Cody was just a little bit disappointed that he couldn’t go pick Shay up from college. He’d been looking forward to the drive, partly for the feeling of independence, and partly because he really wanted to have some one-on-one time with his brother. There were a number of things that had happened, especially in the last week, that he really wanted to talk to Shay about. But, since Janice really wasn’t up to that long a drive, he knew it would be better to stay with her, and he about had to let his mother make the trip.

It wasn’t a total loss; his brother would be home for nearly a month, and there would be plenty of time to talk to him, even alone. In spite of the way that Janice needed him around to feel comfortable, she wasn’t with him all the time, and was still taking naps during the day if she was sure that he was somewhere around.

Even though the two of them were alone, it wasn’t an unpleasant day. Mostly they worked on studying. His own homework and things were in good shape and he didn’t anticipate any problems with them, but Janice still had a lot of catching up to do. The good thing was that she was catching up rapidly, and Cody had quickly come to understand that she was a smarter person than her past grades had indicated. It was rare that he had to go over something more than once for her to get it, and when he went back to review things that they’d covered earlier in the week she showed that she’d retained them well.

Cody knew that his mother was facing a long drive to pick Shay up and bring him home. Along late in the afternoon, she called on her cell phone to announce that they had stopped for lunch earlier, and were about an hour out. After that long a day, Cody didn’t think it was right for his mother to have to cook dinner, too, so he went to the kitchen to get started with Janice looking on. Cody didn’t pretend to be a great cook, but he could manage a couple boxes of Hamburger Helper, filled out with some extras to make a meal for the five of them. It was just about ready when his mother and Shay pulled in, followed within a few minutes by his father.

“Cody,” his mother said. “It was very thoughtful of you to do this. I wasn’t looking forward to coming home and having to head right to the kitchen.”

Dinner went quickly; there was quite a bit of catching up with Shay and his adventures in college. He hadn’t been home since late August, and he’d managed to do quite a bit while more or less on his own in Sault Ste. Marie. Cody was dead sure that they were getting the sanitized version of Shay’s adventures in school, but suspected he’d be able to get the real story when he got his brother alone sooner or later.

They sat around the table well after dinner was over with, listening to some of the stories that Shay was telling. Finally, his mother said, “I’m sure that Shay has some unpacking to do and some arranging in the little bedroom, while I need to get started on the mountain of dirty laundry he brought home. Cody, this is Thursday. Are you going to the range?”

“Hadn’t thought about it,” Cody admitted. “But I probably ought to run a box through the P226 just to make sure I remember how to do it.”

“You’re thinking about going somewhere?” Janice asked, apparently a little alarmed at the thought of his taking off and leaving her.

“Yeah, I usually go to the range and practice on Thursday nights,” Cody said. “I’ll probably run a few rounds through the P226 just on general principles, but I’ll take the Ruger .22 for some serious practice.”

“Can I go along?”

“I suppose,” he shrugged. “It’s probably going to be pretty boring for you, though. And you’ll have to be sitting on some hard chairs. There aren’t any comfortable ones out at the range.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I’m just a little tired of being around here all day, and I wouldn’t mind getting out for a little while. Besides, I’d rather be with you.”

“Suit yourself,” he replied. “You’ll have to wear ear protectors, but I can go downstairs and get Mom’s.”

It took a bit of running around and getting organized, but soon the two pistols were safely in the trunk of the Escort. It was a little harder for Janice to get into the car, since it sat down lower, but Cody helped her get settled in. It only took a few minutes to get out to the range; not surprisingly, both Gil Evachevski and Charlie Wexler were among those present. “Good to see you tonight,” Gil said. “I’ve been meaning to drop by and see you but I just haven’t quite gotten around to it. Everything going all right?”

“Pretty much,” Cody admitted. “What we talked about last week pretty well settled those issues.”

“They never get all the way settled,” Gil warned. “But at least you learn to live with them. Now, I’ll guess from the cane and the arm in a sling that this is Janice.”

“Sorry, I should have introduced you. Yes, this is Janice Lufkin. Janice, this is Gil Evachevski. As much as I have a shooting coach, he’s it.”

“Then I guess I have a lot to thank you for,” Janice said. “Probably more than I can say.”

“So,” Gil asked, “did you come out here just to watch and be with Cody, or did you come out to learn how to shoot?”

