The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  He was just blowing smoke. The Buick was stolen. I mean, I’m not stupid.

  But he went on, looking at me real coy. “Even if your car was stolen, they’re going to check down every lead. Every shoeprint around where you or your friend found it, talk to everybody in the area around the time it vanished.”

  I kept smiling like it was nuts what he was saying. But this was true, shooting the cop part. You do that and you’re in big trouble. Trouble that sticks with you. They don’t stop looking till they find you.

  “And when they identify your buddy”—he nodded toward the couch where Toth’s body was lying—“they’re going to make some connection to you.”

  “I don’t know him that good. We just hung around together the past few months.”

  Weller jumped on this. “Where? A bar? A restaurant? Anybody ever see you in public?”

  I got mad, and I shouted, “So? What’re you saying? They gonna bust me anyway, then I’ll just take you out with me. How’s that for an argument?”

  Calm as could be he said, “I’m simply telling you that one of the reasons you want to kill me doesn’t make sense. And think about this—the shooting at the drugstore? It wasn’t premeditated. It was, what do they call it? Heat of passion. But you kill me, that’ll be first degree. You’ll get the death penalty when they find you.”

  When they find you. Right. I laughed to myself. Oh, what he said made sense, but the fact is, killing isn’t a making-sense kind of thing. Hell, it never makes sense, but sometimes you just have to do it. But I was kind of having fun now. I wanted to argue back. “Yeah, well, I killed Toth. That wasn’t heat of passion. I’m going to get the needle anyway for that.”

  “But nobody gives a damn about him,” he came right back. “They don’t care if he killed himself or got hit by a car accidentally. You can take that piece of garbage out of the equation altogether. They care if you kill me. I’m the ‘Innocent Bystander’ in the headlines. I’m the ‘Father of Two.’ You kill me, you’re as good as dead.”

  I started to say something, but he kept going.

  “Now, here’s another reason I’m not going to say anything about you. Because you know my name, and you know where I live. You know I have a family, and you know how important they are to me. If I turn you in, you could come after us. I’d never jeopardize my family that way. Now let me ask you something. What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?”

  “Keep listening to you spout on and on.”

  Weller laughed hard at that. I could see he was surprised I had a sense of humor. After a minute he said, “Seriously. The worst thing.”

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

  “Lose a leg? Go deaf? Lose all your money? Go blind . . . Hey, that looked like it hit a nerve. Going blind?”

  “Yeah, I guess. That’d be the worst thing I could think of.”

  That was a pretty damn scary thing, and I’d thought on it before. ’Cause that was what happened to my old man. And it wasn’t not seeing anymore that got to me. No, it was that I’d have to depend on somebody else for, Christ, for everything, I guess.

  “OK, think about this,” he said. “The way you feel about going blind’s the way my family’d feel if they lost me. It’d be that bad for them. You don’t want to cause them that kind of pain, do you?”

  I didn’t want to, no. But I knew I had to. I didn’t want to think about it anymore, I asked him, “So what’s this last reason you’re telling me about?”

  “The last reason,” he said, kind of whispering. But he didn’t go on. He looked around the room, you know, like his mind was wandering.

  “Yeah?” I asked. I was pretty curious. “Tell me.”

  But he just asked, “You think these people, they have a bar?”

  And I’d just been thinking I could use a drink, too. I went into the kitchen, and of course they didn’t have any beer in the fridge on account of the house being all closed up and the power off. But they did have scotch, and that’d be my first choice anyway.

  I got a couple of glasses and took the bottle back to the living room. Thinking this was a good idea. When it came time to do it, it’d be easier for him and for me both if we were kinda tanked. I shoved my Smitty into his neck and cut the tape his hands were tied with, then taped them in front of him. I sat back and kept my knife near, ready to go, in case he tried something. But it didn’t look like he was going to be a hero or anything. He read over the scotch bottle, kind of disappointed it was cheap. And I agreed with him there. One thing I learned a long time ago, you going to rob, rob rich.

