Chapter 8: Twenty-One Guns

The funeral Mass for the Judge was at ten on Monday morning, and the church parking lot had a sign.

It said CONCEALED CARRY PERMITTED IN THE PEWS ONLY, and under it, in a different pen, SAFETIES ON DURING THE HOMILY.

The priest had written the second line himself.

At the door, the ushers were Gate Watch retirees in their lawn-chair vests, and one of them handed me a program and then looked twice.

"You're the Cooler Kid," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"Smart thing, the cooler," he said, and shook my hand with both of his. "Next time, I'm in it."

Nine hundred people came to the church, and about four hundred of them carried a firearm.

They sat in their pews in black, with their holsters under their jackets and their hands folded on their knees.

The priest said that the Judge had been a man who loved a rule and broke most of them.

Everybody laughed, and then everybody cried, which was a thing the Judge would have called sloppy.

I sat in the third pew between my grandmother and my aunt.

During the homily I opened the Terms in my head, because my head was the only place I could keep them.

The Terms ran 1,100 pages, and I had read thirty-one of them since Saturday, in the cooler and the pantry.

Page 31 defined the word Territory as "the jurisdiction in which a Deputy's authority is recognized."

Nothing on pages 1 through 31 defined Unsigned, and I did not like that either.

I wore my grandfather's black suit, which smelled of cedar and still did not fit.

My grandfather died when I was five, and the suit had waited for me fourteen years in the closet upstairs.

Yosi sat in the pew in front of me in a pressed black shirt with the plaque pin on his lapel.

He was one of the six pallbearers.

The widow had asked for the three domino men, the priest's nephew, the funeral director's son and Yosi.

Yosi had once driven the Judge to the airport at four in the morning and refused any money.

I watched my cousin's shoulders under the casket as they carried it out.

He took the weight at the back left, and he did not shake.

The slug was in my pocket, in a pill bottle from the pantry.

I had put my hand on it twice during the Mass, and I could not have said why.

It weighed no more than a pencil eraser.

In the front pew, on the other side of the aisle, sat the Governor.

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