The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

Sundays, though, the old man left him alone. Sunday was Poker Day. Land-rich farmers, sly country lawyers with sharp eyes and soft hands, and small-town bankers with the souls of slave traders came from as far away as West Memphis, St. Louis, and Fort Smith to gather in R. L.’s double-wide for a table stakes hold ’em game, a game famous in at least four states, and occasionally in northern Mexico.

  On the sabbath he was on his own, except for the surly, lurking presence of Little R. L., who seemed to blame his coach for every ache and pain, and the jittery passage of a slim, petulant teenage girl who slopped past him across the muddy farmyard in a shapeless feed-sack dress and oversized rubber boots, trailing odd, throaty laughter, the same laughter she had when one of the sows decided to dine on her litter. Benbow should have listened.

  But these seemed minor difficulties when balanced against the fact that Little R. L. gained nearly a hundred yards a game his freshman year.

  The next fall, the shit-shoveling and the old man’s attitude seemed easier to bear. Then when Benbow casually let slip that he had once dealt and played poker professionally, R. L.’s watery blue eyes suddenly glistened with greed, and the Sunday portion of Benbow’s bargain became both easier and more complicated. Not that the old man needed him to cheat. R. L. Dark always won. The only times the old man signaled him to deal seconds was to give hands to his competitors to keep them in the game so the old man could skin them even deeper.

  The brutal arid dangerous monotony of Benbow’s life continued, controlled and hopeful until the fall of Little R. L.’s junior year, when everything came apart. Then back together with a terrible rush. A break, a dislocation, and a connection.

  On the Saturday afternoon after Little R. L. broke the state rushing record the night before, the teenage girl stopped chuckling long enough to ask a question. “How long you have to go to college, Coach, to figure out how to scoot pig shit off concrete with a fire hose?”

  When she laughed, Benbow finally asked, “Who the fuck are you, honey?”

  “Mrs. R. L. Dark, Senior,” she replied, the perfect arch of her nose in the air, “that’s who.” And Benbow looked at her for the first time, watched the thrust of her hard, marvelous body naked beneath the thin fabric of her cheap dress.

  Then Benbow tried to make conversation with Mona Sue, made the mistake of asking Mona Sue why she wore rubber boots. “Hookworms,” she said, pointing at his sockless feet in old Nikes. Jesus, he thought. Then Jesus wept that night as he watched the white worms slither through his dark, bloody stool. Now he knew what the old man had been laughing about.

  On Sunday a rich Mexican rancher tried to cover one of R. L.’s raises with a Rolex, then the old man insisted on buying the fifteen-thousand-dollar watch with five K cash, and when he opened the small safe set in the floor of the trailer’s kitchen, Benbow glimpsed the huge pile of banded stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills that filled the safe.

  The next Friday night Little R. L. broke his own rushing record with more than a quarter left in the game, which was good because in the fourth quarter the turf gave way under his right foot, which then slid under a pursuing tackle. Benbow heard the pop all the way from the sidelines as the kid’s knee dislocated.

  Explaining to R. L. that a bargain was a bargain, no matter what happened with the kid’s knee, the next day Benbow went about his chores just long enough to lure Mona Sue into a feed shed and out of her dress. But not her rubber boots. Benbow didn’t care. He just fucked her. The revenge he planned on R. L. Dark a frozen hell in his heart. But the soft hunger of her mouth and the touch of her astonishing body—diamond-hard nipples, fast-twitch cat muscle slithering under human skin, her cunt like a silken bag of rich, luminous seed pearls suspended in heavenly fucking fire—destroyed his hope of vengeance. Now he simply wanted her. No matter the cost.

  Two months later, just as her pregnancy began to show, Benbow cracked the safe with a tablespoon of nitro, took all the money, and they ran.

  Although he was sure Mona Sue still dreamed, she’d lost her audience. Except for the wrangler, who still watched her as if she were some heathen idol. But every time she tried to talk to the dark cowboy, the old man pinched her thigh with horny fingers so hard it left blood blisters.

