The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “A peace treaty. Let’s cut out the snowmobile parties on the lake by my place and the trash dumped in the driveway and the hang-up calls. Let’s start fresh and just stay out of each other’s way. What do you say? Then, this summer, you can all come over to my place for a cookout. I’ll even supply the beer.”

  He rubbed at the bristles along his chin. “Seems like a one-sided deal. Not too sure what I get out of it.”

  “What’s the point in what you’re doing now?”

  A furtive smile. “It suits me.”

  I felt like I was beginning to lose it. “You agree with the treaty, we all win.”

  “Still don’t see what I get out of it,” he said.

  “That’s the purpose of a peace treaty,” I said. “You get peace.”

  “Feel pretty peaceful right now.”

  “That might change,” I said, instantly regretting the words.

  His eyes darkened. “Are you threatening me?”

  A retreat, recalling my promise to myself when I’d come here. “No, not a threat, Jerry. What do you say?”

  He turned and walked away, moving his head to keep me in view. “Your second got used up a long time ago, pal. And you better be out of this lot in another minute, or I’m going inside and coming out with a bunch of my friends. You won’t like that.”

  No, I wouldn’t, and it wouldn’t be for the reason Jerry believed. If they did come out I’d be forced into old habits and old actions, and I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t.

  “You got it,” I said, backing away. “But remember, Jerry. Always.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The peace treaty,” I said, going to the door of my pickup truck. “I offered.”

  Another visit to Ron, on a snowy day. The conversation meandered along, and I don’t know what got into me, but I looked out the old mill window’s and said, “What do people expect, anyway?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You take a tough teenager from a small Ohio town, and you train him and train him and train him. You turn him into a very efficient hunter, a meat eater. Then, after twenty or thirty years, you say thank you very much and send him back to the world of quiet vegetarians, and you expect him to start eating cabbages and carrots with no fuss or muss. A hell of a thing, thinking you can expect him to put away his tools and skills.”

  “Maybe that’s why we’re here,” he suggested.

  “Oh, please,” I said. “Do you think this makes a difference?”

  “Does it make a difference to you?”

  I kept looking out the window. “Too soon to tell, I’d say. Truth is, I wonder if this is meant to work, or is just meant to make some people feel less guilty. The people who did the hiring, training, and discharging.”

  “What do you think?”

  I turned to him. “I think for the amount of money you charge Uncle Sam, you ask too many damn questions.”

  Another night at two A.M. I was back outside, beside the porch, again with the nightscope in my hands. They were back, and if anything, the music and the engines blared even louder. A fire burned merrily among the snowmobiles, and as the revelers pranced and hollered, I wondered if some base part of their brains was remembering thousand-year-old rituals. As I looked at their dancing and drinking figures, I kept thinking of the long case at the other end of the cellar. Nice heavy-duty assault rifle with another night-vision scope, this one with crosshairs. Scan and track. Put a crosshair across each one’s chest. Feel the weight of a fully loaded clip in your hand. Know that with a silencer on the end of the rifle, you could quietly take out that crew in a fistful of seconds. Get your mind back into the realm of possibilities, of cartridges and windage and grains and velocities. How long could it take between the time you said go and the time you could say mission accomplished? Not long at all.

  “No,” I whispered, switching off the scope.

  I stayed on the porch for another hour, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw more movements. I picked up the scope. A couple of snow machines moved in, each with shapes on the seats behind the drivers. They pulled up to the snowy bank and the people moved quickly, intent on their work. Trash bags were tossed on my land, about eight or nine, and to add a bit more fun, each bag had been slit several times with a knife so it could burst open and spew its contents when it hit the ground. A few more hoots and hollers and the snowmobiles growled away, leaving trash and the flickering fire behind. I watched the lights as the snowmobiles roared across the lake and finally disappeared, though their sound did not.

  The nightscope went back onto my lap. The rifle, I thought, could have stopped the fun right there with a couple of rounds through the engines. Highly illegal, but it would get their attention, right?

  Right.

  In my next session with Ron, I got to the point. “What kind of reports are you sending south?”

  I think I might have surprised him. “Reports?”

  “How I’m adjusting, that sort of thing.”

  He paused for a moment, and I knew there must be a lot of figuring going on behind those smiling eyes. “Just the usual things, that’s all. That you’re doing fine.”

  “Am I?”

  “Seems so to me.”

  “Good.” I waited for a moment, letting the words twist about on my tongue. “Then you can send them this message. I haven’t been a hundred percent with you during these sessions, Ron. Guess it’s not in my nature to be so open. But you can count on this. I won’t lose it. I won’t go into a gun shop and then take down a bunch of civilians. I’m not going to start hanging around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I’m going to be all right.”

  He smiled. “I have never had any doubt.”

  “Sure you’ve had doubts,” I said, smiling back. “But it’s awfully polite of you to say otherwise.”

  On a bright Saturday, I tracked down the police chief of Nansen at one of the two service stations in town, Glen’s Gas & Repair. His cruiser, ordinarily a dark blue, was now a ghostly shade of white from the salt used to keep the roads clear. I parked at the side of the garage, and walking by the service bays, I could sense that I was being watched. I saw three cars with their hoods up, and I also saw a familiar uniform: black snowmobile jump suits.

