The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

by C. J. Box

  Victor had given Bil a generous budget; he offered Morton a quarter million dollars to take a hiatus from dancing for two months and get a job as a security guard at the Pittstown Convention Center. She used her charm and intelligence to talk her way onto the security team working with the Secret Service at the rally, earning the trust of the senior agent, Art Tomson.

  The day of the rally, Bil, who’d grown an impressive mustache and shaved his head, dressed in combat gear and smeared mud on the license plate of an old hulk of a Toyota he’d bought at a junkyard. He’d made his way toward the convention center from Haleyville to Prescott to Avery, making intentionally suspicious purchases: sniper bullets and PVC pipes and hardware. He’d also made the anonymous call about a man having a phone conversation about Ebbett and the rally with a rifle in the backseat of his car.

  Meanwhile, Kim Morton continued to ingratiate herself into the Secret Service operation . . . and get the attention of Ebbett himself. She’d spotted the suspicious man in the crowd, armed with two rotten tomatoes (the kid was an intern from National Party headquarters given a bonus to play the role). Finally she’d offered her insights about the sniper attack being a diversion—​poisoning might be the real form of assassination. (There never was any toxin; at the hardware store Bil had not stolen the rodenticide but had merely hidden the cans in another aisle; when they were later discovered, the Secret Service would conclude the attack was a product of the security guard’s overactive imagination.)

  The script called for Morton to tackle Ebbett to “save his life.” Following that intimate and icebreaking moment, Kim Morton had fired enough flirtatious glances his way to ignite latent flames of infidelity. After he’d asked her to stay and Art Tomson had left the suite, Ebbett slipped his arm around her and whispered, “I know you want a slot at the police academy. An hour in bed with me and I’ll make it happen.”

  She’d looked shocked at first, as the role called for, but soon “gave in.”

  The ensuing liaison was energetic and slightly kinky, as Morton told him she was a bit of a voyeur and wanted the lights on. Ebbett was all for it. This proved helpful, since the tiny high-def video camera hidden in her uniform jacket, hanging strategically on the bedroom doorknob, required good illumination.

  She’d delivered the video to Bil, who uploaded the encrypted file to Victor Brown. The head of the national committee had called Ebbett last week and given him an ultimatum: withdraw or the tape would go to every media outlet in the world.

  After a bit of debate, in which Ebbett had apparently confessed to his wife what had happened (the fish-hand thing suggested this), the man had reluctantly agreed.

  Eyes now on the screen, Morton said to Bil, “He’s actually running for county supervisor?”

  “That’s the only bone they’d throw him. He’s up against a twenty-two-year-old manager at Farmer’s Trust and Savings. The polls aren’t in Ebbett’s favor.” Bil leaned close and whispered, “I have the rest of your fee.”

  “I’ve got one more show. I’ll get it after.”

  Bil had an amusing image of himself sitting in the front row and, as Starlight danced close to him, tucking $150,000 into her G-string.

  “This worked out well. You interested in any more work?” he asked.

  “You’ve got my number.”

  Bil nodded. Then he lifted his drink. “Here’s to us—​unlikely partners.”

  She smiled and tapped her glass to his. Then she shrugged the silky wrap off her shoulders into his lap and walked back to the stage.

  JOHN M. FLOYD

  Rhonda and Clyde

  FROM Black Cat Mystery Magazine

  The strangest two days of Helen Wilson’s life began with a skiing trip to Appaloosa Resort one winter Sunday. The trip itself wasn’t unusual: Appaloosa was a popular location, and only forty miles from her home in the town of Lodgepole, Wyoming. What was unusual was that Helen had gone there in the company of friends. Helen Wilson didn’t have many friends.

