High-Caliber Concealer Read online

  The farm looked mostly like she remembered. Donna, her grandmother’s geriatric gray mare, dozed in the near paddock, one leg cocked, chewing reflexively on some grass. The barn needed painting. There was activity in the peach orchard beyond the paddock. A man on an ATV pulled a trailer full of picked peaches at a snail’s pace through the trees and down toward the barn.

  “That’ll be Jorge,” said Peg coming out onto the porch. “He is always so careful when he drives. He never bruises a single peach. His nephew, on the other hand, drives like a crazy man. Might as well make jam by the time he’s done.”

  “Did Jorge ever get his work visa settled?” asked Nikki, remembering the drama from last Christmas.

  “Sort of,” said Peg pulling a face. “So much damn paperwork these days. This country is fed by the efforts of migrant workers. I fail to understand why we make it so difficult to get work visas.” She waved at Jorge, who waved back.

  “Because politicians aren’t farmers and farmers are too busy to be politicians,” said Nikki, repeating one of her grandfather’s stock phrases, which made Peg laugh.

  “He was so right. Well, what’s your plan for the day? Are you up for shooting at the quarry?”

  “Sure,” said Nikki. “Sounds good.”

  “Good. We should get going before the sun gets too high. I’ll get the gun and bullets, meet you at the car in ten.”

  Nikki nodded and went to add some extra bullets to her own purse before arriving at the car.

  The quarry was an old gravel mine cut into the side of a hill, revealing the hard strata of geologic time. While the mine had been closed for years the road up to it showed that it was clearly still in use and the twinkle of shiny brass among the rocks showed that Peg wasn’t the only one who used it for an informal gun range.

  Nikki frowned as she kicked over a rock and dislodged a mid-sized casing. A few feet away, a discarded Wolf 39mm ammunition box fluttered in the breeze, pinned in place by a dead branch.

  “Something the matter?” asked Peg, taking her gun bag out of the car.

  “What kind of guns do people like to shoot up here? Assault rifles?”

  “I suppose,” said Peg, with a shrug. “People have all sorts of things in their gun safes. That’s why home invasions aren’t too much of a problem around here.”

  “Hmm,” said Nikki, looking at the spray pattern of spent AK-47 ammo. “Yes, but I thought full-auto was illegal here.”

  “Just because it ain’t legal, don’t mean people don’t do it,” said Peg. “What are you looking at over there?”

  “Nothing,” said Nikki looking up with a smile. Peg looked unconvinced, but carried some tin cans out to a board that had been placed between two rocks. The board had the sad, chewed look of anything at the wrong end of a gun range. “OK,” said Peg, coming back and opening the bag. “This is what is known as a revolver.”

  “Grandma,” said Nikki, trying to stem the tide of “Guns for Dummies” that was flowing at her.

  “And that’s because it’s got this little cylinder here that revolves, and that is where you place the bullets.”

  “Grandma.”

  “Now you’ve got to pay attention,” said Peg. “It’s important to know this stuff if you’re going to be in the house with a gun.”

  “Yes, but—” said Nikki.

  “No buts,” said Peg. “I hope California hasn’t turned you into some sort of hippie, gun control idiot.”

  In response, Nikki flipped up the tail of her shirt and pulled out her SIG Sauer. Walking down the line, she capped the cans one after another. When the slide locked back she dropped the empty and inserted a fresh magazine from her pocket. She stepped back, made sure the situation was secure, and then re-holstered.

  “Actually,” she said, turning back to Peg, “I firmly believe in gun control, just, you know, for other people.”

  She could see that Peg was stunned, but true to her character, she simply sniffed and struggled to look unimpressed. “I guess you’re not kidding,” said Peg. “What are you carrying?”

  Nikki pulled out her gun and handed it to her grandmother. “A SIG Sauer P239. It’ll shoot 9mm or your .357 rounds.”

  “Your mother doesn’t know you carry this, does she?”

  “Does she know about yours?”

  Peg looked guilty. “I think she believes I got rid of it. I just don’t talk about it.” She turned Nikki’s gun over in her hand. “I don’t know about these kind of guns. I like the revolver. Fewer parts. And I can take it apart and clean it and put it back together without screwing it up.”

