Still Life with Thompson Gun:

Big Sur 1960

The Seagull Café, a railcar diner, perched on a cliff along the Redwood Highway. Waves hammered the rocks three hundred feet below while gulls rode the updraft, rising and falling at will — perhaps they sensed a storm coming from the sea. A rattletrap Ford station wagon sat alone outside, its faded bumper sticker urging passing drivers to Honk If You Love Jesus.

A slender teenager in a chambray shirt, buckskin jacket, and Levis rolled his idling Indian Motorcycle to a stop beside the wagon. Shoulder-length honey-brown hair spilled beneath a bandanna. He looked too young for the emptiness in his eyes. His name was Jim Lawson.

Jim dismounted slowly, peering through the diner’s fogged window as he rocked the heavy motorcycle onto its stand. Inside, a middle-aged waitress rose from a stool and polished the chrome jukebox. She wore a pale pink uniform, hair pinned beneath a starched cap. At the rumble of Jim’s arrival, she glanced up, but her placid face showed no emotion.

Something in the way the waitress tilted her head struck Jim — a gesture from another lifetime.

He knew her.

The diner looked trapped in its bygone era — a colour-washed postcard of Bonnie and Clyde on the run, Bonnie with a Thompson gun on her hip, Clyde’s revolver peeking from inside his coat. Standing beside his old motorbike, Jim felt frozen in the same slice of time. For a moment the waitress and Jim watched one another through the glass, unmoving.

Fat raindrops shattered the stillness, dappling the parking lot like chocolate coins. Jim sprinted for the door.

(The foregoing is the opening scene from Lawson’s Run, a novella posted elsewhere in this collection.)