  Their mornings were much different now. They all went to the hot water. The doctor slept on a poolside bench behind Mona Sue, who sat on the side of the pool, her feet dangling in the water, her blotched thighs exposed, and her eyes as vacant as her half-smile. R. L. Dark, Curly, and Bald Bill, wearing cutoffs and cheap T-shirts, stood neck-deep in the steamy water, loosely surrounding Benbow, anchored by his plastic-shrouded cast, which loomed like a giant boulder under the heavy water.

  A vague sense of threat, like an occasional sharp sniff of sulfur, came off the odd group and kept the other guests at a safe distance, and the number of guests declined every day as the old man rented each cabin and room at the lodge as it came empty. The rich German twins who owned the place didn’t seem to care who paid for their cocaine.

  During the first few days, nobody had much bothered to speak to Benbow, not even to ask where he had hidden the money. The pain in his foot had retreated to a dull ache, but the itch under the cast had become unbearable. One morning, the doctor had taken pity on him and searched the kitchen drawers for something for Benbow to use to scratch beneath the cast, finally coming up with a cheap shish kebab skewer. Curly and Bald Bill had examined the thin metal stick as if it might be an Arkansas toothpick or a bowie knife, then laughed and let Benbow have it. He kept it holstered in his cast, waiting, scratching the itch. And a deep furrow in the rear of the cast.

  Then one morning as they stood silent and safe in the pool, a storm cell drifted slowly down the mountain to fill the canyon with swirling squalls of thick, wet snow, and the old man raised his beak into the flakes and finally spoke: “I always meant to come back to this country,” he said.

  “What?”

  Except for the wrangler slowly gathering damp towels and a dark figure in a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses standing inside the bar, the pool and the deck had emptied when the snow began. Benbow had been watching the snow gather in the dark waves of Mona Sue’s hair as she tried to catch a spinning flake on her pink tongue. Even as he faced death, she still stirred the banked embers glowing in Benbow’s crotch.

  “During WW Two,” the old man said softly, “I got in some trouble over at Fort Chaffee—stuck a noncom with a broomstick—so the Army sent me up here to train with the Tenth Mountain. Stupid assholes thought it was some kinda punishment. Always meant to come back someday . . .”

  But Benbow watched the cold wind ripple the stolid surface of the hot water as the snowflakes melted into it. The rising steam became a thick fog.

  “I always liked it,” Benbow said, glancing up at the mountain as it appeared and disappeared behind the roiling clouds of snow. “Great hunting weather,” he added. “There’s a little herd of elk bedded just behind that first ridge.” As his keepers’ eyes followed his upslope, he drifted slowly through the fog toward Mona Sue’s feet aimlessly stirring the water. “If you like it so much, you old bastard, maybe you should buy it.”

  “Watch your tongue, boy,” Curly said as he cuffed Benbow on the head. Benbow stumbled closer to Mona Sue.

  “I just might do that, son,” the old man said, cackling, “just to piss you off. Not that you’ll be around to be pissed off.”

  “So what the fuck are we hanging around here for?” Benbow asked, turning on the old man, which brought him even closer to Mona Sue.

  The old man paused as if thinking. “Well, son, we’re waitin’ for that baby. If’n that baby has red hair and you tell us where you hid the money, we’ll just take you home, kill you easy, then feed you to the hogs.”

  “And if it doesn’t have red hair, since I’m not about to tell you where to find the money?”

  “We’ll just find a hungry sow, son, and feed you to her,” the old man said, “startin’ with your good toes.”

  Ev
erybody laughed then: R. L. Dark threw back his head and howled; the hulks exchanged high-fives and higher giggles; and Benbow collapsed underwater. Even Mona Sue chuckled deep in her throat. Until Benbow jerked her off the side of the pool. Then she choked. The poor girl had never learned to swim.

  Before either the old man or his bodyguards could move, though, the dark figure in the hooded sweatshirt burst through the bar door in a quick, limping dash and dove into the pool, then lifted the struggling girl onto the deck and knelt beside her while enormous amounts of steaming water poured from her nose and mouth before she began breathing. Then the figure swept the hood from the flaming red hair and held Mona Sue close to his chest.

  “Holy shit, boy,” the old man asked unnecessarily as Bald Bill helped him out of the pool. “What the fuck you doin’ here?”

  “Goddammit, baby, lemme go,” Mona Sue screamed. “It’s a-comin’!”

