‘Yeah,’ Tommy said, matching her soft tone.
‘Keep it fully loaded.’
‘Those poor damn guys,’ he lamented as he slid the shell into the magazine tube on the Mossberg. ‘What horrible deaths.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ she said.
‘They wouldn’t have been there, the thing wouldn’t have been there, if I hadn’t been there.’
‘It’s upsetting,’ she agreed. ‘But you were only trying to stay alive, running for your life, and they stepped in.’
‘Still.’
‘Obviously, they were marked for an unnatural extraction.’
‘Extraction?’
‘From this world. If the thing in the fat man hadn’t gotten them, then they would have been taken in some other unusual way. Like spontaneous combustion. Or an encounter with a lycanthrope.’
‘Lycanthrope? Werewolf?’ He wasn’t able to deal with her weirdness just now, so he changed the subject. ‘Where the hell did you learn to shoot like that? Your mother again?’
‘Daddy. He taught Mom and me, wanted us to be prepared for anything. Pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns. I can handle an Uzi as if I was born with it, and-’
‘Uzi?’
‘Yeah. And when it comes to-’
‘Submachine guns?’
‘-when it comes to knife throwing-’
‘Knife throwing?’ Tommy said, and realized that he had raised his voice.
‘-I’m good enough to put together a stage act and make a living with it in Vegas or even the circus, if I ever had to,’ Del continued in a murmur as she unzipped another pocket and took from it a handful of cartridges for the Desert Eagle. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not half as good at fencing as I’d like to be, though I’ll admit to being first-rate with a crossbow.’
‘He died when you were ten,’ Tommy said. ‘So he taught you all this when you were just a little kid?’
‘Yeah. We’d go out in the desert near Vegas and blow the crap out of empty soda bottles, tin cans, posters of old movie monsters like Dracula and the creature from the Black Lagoon. It was a lot of fun.’
‘What in the name of God was he preparing you for?’
‘Dating.’
‘Dating?’
‘That was his joke. Actually he was preparing me for the unusual life he knew I was going to have.’
‘How could he know?’
Rather than answer the question, Del said, ‘But the truth is, because of the training Daddy gave me, I’ve never been on a date with any guy who intimidated me, never had a problem.’
‘I guess not. I think you’d have to be dating Hannibal Lecter before you’d feel uneasy.’
Pressing the last two rounds into the .44 magazine, she said, ‘I still miss Daddy. He truly understood me – and not many people ever do.’
‘I’m trying,’ Tommy assured her.
Passing by on his sentry duties, Scootie came to Del, put his head in her lap, and whimpered as though he had heard the regret and the sense of loss in her voice.
Tommy said, ‘How could a little girl hold and fire a gun like that? The recoil-’
‘Oh, of course, we started with an air rifle, an air pistol, and then a .22,’ she said, slamming the loaded magazine into the Israeli pistol. ‘When we practiced with rifles or shotguns, Daddy padded my shoulders, crouched behind to brace me, and held the gun with me. He was only familiarizing me with the more powerful weapons, so I’d feel comfortable with them from an early age, wouldn’t be afraid of them when the time came to actually handle them. He died before I really got good with the bigger stuff, and then Mom continued the lessons.’
‘Too bad he never got around to teaching you how to make bombs,’ Tommy said with mock dismay.
‘I’m comfortable with dynamite and most plastic explosives, but they really aren’t particularly useful for self-defence.’
‘Was your father a terrorist?’
‘Furthest thing from it. He thought all politics were stupid. He was a gentle man.’
‘But he just usually had some dynamite laying around to practice making bombs.’
‘Not usually.’
‘Just at Christmas, huh?’
‘Basically, I learned explosives not to make bombs but to disarm them if I had to.’
‘A task we’re all faced with every month or so.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve only had to do it twice.’ Tommy wanted to believe that she was kidding, but he decided not to ask. His brain was overloaded with new discoveries about her, and in his current weariness, he did not have the energy or the mental capacity to contemplate more of her disconcerting revelations. ‘And I thought my family was strange.’