Three hours into the drive, Hobbs gave Alan the gun back. He asked him, “You know what kind of gun it is?”
Alan shook his head.
“Charter Arms Bulldog, .44 Special. Good gun to hit somebody with. Doesn’t shoot so good. Where’d you get it?”
“My uncle.”
“You know what he did with it? Before you got it?”
“Left it in my mother’s bedroom.”
Hobbs drove for a while, saying nothing. Then he said, “So he could have killed some guy with it. You get caught with it, that’s on you.”
“My uncle isn’t the kind of guy who kills people.”
“You think he’s a nice guy or something?”
“No, I know he’s a bad man. But he’s the kind of guy who hires somebody else to do it. At least now he is.”
Hobbs nodded, taking in a new fact. Then he said, “Next bridge we come to, you throw that out the window and into the water. We already got all the hardware we need for this job.”
“But it’s my gun.”
“I never met your uncle, but I can tell you something about him right now. He’s got a small dick.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” said Alan, impassively looking out the window into the night. “But my mom would.”
“I feel sorry for your mom.”
“Don’t feel sorry for my mother,” Alan said. “She deserves what she gets.”
“What she’s gettin’ ain’t much,” Hobbs said. That one got to Alan. Hobbs saw the hurt and anger flash across Alan’s face. Hobbs said, “That gun is almost the right idea, small, reliable, but unless you are going to mug an elk, nobody needs that much gun. Thirty-eight is plenty if you know how to shoot. But shooting is almost always a mistake. You shouldn’t need to use a gun at all if you do everything right.”
“Have you ever needed to use a gun?”
“They scare civilians. Mostly I’ve just hit people with them.”
“Have you ever shot anybody?”
Hobbs took a while before he answered, “Only people who tried to cross me.”
“How many of them are there?”
“Were,” said Hobbs. “How many of them were there.”
They drove over six bridges, big and small, before they got to where they were going. Alan kept the gun in his pocket. As they went over one of the bridges, Alan asked, “How do I know you’re not gonna cross me?”
Hobbs smiled and said, “You don’t.”
And that was the last they spoke of the gun.