  I sat back where I could keep an eye on him.

  “The last reason. OK, I’ll tell you. I’m going to prove to you that you should let me go.”

  “You are?”

  “All those other reasons—the practical ones, the humanitarian ones . . . I’ll concede you don’t care much about those—you don’t look very convinced. All right? Then let’s look at the one reason you should let me go.”

  I figured this was going to be more crap. But what he said was something I never would’ve expected, and it made me laugh.

  “For your own sake.”

  “For me? What’re you talking about?”

  “See, Jack, I don’t think you’re lost.”

  “Whatta you mean, lost?”

  “I don’t think your soul’s beyond redemption.”

  I laughed at this, laughed out loud, because I just had to. I expected a hell of a lot better from a hotshot vice president salesman like him. “Soul? You think I got a soul?”

  “Well, everybody has a soul,” he said, and what was crazy was, he said it like he was surprised that I didn’t think so. It was like I’d said, Wait a minute, you mean the earth ain’t flat? or something.

  “Well, if I got a soul it’s taken the fast lane to hell.” Which was this line I heard in this movie and I tried to laugh, but it sounded flat. Like Weller was saying something deep and I was just kidding around. It made me feel cheap. I stopped smiling and looked down at Toth, lying there in the corner, those dead eyes of his just staring, staring, and I wanted to stab him again I was so mad.

  “We’re talking about your soul.”

  I snickered and sipped the liquor. “Oh yeah, I’ll bet you you’re the sort that reads those angel books they got all over the place now.”

  “I go to church, but no, I’m not talking about all that silly stuff. I don’t mean magic. I mean your conscience. What Jack Prescot’s all about.”

  I could tell him about social workers and youth counselors and all those guys who don’t know nothing about the way life works. They think they do. But it’s the words they use. You can tell they don’t know a thing. Some counselors or somebody’ll talk to me and they say, Oh, you’re maladjusted, you’re denying your anger, things like that. When I hear that, I know they don’t know nothing about souls or spirits.

  “Not the afterlife,” Weller was going on. “Not mortality. I’m talking about life here on earth that’s important. Oh sure, you look skeptical. But listen to me. I really believe if you have a connection with somebody, if you trust them, if you have faith in them, then there’s hope for you.”

  “Hope? What does that mean? Hope for what?”

  “That you’ll become a real human being. Lead a real life.”

  Real . . . I didn’t know what he meant, but he said it like what he was saying was so clear that I’d have to be an idiot to miss it. So I didn’t say nothing.

  He kept going. “Oh, there’re reasons to steal, and there’re reasons to kill. But on the whole, don’t you really think it’s better not to? Just think about it: why do we put people in jail if it’s all right for them to murder? Not just us but all societies.”

  “So, what? I’m gonna give up my evil ways?” I laughed at him.

  And he just lifted his eyebrow and said, “Maybe. Tell me, Jack, how’d you feel when your buddy—what’s his name?”

  “Joe Roy Toth.”

  “Toth, whe
n he shot that guy by the counter? How’d you feel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He just turned around and shot him. For no reason. You knew that wasn’t right, didn’t you?” And I started to say something. But he said, “No, don’t answer me. You’d be inclined to lie. And that’s all right. It’s an instinct in your line of work. But I don’t want you believing any lies you tell me. OK? I want you to look into your heart and tell me if you didn’t think something was real wrong about what Toth did. Think about that, Jack. You knew something wasn’t right.”

  All right, I did. But who wouldn’t? Toth screwed everything up. Everything went sour. And it was all his fault.

  “It dug at you, right, Jack? You wished he hadn’t done it.”

  I didn’t say nothing but just drank some more scotch and looked out the window and watched the flashing lights around the town. Sometimes they seemed close, and sometimes they seemed far away.

  “If I let you go, you’ll tell ’em.”

