The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

by Edited By Scott Turow

  The train station in Spokane is brick, a mix of new and old. Jack Cooley wasn’t there yet; his train was late. The kid rode up and down on the escalators and had a soda. Pop sat on the wood benches and watched the people with their luggage, buying tickets. When I went to sit next to Pop, there on the bench was a small smiley face and Peeler written underneath. The kid went down the escalator again, back up. Then the train arrived.

  Jack Cooley was one of the first ones to come out of the arrival door and start walking toward us. He was an inch taller than I was and broad in the shoulders. He wore an old army jacket and jeans and work boots. The kid went right over to him and hugged him and Jack hugged him back.

  “Peeler,” Jack said. “Fucking little Peeler. Jesus Christ.” He hugged the kid again.

  Pop went over and shook hands with Jack and hugged him with one arm. He introduced me. “This is Ed Snider, he’s renting Grandpa’s house while he does some contract logging over on the edge of old Freleigh’s property. He drove us today.”

  Jack Cooley looked me up and down. “Thanks,” he said. He motioned at Pop and the kid. “These are nice people to be nice to.”

  “Glad you’re out,” I said.

  “You’re never out after that long,” Jack answered. “The cell just gets a little bigger.” He looked around at the vending machines and pay phones by the door. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get up in those mountains. I’ve been dreaming about them for ten years. Are they still there?”

  “Nothing’s changed,” Pop said, “Nothing’s changed.”

  The kid stopped to take a piss before we got in the truck and when he came out, he had another can of soda with him. He shook it before he got in my truck. He cracked the can open and sprayed Jack with the soda and Jack was laughing and shaking his head soaking wet. “I’ll clean it,” the kid said. “Pop told me we shouldn’t use champagne, so I used soda.”

  “Peeler,” Jack said, “you should never sleep too heavy.” He was laughing as he said it.

  I drove the Cooley family back to the tip of the Idaho Panhandle. By the time we got home, it was snowing lightly and the three of them walked up the hill to their house while I reloaded my woodstove for the night.

  ~ * ~

  The next morning I had been up for a while when Jack Cooley came down for a cup of coffee. He was still wearing the old army jacket.

  “How’re you doing?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he said. “Same as always.”

  “How was it inside?”

  “Brutal,” he said and left it at that.

  “Where’d you do most of your time?”

  He sipped his coffee. “Kentucky. Pennsylvania.”

  He was right across the table from me, so I had to ask. “Pop said you might come out and go after some people.”

  Jack shook his head. He rubbed his chin. “I’m not doing anything to anybody up here, not a thing. I’m not involved in anything other than my own life.”

  “Do they know that?” I asked.

  He put his coffee down. “Everything with you is a question,” he said. “Who is they?”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” I said.

  “The only people here are you and me, Pop, and Peeler. Is that right?”

  “Hey,” I said, “I misspoke myself.”

  “I’m not moving off this mountain until yesterday is dead, do you get my meaning?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m not hiding up here,” he said. “I’m out.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “You ever see a nest of snakes in the woods? Sometimes they’ll be in a rotted tree trunk or out in a field?”

  I nodded.

  “Crawling all knotted up with each other, biting each other, this one eating the tail of that one that’s eating the head of another, sliding all around each other, so you can’t tell which one is which one. Some poor people think that’s life.” He reached down and brought his coffee up, took a swallow. He was looking at the mountains. He set his coffee on the table and started for the door. “Solitary never bothered me,” he said. “It was being in population that I didn’t care for. Too many snakes.” He went out and I watched him walk back up the hill through the ankle-deep snow.

  ~ * ~

  The next day I drove to Spokane alone. George Beck’s lawyer met me downtown and we talked near the water, in the park.

  “What did you find out?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Jack Cooley isn’t doing anything in any organization, as far as I can tell yet.” We walked along a side street and pretended to look at the shops.

  “This isn’t what we agreed on, this isn’t going to help George. You’ve got to dig around and find something.”

  “These people don’t trust me,” I said. “And they don’t talk much under the best of circumstances. Jack’s still wearing his prison laundry army coat, for God’s sake.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Tomorrow, George is going to begin talking about Tim Shipman and you and that Larson girl and you can deal with the fallout from that on your own.” He started to walk away. “The gun won’t help you. We’re going forward.”

  “That’s no good,” I said. “I need more time.”

  “Two days,” he said. “And here.” He handed me a pad and pen. “Draw me a map of where the Cooleys are, so if it comes to it, the sheriffs can get a decent address for the warrant.”

  I drew the map as best I could and if someone was really bent on finding it, they’d find it. I handed the pad back to him.

  “That will buy you two days with me, but after that, George talks and signs statements and testifies and your name is on everything.”

  When I got home, there was a sandwich on my kitchen table and a small stick with a smiley face on it. As I went to put wood in the stove, I realized that several of the logs carried messages. Peeler, on each one of them. Peeler.

  ~ * ~

  The next morning Cannon was scratching at my door and I came out. Something was in the road, about fifty yards from my house. I thought it was Jack, facedown in the snow. I recognized the army jacket. Cannon started back toward his house and when I looked up, Pop and Jack were running down the road toward me.

  “They shot Peeler,” Pop yelled to no one.

  “I didn’t hear a shot,” I said.

  “Nobody heard it,” said Jack.

