Twisted

never held a gun in her life, not a pistol anyway, and she now crouched down and lifted it, felt its heavy weight, felt its heat. She shoved the muzzle into the face of the mugger. He went limp as cloth.
    Lincoln Man—a good foot taller than the kid—rolled off the hood and took him by the collar.
    The mugger looked at Carolyn’s uneasy eyes andmust’ve concluded that she wasn’t going to be shooting anybody. He pushed Lincoln Man away with surprising strength and took off at a gallop into the brush beside the gas station.
    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 tomentioning 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