  Which roused the doctor from his sleepy rest. And the wrangler from his work. Both of them covered the wide wooden bench with dry towels, upon which Little R. L. gently placed Mona Sue’s racked body. Curly scrambled out of the pool, warning Benbow to stay put, and joined the crowd of men around her sudden and violent contractions. Bald Bill helped the old man into his overalls and the pistol’s thong as Little R. L. helped the doctor hold Mona Sue’s body, arched with sudden pain, on the bench.

  “Oh, Lordy me!” she screamed. “It’s tearin’ me up!”

  “Do somethin’, you pissant,” the old man said to the wiry doctor, then slapped him soundly.

  Benbow slapped to the side of the pool, holding on to the edge with one hand as he dug frantically at the cast with the other. Bits of plaster of Paris and swirls of blood rose through the hot water. Then it was off, and the skewer in his hand. He planned to roll out of the pool, drive the sliver of metal through the old man’s kidney, then grab the Webley. After that, he’d call the shots.

  But life should have taught him not to plan.

  As Bald Bill helped his boss into the coat, he noticed Benbow at the edge of the pool and stepped over to him. Bald Bill saw the bloody cast floating at Benbow’s chest. “What the fuck?” he said, kneeling down to reach for him.

  Benbow drove the thin shaft of metal with the strength of a lifetime of disappointment and rage into the bottom of Bald Bill’s jaw, up through the root of his tongue, then up through his soft palate, horny brainpan, mushy gray matter, and the thick bones of his skull. Three inches of the skewer poked like a steel finger bone out of the center of his bald head.

  Bald Bill didn’t make a sound. Just blinked once dreamily, smiled, then stood up. After a moment, swaying, he began to walk in small airless circles at the edge of the deck until Curly noticed his odd behavior.

  “Bubba?” he said as he stepped over to his brother.

  Benbow leaped out of the water; one hand grabbed an ankle and the other dove up the leg of Curly’s trunks to grab his nut sack and jerk the giant toward the pool. Curly’s grunt and the soft clunk of his head against the concrete pool edge was lost as Mona Sue delivered the child with a deep sigh, and the old man shouted boldly, “Goddamn, it’s a girl! A black-headed girl!”

  Benbow had slithered out of the pool and limped halfway to the old man’s back as he watched the doctor lay the baby on Mona Sue’s heaving chest. “Shit fire and save the matches,” the old man said, panting deeply as if the labor had been his.

  Little R. L. turned and jerked his father toward him by the front of his coat, hissing, “Shut the fuck up, old man.” Then he shoved him violently away, smashing the old man’s frail body into Benbow’s shoulder. Something cracked inside the old man’s body, and he sank to his knees, snapping at the cold air with his bloody beak like a gut-shot turtle. Benbow grabbed the pistol’s thong off his neck before the old man tumbled dead into the water.

  Benbow cocked the huge pistol with a soft metallic click, then his sharp bark of laughter cut through the snowy air like a gunshot. Everything slowed to a stop. The doctor finished cutting the cord. The wranglers hands held a folded towel under Mona Sue’s head. Little R. L. held his gristled body halfway into a mad charge. Bald Bill stopped his aimless circling long enough to fall into the pool. Even Mona Sue’s cooing sighs died. Only the cold wind moved, whipping the steamy fog across the pool as the snowfall thickened.

  Then Mona Sue screamed, “No!” and broke the frozen moment.

  The bad knee gave Benbow time to get off a round. The heavy slug took Little R. L. in the top of his shoulder, tumbled through his chest, and exited just above his kidney in a shower of blood, bone splinters, and lung tissue, and dropped him like a side of beef on the deck. But the round had already gone on its merry way through the sternum of the doctor as if he weren’t there. Which, in moments, he wasn’t.

  Benbow threw the pistol joyfully behind him, heard it splash in the pool, and hurried to Mona Sue’s side. As he kissed her blood-spattered face, she moaned softly. He leaned closer, but only mistook her moans for passion until he understood what she was saying. Over and over. The way she once called his name. And Little R. L.’s. Maybe even the old man’s. “Cowboy, Cowboy, Cowboy,” she whispered.

  Benbow wasn’t even mildly surprised when he felt the arm at his throat or the blade tickle his short ribs. “I took you for a backstabber,” he said, “the first time I laid eyes on your sorry ass.”

