Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

The nozzle snapped off and she went inside to pay.

A cup of black coffee, a roll of Lifesavers. Pep-O-Mint. Without a hint of recognition, the young clerk looked up from his portable TV only long enough to glance at her chest while he gave her the change; maybe it was just her face he didn’t recognize.

She stepped back outside, glancing at the man with the Lincoln as he tossed his phone on the seat of the car and reached into his pocket, fishing for money. He glanced toward her again.

Then he froze. His eyes went wide, focusing just past her.

And she felt an arm snake around her waist, felt cold metal at her ear.

“Oh, God...”

“Shut up, lady,” a young man’s voice stuttered in her ear. He was nervous and smelled of whisky. “We’re gonna get in your car and drive. You scream, you’re dead.”

Carolyn had never been mugged. She’d lived in Chicago and New York City and briefly in Paris but the only time she’d ever been physically threatened, the perpetrator hadn’t been a crook but the wife of the man who lived across the hall from her on the Left Bank. She was now paralyzed with fear.

As the mugger dragged her toward her car she stammered, “Please, just take the keys.”

“No way, babe. I want you’s much as I want your wheels.”

“Please, no!” she moaned. “I’ll give you a lot of money. I’ll—”

“Shut up. You’re coming with me.”

“No, she’s not.” Lincoln Man had walked up to the passenger side of her Lexus. He was standing between them and the car. His eyes were steady. He didn’t seem afraid. The skinny kid, on the other hand, seemed terrified. He shoved the gun forward. “Get the hell outa the way, mister. Nobody’ll get hurt, you do what I say.”

The man said calmly, “You want the car, take the car. Take my car. It’s new. Got twelve thousand miles on it.” He held up the keys.

“I’m taking her and her car and you’re getting outa my way. I don’t want to shoot you.” The gun wavered. He was a scrawny young guy, backwoods, with dishwater-brown hair in a snaky ponytail.

Lincoln Man smiled and continued to talk calmly. “Look, friend. Carjacking’s no big deal. But a kidnapping or rape count? Forget about it. You’ll go away forever.”

“Get the hell out of my way!” his voice crackled. He moved forward a few feet, forcing Carolyn along with him. She was whimpering. Hated herself for it but she had no control.

Lincoln Man stood his ground and the kid shoved the gun directly into his face.

What happened next happened fast.

She saw:

Lincoln Man turning his palms toward the mugger in a gesture of surrender, stepping back slightly.

The passenger door swinging open and the kid shoving her inside. (Carolyn, thinking crazily: I’ve never been in the passenger seat of my car before, the seat’s too far forward, I’ll tear my panty hose...)

The mugger walking around the front of the car to the driver’s side of the Lexus, forcing Lincoln Man — hands still raised — out of the way.

Carolyn glanced hopelessly into the gas station window. The young attendant was still behind the counter, still eating potato chips, still watching Roseanne on the tiny TV.

The mugger started to climb into the car, then paused, looking back, realizing the nozzle was still in the gas tank of the car.

Then Lincoln Man was lunging, grabbing the mugger’s gun hand. He gasped in surprise and fought fiercely to free his hand.

But Lincoln Man was stronger. Carolyn pushed open her door and sprang out as the two men tumbled onto the hood of the Lexus and grappled for the gun. Lincoln Man banged his opponent’s wrist onto the windshield several times and the black pistol flew from his grasp. Carolyn squinted as it landed at her feet. The gun didn’t go off.

She’d 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 and must’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 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.”