”
Annoyed, the slugmonger hands over the pistol; he’s not a gambling man. “I’ll bill his account.”
“Have a splendid day.”
Back out on the street, in air now tinged with smoke from the next block’s dragonfire, Swanny hurries home with her purchase, glancing around furtively.
When will all of this end?
* * *
“What are you doing there?”
Swanny directs this question to Grub and Morsel, who crouch under the Chaw Shop register, huddled together like stowaways. She clunks her purse, locked and loaded, onto the counter above their heads.
“We came to see you, Your Bareness,” one of them finally says. “But then we heard footsteps and got scared it was Sharkey.”
“Well, you should be scared, very scared indeed. Kindlings aren’t allowed in here, especially not behind the counter.”
“But we was playing Chaw Shop,” pipes up the other.
Swanny finds herself wondering how they’ve survived as long as they have, in this evolutionary killing field of mercurial tempers. “Out you go,” she says, shooing them brusquely. But before they can scrabble out from below, the bells jangle again, and it is Sharkey this time.
Swanny slept in—or rather, tossed and turned sleepless—till past breakfast; it’s the first time all day she’s seen him. His body is an accusation to her, tall-hatted and intact in his finest sharkskin. His smirking lips, his hot cloven hands, send signals to all her guiltiest pleasure centers.
“Hello there,” he says, as if it isn’t her personal responsibility to send him to hell. He glances around. “Who’re you talking to?”
“No one. Myself.” Swanny sashays around the counter to divert him from the twins. “And it’s all your fault, Howie. I’ve been bored to distraction, waiting here for you.”
“Since when? I made coffee, you never came down.” Sharkey reaches for her, curving his hand around her waist; Swanny stiffens. “What’s the matter, your husband ain’t watching.”
“I just have the most awful—toothache.” It’s true: a new molar asserts itself in the back of her upper jaw, in defiance of his prophecy.
Sharkey touches her swollen cheek. “Maybe you need some ice.”
“I’m sure it’ll pass.”
“C’mon, I’ll make something soft for lunch. You want soup?”
She moves as if to follow him, then stalls. “Just let me get my purse.”
“What for? You planning to leave me a tip?”
Swanny thinks of the boys beneath the counter; she didn’t plan on witnesses. But the moment is perfect. Almost effortlessly, she reaches inside the handbag, grasps her mother’s gun, and draws it out, a graceful assassin. But though she has a perfect shot, Sharkey’s back is turned, headed toward the kitchen, and she can’t bring herself to cap him unawares.
“Here’s a message from Pippi Dahlberg,” Swanny says, just as she practiced in her attic bedroom last night. To her relief, he turns. “Eat shit and die.”
It hadn’t occurred to her that her aim would be so poor. The slug barely grazes his shoulder as he lunges, spring-loaded, in her direction, already fully adapted to the sudden change in circumstances. She tries to fire the weapon again, but before she can, he twists it out of her fingers and hurls it across the room. Then he punches her in the stomach. The event strikes Swanny as astonishing, impossible, even as she doubles over—it quite literally takes her breath away. Before she can recover, Sharkey punches her in the face. Her body is full of the most dreadful surprises: she never knew she had so many capillaries before they burst. She recoils, staggering back, and Sharkey knocks her to the floor. She’s so much larger than him, but she isn’t stronger.
“Please,” Swanny whimpers.
“Please? You’re asking me please?”
Sharkey kicks her in the ribs, then grabs her by the shoulders and slams her head into the unyielding floorboards. Above her, the electrolier makes dazzling revolutions in triplicate. Sharkey unholsters his own gun, and she falls down that barrel, that tunnel, that portal, that well, into the negative space.
“Can’t you see, I had to try,” she weeps. “I had to. I owed her that much, at least.”
Sharkey fires.
And fires.
And fires a third time for good measure.