Blvd. of Blood

Book 1, chapters 8–9

Continued from here. Table of contents here.

(The story so far: Colin Lang is planning something “violent and evil, if as yet undefined.”)

8.

Nine days after the night at the Munster Pub, a Sunday, Colin drove to Pennsylvania to get his rifle. The Pennsylvania state line was only half an hour away from Cottinend, New York, but the gun show was six hours west of that. Colin left before dawn. He had a money belt full of really a lot of cash tucked into the waistband of his jeans. He was wearing the plaid shirt he’d bought, with an old gray sweatshirt over it. With the CAT baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, and his week’s worth of November beard, he looked nothing like Colin Lang, F.S.A. Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, that is. The gym bag was in the back seat. His cell phone he’d left at home, of course. There would be no record. He was taking no risks.

Shoreditch, Pennsylvania, was far from the highway and not easy to find, especially for someone who had grown accustomed to his phone’s GPS. The gun show was in the ballroom of their Elk’s Club hall, and shared space with a Poison Fair, so-called. Colin walked through the door with his gym bag and found himself faced with cage after cage of venomous snakes. One table had terraria of scorpions and centipedes. Curious shoppers milled around and made it hard to squeeze between them. Colin couldn’t stop scratching his neck.

“Am I in the wrong place?” Colin said, perhaps out loud.

“You want to buy a bat?” an old woman in a powder blue track suit asked Colin. She was standing behind some scorpions.

“A bat?”

“They’re not poison, you know. They’re like kittens.”

“A rifle?” Colin asked, and the woman glumly pointed, with an arm hidden by dozens of Easter-colored hard plastic bracelets, to the other side of the ballroom. Colin dodged through a labyrinth of booths and cages and women in bathing suits with albino pythons draped over their shoulders to emerge among a new tangle of vendors, each with rack after rack of shotguns and pistols and rifles. Some of them were also selling, or at least displaying, tarantulas.

The whole atmosphere was so far outside Colin’s daily experience—even the echoing from the high-ceiling was a sound he hadn’t heard since some job fair in college. He felt conspicuous in his dress, like a man parodying the outfits of the people around him. Indeed, he was. How did you even ask to buy a gun? How did you do the thing you’d never done before? In his left front pants pocket rested a Swiss army knife, but that appeared to make him the least well-armed man in the building.

His heart began to jackhammer, but then Colin remembered: he was dead inside. If something as simple as a room full of firearms and vipers was going to get him all excited, there was hardly any point in going through with the plan.

How did you do the thing you’d never done before? Now that, indeed, was the question that next April was designed to answer. Colin strode somewhat purposefully up to a vendor. The man was wearing a khaki vest that was full of pockets, and every pocket full. His beard was fuller than Colin’s. He stood behind a plastic folding table piled high with boxes of ammunition. Behind him was a pegboard partition festooned with rifles.

“Hello,” Colin said. “I’m interested in an automatic rifle.”

“A semi automatic?” the man asked.

“An automatic,” Colin repeated, and the man began laughing.

“How many thousands of dollars do you have?” he choked out between his obvious and fake guffaws.

Colin was taken aback. Certainly he shouldn’t reveal how much money he had stashed on his person. “A couple?” he said.

“Yeah, that’ll get you sweet Fanny Adams. An automatic rifle! Glorious Christ!”

“I was under the impression,” Colin said primly—he tried to remember the old Colin, the bad Colin who had spent two teenaged hours in a holding cell with pimps and junkies and possibly (who knew?) murderers; he tried to remember how that self-styled rebel would talk—“that everything was legal here. I wouldn’t want to break the law.” Not the best impression.

“Bully for you. Look, you want an assault rifle?”

Colin certainly did! It turned out that automatic weapons were perhaps technically legal but so heavily regulated that it even if the cost were not prohibitive, the government attention required to buy one would be. It turned out what Colin wanted was a semiautomatic tricked out with a bump stock to make it approximate the action of an automatic.

“Like an M-16,” the seller claimed.

“Like a firehose?” Colin asked.

“No, like an M-16.”

Colin wished he knew if this was true, if bump stocks worked. His library research had really been restricted to questions on what states had the laxest gun laws and where the nearest gun shows were—the locations of Halloween stores and abandoned campgrounds—maps of Cottinend—anodyne questions that weren’t even suspicious. He’d never thought to ask Google “how do you make an only very deadly gun very very deadly without attracting ATF attention?” His knowledge of firearms, frankly, came mostly from action movies he’d stopped watching as a teenager.

But semi-automatic or bump stock notwithstanding, what Colin really wanted, what he really wanted was for no one to card him or record his name anywhere. He was prepared to walk away from the sale if the man asked for ID; but this turned out not to be necessary.

