Twisted

entry wound. “Stay calm. Don’t move!”
    But he couldn’t find a bullethole.
    “Where’re you hit?” the detective shouted. “Talk to me. Talk to me!”
    But the big man continued to sob and shake hysterically and didn’t respond.
    Sid Harper ran up, panting. He dropped to his knees beside Dale. “Ambulance’ll be here in five minutes. Where’s he hit?”
    The detective said, “I don’t know. I can’t find the wound.”
    The young cop too examined the stalker. “There’s no blood.”
    Still, Dale kept moaning as if he were in unbearable pain. “Oh, God, no . . . No . . .”
    Finally Loesser heard Kari Swanson call out, “He’s fine. I didn’t hurt him.”
    “Get her up,” the detective said to Harper as he continued to examine Dale. “I don’t understand it. He—”
    “Jesus Christ,” Sid Harper’s stunned voice whispered.
    Loesser glanced at his assistant, who was staring at Kari with his mouth open.
    The detective himself turned to look at her. He blinked in astonishment.
    “I really didn’t shoot him,” Kari insisted.
    Except . . .  Was this Kari Swanson? The woman was the same height and had the same figure and hair. And the voice was the same. But in place of the extraordinary beauty that had burned itself into Loesser’s memory on their first meeting, this woman’s face was very different: she had a bumpy, unfortunate nose, thin, uneven lips, a fleshy chin, wrinkles in her forehead and around her eyes.
    “Are you . . . Who are you?” Loesser stammered.
    She gave a faint smile. “It’s me, Kari.”
    “But . . . I don’t understand.”
    She gave a contemptuous glance at Dale, still lying on the pier, and said to Loesser, “When he followed me to Crowell I finally realized what had to happen: One of us had to die . . . and I picked me.”
    “You?”
    She nodded. “I killed the person he was obsessed with: Kari the supermodel.” Looking out to sea, breathing deeply, she continued. “Last year, down in the Caribbean, I met this plastic surgeon. His office was in Manhattan but he also ran a free clinic in Haiti, where he was born. He’d rebuild the faces of locals injured in accidents.” She laughed. “He was trying to pick me up, of course, joking that if I ever needed a plastic surgeon, give him a call. Buthe wasn’t obnoxious and I liked the volunteer work he did. We hit it off. When I decided last month I had to do something about Dale I called him. I figured if he could make really deformed people look normal, he could make a beautiful person look normal too. I met with him in New York. He didn’t want to do the operation at first but I gave him a hundred thousand for his clinic. That changed his mind.”
    Loesser studied her closely. She wasn’t ugly. She simply looked average—like any of ten million women you’d meet on the street and not glance at twice.
    David Dale’s terrible moaning rose up over the sound of the wind, not from physical pain but from horror—that the beauty that had obsessed him was now gone. “No, no, no . . .”
    Kari asked Loesser, “Can you take these things off me?” Holding up the cuffs.
    Harper unhooked them.
    As Kari pulled her coat tighter around her a mad voice suddenly filled the air, rising above the sound of the waves. “How could you?” Dale cried, rising to his knees. “How could you do this to me?”
    Kari crouched in front of him. “To you ?” she raged. “What I look like, who I am, the life I lead . . . those don’t have a goddamn thing to do with you and they never did!” She gripped his head in both hands and tried to turn it toward her. “Look at me.”
    “No.” He struggled to keep his face averted.
    “Look at me!”
    Finally he did.
    “Do you love me now, David?” she asked with a cold smile on her new face.
    He scrabbled away in revulsion and began to run back toward the street. He stumbled then picked himself up and continued to sprint away from the pier.
    Kari Swanson rose and shouted after him, “Do you love me, David? Do you love me now? Do you? Do you?”

    “Hey, Cath,” the man said, surveying the grocery cart she was pushing.
    “What?” she asked. The plastic surgery had officially laid “Kari” to rest and she was now accepting only variations on Catherine.
    “I think we’re missing something,” Carl replied with exaggerated gravity.
    “What?”
    “Junk food,” he answered.
    “Oh, no.” She too frowned in mock alarm as she examined the