  Even as a child she’d been a loner, and her school years had given her little reason to change. She also had no desire, after graduating with an accounting degree from UW, to leave her hometown to pursue a career. Instead she hired on as a bank teller, a safe and unpretentious job on a safe and unpretentious street near the house her late parents had left her. Ten years later Helen was still there, a sensible woman of reasonable means but no ambition, one of those rare people who doesn’t require much in order to be happy. Even so, she was pleasantly surprised when two total strangers engaged her in conversation one day at a neighborhood coffee shop, and even more surprised to find that she enjoyed their company.

  Rhonda Felson and her husband, Clyde, were new to the area, Helen discovered—​writers who had rented a cabin in the mountains nearby and who spent most of their time hiking and sightseeing and creating what Helen suspected would one day be masterpieces of literature. During the days after that first meeting, the three of them had gotten together twice for dinner in local restaurants, and the following weekend Rhonda had invited Helen to accompany them to Appaloosa. The trip ended badly. Helen, who had never before been near a pair of skis, suffered the fate of many first-timers: six hours later she found herself medicated and hobbling on crutches through the exit doors of the local ER. More painful to her than her injuries was the knowledge that she’d been so much trouble to her new friends—​they’d driven her to the hospital and then home afterward—​and she found herself apologizing nonstop for spoiling their outing.

  “Nonsense,” Rhonda said for the tenth time. She used Helen’s key to open the apartment door and stood aside as Clyde helped Helen maneuver down the hallway to her bedroom. “These things happen. I’m just sorry it happened to you.”

  Helen sagged backward onto the bed, propped her bad leg up on pillows, and sighed. “Thanks, guys,” she said. “I’ll be okay now.”

  Rhonda was frowning. “Maybe I better stay. Clyde can come fetch me in the morning—”

  “I’ll be fine,” Helen said again. “Oh, I just remembered—​where’d we put my purse?”

  “It’s in the other room.”

  “Could you get it for me? My cell phone’s inside it, and I need to call my boss.”

  “Now?” Clyde asked. “It’s past ten.”

  “He stays up late. He knows a lot of the folks at the resort, and if he hears about my mishap I want him to know I’ll still be coming in to the bank tomorrow.”

  Both Felsons blinked at the same time. “You’re going in to work?” Rhonda said.

  “This isn’t exactly life-threatening. I just want to forewarn him. I don’t want everybody mooning over me when I limp in with my cast and my new wooden legs.” Helen closed her eyes for a second and added, “Whoa—​I can’t believe I’m so tired.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll make the call for you. You need to rest. What’s your boss’s number?”

  Helen gave it to Rhonda and watched sleepily as the two of them left the room. It occurred to her that from now on she would stick to tennis . . .

  * * *

  Sheriff Marcie Ingalls had never fully adjusted to cold weather. Her parents had moved the family here from Alabama when she was nine, and she was sometimes convinced that she’d lived in balmy climes just long enough to thin her blood. But she’d married a local guy and her mother was still here, so Marcie made the best of it. She dressed in three or four layers, never complained, and even on subzero mornings usually got to the office before anyone else.

  Today, though, she arrived to find the door unlocked and coffee brewing. Jerry Pearson, her only deputy, was at his desk in the back corner, feet propped up and a copy of Guns & Ammo in his hands.

  “You’re early,” Marcie said. What a detective she would’ve made.

  “And full of news,” Pearson replied in a bored voice. “I put a ticket on a car parked in the alley off Fourth Street, a twenty-foot limb fell from an oak in front of the courthouse, and the bakery has jelly doughnuts on special today.” />
  Sheriff Ingalls shrugged out of her heavy coat and took a seat at her desk. “Was it blocking traffic?” she asked.

  “What, the limb?”

  “The car.”

  “No, just blocking the alley.” Pearson tossed the magazine onto his desktop. “Illegally parked. You saying I shouldn’t have ticketed it?”

  “I’m just saying it’s not even seven a.m., and nobody ever drives through there anyhow.”

  He snorted. “Where I come from, they’d tow it away.”

  “You’re not where you came from, Jerry. We do things a little different here.”

