Love and Sorrow (Small Town Secrets Book 5), стр. 65
He grabbed the box as we got out. Although it was even cooler here than in town, being here helped me feel a little refreshed. I took a deep breath of crisp mountain air, heavy with the scent of pine and zipped up my jacket to keep me warmer. Meanwhile, Justin reached in the bed of his truck and started ripping up a cardboard box. He asked, “Got a pen?”
“Uh, yeah. Just a sec.” I got back in the truck and dug through my purse until I found one, and then I took it to Justin, curious what he wanted it for. He’d already torn a piece of cardboard that was about two-by-two feet. When I handed him the pen, he scribbled a head-sized circle on top, then drew an approximation of shoulders and the top of what would be a person’s chest area. He kept retracing the lines to make them bolder, but it was still light compared to if he’d used a marker. “I guess I shoulda thought about this before.” Then he walked a few feet away and propped it up against a tree on the edge of the clearing. “Not the greatest, but it’ll do.”
Finally, he took the gun out of the box and stood next to me. “The most important thing is aim. If your aim is bad, then it doesn’t really matter if you know how to shoot.” Although I nodded, I kept my mouth shut as Justin turned the gun in his hand. “This little knob right here is called the safety. If you have it here, the gun won’t fire. You have to move it like this,” he said, pushing the little black knob down, “to turn it off.” When I simply nodded, he continued. “This is a semi-automatic. All you have to do is aim the gun and squeeze the trigger to make it work.” Then he took a smaller box out of the bigger box that had held the gun. “Here’s your ammo.” After turning the gun, he popped open what looked like a small metal box. “This is your magazine.”
“Magazine?”
“Yep. That’s how you load it.” Like a pro, he took some bullets out of the box to show me how to place them in the magazine. Then he tossed the ammunition box back in the larger one. “Once that’s done, you pop it back in—but it’s not ready to go yet.” As he slid the upper part of the gun back and released it, it moved back into place. “You have to pull that part to load the first bullet. After that, each one will move into the chamber automatically, ready to fire.”
“Okay. I think I got it.”
He turned the gun up in front of him and then pointed to the top. “See these little metal things sticking up here on the front and back? Those are your sights. So you hold it up, like this.” The gun was in one of his hands, cradled by the other. “You line up this one in between the two at the front. See?” Moving closer, I stood on my tiptoes so that my head pressed against his shoulder as he shifted to face the cardboard target he’d created. “When you’re ready, you just pull back on the trigger. Want me to show you?”
“Yeah.”
I stood back as Justin squeezed the trigger. The noise coming out of the gun was far louder than I’d expected. As my ears started ringing, my eyes scoured the target and found that his bullet had made a hole in the center of the cardboard. He asked, “You ready to try?”
“Yeah.” The first thing I noticed after he handed the gun to me was how much heavier it felt now than when I’d held it in his apartment. “So I pull on this thing?”
“No. Only the first time.” Before I even brought my hands up to aim, Justin moved so that he could wrap his arms around me, and he placed his hands over mine, showing me how to hold the gun. As I drew in a deep breath, I wondered how, after all this time, I still felt weak in his arms, but I exhaled with the intent of focusing. Justin moved then, examining my posture, and adjusted my left hand a bit. “Okay, now line up your sights.” Because my arms weren’t fully extended, my elbows were slightly bent, and I moved the gun up a little higher so I could see the sights right in front. When I closed my right eye, I squinted the left and lined up the sights. Finally, I looked beyond them to the cardboard against the tree and pulled my right index finger back. The trigger was more resistant than I’d expected, but I pulled it, instantly feeling the force of the bullet leaving the gun—but there was no delay when it hit the target. I managed to hit the top right edge of the circle, so I figured that was good for my first shot. Justin said, “Try it a few more times.” As I fired three bullets in succession, each one was more accurate than the last, until I hit the inside of the circle twice.
The last time I hit dead center.
“You got good aim, Rascal.”
But while that might have been true, how could I expect to actually shoot a person after all the rigamarole of getting set up? Breathing a sigh of relief, I allowed my arms to drop, still holding the gun in one hand. “Good.”
“You wanna practice more?”
“I want a cigarette.” After handing it to Justin, I walked back to the truck and lit a cigarette before rejoining him. He was already taking the remaining bullets out of the magazine, placing them back in the ammunition box. Then he set the gun in the larger box