Twisted: The Collected Stories (15 page)

Carolyn thrust the gun generally in his direction.

Lincoln Man said urgently, “Just shoot for his legs, not his back. You’ll be in trouble, you kill him.”

But her hands began to tremble and by the time she forced herself to steady it, he was gone.

In the distance a car started, a car with a rattling tailpipe. Then a screech of tires.

“Oh, God, oh, God . . .” Carolyn closed her eyes and leaned against her car.

Lincoln Man came up to her. “You all right?”

She nodded. “Yes. No. I don’t know. . . . What can I say? Thank you.”

“Uhm . . . ” He nodded toward the gun, which she was carelessly pointing at his belly.

“Oh, sorry.” She offered it to him. But he glanced down and said, “You better hold on to it until the cops get here. I’m not supposed to have too much to do with guns.”

Carolyn didn’t understand this. For a moment she thought that he was in recovery and touching a gun would be like somebody in AA taking a drink. Maybe people got addicted to guns the way other people—her husband, for instance—got hooked on gambling or women or coke.

“What?”

“I have a record.” He said this without shame or pride but in a tone that suggested he was used to
mentioning it early in a conversation, getting the fact out of the way, and seeing what the reaction was. Carolyn had none, and he continued, “Somebody finds me with a pistol . . . well, it’d be a problem.”

“Oh,” she said, as if he were a Safeway clerk explaining about an expired spaghetti sauce coupon. His eyes dipped again to her beige suit. Well, more accurately: to the part of her body where her suit was not.

He glanced inside the station, where the clerk continued obliviously to watch his TV program, then he said, “We better call the cops.
He’s
sure not going to do it.”

“Wait,” she said. “Can I ask a question?”

“Sure.”

“What’d you do time for?”

He hesitated. “Well,” he said slowly. And then must’ve decided that Carolyn, with her beautiful suit, her tight skirt, her black lacy stockings from Victoria’s Secret, this wonderful, fragrant package (Opium, $49 an ounce) would never be his and so he had nothing to lose. He said, “Assault with a deadly weapon. Five counts. Guilty on all of them. Oh, and conspiracy to commit assault. So, should we call those cops?”

“No,” she answered, slipping the gun into the glove compartment of her car. “I think we should have a drink.”

And nodded toward the lounge of the motel across the road.

They awoke three hours later.

He looked like a smoker but he wasn’t. He looked like a drinker too and drink he did but he’d had only one beer to her three from the six-pack they bought at the party store beside the motel, after one martini each in the bar.

They stared at the cracked ceiling.

“You have someplace you have to be?” she asked.

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“I mean now. Tonight.”

“No. I’m just in the area for the day. Going back home tomorrow.”

Home, he’d explained over the martini, was Boston. He was staying the night at the Courtyard Inn in Klammath.

His name was Lawrence—emphatically not Larry. After prison he’d gone straight and given up his job of collecting debts for some men he described vaguely as “local businessmen.”

“I collected the vig, they call it,” he’d explained. “The interest on loan shark loans. You gotta pay the vig.”

“Like Rocky.”

“Yeah, sorta,” Lawrence said.

When she asked his last name his eyes went cloudy and though he said, “Anderson,” he might as well have answered “Smith.”

He said, “None of the above,” to her inquiry about a wife and family and she was inclined to believe him.

The one thing she knew about him for certain was that he was an incredible lover.

Sensuous road, sensuous curves . . .

Nothing soft about his shoulders.

For nearly two hours, they’d kissed, touched, tasted, pressed together. There was nothing kinky about him, nothing odd. He was simply, well, overwhelming. That was the only way she could describe it. His strong arms around her, his large body atop hers . . .

As they lay now in the warm, cheap bed, she watched his chest rising and falling. There was a nasty scar on it, clearly visible beneath the black, curly hair. She wanted to ask him about it but couldn’t bring herself to.

“Lawrence?”

He glanced at her cautiously. This was the revered moment after coupling. A risky time. Certain conventions had to be followed. Honesty was dangerous but sincerity a must. Synonyms for
commitment
and
love
and
the future
—if not those words themselves—had ruined many rosy evenings.

But Carolyn’s mind wasn’t on any of those matters. She was picturing the black gun in her glove compartment and the high, frantic voice of the man who’d nearly kidnapped her.

“What do you do for a living now?” she asked him.

A pause.

“I used to sell auto parts. Well, manage a store. I’m between things right now.”

“Got fired?”

“Yeah, got fired.” He stretched, a bone popped. “You have a record, they’ll fire you if some kid in the mailroom takes a box of staples home. You’re always the number-one suspect. I came up for a
job interview in Hammond today. Didn’t work out.”

She remembered his sullen face during the conversation on his cell phone:

“Can I ask
you
a question?” he asked.

“Sure. I’m married, no children. I love sex and I drink too much. Anything else?”

“Why didn’t you want to call the cops?”

But instead of answering she asked, “Why didn’t you get shook back there?”

He shrugged those great shoulders again. “I’ve had guns pointed at me before. I can tell when somebody’s going to use a piece and when he’s not. Oh, that kid’d been a pro, I’d’ve said so long, lady, and hoped the state troopers got to you before it was too late.”