  “You can say that again.” He nodded toward the window. “Hear that sound?”

  Marcie frowned, listening. Sure enough, something was pounding on something, in the distance—bam . . . bam . . . bam, sharp and clear in the brittle morning air. She was about to reply, then stopped as Wanda Stalworth, the dispatcher, pushed through the door in a bright red parka. They exchanged greetings, Wanda headed for her desk in the other room, and Marcie looked again at Jerry Pearson.

  “I hear it,” she said. “What is it? Hammering?”

  “Yeah. Roscoe Three Bears. He’s fixing Maude Jessup’s front steps.”

  “Good. She’s almost ninety, and that’s a high porch—​it’d be too bad if she fell.”

  “What I can’t figure is why he does it. Splits her firewood for her too. Roscoe’s banned from the rez and dirt poor, and I hear she never pays him. Probably never even thanks him.”

  Marcie took a pair of reading glasses from her pocket and started riffling through her in-basket. “He does it because Maude’s old and there’s no one else to help her, Jerry.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe one of these days I’ll understand that kind of thinking.”

  “I doubt it,” she said.

  From the dispatch desk Wanda called, “Are you two arguing again?”

  “Not me,” Pearson said. He rose to his feet and picked up his coat. “I’m going to do something to make me feel good for a change.”

  “You quitting?” Marcie asked.

  “Not that good.”

  “Where you going, then?”

  “To buy some jelly doughnuts.”

  * * *

  Two hours later and two blocks away, in the bank on the corner of Western and Fourth, branch manager Spencer E. Spencer looked up from the papers on his desk to see loan officer Ernest Polk standing in his office doorway. Both men were wearing thick winter jackets, and Polk even had on a fur hat with earflaps. He looked like a movie poster for Fargo.

  “Any word on the heating situation?” Spencer asked him.

  “They’re sending a repair crew from Casper,” Polk said. “It’ll take a couple hours. Until then I guess we’ll just have to stay bundled up.”

  Spencer sighed. He had come in this morning to find the bank lobby as cold as Siberia, although the lights and the computers all seemed to be working. When he’d phoned the bank’s home office, they had instructed him to call the heating-system people and to—​above all else—​remain open for business. He glanced through the glass wall of his office at two of his tellers, who were huddled at their stations like ice fishermen. Both were wearing mittens and had the hoods of their coats pulled up over their heads. He found himself dreaming of Florida.

  Spencer E. Spencer was still staring at the lobby when his third teller clomped through the door on a pair of crutches. Helen Wilson was encased in a brown parka from the top of her head to her knees, and what little of her could be seen wasn’t good: one eye was squeezed shut, her nose was bandaged, and a long comma of black hair hung in her face. Looking at no one and saying not a word, she solemnly made her way to her teller cage and wrestled herself onto her stool. The other two women muttered sympathetic words to her, their breath making little white clouds in the air, but otherwise the room was dead silent.

  The two men in the office couldn’t help staring. “She’s in worse shape than I expected,” Ernest Polk whispered.

  Spencer, who had already alerted the staff, said, “That friend of hers—​the one who called me last night to tell me Helen was coming in?—​said she skied into a tree.”

  “She must’ve knocked it down.”

  “Tough lady,” Spencer said. He reached for his phone and punched a number. When he saw Helen Wilson pick up her receiver, he said, “Sure you feel all right, Helen?”

  “I’b vine,” her voice said. “Doesn’d hurd doo bad.”

  “Looks like it would, from here. And what’s wrong with your voice?”

  “My doze is all stobbed up, dad’s all. Like I god a gold.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You let me know if you need anything.” He hung up and said to Polk, “Maybe she’ll have an easy morning—​we shouldn’t get many customers anyhow, with no heat.”

