Chapter 8: The Range

The Range

He finished the exam with forty minutes left on the clock. He turned the paper face down, showed his ID at the door, and went out.

The shift started at noon. There was no time between the exam and work, and none between work and rehearsal, so he stopped by his room on the way across campus and took the bass with him.

The 313 was the biggest place of its kind on that side of town — pool tables, twelve lanes of bowling, a VR room that poured noise through an open door, and past the bar at the far end, a four-lane archery range. Faye had named it for the area code she grew up in, and she told you that about once a week.

He had applied because of the range. It cost him nothing to shoot there, and they paid him for the hours.

Faye Brennan didn’t hire freshmen. Freshmen were drama, or they were soft, or they quit in three weeks. Then Eli put ten arrows into a target in front of her — two in the blue, the rest in the red, the last four inside a hand span — and she hired him on the spot. She was getting a coach for what she paid a part-timer.

The staff room was a long closet at the back with eight lockers and a fan that didn’t reach.

When he pulled his locker open, an envelope came over the lip and floated down to the floor.

Pink. A heart sticker on the front, stuck on a little crooked.

He picked it up. He didn’t turn it over. He set it back on the shelf inside and shut the door, and went on unpacking — the bass into the corner, two drops in each eye, his own clothes onto the hook, the white polo over his head. The glasses came out of the case.

Archery was the least popular thing in the building. He had done the math his first week: nobody came here for the range. People came for bowling and drifted over, or brought a date and wanted to be good at something.

That afternoon there was a line.

“You know it didn’t used to be like this,” the other guy said, leaning on the counter with his phone. “Four people a day. Five if it rained.”

“That so.”

It wasn’t a question. It was what he said when he wanted a conversation to be over.

He put a bow in the first one’s hands — a twenty-four-pound recurve, light enough that a kid could have drawn it, and she was not a kid — and walked her through it. Feet apart, bow arm out, elbow soft. Three fingers under the nock. Don’t pinch it. Don’t watch the arrow when you let go; watch where you want it to land.

She hit the bale. The next one hit the bale sideways, which takes real work. The one after that drew with two fingers and let go early, and the arrow went into the ceiling tile over the line. Everybody laughed. Eli took the bow out of her hands, told her it happens to everybody, and gave her another arrow.

Between lessons he watched the door. He watched everyone who came through it, and he watched the ones who walked past the bar and asked for Faye by name.

“Are you waiting for somebody?”

The girl at the head of the line had been standing there ten minutes and had not looked at the target once.

He didn’t answer. The corner of his mouth moved about a millimeter. Behind the lenses his eyes did nothing at all.

At five thirty he carried a bundle of arrows back out through the lounge, and saw him.

Mask on. He wore one most places now, inside or out. Down in the far corner of the sectional with his chin on his chest, sunk low enough that the couch looked like it was eating him. Eli knew him at twenty yards — the mask, the shoulders, how he sat when he’d given up on the day. Hollis was at table two, racking the balls by himself.

Quin hadn’t wanted to come. He was there because Hollis had shown up at his door and wouldn’t leave, and arguing with Hollis in a hallway takes longer than getting in the car.

The sound system was playing electronic music with no melody in it, at a volume built for a hundred people dancing, in a room with eleven people in it. Every time he got close to dropping off, the low end came up through the couch and moved him.

He gave up, sat forward with his elbows on his knees, and put his face in his hands. His hair hung down over his fingers. He knew what he looked like sitting like this. He looked like somebody who still had a homeroom.

Hollis was terrible at pool. Quin used to run a table without thinking about it; he used to like the things he was good at. He couldn’t watch it now, so he looked around the room instead — the birthday party in lane six, the VR door flashing, the bar — and his eyes landed at the far end and stopped.

White polo. Name tag. An apron with pens in the pocket.

Just a back. He was sure anyway.

Followed again?

