You're a woman with a point to make, all you got to do is point one of these things at the person you're mad at, in this case your husband but could be your boyfriend, or your husband's girlfriend or boyfriend any number of possible combinations. And you make the choice, you cute little dickens, because you are the one with the sidearm. Simple to use. Load it and point it and pull the trigger; that's all there is to it. If it's your lucky day, or night, and it isn't his, or hers, the gun goes off like it's supposed to and then there's this loud noise, like in the movies, and the bullet comes out the front of the barrel.
'"This is good news when that happens, good news for you anyway. Bad news for the guy in front of you, unless you didn't aim right. But good news for you because it means the weapon didn't jam. When you get a jam it gives the guy you aimed at time to express his feelings, how he felt when he saw you point a firearm at him and then pull the trigger. A lot of people take this sort of thing very personally, and quite often if the gun misfires they will take the opportunity to share their feelings with the person with the gun. If they don't have their own gun with them, they do this by taking his away from him and then beating the shit out of him. As the lady now leaving with the officers can tell you, this also applies when the shooter is a woman.
'"So if the gun went off and you're the guy holding it, that is good news. And if the bullet hits the guy you're angry at, well, that's even better news. It means the gun didn't blow up in your hand, which these cheapies sometimes do. That could spoil your plans for the rest of the evening. But it's bad news for the person you're mad at because he has a hole in him, probably not exactly what he had in mind when he set out for his night on the town. But what the hell, life's full of disappointments.
'"You now get the hell out of wherever it is that you both were when you shot him and dump the gun down the first stor-drain you come across. Then you start praying either that you killed the bastard, clean, so he doesn't get himself patched up through some goddamn miracle of modern medicine, and then get his own gun and start looking for you; or else that you didn't kill him, even though you did your best to, because now you are filled with remorse. Because that way you may've lost yourself a friend but you wont be facing a murder charge."
"Anyway," Merrion said, "I said to him that even though everybody who was in that room heard that sound the shot made, I doubt very much that any one of us could've said for sure afterwards that it was a shot wed heard, unless someone told us or we saw the gun. I think we've all seen and heard so many shots on television, movies, we've reached the point now when we see someone with a gun, we expect it to go off and someone to get shot. Not really get hurt, of course; it's only TV, and we know that. And if the gun doesn't go off, we're kind of disappointed.
"But as a result, the opposite is also true. When we haven't seen a gun, then when we hear something that sounds like a gunshot we don't think it is. We think it's just "a loud noise" we can't identify. Or maybe "it's a backfire." We explain it away. But cars don't backfire anymore, but we still say they do. That way what we heard wasn't a shot, we've said it was something else. For us to know for a fact there was a shot, someone has to show us a gun.
"And Dave said to me that he thought that's very likely, may explain a lot of things that he's run into that sort of puzzle you at first, taking witness statements. "They're not telling you what they actually heard. They're telling you what they think they must've heard."
"So the two of us're having this fine philosophical discussion there about the gun that the two uniform Statics took away from our Sheila, and that's when I remember old Lennie's hunkered down out in back.
"Excuse me," I say to Dave, my new friend, j.
"I better go see how the judge is doin' here. Handlin' all this excitement."
"So," Merrion said, "I went in there and I told him all the things that'd been happening out front while he's been in his hiding place and everybody else who was there except Sheila Ryan and her husband was touching themselves all over to make sure they didn't have any holes in them spurting blood or anything. He looked me right in the eye and said to me that he thought "it would be best if we didn't try to go back out there today and try to pick up where we left off before all of this happened and disrupted everything.
