Read Online Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman - Free Book Online

I’ll finish it. Next time it won’t be me they’re peeling off the floor. Remember that.”
    Out on the street, I took a few deep lungfuls of Brixton’s best. Jim was holding on to my elbow, walking me away from the diner.
    “That was great in there, Kip,” he said.
    “The part where I curled up in a ball like an insect?”
    “The first punch. Do you know how many people in this town would like to pop Stan Petrovic one? You actually did it.”
    “Yeah, Jim, but you heard him in there. He’s going to kick my ass sooner or later.”
    “Or, like you said, maybe you’ll kick his.”
    “That was just my anger talking.”
    “No way,” he gushed. “Are you on campus tomorrow?”
    “Freshman Comp at nine fifteen,” I said.
    “Meet me by the student union after class.”
    “Why?”
    “So we can go hit some balls.”

Eight

Fifteen Minutes
     
    My writing didn’t suck. I couldn’t believe it, but it really didn’t suck. I read and reread and re-reread the pages I put down in between the long bouts in bed with the St. Pauli Girl. It didn’t suck because what I was reading wasn’t recognizable as the Kipster’s, and that was all to the good. The Kipster was dead, not risen, and I was all that remained in his place.
    The Kipster was a cynical bastard, full of high sentence, but never obtuse: a poet, a prince looking down upon the great unwashed with only contempt. He was above it all, untouchable and untouched. He was master of his instrument, so much so that it was all an inside joke to him. I didn’t recognize the writing because it came from a very different place than from where the Kipster’s art had come. It all came too easily for the Kipster, which is why he foundered when the words stopped coming to him on the cusp of the ’90s. I had nothing to hold on to but the empty shell of the Kipster. His old protagonists were whimsies and straw men, put up like bowling pins only to be knocked down. They were sacrifices meant as meat for elitist snobs. His protagonists were soulless, ironic follies to be run up the flagpole like a fat girl’s underthings.
    Other than a complete loss of talent, one of the reasons I’d managed but seven first lines in all these years was the very nature of the man I thought of as McGuinn. He was a real man, not a construct. There was nothing about his bloody and violent life that even remotely resembled Kant Huxley’s or any of the other cool-boy protagonists that had flowed from the Kipster’s fingertips. The other things that had daunted me for so long were setting and form.
    I wasn’t a biographer, not in temperament or by training, but what McGuinn had given me was basically the details for the biography of a murderer. The killings—their mechanics, the reasons and rationalizations behind them, the stories of the victims—as fascinating as some readers might have found those things, weren’t what interested me. Nor, do I think, were they what motivated McGuinn. It was his emotional journey and evolution from teenage murderer to soldier to assassin to target that got my attention. Besides, I’d spent all of two months in Ireland and the North. I didn’t know the place or the people, and I certainly had only a superficial understanding of the conflict. I’d been a glorified tourist, nothing more. A mostly drunk one at that. Even if I’d been up to the writing, I didn’t understand the context.
    Just because I lost my talent for writing didn’t mean I’d lost my instinct for good work and a good story. I still had an eye and ear for fine ingredients even if I had lost the recipe. And McGuinn’s life had all the best ingredients. Whenever I imagined the book, I imagined it as fiction with Terry McGuinn in an alien setting. What could I have added to something set on the streets of Belfast? Nothing. If I wanted to give meaning to this man’s journey, he needed to be a stranger in a strange land. But until the St. Pauli Girl brought me to that old hangar and