  The chief was overweight and wearing a heavy blue jacket with a black Navy watch cap. His face was open and friendly, and he nodded in all the right places as I told him my story.

  “Not much I can do, I’m afraid,” he said, leaning against the door of his cruiser, one of two in the entire town. “I’d have to catch ’em in the act of trashing your place, and that means surveillance, and that means overtime hours, which I don’t have.”

  “Surveillance would be a waste of time anyway,” I replied. “These guys, they aren’t thugs, right? For lack of a better phrase, they’re good old boys, and they know everything that’s going on in Nansen, and they’d know if you were setting up surveillance. And then they wouldn’t show.”

  “You might think you’re insulting me, but you’re not,” he said gently. “That’s just the way things are done here. It’s a good town and most of us get along, and I’m not kept that busy, not at all.”

  “I appreciate that, but you should also appreciate my problem,” I said. “I live here and pay taxes, and people are harassing me. I’m looking for some assistance, that’s all, and a suggestion of what I can do.”

  “You could move,” the chief said, raising his coffee cup.

  “Hell of a suggestion.”

  “Best one I can come up with. Look, friend, you’re new here, you’ve got no family, no ties. You’re asking me to take on some prominent families just because you don’t get along with them. So why don’t you move on? Find someplace smaller, hell, even someplace bigger, where you don’t stand out so much. But face it, it’s not going to get any easier.”

  “Real nice folks,” I said, letting an edge of bitterness into my voice.

  That didn’t seem to bother the chief. “That they are
. They work hard and play hard, and they pay taxes, too, and they look out for one another. I know they look like hell-raisers to you, but they’re more than that. They’re part of the community. Why, just next week, a bunch of them are going on a midnight snow run across the lake and into the mountains, raising money for the children’s camp up at Lake Montcalm. People who don’t care wouldn’t do that.”

  “I just wish they didn’t care so much about me.”

  He shrugged and said, “Look, I’ll see what I can do. . . .” but the tone of his voice made it clear he wasn’t going to do a damn thing.

  The chief clambered into his cruiser and drove off, and as I walked past the bays of the service station, I heard snickers. I went around to my pickup truck and saw the source of the merriment.

  My truck was resting heavily on four flat tires.

  At night I woke up from cold and bloody dreams and let my thoughts drift into fantasies. By now I knew who all of them were, where all of them lived. I could go to their houses, every one of them, and bring them back and bind them in the basement of my home. I could tell them who I was and what I’ve done and what I can do, and I would ask them to leave me alone. That’s it. Just give me peace and solitude and everything will be all right.

  And they would hear me out and nod and agree, but I would know that I had to convince them. So I would go to Jerry Tompkins, the mustached one who enjoyed marking my territory, and to make my point, break a couple of his fingers, the popping noise echoing in the dark confines of the tiny basement.

  Nice fantasies.

  I asked Ron, “What’s the point?”

  He was comfortable in his chair, hands clasped over his little potbelly. “I’m sorry?”

  “The point of our sessions?”

  His eyes were unflinching. “To help you adjust.”

  “Adjust to what?”

  “To civilian life.”

  I shifted on the couch. “Let me get this. I work my entire life for this country, doing service for its civilians. I expose myself to death and injury every week, earning about a third of what I could be making in the private sector. And when I’m through, I have to adjust, I have to make allowances for civilians. But civilians, they don’t have to do a damn thing. Is that right?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Hell of a deal.”

  He continued a steady gaze. “Only one you’ve got.”

  So here I am, in the smelly rubble that used to be my home. I make a few half-hearted attempts to turn the furniture back over and do some cleanup work, but I’m not in the mood. Old feelings and emotions are coursing through me, taking control. I take a few deep breaths and then I’m in the cellar, switching on the single lightbulb that hangs down from the rafters by a frayed black cord. As I maneuver among the packing cases, undoing combination locks, my shoulder strikes the lightbulb, causing it to swing back and forth, casting crazy shadows on the stone walls.

  The night air is cool and crisp, and I shuffle through the snow around the house as I load the pickup truck, making three trips in all. I drive under the speed limit and halt completely at all stop signs as I go through the center of town. I drive around, wasting minutes and hours, listening to the radio. This late at night and being so far north, a lot of the stations that I can pick up are from Quebec, and there’s a joyous lilt to the French-Canadian music and words that makes something inside me ache with longing.

  When it’s almost a new day, I drive down a street called Mast Road. Most towns around here have a Mast Road, where colonial surveyors marked tall pines that would eventually become masts for the Royal Navy. Tonight there are no surveyors, just the night air and darkness and a skinny rabbit racing across the cracked asphalt. When I’m near the target, I switch off the lights and engine and let the truck glide the last few hundred feet or so. I pull up across from a darkened house. A pickup truck and a Subaru station wagon are in the driveway. Gray smoke is wafting up from the chimney.

  I roll down the window, the cold air washing over me like a wave of water. I pause, remembering what has gone on these past weeks, and then I get to work.