  “I can take this one apart without screwing it up,” said Nikki. “But I know what you mean. I’ll show you how later if you want. Do you want to shoot it?”

  “Heck, yeah!”

  Peg fired off carefully aimed shots, while Nikki reloaded bullets into her empty magazine.

  “It’s kind of fun!” said Peg handing it back. “But more kicky than mine.”

  “Yours is heavier,” said Nikki. “The lighter the gun, the more you have to rely on your hands to control the recoil.”

  “Huh. Where’d you learn to shoot?”

  “Um, my work offers courses on shooting,” said Nikki. Which was true. True-ish anyway. “We travel a lot and they want us to be safe and prepared for any situation.”

  “I thought you were a project coordinator for a make-up company,” said Peg, looking puzzled.

  “For the Carrie Mae Charity Foundation, yes,” said Nikki.

  “Need a lot of guns working for charity work, do you?” Peg looked skeptical.

  “Charity goes to the people in need,” said Nikki. “And frequently the people in need live in dangerous situations. Carrie Mae likes its ladies to be well-groomed, well-spoken, and well-prepared.”

  “Sort of a Boy Scout philosophy, I guess,” said Peg. “Let’s shoot some more. I want to see how you do with mine.”

  It was close to noon by the time they quit and Nikki sank into the cloth seats of her grandmother’s Ford, happily cranking the air conditioning.

  “I love the Impala,” she said, flapping her hands into the breeze from the vent, trying to channel more air to her skin. “But I do miss modern air-conditioning.”

  “When did you get that car? I can’t say that I would have picked it out for you.”

  “I wouldn’t have picked it out for me either,” said Nikki. “It belonged to a co-worker of mine who died. She really loved that car, and I didn’t have the heart to let it go out to auction.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. How’d she die?”

  The thumping blades of the helicopter were close and Nikki glanced over her shoulder. The helicopter was holding steady at road level, with Ellen leaning out the door, aiming her rifle past Nikki at Val. She didn’t hear the gunshot, but she saw Val jerk and fall over the railing. Nikki ran forward, catching Val’s hand as it slipped from the edge of the bridge.

  “Val!” yelled Nikki.

  Val’s hand was sliding from her grasp, it was wet with blood. Nikki leaned further over the railing, feeling a precarious shift in balance. Val looked up, her naturally pale face even paler. Behind her, Nikki could hear the helicopter settling onto the bridge.

  “I take it back, Nikki.”

  “What? Val, hold on!”

  “I take it back. I’m not sorry I bought you shoes.”

  “I lost those shoes! It doesn’t matter! None of it matters!” Nikki was screaming now. “Just hold on to my hand!”

  Val looked down at the water. Nikki could hear the pounding of feet on the bridge behind her.

  Val looked up into Nikki’s face and smiled. Then she let go.

  “Val!” screamed Nikki as her friend tumbled into the turgid water of Chao Phraya.

  Nikki paused, absorbing the memory like a blow, before answering her grandmother. Talking about Val Robinson, her first partner at Carrie Mae, had gotten easier, but she still never quite knew what to say. Ellen shot her, and then I dropped her off a bridge? That
wasn’t going to go over well.

  “She drowned,” said Nikki. You know, eventually, if the fall from the bridge or the bullet wound didn’t kill her first.

  “Wow, that’s too bad. Was it an accident?”

  “Well, no one drowns on purpose,” said Nikki.

  “I don’t know—could have been suicide.”

  “It wasn’t,” said Nikki. “She just got careless.” She tried to smother the bitterness in her tone, but didn’t succeed. Val’s betrayal still stung and she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she should have been able to talk Val into coming back to Carrie Mae. No one else shared that view. They all said that killing Val had been the only solution, but on sleepless nights Nikki found herself replaying the incidents in Bangkok, trying to figure out what she could have done differently.

  “So you keep her car to remind you not to be careless, too?” asked Peg, and Nikki froze in her seat. She could feel a trickle of sweat roll down into her cleavage.

