Free Reckless Endangerment by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page A

your life, you make your stand, with deadly force in the last extremity, if and when deadly force is being used against you.”
    Savitch nodded woefully, and after another fifteen minutes of quiet talk, Marlene got her together enough to face the street. She had scheduled another two sessions, after which Joan Savitch would be on her own. Marlene hoped she would do the unpleasant thing and put enough bullets into her ex-husband to make him dead, but she also knew that, oddly enough, women involved with men like Gerald Savitch often declined to defend themselves, even in the face of imminent death. She was a good deal less optimistic about her work now than when she had started, and also about the possibility of any simple resolution of the politics of sex.
    After bundling her client into a cab, Marlene went back into the range and set up a fresh silhouette target, and sent it twenty-five yards down the lane. She composed herself and took a few deep breaths. Then she pulled her own pistol out of a cross-draw holster on her hip and shot the target twice. She replaced the pistol and did it again. And again. Marlene used a Colt Mustang .380 Pocketlite, which at twelve and a half ounces—about the heft of a set of pliers—was the smallest serious weapon she had been able to buy. She punched the traveler switch and brought the target back. Its upper arms were decorated with neat pairs of holes, very close together. This was another part of Marlene’s plan for not killing anyone anymore. Combat shooters are taught to fire at the center of mass, and that is what Marlene taught her clients to do as well. But Marlene was interested in reliably shattering the bones and nerves of the upper arms, which was a lot safer for the target, if also a lot riskier for the target’s target. Marlene did not care; let the women do the killing, was her thought.
    She shot off the rest of her box in this way, then packed up and left. Marlene crossed Tenth, walking in the quick, aggressive manner of the born New Yorker, swinging her aluminum case. She was wearing jeans, a black turtleneck jersey, a navy pea coat, and black Converse high-tops. Now in her early thirties, Marlene remained a semi-beauty; although the startling bloom of her youth was gone, she still had the bones, the oval, strong-featured face beloved of Baroque sculptors. She still wore her hair as a tumble of thick black, neck-length curls, skillfully cut so as to draw attention from the left side of her face, where the eye was glass. Marlene had a wiry, muscular body, not quite that of a flyweight in training but close; she worked out with boxing bags and ropes every day, as she had since childhood.
    Marlene’s car, a venerable VW square-back in yellow, was parked illegally as usual, and as usual the old D.A. placard had kept the meter maids away. In the luggage space in the rear of the car lay a Neapolitan mastiff, coal black, red-eyed, and of prodigious size and excellent training. It responded to commands in Sicilian and answered to the ridiculous name of Sweetie.
    Marlene entered her car and drove off to the south. She turned the radio on and then snapped it off again. Instead, she sang to herself. She had a decent, soft contralto. She sang a verse from the old Billie Holiday song: “If I don’t call no copper, when I get beat up by my poppa, ain’t nobody’s business but my own.” Yes, indeed.
    Lucy Karp waited outside the old building on Mott Street that housed the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and its famous Chinese school. It irked her that she had to wait to be picked up, as she was less than a quarter of a mile from home, but she understood that her mother had enemies who might try to hurt her. Lucy was the only Caucasian person in her class at the Chinese school, which had been founded to transmit Chinese culture and language to the children of immigrants. Why the authorities had allowed her entry was something of a mystery, although Lucy thought that it