Speaking in Tongues

unglamorous Smith & Wesson .38 Special, sporting six chambers, only five loaded, the one under the hammer being forever empty, as Konnie always preached.
    This gun was locked away where it’d been for the past three or four years—in a trunk in Tate’s barn. He now sped up his driveway and leapt out, observing that with his manic driving he’d lost the white van without intending to. He ran into the barn, found the key on his chain and after much jiggling managed to open the trunk. The gun, still coated with oil as he’d left it, was in a Ziploc bag. He took it out, wiped it clean and slipped it into his pocket.
    In the car Bett asked him timidly, “You have it?” the way a college girl might ask her boyfriend if he’d brought a condom on a date.
    He nodded.
    “Is it loaded?”
    “Oh.” He’d forgotten to look. He took it out and fiddled with the gun until he remembered how to open it. Five silver eyes of bullets stared back from the cylinder.
    “Yep.”
    He clicked it shut and put the heavy gun in his pocket.
    “It’s not going to just go off, is it? I mean, by itself.”
    “No.” He noticed Bett staring at him. “What?” he asked, starting the engine of the Lexus.
    “You’re . . . you look scary.”
    He laughed coldly. “I feel scary. Let’s go.”
    •   •   •
    Manassas, Virginia, is this:
    Big-wheeled trucks, sullen pick-a-fight teenagers (the description fitting both the boys and the girls), cars on the street and cars on blocks, Confederate stars ’n’ bars, strip malls, PCP labs tucked away in the woods, concrete postwar bungalows, quiet mothers and skinny fathers struggling, struggling, struggling. It’s domestic fights. It’s women sobbing at Garth’s concerts and teens puking at Aerosmith’s.
    And a little of it, very little, is Grant Avenue.
    This is Doctors’ and Lawyers’ Row. Little Taras, Civil War mansions complete with columns and detached barns for garages, surrounded by expansive landscaped yards. It was to the biggest of these houses—a rambling white Colonial on four acres—that Tate Collier now drove.
    “Who lives here?” Bett asked, cautiously eyeing the house.
    “The man who knows where Megan is.”
    “Call Konnie,” she said.
    “No time,” he muttered and he rolled up the drive, past the two Mercedeses—neither of them gray, he noticed—and skidded to a stop about five feet fromthe front door, nearly knocking a limestone lion off its perch beside the walk.
    “Tate!”
    But he ignored her and leapt from the car.
    “Wait here.”
    The anger swelled inside him even more powerfully, boiling, and he found himself pounding fiercely on the door with his left hand, his right gripped around the handle of the pistol.
    A large man opened the door. He was in his thirties, muscular, wearing chinos and an Izod shirt.
    “I want to see him,” Tate growled.
    “Who are you?”
    “I want to see Sharpe and I want to see him now.”
    Pull the gun now? Or wait for a more dramatic moment?
    “Mr. Sharpe’s busy right at the—”
    Tate lifted the gun out of his pocket. He displayed it, more than brandished it, to the assistant or bodyguard or whatever he was. The man lifted his hands and backed up, alarm on his face. “Jesus Christ!”
    “Where is he?”
    “Hold on there, mister, I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here but—”
    “Jimmy, what’s going on?” a voice called from the top of the stairs.
    “Got a problem here, Mr. Sharpe.”
    “Tate Collier come a-calling,” Jack Sharpe sang out. He glanced at the gun as if Tate were holding a butterfly net. “Collier, whatcha got yourself there?” He laughed. Cautious, sure. But it was still a laugh.
    “Was he driving the white van?” Tate pointed thegun at the man in the chinos, who lifted his hands. “Careful, sir, please!” he implored.
    “It’s okay, Jimmy,” Sharpe called. “Just let him be. He’ll calm down. What van, Collier?”
    “You know what van,” Tate said, turning back to Sharpe. “Was he the asshole driving?”
    “Why’n’t you put that thing away so’s nobody gets hurt. And we’ll talk . . . No, Jimmy, it’s okay, really.”
    “I can shoot him if you want, Mr. Sharpe.”
    Tate glanced back and found himself looking into the muzzle of a very large pistol, chrome plated, held steadily in Jimmy’s hand. It was an automatic, he noticed—with clips and safeties and all the rest of that stuff.
    “No, don’t do that,” Sharpe said. “He’s not