  Like everybody else. They all betrayed me. My father—even after he went blind, the son of a bitch turned me in. My first PO, the judges. Sandra . . . My boss, the one I knifed.

  “No, I won’t,” Weller said. “We’re talking about an agreement. I don’t break deals. I promised I won’t tell a soul about you, Jack. Not even my wife.” He leaned forward, cupping the booze between his hands. “You let me go, it’ll mean all the difference in the world to you. It’ll mean that you’re not hopeless. I guarantee your life’ll be different. That one act—letting me go—it’ll change you forever. Oh, maybe not this year. Or for five years. But you’ll come around. You’ll give up all this, everything that happened back there in Liggett Falls. All the crime, the killing. You’ll come around. I know you will.”

  “You just expect me to believe you won’t tell anybody?”

  “Ah,” Weller said, and lifted his taped-up hands to drink more scotch. “Now we get down to the big issue.”

  Again that silence, and finally I said, “And what’s that?”

  “Faith.”

  There was this burst of siren outside, and I told him to shut up and pushed the gun against his head. His hands were shaking, but he didn’t do anything stupid and a few minutes later, after I sat back, he started talking again. “Faith. That’s what I’m talking about. A man who has faith is somebody who can be saved.”

  “Well, I don’t have any goddamn faith,” I told him.

  But he kept right on talking. “If you believe in another human being, you have faith.”

  “Why the hell do you care whether I’m saved or not?”

  “Because life’s hard, and people’re cruel. I told you I’m a churchgoer. A lot of the Bible’s crazy. But some of it I believe. And one of the things I believe is that sometimes we’re put in these situations to make a difference. I think that’s what happened tonight. That’s why you and I both happened to be at the drugstore at the same time. You’ve felt that, haven’t you? Like an omen? Like something happens and is telling you you ought do this or shouldn’t do that.”

  Which was weird ’cause the whole time we were driving up to Liggett Falls I kept thinking, something funny’s going on. I don’t know what it is, but this job’s gonna be different.

  “What if,” he said, “everything tonight happened for a purpose? My wife had a cold, so I went to buy NyQuil. I went to that drugstore instead of 7-Eleven to save a buck or two. You happened to hit that store at just that time. You happened to have your buddy”—he nodded toward Toth’s body—“with you. The cop car just happened by at that particular moment. And the clerk behind the counter just happened to see him. That’s a lot of coincidences. Don’t you think?”

  And then—this sent a damn chill right down my spine—he said, “Here we are in the shadow of that big rock, that face.”

  Which is 100 percent what I was thinking. Exactly the same—about the Lookout, I mean. I don’t know why I was. But I happened to be looking out the window and thinking about it at that exact same instant. I tossed back the scotch and had another and, oh man, I was pretty freaked out.

  “Like he’s looking at us, waiting for you to make a decision. Oh, don’t think it was just you, though. Maybe the purpose was to affect everybody’s life there. That customer at the counter Toth shot. Maybe it was just his time to go—fast, you know, before he got cancer or had a stroke. Maybe that girl, the clerk, had to get shot in the leg so she’d get her life together, maybe get off drugs or give up drinking.”

  “And you? What about you?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you about me. Maybe you’re the good deed in my life. I’ve spent years thinking only about making money. Take a look at my wallet. There. In the back.”

  I pulled it open. There were a half-dozen of these little cards, like certificates, RANDALL WELLER—SALESMAN OF THE YEAR, EXCEEDED TARGET TWO YEARS STRAIGHT. BEST SALESMAN OF 1992.

  Weller kept going. “There are plenty of others back in my office. And trophies, too. And in order for me to win those, I’ve had to neglect people. My family and friends. People who could maybe use my help. And that’s not right. Maybe you kidnapping me, it’s one of those signs to make me turn my life around.”

