I stopped again and, with a feeling of dread, I turned around. She was holding an automatic pistol pointed at my heart.
“Won’t you help me, Mr. Carl? Please? You don’t know how desperate I am.”
The gun had a black dull finish, rakish lines, it was small-bore, sure, but its bore was still large enough to kill a generation’s best hope in a hotel ballroom, not to mention a small-time criminal attorney who was nobody’s best hope for anything.
I’ll say this for her, she knew how to grab my attention.
3
“PUT THE GUN AWAY,” I said in my sharpest voice.
“I didn’t mean, oh God no, I…” Her hand wavered and the barrel drooped as if the gun had gone limp.
“Put the gun away,” I said again, and it wasn’t as brave as it sounds because the only other options were to run, exposing my back to the.22 slug, or pissing my pants, which no matter how intense the immediate relief makes really an awful mess. And after I told her to put the gun away, told her twice for emphasis, she did just as I said, stuck it right back in her handbag, all of which was unbelievably gratifying for me in a superhero sort of way.
Until she started crying.
“Oh no, now don’t do that,” I said, “no no don’t no.”
I stepped toward her as she collapsed in a sitting position to the sidewalk, crying, the thick mascara around her eyes running in lines down her cheek, her nose reddening. She wiped her face with a black leather sleeve, smearing everything.
“Don’t cry, please please, it will be all right. We’ll go somewhere, we’ll talk, just please please stop crying, please.”
I couldn’t leave her there after that, sitting on the ground like she was, crying black tears that splattered on the cement. In a different era I would have offered to buy her a good stiff drink, but this wasn’t a different era, so what I offered to buy her instead was a cappuccino.