“Have you ever killed anybody?”

The hesitation was his answer.

“No more questions from you till you answer mine,” he said. “Why no cops?”

“Because I have a business proposition for you.”

“What, you need some auto parts?”

“No, I want you to murder my husband.”

“Divorce him,” Lawrence said. “That’s what they make lawyers for.”

“He’s worth a lot of money.”

“If he’s cheating, you’ll get half. Maybe more.”

“Well . . .”

“Oh. He’s not the only guilty party.” Lawrence laughed and gestured toward the bed they were lying in. “Guess not. Who cheated first?”

“He did.” Then she added, “Well, he got caught first.”

“Tough luck. But I’m not a hit man. I never was.”

“What can I say to convince you?”

“Nothing. Not. A. Thing.”

“What can I
do
to convince you?” She moved her hands along his body, pinched his thigh playfully.

He laughed.

He stopped smiling when she asked, “Fifty thousand?”

But after a moment: “I’ve done my time. I didn’t like it.”

“A hundred?”

The hesitation was probably only a millisecond but to Carolyn it was plenty long enough.

Lawrence said, “I don’t think so.”

“
I don’t think
—that’s not the same as
no.
”

“It’s not easy killing somebody. Well, matter of fact, that part
is
easy. But getting away’s tricky. That’s the almost-impossible part.”

As she often did in the meetings she ran at the hospital—when the people who worked for her would come up with excuses for not having their reports or proposals in on time—Carolyn said, “I’m hearing
almost.
I’m hearing
tricky.
But all that tells me is it’s doable.”

“You ever threatened him?”

She shrugged. “I found him with his girlfriend once at the mall. I lost it. I said I’d kill them both. . . . No, I think I said they’d wish they were dead by the time I got through with them.”

“Ouch.”

“I don’t think anybody heard me.”

“Well,” he said slowly, like a doctor formulating an opinion. “You’ve got a reason to kill him. That’s a problem. It means you’ve got to find a fall guy. You’ve got to make it look like it’s more likely somebody else committed the crime than you, even if you have a motive. We need—”

“Another suspect?”

“Yeah.”

She smiled and eased her breasts against him. “Like a carjacker. Or a mugger?”

“Sure.” His eyes swung toward the gas station. He nodded. “That kid, we’ve got his gun . . .”

Stan had several guns. Carolyn remembered the forms he’d had to fill out to buy them; she knew gun shops kept good records of ownership. She mentioned this now.

“Might be stolen, might not be his,” Lawrence said.

“It’d have his fingerprints on it.”

“We’d have to wipe it—you touched it, remember?” But then he laughed.

“What?”

“Well, even if we wiped the gun, the bullets’d still have
his
prints on them.”

She nuzzled against his neck.

“But,” Lawrence added, “he’s just a carjacker. You really want to bring him down on a murder charge?”

“He was going to rape me,” she pointed out. “Maybe kill me. Look at it like this: We’ll be doing a good deed, getting him put away before he hurts someone.”

“A hundred thousand?” Lawrence gazed up at the ceiling. “You know, those social workers and counselors
. . . in prison, I mean? They’d ask about all sorts of crazy stuff. What appealed to me about antisocial behavior? What was I angry about? Was my childhood
conflicted?
” He laughed. “They didn’t like my answers. I told ’em I could make five thousand a day just to break some poor schmuck’s arm. Who the hell
wouldn’t
want a job like that?”

“Well, here’s a chance for your nest egg.” She kissed his ear and whispered the words that always thrilled her, “Tax free.”

He thought for a moment. “We’d have to set it up carefully. Maybe we find the motel where he’s meeting his girlfriend—”

“I know it. They always go to the same place.”

“How does it work?” He laughed. “I was married for ten years and I never had an affair. Would she leave the place first? Or him?”

“She’d leave first. He’d wait, pay for the room.”

“Okay, after he pays he gets in the car. I’m there waiting for him.”

“And you shoot him?”

Lawrence laughed. “In a motel parking lot? With people around? I don’t think so. No, I’ll force him to drive me someplace deserted. Do it there. Make it look like we fought and I shot him. Then I panicked and jumped out of the car and ran. I’ll drop the gun on the way. You follow and pick me up. . . . When should we do it? Sooner’s better. I need the money bad. I owe big-time on that Lincoln.”

“Stan usually goes to see her on Tuesday and Thursday nights.”

“Today’s Tuesday,” he said.

She nodded. “That’s where he is now.”

“Well, day after tomorrow. Sure. It’s a good setup. We’ve got a murder weapon that can’t be traced to us, a good motive. And a fall guy.”

Carolyn rolled atop Lawrence once more, straddled him, feeling his interest in her Pamela Anderson body rapidly reviving. And she thought: We sure
do
have a fall guy, Lawrence. You. An ex-con out of work, a man with a great motive to rob Stan—and kill him in the process.

“I think it’ll work,” he said.

“I think it will too,” Carolyn said. And started to chew on his lower lip.