  “Shh,” said Nikki. “No one’s supposed to know that.”

  Peg laughed, then she put out her hand and patted Nikki’s knee. “We all got secrets, honey. But believe me, they’re never as big as we think they are. Because, and don’t take this the wrong way, generally speaking, no one cares about us as much as we ourselves do. If you don’t want to talk about this Val woman, that’s fine. I won’t push it. But really, whatever you’re not saying probably isn’t that big a deal. It’s not like you killed her.”

  “Right,” said Nikki. It was really more of a joint effort. “Speaking of things that weren’t my fault, I should probably tell you something before you hear about it around town.” Nikki briefly filled her grandmother in on the events at the Kessel Run. “And then less than an hour later, I saw one of the guys walking down the street!”

  “That sounds like Merv,” said Peg, shaking her head. “Thinks a sheriff’s badge gives him the right to run things however he wants.”

  “You don’t like him?” asked Nikki.

  Peg shrugged. “Not really, and I trust him only about as far as I can throw him. He keeps offering to buy my farm. Frankly, I’d rather let the vultures at the bank have it than sell it to him.”

  “Is bankruptcy a possibility?” asked Nikki, startled.

  “Eh, no more than any other year,” said Peg. “It’s farming. You know, you just get along and hope the crops come in and if they do, it all works out, and if they don’t then you have to get creative. But my advice is to stay out of the sheriff’s way. Nothing good can come from hanging around him.”

  “I didn’t intend to hang around him last time,” said Nikki.

  “Well, then you’d better stay out of bar fights,” said Peg, tartly.

  “It wasn’t a bar fight,” protested Nikki. “At least not much of one. They were drunk and stupid.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing Jackson was there then, in case things had gotten dangerous.”

  “Uh, yeah,” said Nikki feeling annoyed. She had downplayed the bar fight quite a bit, but she didn’t think she’d made it sound like she needed help.

  “He’s such a sweet boy. I don’t know why your mother never liked him.”

  “He’s from Kaniksu Falls,” said Nikki with a shrug. “She never likes anyone from Kaniksu Falls.”

  Peg grunted, but didn’t refute her statement.

  August VIII

  Town & Country

  Nikki exited the shower, wrapped herself in a towel, and went back to her room. After her parents were married they had spent a year traveling the country in a VW microbus. When Nell had gotten pregnant, they had returned to her parents’ house and lived there until her father’s abrupt departure. In retrospect, Nikki wondered what her grandparents had thought of her free-spirited father. Peg generally avoided talking about him at all. Given her firm, “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all,” philosophy, that didn’t bode well for her opinions on him. She didn’t remember her grandfather saying anything other than “stupid” before stomping off to the barn.

  Not much had changed in the years since Nikki had last visited. Her room was still painted the bright pink with purple butterflies that she had favored when she was nine. Given that the Carrie Mae logo was a purple butterfly, Nikki found the décor comforting.

  She shuffled through the racks of clothes. Peg had labeled each piece according to its original owner, with a guess at the year. She pulled out a pair of blue shorts with a double row of buttons up the front. It was labeled, 1933? Mama Connelly? Mama Connelly was her grandfather’s mother. The shorts were paired with a sleeveless satin shirt sporting a collar and a long looping bow. Nikki remembered seeing pictures of Mama Connelly. She’d been shaped like a potato and mostly wore an expression of stern disapproval. Nikki couldn’t imagine her ever wearing short shorts and a sleeveless shirt. She glanced out the window. Her grandmother was still down in the orchard checking on the harvest. So she pulled on her underwear and bra and then slipped into Mama Connelly’s outfit.

  Then she strutted down the hall to the full-length mirror and did a turn. She pinned a damp curl down over her ear and pursed her lips in the closest approximation to a cupid’s bow that she could get without make-up.

  “I need Keds and a scarf for my hair,” she said to her reflection, only to hear her grandmother’s laugh on the stairs.

  “Look at you!” exclaimed Peg. “So art deco.”

  “Hey, Grandma,” said Nikki, blushing at being caught playing dress up. “Mama Connelly didn’t really wear this, did she?”