  “Just tell me where the money is, old man,” the wrangler whispered, “and you can die easy.”

  “You can have the money,” Benbow sobbed, trying for one final break, “just leave me the woman.” But the flash of scorn in Mona Sue’s eyes was the only answer he needed. “Fuck it,” Benbow said, almost laughing, “let’s do it the hard way.”

  Then he fell backward onto the hunting knife, driving the blade to the hilt above his short ribs before the wrangler could release the handle. He stepped back in horror as Benbow stumbled toward the hot waters of the pool.

  At first, the blade felt cold in Benbow’s flesh, but the flowing blood quickly warmed it. Then he eased himself into the hot water and lay back against its compassionate weight like the old man the wrangler had called him. The wrangler stood over Benbow, his eyes like coals glowing through the fog and thick snow. Mona Sue stepped up beside the wrangler, Benbow’s baby whimpering at her chest, snow melting on her shoulders.

  “Fuck it,” Benbow whispered, drifting now, “it’s in the air conditioner.”

  “Thanks, old man,” Mona Sue said, smiling.

  “Take care,” Benbow whispered, thinking, This is the easy part, then leaned farther back into the water, sailing on the pool’s wind-riffled, snow-shot surface, eyes closed, happy in the hot, heavy water, moving his hands slightly to stay afloat, his fingers tangled in dark, bloody streams, the wind pushing him toward the cool water at the far end of the pool, blinking against the soft cold snow, until his tired body slipped, unwatched, beneath the hot water to rest.

  JEFFERY DEAVER

  The Weekender

  FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  I LOOKED IN the rearview mirror and didn’t see any lights, but I knew they were after us and it was only a matter of time till I’d see the cops. Toth started to talk, but I told him to shut up and got the Buick up to eighty. The road was empty, nothing but pine trees for miles around.

  “Oh brother,” Toth muttered. I felt his eyes on me, but I didn’t even want to look at him, I was so mad.

  They were never easy, drugstores.

  Because, just watch sometime, when cops make their rounds they cruise drugstores more often than anyplace else. Because of the prescription drugs.

  You’d think they’d stake out convenience stores. But those’re a joke, and with the closed-circuit TV you’re going to get your picture took, you just are. So nobody who knows the business, I mean really knows it, hits them. And banks, forget banks. Even ATMs. I mean, how much can you clear? Three, four hundred tops? And around here the Fast Cash button gives you twenty bucks. Which tells you something. So why eve
n bother?

  No. We wanted cash and that meant a drugstore, even though they can be tricky. Ardmore Drugs. Which is a big store in a little town. Liggett Falls. Sixty miles from Albany and a hundred or so from where Toth and me lived, farther west into the mountains. Liggett Falls is a poor place. You’d think it wouldn’t make sense to hit a store there. But that’s exactly why—because like everywhere else people there need medicine and hairspray and makeup, only they don’t have credit cards. Except maybe a Sears or Penney’s. So they pay cash.

  “Oh brother,” Toth whispered again. “Look.”

  And he made me even madder, him saying that. I wanted to shout, Look at what, you son of a bitch? But then I could see what he was talking about, and I didn’t say anything. Up ahead. It was like just before dawn, light on the horizon. Only this was red, and the light wasn’t steady. It was like it was pulsing, and I knew that they’d got the roadblock up already. This was the only road to the interstate from Liggett Falls. So I should’ve guessed.

  “I got an idea,” Toth said. Which I didn’t want to hear but I also wasn’t going to go through another shootout. Sure not at a roadblock where they was ready for us.

  “What?” I snapped.

  “There’s a town over there. See those lights? I know a road’ll take us there.”

  Toth’s a big guy, and he looks calm. Only he isn’t really. He gets shook easy, and he now kept turning around, skittish, looking in the back seat. I wanted to slap him and tell him to chill.

  “Where’s it?” I asked. “This town?”

  “About four, five miles. The turnoff, it ain’t marked. But I know it.”

  This was that lousy upstate area where everything’s green. But dirty green, you know. And all the buildings’re gray. These gross little shacks, pickups on blocks. Little towns without even a 7-Eleven. And full of hills they call mountains but aren’t.