“Oh, just to be with Cody,” she smiled. “He’s been very nice to me, and I feel safer when I’m with him.”

“Maybe you ought to learn how to shoot, at least a little,” Gil suggested. “A lot of people are scared of firearms if they don’t know what’s going on.”

“Well, maybe,” she said dubiously.

That might not be a bad idea, Cody thought. While he didn’t mind having Janice sleep with him while he had the P226 on the bedside stand, perhaps if she knew how to use a gun, even an easy one like the Ruger, she might find it within herself to be able to defend herself in her dreams. That might let him off the hook. Whatever else, it was worth a try; after what his mother had told him Janice had said yesterday, it was easy to believe that the two of them sleeping together could lead to places he didn’t really want to contemplate going. “That’s not a bad idea, Jan,” he told her. “Gil is very good at teaching beginners, and you wouldn’t want to start with a harder gun like the P226.”

“No way,” Gil agreed. “Especially if she can only use one arm. But it’s better to learn with something easy like the Ruger anyway. That’ll get you the basics, and when you get your other arm back you can move up.”

“Why don’t you watch for a while,” Cody suggested. “That’ll give you an idea of how it’s done. Then, you get together with Gil and use the Ruger for a bit. I think it’ll be good for you.”

“All right, Cody, if you say so,” she replied.

It was a little harder for Cody to load and shoot the P226 than he’d expected. After all, the last time he’d fired the weapon . . . he pushed the thought from his mind. The last time he’d fired it, he’d rescued Janice, maybe from getting killed. Once again the thought of that evening came to him. It didn’t make him nervous; now it inspired him. Good clean, quick shooting had made the difference, shooting that he’d mostly learned under Gil’s patient teaching here at the indoor range or the outdoor range out back in the summer. The familiar weapon came easily to his hand; he pushed any doubts he may have had to the back of his mind, and when Gil called, “Commence firing,” he shot with confidence.

It didn’t take long to blow through the clip, and the target came back with the X-ring completely obliterated, which he considered to be both normal and adequate. “Well,” Gil said when he glanced at the target, “That kind of says that you got things back together. You going to fire another round with the nine?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Cody nodded. “I mean just to work the kinks out. Then I think I’d better break out the Ruger and get serious about practicing.”

Cody really enjoyed firing the old Mark II Ruger. It was a very good target pistol, similar to the one he’d fired for the first time a few years ago. It didn’t have the punch of the nine millimeter, but was even more accurate on the target range, and the smaller bullets made it a little easier to check accuracy. His shooting was what he considered to be pretty good; once in a while he nicked the outside edge of the X-ring but never crossed it – the kind of shooting that had made him regional junior champion. Competition had been fun, but he knew he’d reached a level where any more progress was going to involve lots more shooting, lots more expense, and frankly, even better coaching. Pushing on was something he’d contemplated before, but for the moment he’d more or less decided that he was just going to try to stay in practice while he was still in high school. Once he was past that, if the money was there he might try to get involved in higher level competition. It was a decision still lying out there to be made, and with the way he was shooting this evening, after what had happened last week, it proved that he was still mentally and physically capable of doing so.

All the time Cody had been shooting, Janice sat back and watched without saying much, although she smiled at the tight groups that Cody had put in the paper targets. It didn’t take much for Cody to realize that she knew just exactly what that kind of shooting had meant for her – she was probably alive because of it.

After a while the initial burst of activity died down, and several of the shooters took a break at the coffee pot. “All right, Janice,” Gil told her. “We might as well get your feet wet. I know you’ve seen Cody shooting, and it’s not quite as easy as he makes it look. But let’s go through the basics of what the weapon is, the safety rules, and then I’ll give you the chance to see how it shoots.”

“Listen to Gil and do what he says,” Cody told her. “He’s better at teaching this stuff than I would be.”

It took a few minutes for Gil to get her ready to go to the firing line. Not surprisingly her first few shots were pretty wild; only some of them got on the paper. Only one was even near the black, clearly a lucky shot, but at least it was teaching her what it was like to have the gun in her hand and what it felt like to fire it. “OK, now you know what it’s like to shoot it,” Gil told her supportively. “Now you need to learn how to aim it. Slow down, take your time. Concentrate on what you’re doing. You’re not going to be real accurate shooting offhand like that, but you should be able to do better than that.”

