Hard Candy Read Online Free Page B

day after Uncle Rock had prepared Candice a sandwich with chips and a soda, her favorite meal, she pushed away from the table as he was preparing to leave and confronted him. “Uncle Rock, I know you kill people for a living,” she blurted out matter-of-factly. “I want to learn how to do it, you know, so I can get back at the guys who killed my family.”
    Rock, caught off guard, dropped his black bag on the floor and swiped his black knitted hat off his head. Nostrils flared, he stormed into his bedroom and slammed the door.
    Candice stood in the middle of the floor at a loss for words. She had never seen Uncle Rock react so strongly to anything she had said. She began to cry. She knew she had overstepped some unknown boundary. She thought for sure he would kick her out, and her family’s murderers would then find her.
    Candice pleaded with him through the door to come out. She apologized over and over again, until she finally fell asleep on the floor in front of his bedroom door.
    When Uncle Rock finally emerged, he picked her up from the floor and put her in her bed. He sat and stared at her for hours, contemplating how to handle her request. The next day, as soon as Candice had awaken, Uncle Rock sat her down and gave her a stern lecture. He told her he was not a killer or hit man, but a “cleaner.” He explained that cleaners simply rid the world of despicable people who make the world unsafe, while hit men killed for their own selfish gain.
    That made sense to Candice, who had listened intently. Then she begged Rock to teach her everything he knew about being a cleaner.
    Reluctantly, Rock went about training Candice, little by little, showing her the real way to hold a gun and how to use her sights. He also warned her against using the “sideways cowboy style” that hood niggas liked so much, where they ended up always missing their intended targets and shooting innocent bystanders. He also taught her the two-handed, thumb-over-thumb hold and worked with her for hours on her grip.
    â€œSqueeze with your support hand and relax your strong hand,” he told her, after explaining the different role each hand played.
    Candice found that this method was quite effective at keeping the weapon from flying up out of her small hands whenever she shot.
    Uncle Rock made her stand with the gun in her hands in the proper hold and with her arms extended for long periods of time.
    â€œThis is so you never get tired in a gunfight,” he explained. “You need to be able to shoot until the threat is eliminated.”
    He also tested Candice on the nomenclature of several types of weapons, including the MP5. Rock took Candice to a gun range in New Jersey and trained her until all of her shots were center of mass on the targets. He even taught her about different types of cover, showing her how to blade her body behind something as skinny as a pole and become nearly invisible to a distant target.
    Candice had the most fun when Uncle Rock showed her how to shoot from a prone position and from a fetal position with the gun between her knees. Hitting a target center of mass while lying down on her side and stomach was exciting.
    â€œSee, as long as you use your sights and have the proper trigger pull, you can hit anything from any position,” Uncle Rock told her.
    Uncle Rock spent an entire week using himself as a crash test dummy as he taught Candice how to make a person catatonic with pressure points on the body, like the jugular notch and brachial stun. When she placed her index and middle fingers into his jugular notch and applied pressure, she forced his large body to his knees.
    Gasping for breath afterwards, Uncle Rock told her she was a natural. He’d even tested her on the arteries she needed to hit “to make someone bleed out in less than ten seconds.” Candice had remembered the term femoral artery by equating the word femoral with female , she being a female that now