There’s truth to what my friend said, however narrow it is, and the truth scares me. When I drive through my neighborhood, I see poor, but I don’t see poverty.

Driving into Jenna’s neighborhood, I saw a lot of poverty. I saw a big, ugly scar of a neighborhood with several boarded-up storefronts. I saw one that hadn’t been boarded up yet, but was just as closed. The front window was blown out and bullet holes pocked the walls in jagged patterns of lethal acne. The inside was scorched and gutted and the fiberglass sign overhead that once said delicatessen in Vietnamese was shattered. The deli business wasn’t what it once was in this neighborhood, but the crack business seemed to be doing just fine.

I turned off Blue Hill Avenue up a rutted hill that looked like it hadn’t been paved since the Kennedy administration. The sun was setting, blood red, behind an overgrown yard of rotting weeds at the top of the hill. A group of laconic black kids crossed the street in front of me, taking their time, staring into my car. There were four of them, and one had a broomstick in his hand. He turned his head to look at me and whacked the stick off the street with a harsh snap. One of his buddies, bouncing a tennis ball in front of him, laughed and pointed an admonishing finger at my windshield. They passed over the sidewalk and cut through a rotted brown pathway between two three-deckers. I continued on up the hill, and something primal reassured me that my gun was hanging heavily from the holster on my left shoulder.

My gun is, as Angie would say, “not a fuck-around thing.” It’s a .44 magnum automatic an “automag,” they call it gleefully in Soldier of Fortune and like publications and I didn’t purchase it out of penis envy or Eastwood envy or because I wanted to own the goddamned biggest gun on the block. I bought it for one simple reason: I’m a lousy shot. I need to know that if I ever have to use it, I hit what I’m aiming at and I hit it hard enough to knock it down and keep it there. Shoot some people in the arm with a .32 and they just get angry. Shoot them in the same place with the automag and they ask for a priest.

I’ve fired it twice. Once when a brain-dead sociopath who was only slightly bigger than Rhode Island wanted me to prove how tough I was. He’d jumped out of his car and was six feet away from me and coming on fast, when I fired a round that went straight through his engine block. He stared at his Cordoba like I’d just shot his dog and almost wept. But the steam pouring out of the torn metal on his hood convinced him that there were things out there that were tougher than the two of us.

The other time was Bobby Royce. He had his hands on Angie’s neck at the time, and I blew a chunk out of his leg. Tell you something about Bobby Royce: he got back up. He raised his gun toward me and still had it pointed that way even after Angie’s two rounds had picked him up and drilled him against a hydrant and the light had left his eyes. Bobby Royce, going into rigor with his gun pointed at me, flat dead eyes not much different than they’d been when he was breathing.