  The funny thing was this made sense. Oh, it was hard to imagine not doing heists. And I couldn’t see myself, if it came down to a fight, not going for my Buck or my Smitty to take the other guy out. That turning the other cheek stuff, that’s only for cowards. But maybe I could see a day when my life’d be just straight time. Living with some woman, maybe a wife, living in a house. Doing what my father and mother, whatever she was like, never did.

  “If I was to let you go,” I said, “you’d have to tell ’em something.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll say you locked me in the trunk and then tossed me out somewhere near here. I wandered around, looking for a house or something, and got lost. It could take me a day to find somebody. That’s believable.”

  “Or you could flag down a car in an hour.”

  “I could. But I won’t.”

  “You keep saying that. But how do I know?”

  “That’s the faith part. You don’t know. No guarantees.”

  “Well, I guess I don’t have any faith.”

  “Then I’m dead. And your life’s never gonna change. End of story.” He sat back, and it was crazy but he looked calm, smiling a little.

  That silence again, but it was like it was really this roar all around us, and it kept going till the whole room was filled up with the sound of a siren.

  “You just want . . . what do you want?”

  He drank more scotch. “Here’s a proposal. Let me walk outside.”

  “Oh, right. Just let you stroll out for some fresh air or something?”

  “Let me walk outside and I promise you I’ll walk right back again.”

  “Like a test?”

  He thought about this for a second. “Yeah. A test.”

  “Where’s this faith you’re talking about? You walk outside, you try to run and I’d shoot you in the back.”

  “No, what you do is you put the gun someplace in the house. The kitchen or someplace. Somewhere you couldn’t get it if I ran. You stand at the window, where we can see each other. And I’ll tell you up front. I can run like the wind. I was lettered track and field in college, and I still jog every day of the year.”

  “You know if you run and bring the cops back everything’s gonna get bloody. I’ll kill the first five troopers come through that door. Nothing’ll stop me, and that blood’ll be on your hands.”

  “Of course I know that,” he said. “But if this’s going to work, you can’t think that way. You’ve got to assume the worst is going to happen. That if I run I’ll tell the cops everything. Where you are and that there’re no hostages here and that you’ve only got one or two guns. And they’re going to come in and blow you to hell. And you’re not going to take a single one down with you. You’re going to die and die painfully ’cause of a few lousy hundred bucks . . . But, but, b
ut . . .” He held up his hands and stopped me from saying anything. “You gotta understand, faith means risk.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “I think it’s just the opposite. It’d be the smartest thing you ever did in your life.”

  “What’ll it prove?” I asked. But I was just stalling. And he knew it. He said patiently, “That I’m a man of my word. That you can trust me.”

  “And what do I get out of it?”

  And then this son of a bitch smiled that weird little smile of his. “I think you’ll be surprised.”

  I tossed back another scotch and had to think about this.

  Weller said, “I can see it there already. Some of that faith. It’s there. Not a lot. But some.”

  And yeah, maybe there was a little. ’Cause I was thinking about how mad I got at Toth and the way he ruined everything. I didn’t want anybody to get killed tonight. I was sick of it. Sick of the way my life had gone. Sometimes it was good, being alone and all. Not answering to anybody. But sometimes it was real bad. And this guy, Weller, it was like he was showing me something different.

  “So,” I said. “You just want me to put the gun down?”

  He looked around. “Put it in the kitchen. You stand in the doorway or window. All I’m gonna do is walk down to the street and walk back.”

  I looked out the window. It was maybe fifty feet down the driveway. There were these bushes on either side of it. He could just take off, and I’d never find him.

  All through the sky I could see lights flickering.

  “Naw, I ain’t gonna. You’re nuts.”

  And I expected begging or something. Or getting pissed off, more likely—which is what happens to me when people don’t do what I tell them. Or don’t do it fast enough. But, naw, he just nodded. “OK, Jack. You thought about it. That’s a good thing. You’re not ready yet. I respect that.” He sipped a little more scotch, looking at the glass. And that was the end of it.