“I’ll also need a lot of ammunition,” Colin said, “and…some of those.” He pointed at the magazines. “The long ones.”

“Sure. I’m supposed to ask you what you’re buying this for,” the vendor said. “Hunting, home security…”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Colin. “I’m trying to impress a girl.”

And the vendor nodded as though this was the most natural thing in the world.

9.

It was a long drive back to Cottinend, but Colin had a couple of stops to make. He took an exit to a small town with a sad little Halloween popup store, one of the places he’d looked up at the library. Everything up to 75% off, said the signs. The poor store couldn’t last too much longer into November; doubtless a Christmas shop would spring up in another week or two.

Colin parallel parked at a meter, and left his arms in the gym bag in the backseat. He’d had a hard time closing the zipper over the long rifle, which made him wonder if he’d actually bought a lacrosse gym bag after all. He locked the car, even though there was no one in sight, no other cars on the street. He had a two-grand investment in that bag. One quarter for the meter, and he tingalinged the door of the shop.

He picked out two Alfred E. Neuman masks, one blonde pageboy wig, and a junior disguise kit, with nose putty and cheek cotton and fake facial hair.

A chainsmoking high school girl was behind the counter. “Why are you buying two masks and only one wig?” she asked.

Colin’s first instinct was to respond, “Is everybody in this state an asshole?” but he bit it back. There was no reason to highlight the fact that he was from New York. There was no reason to be memorable. He could have shut her up, of course; he could have gone to the car, come back in with his purchase held casually over one arm. She would have minded her own business then.

But he just said, “Twins, am I right?” and paid cash. The door dinged on the way out. By the time he needed a disguise, by the time he used anything he’d bought, this shop would be out of business. Even if the products were traced back to this place, even if someone somehow managed to find what seasonal workers had killed their time working here—why would this girl remember this boring scruffy man in plaid? He walked back to his car, almost whistling. He didn’t whistle.

His next stop was a campground that the internet claimed had closed a full month ago. Up to this moment he had broken no laws. He was a law-abiding actuary. Owning a bump stock in Pennsylvania was still legal back then. Driving around with a rifle in the backseat was an innocent pastime. The Alfred E. Neuman masks were nothing but an eccentricity. His next move—he had no idea if it was legal, but he assumed it would be low risk. He parked in the empty lot and walked down a path into the woods, his gym bag under his arm. There were still several hours of daylight left, and although the trees were dense overhead, most of the limbs were already bare; the sun filtered down leaving crazy, spindly shadows. Some tree trunks were blazed with blue swatches of paint.

Colin Lang had never fired a gun before. He knew the basics: which end to point away from you. The bearded vendor had gone over the intricacies of loading and had even installed the bump stock using an Allen wrench on a multitool he kept clipped to his kilt. When Colin decided he was isolated enough, he stopped and filled one, two, three magazines, one bullet at a time. Then he checked that the safety was on. He pushed a magazine into the rifle. It failed to snap in place, so Colin turned it around; this time it went home.

Taking careful aim at a nearby tree, Colin pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He flipped the safety off, aimed and pulled the trigger again. The gun bucked like a cat and flew out of Colin’s hands. It was as loud as the Fourth of July; it was like trying to hold a skyrocket. There was more smoke than he’d imagined. There was more everything than he’d imagined.

Colin picked the rifle up, aimed and tried again. The bumpstock really worked! He just held the trigger and the gun kept up a rapid-fire. It took only a moment to go through a whole magazine of bullets, forty rounds. Colin took out another magazine. He didn’t have to be a good shot. He just needed to be able to hold it steady.

The sky was darkening when Colin turned back and followed the blue swatches back to his car. He climbed in and after a few false starts found his way back to the interstate. He held one of the Neuman masks on his lap: it was a rubbery mask that you pulled all the way over your head like a ski mask. He waited until night had good and fallen; he waited until there was a long straightaway and no other cars in sight. Holding the steering wheel steady with his knees he slipped the mask on. It wobbled and caught and took longer to pull into place than he had anticipated. The car swerved precipitously. The mask’s eyeholes were small and ruined his peripheral vision; the slit at the mouth was small, and the mask soon filled up with his stifling, stale breath. Colin pulled over to the side of the highway, put on his hazards, and cut the eyeholes larger with his jackknife. He enlarged the hole at the mouth.

“Maybe I should have bought more than two masks, in case I screw this up,” he said in the black, stifling silence of the car. He put the mask on and began to drive again. Better; he could see better.

Both masks were mutilated but serviceable by the time he reached home. The lights he’d turned on that morning were still on. He slipped the car into the garage. He selected some DVDs he’d watched a dozen times before and set them by the television. If anyone asked he’d say he spent the day watching movies.

No one asked.

(continued here)