22. Mike

"Is this somebody's case of Amstel Light?" The stranger fished a bottle out of the box by Mike's elbow. "Yours?" Mike shrugged. "Nobody's, then. Pff!" The cap flicked to the side, tumbling end over end like a shell casing. Mike's eyes followed it to the floor. He could have caught it. "Hey," the guy said a moment later, and Mike tuned back in.
"Mike." They shook hands. "I'm just going to apologize right now if I forget, I'm bad with names."
"No problem. Good to meet you anyway."
"Nice shirt."
"Thanks, yeah, it's kind of my favourite. I mean, it's a tiger with a machine gun, how awesome can you get?"
"That's a submachine gun, actually. Not a machine gun."
"Huh? Oh, okay, a sub-mo-sheen." He chuckled and swigged the Amstel.
"A Heckler & Koch MP5-K. You can tell it's a K. It doesn't have the lugged barrel."
"Jesus. Do you know how much the tiger paid for it, too?"
Mike blinked. The question seemed irrelevant. "Tigers don't have any money."
"Uh, yeah, they don't. So how come you know what kind of arms he's packing, you play a lotta Call of Duty or something?"
Mike smiled in a way that affected his mouth and not his eyes. "No, I've never played it. I'm studying to become a firearms instructor. I have a gun license. To get one you have to pass a test on several common types of weapon, disassemble and strip them, reassemble them, and follow range safety rules while firing, scoring a minimum accuracy and speed requirement. So with a gun like that I'd have to identify it and know how to field-strip it in three minutes." He produced his license from his wallet with fluid precision, perfunctorily displayed it, and with the same practiced speed put it back in his pocket.
Stepping back a little, the tiger shirt guy rubbed a knuckle into his chin. "I'm for gun control."
"Oh, so am I," Mike said, nodding. "Gun control is a very important issue. But that doesn't mean there should be no guns, only that they belong in the hands of citizens who are trained to use them safely and responsibly."
The one who'd brought up the topic was already talking over Mike, laughing. "I thought you were going to say like a Chuck Norris thing, that 'if there's a gun around, I want to be in control of it,' you know?" It was actually a Clint Eastwood quote. "Anyway, I'm going to check out what's going on over there, nice meeting you." With that he left the kitchen and blended into the rest of the party. Mike wanted to reacquire the conversation, to convince the stranger that his opinions on gun control really were well-reasoned and safe, but he really wasn't all that good with faces either. He looked across the room and it seemed like a department store, full of mannequins. One of them wore a shirt with a H&K MP5-K on it, but he couldn't see which one. The rest of the party was no more interesting.

Alone, Mike stepped up to the firing line, chambered a round, disengaged the safety and straightened his arm in anticipation of recoil. Thirty yards away, wisps of paper drifted down to the floor of the range, seesawing in the air as lead slugs shredded the target. He breathed evenly; his heart rate slowed. First he took off the orange earmuffs and the yellow glasses, then he picked up the stopwatch he would use to measure his reload time. 'Manual precision,' Mike thought, 'comes from repetition, doing it the same way over and over again, making it automatic.' He took six bullets from the box, all identical and without any differences or inconsistencies; perfect.