  The nightscope comes up and clicks into action, and the name on the mailbox is clear enough in the sharp green light, TOMPKINS, in silver and black stick-on letters. I scan the two-story Cape Cod, checking out the surroundings. There’s an attached garage to the right and a sunroom to the left. There is a front door and two other doors in a breezeway that runs from the garage to the house. There are no rear doors.

  I let the nightscope rest on my lap as I reach toward my weapons. The first is a grenade launcher, with a handful of white phosphorus rounds clustered on the seat next to it like a gathering of metal eggs. Next to the grenade launcher is a 9mm Uzi, with an extended wooden stock for easier use. Another night-vision scope with crosshairs is attached to the Uzi.

  Another series of deep breaths. Easy enough plan. Pop a white phosphorus round into the breezeway and another into the sunroom. In a minute or two both ends of the house are on fire. Our snowmobiler friend and his family wake up and, groggy from sleep and the fire and the noise, stumble out the front door onto the snow-covered lawn.

  With the Uzi in my hand and the crosshairs on a certain face, a face with a mustache, I take care of business and drive to the next house.

  I pick up the grenade launcher and rest the barrel on the open window. It’s cold. I rub my legs together and look outside at the stars. The wind comes up and snow blows across the road. I hear the low hoo-hoo-hoo of an owl.

  I bring the grenade launcher up, resting the stock against my cheek. I aim. I wait.

  It’s very cold.

  The weapon begins trembling in my hands and I let it drop to the front seat.

  I sit on my hands, trying to warm them while the cold breeze blows. Idiot. Do this and how long before you’re in jail, and then on trial before a jury of friends or relatives of those fine citizens you gun down tonight?

  I start up the truck and let the heater sigh itself on, and then I roll up the window and slowly drive away, lights still off.

  “Fool,” I say to myself, “remember who you are.” And with the truck’s lights now on, I drive home. To what’s left of it.

  Days later, there’s a fresh smell to the air in my house, for I’ve done a lot of cleaning and painting, trying not only to bring everything back to where it was but also to spruce up the place. The only real problem has been in the main room, where the words GO HOME were marked in bright red on the white plaster wall. It took me three coats to cover that up, and of course I ended up doing the entire room.

  The house is dark and it’s late. I’m waiting on the porch with a glass of wine in my hand, watching a light snow fall on Lake Marie. Every light in the house is off and the only illumination comes from the fireplace, which needs more wood.

  But I’m content to dawdle. I’m finally at peace after these difficult weeks in Nansen. Finally, I’m beginning to remember who I really am.

  I sip my wine, waiting, and then comes the sound of the snowmobiles. I see their wavering dots of light racing across the lake, doing their bit for charity. How wonderful. I raise my glass in salute, the noise of the snowmobiles getting louder as they head across the lake in a straight line.

  I put the wineglass down, walk into the living room, and toss the last few pieces of wood onto the fire. The sudden heat warms my face in a pleasant glow. The wood isn’t firewood, though. It’s been shaped and painted by man, and as the flames leap up and devour the lumber, I see the letters begin to fade: DANGER! THIN ICE!

  I stroll back to the porch, pick up the wineglass, and wait.

  Below me, on the peaceful ice of Lake Marie, my new home for my new life, the headlights go by.

  And then, one by one, they blink out, and the silence is wonderful!

  ELMORE LEONARD

  Karen Makes Out

  FROM Murder for Love

  THEY DANCED UNTIL Karen said she had to be up early tomorrow. No argument, he walked with her throug
h the crowd outside Monaco, then along Ocean Drive in the dark to her car. He said, “Lady, you wore me out.” He was in his forties, weathered but young-acting, natural, didn’t come on with any singles-bar bullshit buying her a drink, or comment when she said thank you, she’d have Jim Beam on the rocks. They had cooled off by the time they reached her Honda and he took her hand and gave her a peck on the cheek saying he hoped to see her again. In no hurry to make something happen. That was fine with Karen. He said “Ciao,” and walked off.

  Two nights later they left Monaco, came out of that pounding sound to a sidewalk café and drinks and he became Carl Tillman, skipper of a charter deep-sea fishing boat out of American Marina, Bahia Mar. He was single, married seven years and divorced, no children; he lived in a ground-floor two-bedroom apartment in North Miami—one of the bedrooms full of fishing gear he didn’t know where else to store. Carl said his boat was out of the water, getting ready to move it to Haulover Dock, closer to where he lived.

  Karen liked his weathered, kind of shaggy look, the crow’s-feet when he smiled. She liked his soft brown eyes that looked right at her talking about making his living on the ocean, about hurricanes, the trendy scene here on South Beach, movies. He went to the movies every week and told Karen—raising his eyebrows in a vague, kind of stoned way—his favorite actor was Jack Nicholson. Karen asked him if that was his Nicholson impression or was he doing Christian Slater doing Nicholson? He told her she had a keen eye; but couldn’t understand why she thought Dennis Quaid was a hunk. That was okay.

  He said, “You’re a social worker.”

  Karen said, “A social worker—”

  “A teacher.”

  “What kind of teacher?”

  “You teach Psychology. College level.”