Flagged Victor Read Online Free PDF Page B

also had a knack for the mechanical aspects of loading, breaking down, and cleaning. Sunday afternoons, Mr. R cleaned his guns on the kitchen table on a green felt cloth, and we would watch and ask him what certain guns could do to a person.
    He told us: This one will pop a three-quarter-inch hole in your chest and churn around inside, in the process causingenough internal damage to bleed you out within thirty minutes. Approximately.
    What about that one? Chris asked, pointing to the stainless steel .357 Magnum with the fitted rubber grip, which we both thought was the coolest handgun in the known universe.
    No internal bleeding with that one, Mr. R said. Tends to blow the head clean off the shoulders.
    And that became one of our favourite jokes. We laughed with pure pleasure every time it came up. Tends to blow the head clean off the shoulders. Ha ha ha.
    Mr. R and Chris had the same laugh: a deep, rolling cackle that grew in cruelty and mirth until you thought of evil geniuses hatching plots while wringing their hands.
    One day, Mr. R drove Chris and me to school in a squad car. As an officer, Mr. R needed to do a day in the squad car every six months or so, even though he worked at a desk. We loved sitting in the back, behind Plexiglas and cage wire, but it was even cooler when Mr. R sounded the siren. Some guy in a beat-up Mercury Monarch had rolled through a stop sign and Mr. R thought it would be fun to pull him over and show us what it was like to give a ticket.
    He stepped out of his car and walked to the front driver’s side window, then he returned with the offending driver’s licence in hand. We were out of our minds with excitement.
    Mr. R called the licence number into dispatch and waited. He listened as the dispatch announcer gave him a long explanation. It was unintelligible to us. But Mr. R didn’t explain whatshe said. He stepped out of the car, handed the licence back to the driver, and the big car pulled away.
    When Mr. R sat back in the driver’s seat, Chris asked him what was wrong.
    He was flagged victor, Mr. R said.
    Before we got to school, we learned what that meant. The
V
was for violence. The driver had been flagged as a violent offender. And so, Mr. R let him go rather than continue his stunt with two children in his car.
    We felt like we’d had a close call. Like we’d accidentally bumped into Jesse James.
    Flagged victor
became one of our secret code-word expressions ever after. Doing something wrong, getting away with it, grinning an evildoer’s grin. That was very FV.
    Mr. R had a
Playboy
collection in the basement, and it was okay for us to go down there and look through them. The issues were all from the early to mid-seventies. The women stood differently then, often on tiptoes, their calves straining, like awkward ballerinas reaching for something on the top of some imaginary shelf. Their breasts were different then, too, starting higher on their chests, sinking lower and hanging rounder, and their shoulders and hips were wider and fuller. Beyond their bikini tan lines, their pubic hair was far, far bushier, a wide swath of mysterious wilderness.
    One day, I was exploring the woods around Oathill Lake with Derek. Together, we found a stash of pornographic magazines. There were no
Playboys
in the pile, only titles we’d never heardof before with pictures inside that were far more graphic than anything we’d ever seen. There were around thirty magazines total, so we each claimed approximately fifteen and worked on a plan to get them home without detection. We decided to risk hiding them in the forest until that night. Then Derek, who had a bedroom on the ground floor, would sneak out of his house, grab the loot, and deliver my share to me at my front door.
    I woke myself up at two in the morning, the designated time, and crept downstairs. I stood looking out the glass of our front door for about ten minutes until I saw a dim figure in the haze, running down the middle of the street. I