Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake #1)(4)

He shakes hands with me, and I grin back. “See you next time, Javi.” Privilege of my age and gender. I get to use his first name. I said Mr. Esparza for the first solid month, until he gently corrected me.

“Next time—” Something catches his attention, and his easy calm shifts to sudden alertness. His focus goes down the line, and he bellows out, “Cease fire! Cease fire!”

I feel a sweep of adrenaline ping every nerve, and I go very still, assessing, but this isn’t about me. Raggedly, all the percussive noise of the range dies, and people pull their weapons down, elbows in, while he walks down four stalls. There’s a burly man there with a semiauto pistol. Javi orders him to clear the firearm and step away.

“What’d I do?” the man asks in a belligerent tone. I pick up my bag, nerves still jangling, and head for the door, though I do it slowly. I realize the man hasn’t done as Javi instructed; instead, he’s chosen to get defensive. Not a good idea. Javi’s face goes stiff, and his body language changes with it.

“Clear that weapon and place it on the shelf, sir. Now.”

“Ain’t no call for this. I know what I’m doing! Been shooting for years!”

“Sir, I saw you turn your loaded weapon in the direction of another shooter. You know the rules. Always point the muzzle downrange. Now clear it and put it down. If you don’t follow my instructions, I will remove you from the range and the police will be called. Do you understand?”

Smiling, calm Javier Esparza is now someone else entirely, and the force of his command blasts through the room like a stun grenade. The offending shooter fumbles at his gun, gets the clip out, and throws it and the weapon down on the counter. I notice the muzzle still isn’t pointed downrange.

Javi’s voice has gone clear and soft now. “Sir, I said clear your weapon.”

“I did!”

“Step back.”

As the man stares, Javi reaches for the gun, ejects the last cartridge from the slide, and sets the bullet down on the counter beside the clip. “That’s how people get killed. If you can’t learn how to properly clear a weapon, you need to find another range,” he says. “If you don’t know how to obey a range instructor’s orders, find another range. In fact, you might want to just find another range. You endanger yourself and everybody here when you ignore safety rules, do you understand?”

The man’s face turns a puffy, unhealthy red, and he balls his fists.

Javi puts the gun back down exactly the way it had been when he picked it up, turns it downrange, and then pointedly turns it to lie on its other side. “Ejection port goes up, sir.” He steps back and locks eyes with the man. Javi’s wearing jeans and a blue polo shirt, and the shooter is wearing a camo shirt and old army-surplus uniform pants, but it’s clear as day which one is the soldier. “I think you’re done for the day, Mr. Getts. Never shoot angry.”

I’ve never seen a man so clearly on the edge of either outright, unthinking violence or a massive heart attack. His hand twitches, and I can see him wondering how fast he can get to his gun, load it, and start to fire. There’s a heavy, sick weight to the air, and I find my hand moving the zipper slowly down on the bag I’m holding, my mind calculating the steps—just as he is—to preparing my gun to fire. I’m fast. Faster than him.

Javier isn’t armed.

The tension shatters as one of the other people standing frozen at a shooting station takes a single step out, halfway between me and the angry guy. He’s smaller than both Javi and the red-faced man, and he has sandy-blond hair that might have been close-cropped once but is growing out to fan his ears now. Lithe, not muscular. I’ve seen him around but don’t know his name.

“Hey now, mister, let’s just gear this back,” he says in an accent that doesn’t sound like Tennessee to me but comes from somewhere more in the Midwest. Folksy. It’s a calm, quiet sort of voice, seductively reasonable. “The range master’s just doing his job, all right? And he’s right. You start shooting angry, never know what could happen.”

It’s amazing, watching the rage drain out of Getts, as if someone has kicked a plug loose in him. He takes a couple of deep breaths, color fading back to something like normal, and nods stiffly. “Shit,” he says. “Guess I got a little ruffled there. Won’t happen again.”

The other man nods back and returns to his shooting window, avoiding everyone’s curious looks. He starts checking over his own pistol, which is oriented the correct way, downrange.

“Mr. Getts, let’s talk outside,” Javier says, which is polite and correct, but Carl’s face twists up again, and I see a vein pulse in his temple. He starts to protest and then senses the weight of eyes on him, all the other shooters waiting in silence, watching. He steps back into the booth and angrily begins shoving his kit into a bag. “Fucking power-hungry wetback,” he mutters, then stalks toward the door. I pull in a breath, but Javi lays a friendly hand on my shoulder as the door slams behind him.

“Funny how that asshole listens to the white guy before the range master,” I say. All of us in here are white, with the exception of Javier. Tennessee has no shortage of people of color, but you’d never know it from the makeup of the people on the firing line.

“Carl’s a jackass, and I didn’t want him in here anyway,” Javi says.