After a couple more rounds of coaching, her shooting had markedly improved – at least to the point where she was getting all the rounds on the paper, and some of them in the black. Cody was standing at her side, in the hope of giving her a little more confidence by his presence. “You’re coming along,” Gil said. “Why don’t you fire one more round and take a break.”

“Concentrate on hitting the target,” Cody told her as he slid the clip into the Ruger. “Relax, and put your shots in the black. You can do it, Jan. Just do it.”

“All right, Cody,” she said. “I’ll try.”

“Don’t just try, do it,” he told her.

“Ready on the firing line,” Gil announced. “Commence firing.”

Janice took the safety off and raised the Ruger. Cody could see that she was taking extra care with getting ready to shoot. He saw her take a deep breath, pull the trigger, relax for a second, then pull it again.

It took longer than it had before for her to get through the ten shots in the clip, but it looked to him like they’d been good ones. After Gil called cease fire and reeled the target in, he could see that his initial impression had been correct – each of the ten holes in the paper was in the black. “Good job, Jan!” he smiled. “I said you could do it, and you did.”

“Darn good shooting for your first evening, and offhand at that,” Gil agreed. “I don’t want to say you could get up to Cody’s class, but some of the guys shooting here tonight haven’t done that well. When you get a little practice and get your other arm back, you could be darn good. Would you like to come out here next Thursday and practice a little more?”

“If Cody wants me to, I will,” she said. “It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.”

“Well, you’ll be welcome,” he replied. “This is something that’ll be good for you to know. How’d you like to take a break and have a cup of coffee?”

Gil had Charlie take over the firing line duties, and they gathered around the table in the back of the range, where several other shooters were finishing their break. “Cody,” he said. “I don’t know what you said to her while she was getting ready to fire, but it sure settled her down.”

“Nothing much,” Cody admitted. “I just told her to hit the black, and she did it.”

“Cody told me not to try it, but do it,” Janice added shyly.

“Jeez, it was like Yoda and Luke Skywalker,” Gil shook his head. “‘Do, or do not . . . there is no try.’ I always thought that was good advice. Like I said, you’ve got the potential to be a pretty good shooter if you get some practice.”

“Like I said, if Cody wants me to, I will,” she smiled.

“I think I’ll bring her out again,” Cody said, pleased at how well this experiment had worked out. She was probably a ways away from the kind of confidence with a firearm that he thought she would need, but a first step had been taken. “It was fun to watch her take hold of it.”

“That it was,” Gil said. “Changing the subject on you a little, have you thought any more about coming down to the dojo on Tuesdays?”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about it,” Cody admitted. “With all the other stuff that’s happened this week, I just wasn’t up for it on Tuesday evening. But I had a talk with Charlie yesterday, and he suggested that I might be able to pick up on police-style martial arts with you guys.”

“We can do that,” Gil said. “In fact, we’ve done a lot of it over the years. It’s really a sort of thing where you can learn what you want to learn, and you can pick up more along the way.”

“I think I’ll take you up on that. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I’m thinking about going to police academy somewhere along the way. Charlie said that it wouldn’t hurt me to already have some of the skills learned, and they might be useful even if I didn’t decide to become an officer.”

“Well, he’s right about that, and you sure have the shooting part of it down pretty good already. We can add on some other skills, too; we’re a versatile bunch. Janice, maybe you ought to come, too. We also teach a woman’s self-defense course that I think every woman ought to be exposed to.”

“I’m not really up for it right now,” she said shyly. “But if Cody wants me to, it’s all right with me.”

“Actually, a lot of those skills involve using what you have available,” Gil smiled. “Hey, if someone were to come after you right now, you could do some serious damage if you just whacked them up the side of the head with that cast.”

“It’s probably going to have to wait until we get through all the holiday stuff,” Cody commented. “In fact with the holidays, we may have to miss the range next week. I don’t know yet. But once things settle down, I think we’ll come on over and see.”

Shay was out trying to track down some of his old buddies during the day, so it was late in the afternoon the next day before Cody got to talk to his brother without his parents around. Janice was present, of course, but was lying back in a living room recliner working her way through a book for English class while the guys tried to talk quietly to not disturb her concentration. “So,” Cody asked. “You made any more progress on what you want to do when you get out of college?”