That was the reflex, and he knew it was the reflex. He had been followed — properly followed, the kind that ends with somebody’s name in a court file. He’d had the other kind too, the ones who wouldn’t take the word no and came back anyway. Stalker wasn’t right for this one. Neither was anything with the word fan in it. The kid was calm. He kept his distance. And when he was told no, he didn’t push through the door; he worked out how to get you to walk into the room he was already standing in.

Then Quin took in the uniform properly — the shirt, the name tag, the pens — and understood he had it wrong.

Part-time. The kid worked here.

He’d stopped believing in coincidences about this one a while back.

With the glasses on he looked more like a college student. That was about the whole inventory: glasses, a haircut that covered his face, a cap over it the rest of the time. They had been close enough to touch, and Quin still couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup.

So he stayed where he was and watched him.

Five people were lined up behind him with bows in their hands, and not one of them was looking at the target; they were watching him talk. Nobody learns anything that way. The only person in the bay with his eyes where they belonged was the one getting paid for it, and he never once turned his head.

Which was the part that wouldn’t sit right. Last night he wouldn’t take no. This afternoon he hadn’t so much as glanced over.

“Hey.”

Hollis, from the table, for the third time.

“What.”

“What are you looking at like that?” Hollis turned and followed it across the room. “Oh. The long-legged kid. Nice cut, though. What is that, a wolf cut?”

“Get a dog cut. Costs nothing. Just stop cutting it.”

Hollis swung the cue at his head. Quin leaned out of the way without getting up off the couch.

“I told you I didn’t want to come,” he said. “You dragged me out, and now look.”

“How was I supposed to know he’d be here? I brought you because you’ve been drinking in that apartment every night for a week. Keep it up and the next time you land in a hospital there won’t be anybody standing around who cares whether you come out of it.”

Hollis dropped the cue on the felt and walked off.

“Where are you going?”

“Thirsty.”

He took the last group through their rotations, sent them back out through the lounge with their wristbands on, and started pulling arrows. The foam came off the shafts in little flakes. He checked each one and laid it in the quiver by the nock.

When he looked up again, Hollis was coming back past the bar with a bottle of water in one hand and something green in the other.

Quin took the can.

Eli had seen him open cans a hundred times. Left hand flat around the body of it, thumb hooked under the tab, one pull, no second hand anywhere near it — the whole thing done in the middle of a sentence. Everything about him was like that: noticed once, kept exactly.

“Left hand’s the talented one,” he’d said one night, holding it up, proud of it like a trick he’d had for years.

Eli put another arrow in the quiver and kept his eyes where they were.

Quin’s left hand found the tab by itself.

Then it stopped.

Nothing dramatic. His thumb sat on the tab and did nothing for a full second. Then he brought his right hand in, steadied the can with his left, and opened it with his right thumb. Two hands. The hiss came off it the same as always.

He drank, knocked his shoulder into Hollis’s, and said something. The music had come down at the end of the track, and in the gap Eli heard it.

“Do you think my place is haunted?”

Hollis said something that got swallowed up.

“Serious. I bought ten beers, what, four days ago. I drank three of them. This morning I open the fridge — nothing. Not one can. So I go look in the kitchen trash. You want to guess what’s in the kitchen trash?”

He shook the can.

“So either I’ve got a ghost or I’ve got a thief.”

Hollis snorted.

“Rob what,” he said. “There’s nothing in that apartment but you and a chair. You’re not a rich kid anymore, in case somebody hasn’t said it out loud.”

Eli put the last two arrows in the quiver without looking at them.

Quin drank and set the can down with his left hand. Everything else that afternoon — the can, the shoulder he bumped into, the hand he talked with — he did left-handed. He had been opening cans with that hand for as long as Eli had been watching him.

It was only the tab that had changed.

He took the bow down off the rack and called the next group through. At the far end of the lounge the left hand was still around the can. He gave it another second, put it away with everything else he had of Quin, and went back out to the range.