  “Well, I have a hard time imagining it,” said Peg, “because the woman was shaped like a fireplug when I knew her. But it definitely wasn’t my mother’s—totally wrong size—and I can’t think of who else it would have belonged to. Anyway, go grab your Keds and head scarf and let’s go into town. I have an appointment at the beauty shop.”

  “I’ll change,” said Nikki.

  “No, don’t. We’ll stop and take some pictures. I need them for when I sell the clothes and you’re much better than the sewing dummy, which was my next option.”

  “Grandma, are you really going to sell the clothes on the internet? You do realize that’s not as easy as it sounds, right?”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Peg. “But I got a Dreamer who’s going to help me.”

  “A dreamer?” Nikki repeated, but Peg was already heading down the stairs.

  “Where are we going to take pictures?” asked Nikki when they were in the car. Photography had been her grandmother’s hobby for years and her nervous forays onto the internet were reserved for email and photography chat rooms.

  “Bill Hanna has a model-A in his barn. I called while you were putting on your make-up and he said he’d leave it unlocked for us. I’ve shot there before. It’s got good reflected light this time of day. We’ll pick up a few shots and then head into town.”

  “Do you know anyone with a 1950s Buick? Maybe tomorrow, I can wear the striped sundress.”

  Peg looked at her with shining eyes. “I know someone with a 1956 Chevy truck. And you’ve got that crazy car. I bet we could do a whole batch of matching cars and outfits.”

  “Oh, Grandma, I don’t know,” said Nikki, doubtful of the elaborate plan Peg was forming.

  “No, it’s going to be great. I’m going to call my web kid, though. This may change the website design.”

  “Website design? There’s a website?”

  “I told you. I’ve got Eric to help me. He’s going to build a website as part of a school project. He’s one of the Dreamer kids. Jorge knows him.”

  “What’s a dreamer?”

  “One of the kids who qualifies for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act. Washington has a lot of them. He’s going to Wazzu and is doing an independent study over the summer on website programming. I’m his project.”

  “Oh,” said Nikki. “I had no idea.”

  “See what you miss by not visiting more often?”

  “I guess so
.”

  The photo shoot with the Model-A was indeed quick. Peg clearly knew the location and the car and whipped through her shots with ease.

  “I didn’t even need a filter,” said Peg, shaking her head, as she reviewed her shots on the way back to the car. “With the air so smokey from the Colville Complex everything looks soft and hazy.” She opened the car door, still staring into the camera, “You know, maybe I could round up a couple of more girls. That way you don’t have to do all the outfits this week.”

  “Yes,” agreed Nikki, perhaps with more force than necessary.

  “I’ll ask Leona down at the beauty shop. She’ll have some good ideas of who to ask. What do you want for dinner, by the way? We should go to the grocery store after the beauty shop.”

  “I can do that while you get your hair cut,” said Nikki, who didn’t think she could face the gossip hounds at the salon, particularly not in her great-grandmother’s athletic apparel.

  “Get whatever you want,” said Peg, as she hopped out in front of the salon. “We don’t have anything but pie fixings.” Nikki nodded as she climbed into the driver’s seat. Her grandmother had been seeing Leona for as long as Nikki could remember, but then so had half the town. Of Scandinavian descent, Leona stood almost six feet tall in her stocking feet, but no one, possibly not even her husband, had ever seen her in stocking feet. She wore four-inch heels to every event. Between her natural height, the heels, and her trademark bouffant, going to the Curl Me Crazy was like having your hair cut by a Wagnerian Valkyrie. Nikki didn’t like to admit that as a child she’d had more than one nightmare about getting her hair cut and now that she was old enough to make her own hair decisions, she didn’t think that there was a force on earth that could drag her back in.

  The grocery store was not quite as she remembered it. There had obviously been renovations. Just not very good ones. The cement floor still bore the scars of the previous aisle locations and Nikki wasn’t sure if sky-blue paint counted as an improvement if you could still see the butter yellow in patches on the ceiling. Nikki pushed the ancient cart down an aisle, pondering if LA had really made her that snobby or if this grocery store really was that bad.