“Not really,” Shay admitted. “I have to declare a major before next year, and I’m still kicking around what I want to do. I keep thinking I ought to take a business major since I can use it somewhere. The hell of that is that the next thing you know I’m sitting at a desk, running a computer on something really boring, and I keep thinking I ought to be able to come up with something better than that. They have a parks and recreation program that looks like it might lead to a lot of outdoor stuff, maybe becoming a park ranger or something. It’d be outdoors and active, so I’ve been kicking that one around, but I’m nowhere close to making my mind up yet. So how about you?

“I’ll be honest, after the last few days I’m having second thoughts about becoming a cop. Some of the stuff that happened really made me think. I haven’t ruled it out yet, but I’m just not sure that’s the way I want to go. Actually, I’m sort of thinking about looking into becoming a lawyer, but I really haven’t had the time to figure out what’s involved.

“Well, they have a pretty good pre-law program at Lake State, and a good criminal justice program. If you went there, it’s not like you have to make your mind up yet.”

“Something to think about,” Cody said aloud. Privately he wasn’t so sure about how bad he wanted to go to Lake State. He’d only been to the campus once, when he and his folks had dropped Shay off the previous fall. It may have been a fine place for Shay, but when he got right down to it he didn’t really want to follow in his brother’s footsteps. He’d done that all the way through school and in some ways not measuring up to Shay, especially in athletics. He hadn’t gotten serious about where he wanted to go to college, but unless there was a real good reason he didn’t want to go to Lake State. Criminal justice and pre-law were available at a lot of places, so that wasn’t a concern.

“Janice,” Shay said, remembering the discussion with his mother from the day before. “Have you got any idea of what you want to do when you get out of high school?”

“Not really,” she said, putting the book down. “Until a few days ago, it wasn’t something that I had any reason to think about. Getting out of high school alive was about the best I could hope for, and there often didn’t seem to be much chance of that.”

“Well, you’ve got some time to think about it before you have to make up your mind.”

“Yes, at least now I have the chance to think about it, thanks to Cody. I’m hoping he’ll be able to come up with a good idea or two.”

“Are you thinking about college?”

“Maybe,” she shrugged. “Like I said, I really haven’t thought about it. I never figured I’d get to go to college, so I never really gave it any consideration. The fact that I could probably do it is still very new to me. If it works out that I actually can go, I’ll probably go wherever Cody decides to go, and really, that’s as far as I’ve thought about it.”

“You’re comfortable with going along with where he wants to go?”

“Of course,” she smiled. “I trust Cody, and I’m sure he’ll do the right thing.”

Again keeping it private, Cody wasn’t too sure how thrilled he was about that announcement. The subject had never come up between the two of them, other than the fact that he’d pointed out that she would need good grades to get into college, which was why he was working so hard to help her catch up with her studies. While the idea of her going to college was new to her, having her go with him bothered him a bit. He’d already seen that she was pretty passive and willing to take guidance from him, but he wasn’t sure how glad he was to have her dumping a decision like that on his shoulders. But, as he’d told himself before, things could change as she got better, and hopefully one of those things that would change was that she would develop a little more independence.

“Cody’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Shay admitted to her. “But you need to think some yourself about what you want to do, rather than just what he wants the two of you to do.”

“I suppose,” she replied unenthusiastically, “but I don’t mind.”

“It’s something we need to talk about,” Cody said. “I’m not just going to make a decision like that without your input on it, even if we do wind up going to the same place. At least we don’t have to decide right now. We’ve got a while, and once you get to feeling better I hope you’ll get some idea of what you want to do.”

“Well,” Shay said, realizing he was getting into uncomfortable territory and trying to change the subject, “If the two of you wound up going to Lake State, I probably could help get you going a little better than if you do it on your own. I mean, I’ve gotten to know my way around the system there pretty well.”

“It’s an option,” Cody replied distantly, his mind more on what Janice had said and how uncomfortable he was with her lack of opinion. “But I keep thinking I might like to go someplace downstate, or even out of state if we can afford it.”

“Well, if you want to consider something like that, you might want to consider Grand Valley, where Bethany goes. She seems to like it pretty well, and they’re very career focused. I mean, I think more than Lake State. Maybe you ought to talk to her when she comes home.”

“Something to think about,” Cody agreed, if for no more reason than to get Shay off of the subject. “Maybe I’ll have to look it up online and see what I can find out about it.”

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