  But as soon as he uttered those words, the front door opened again and a short redheaded man entered carrying two duffel bags. On the nearest bag were the printed words PARADISE VALLEY CASINO. He walked to Helen Wilson’s station, set the bags on the counter, and grinned at her. The tired smile she gave him in return looked more like a grimace to Spencer, but the man didn’t seem to mind. He also didn’t seem bothered by the frigid temperature.

  “Thank God for the casino,” Spencer said. “They deposit more money in a week than most of our customers deposit in a year.”

  “I believe it,” Polk said as he turned to leave. “I’ll keep a watch out for the repair folks.”

  Spencer nodded and went back to his paperwork, wishing he could do it with his gloves on. He also wished he didn’t know the Paradise Valley Casino quite as well as he did. Sadly, some of those funds being deposited had probably once been his.

  * * *

  It took him twenty minutes to sign off on the earnings reports and finish a long phone call with the bank’s IT crew about an upgrade to his ATM software. Finally Spencer leaned back in his swivel chair, burrowed lower into his coat, looked over at the tellers—​and frowned. No one was sitting at Helen Wilson’s station. Earlier, around the time the casino courier was here, Spencer had noticed Helen leaving her stool to make several trips to the vault. That made sense: the casino’s deposits were always large, and her crutches would prevent her from carrying too big a load at once. But now she was gone. He picked up the phone to call the head teller, but before he could hit the intercom button, Ernest Polk stuck his head into the office.

  “Know what we should do, Spence?”

  “What.”

  “We should have a promotion and give away those big duffel bags like the casino does.”

  “What?” Spencer said again. His mind was on injured employees, not bank giveaways.

  “You know—​those bags like the ones the guy was carrying earlier, with the name printed on the side. That’s great advertising, and—”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, still holding the receiver. “Are you saying the casino lets anybody have those, for free?”

  “Well, not free,” Polk said. “You have to spend at least fifty bucks at the slot machines. But that doesn’t take long.”

  Spencer frowned. A vague uneasiness had crept into his bones. Shaking it off, he said, “Thanks, Ernie. I’ll consider it.” Then, without waiting for a response, he pressed the button for the head teller and, when she answered, said, “Libby? Is Helen taking her break?”

  “She left for home ten minutes ago, Spence. Said she wasn’t feeling well after all. I’m not surprised—​she shouldn’t have tried to come in.”

  “Thanks, Lib. I’ll give her a call.” Which he did, after allowing her five more minutes to get home. That should be plenty—​Helen’s house was barely a mile from the bank.

  But her cell phone didn’t answer. It rang four times, then went to voicemail. Rather than leave a message, he found her home number and tried her landline. After three rings, she picked up.

  “Helen?” he said. “It’s Spencer, at the bank. Just wanted to make sure you’re all right.”


  Helen Wilson said, a little groggily, “I’m fine—​thanks for checking on me.”

  “Well, you sound better, anyway. More like yourself.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your clogged nose,” Spencer said. “It must’ve cleared up, right?”

  Hesitation. Then: “It’s my leg, Spence, not my nose. I broke my ankle.”

  “But—​when you were here earlier . . .”

  “There? I wasn’t there. I’ve been here at home all morning.”

  Spencer felt a cold ripple move through his stomach. “What?”

  “My friend Rhonda phoned you last night, right? At first she was going to call and tell you I’d be coming in anyway, but she later said she’d taken the liberty of telling you I’d be staying home sick today. She was right, I guess—​I needed the rest. So I stayed home.”

  Silence. Spencer tried to respond, but his throat seemed to have closed up.

  “Didn’t she call you?” Helen asked him. “What’s going on?”

  He swallowed. “I don’t know. I mean—​the person who called said you’d be coming in, like always. She didn’t say anything about taking a sick day.”

  “Oh my. She must’ve misunderstood. Or maybe I misunderstood her . . .”

  “Listen, Helen—​this is important. Who’s Rhonda?”

  “I told you, a friend. I met her last week, she’s the one who invited me to go skiing with her and her husband yesterday. The one who fell on my leg.”