Free Silver Lake by Peter Gadol Page B

case, a key witness questioned by an assistant district attorney had contradicted testimony he’d originally given the detective, throwing the prosecution into disarray. Which was to say Detective Michaels was probably not going to be amused to learn about a relatively less serious instance of fibbing.
    “I thought it would be best if I cleared something up,” Carlo started.
    The detective pinched the tip of her nose with her thumb and forefinger and held it a moment.
    “I said I’d never met Tom before he showed up at our office, but I had,” Carlo said.
    “Is that so?”
    The detective stared at him, waiting, but it was a difficult story to relay and even now, having decided to come clean, Carlo hesitated. The way the detective was regarding him, half squinting, didn’t help.
    “Yes,” Carlo said. “Last April.”
    One evening the previous April, he had gone alone to a dinner party at friends in Glendale while Robbie stayed home nursing a cold. Carlo left relatively early and was driving along Fletcher and had passed under the 5 and was coming up to the light at Riverside. He was in the right lane and driving at a more cautious speed than usual because he’d consumed a good amount of wine with dinner, which had been rich, all about cream sauces, a cheese course, a chocolate course, gluttony. He was woozy when he came up behind a car at the red light, and there were no other cars at the intersection. The car, a long black sedan, had its flasherson—it looked like maybe it had stalled out. Carlo was about to turn into the left lane and maneuver around it when two men shot out of the back of the sedan, flailing their arms yet making no noise he could hear.
    Carlo’s first thought was they wanted him to call for help. He rolled down his window as one man approached, and as soon as he had the window part-way down, the man reached in the car and twice depressed the power lock. Before Carlo could react, the second man had opened up the passenger-side and slid in next to Carlo. This second man was pointing a gun at him.
    “What do you want,” Carlo asked, “what do you want—do you want the car?”
    The man with the gun didn’t respond.
    “Take it,” Carlo said and lifted his hands off the steering wheel, and he would have gotten out of the car and bolted if the first man were not standing next to the driver’s-side door and preventing egress.
    “What do you want—do you want money?”
    The man pressed the gun against the side of Carlo’s ribs, which hurt, and still the man didn’t speak, which only confused Carlo.
    “What, my wallet?”
    Which was what Carlo reached for—he kept it in his front pocket—but as he did this, his foot began to slip off the brake and he slammed his foot hard against the pedal, which made the man with the gun in the passenger seat jerk forward, his free fist hitting the glove compartment.
    “Don’t fuck with me,” the man said and jabbed Carlo in the ribs. “And don’t look at me,” he said. “Don’t look at me.”
    But Carlo already had looked at the man, already noted theway his chin drooped left to right, the way his moustache was similarly angled. Already Carlo had taken a good long look: blue eyes, black hair, young, possibly high school-aged, a constellation of moles by his left ear. Carlo turned instead toward the other man still standing on the street, which was when he noticed that while the man wasn’t holding a gun, he had formed a pretend one with his thumb and first two fingers. Bang, bang.
    “Put the car in park,” the man with the real gun said, and Carlo obeyed.
    “Get out,” the man with the gun said and shoved Carlo toward the door, again with the gun pressed at, into his ribs, but the second man standing next to Carlo’s door still made that impossible—
    “Get the fuck out of the fucking car,” the man with the gun yelled, and so Carlo opened his door, which irritated the second man, although he moved aside and grabbed Carlo’s shirt