  When we got close I could see a faint spray of blood around Peeler’s head. I threw up into the snow. Not at any time had shooting the kid been discussed. Beck’s people would push until something gave. Either me or Jack Cooley. I threw up again.

  ‘Why the fuck did they shoot Peeler?” Jack asked the sky.

  I realized Peeler had Jack’s coat on.

  “He drew the fire,” Pop said. “He walked around in it the other morning. I thought maybe you had some cigarettes in there and he was trying out smoking.”

  When we got close, we could see Peeler was still breathing, even though there was blood coming out of his nose.

  “Peeler?”

  His mouth opened and his voice, scratchy and cracked, came out. “Pop,” the kid groaned. “It hurts.”

  Jack rolled him over, pulled back the coat. He was wearing the Kevlar vest, my bulletproof. He’d been hit, twice, body shots. He was hurt, but he was alive, Jack carried him up to the house.

  “What can I do?” I said.

  “Keep an eye out,” Pop said.

  ~ * ~

  I took George Beck’s pistol out of the truck, grabbed some shells Pop had given me when I first got there, and went walking. I went into the woods, to try to see if I could spot anyone.

  Down the hill a ways, on the other side of the Cooleys’ house, was a small family cemetery. I stopped for a minute. Pop had told me who was in there, where his family tree had branched. Outside the cemetery, I noticed a pick and a shovel. Jack must have been down there. It looked like he was getting ready to dig a new grave. Peeler had carved some sticks and one was in the shape of a cross
. The stick read george beck, sent to hell by the cooleys.

  I walked back to my cabin. Somehow, while in the shadow of prison yards and guards and friends and enemies, Jack already knew who killed his grandfather.

  ~ * ~

  An hour later, Pop came down to my door. “Do you think,” Pop asked me, “you could go into town and get some cigarettes and coffee and groceries — could you do that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll do it right now.” It was my only way out.

  I drove through town and kept going. Maybe they were planning my burial, too. For such big country, things had closed in on me rapidly. I needed to get out of rifle range of these people.

  That fall, in one of the big shipping yards out in Grays Harbor, a guy who looked a lot like me started running a forklift and a log loader. He didn’t eat with anybody, didn’t talk to anybody. He cashed his check in the bar across the street and lived in a two-room apartment over the pool hall. He walked to work. The name he gave people was Tom Miller and he worked at the yard for six months. He didn’t miss a day.

  Monday came, time to clock in, then noon, and the foreman noticed Miller’s card still in the rack. He asked around, did anybody know where Miller was? One guy said he heard Miller say he had a sister in California. He never said that to me, somebody else spoke up. Said he was from right here near Tacoma, born and raised. He didn’t want to go fishing Friday, someone said. We asked him to go fishing, said we were taking our kids and he was welcome, and he said no thanks.

  I guess he quit, the foreman said when Miller hadn’t showed by the end of the day. So if anybody knows anybody looking for work and can run a loader and show up on time, the job pays four fifty a week, you do your own taxes as a subcontractor and don’t talk union here. Sitting behind his desk in his office, the foreman cut Miller’s time card in half and threw it in the garbage.

  Tom Miller hadn’t quit. Somebody with sharp eyes and a long memory spotted him. The man who called himself Tom Miller couldn’t report to work because he was being held in a little room in the basement of a Seattle courthouse. Held until the investigators arrived.

  ~ * ~

  After I told this whole story to the investigators, they kept me in custody for a couple of days. They told me that the man who lived with Penny Larson and her daughter was fatally shot in a hunting accident in the mountains of Northern Idaho, not far from their house, but managed to struggle into Canada before he died. The Mounties found him. They told me George Beck had been released. They told me Carl Larson was missing. They told me that Jack Cooley might be dead but that Peeler was still alive. They told me they knew I’d been Ed Snider for a while.

  Then the investigators approached me about being an informant down in Oregon, on the Rogue River, where a group of white supremacists was moving meth and dogs and guns. We want you to do this, they said. Not that you have much choice. Sure, I said, I’ll do it. But all I wanted was out. The whole sky seemed covered with heavy-gauge mesh steel, one big prison. If I was lucky to be alive, I rarely knew it. Normal men get to be things. Sons and husbands, fathers and friends. I was not any of those things. I tried, but this is me telling you I failed.

  So I went in undercover, and in the middle, the fucking middle of it all, there was an hour when nobody was watching me and I had a little money and I slipped away, on the ghost train out of there.

  I can’t even imagine how many people are looking for me now.

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  ~ * ~

  Contributors’ Notes

  Karen E. Bender is the author of the novel Like Normal People. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, and other magazines. They have been reprinted in the Best American and Pushcart Prize anthologies and read on the Selected Shorts program on NPR. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and is working on a collection of stories.

  ■ “Theft” began because I wanted to write something from the point of view of a swindler. Ginger was a great character to let out the id. It was fun trying to figure out how she would use people and try to figure out her own theories on how the world worked.

  I chose a cruise ship because once I weirdly ended up on a cruise to Alaska, and the setting had to be used — the general sense of desperation and sequins and the constant eating opportunities, particularly the chocolate buffet, which was one of the most poignant and piggish experiences I have ever witnessed. A friend told me that he had heard of instances in which lonely people went on cruise ships to die and be found. That was incredibly powerful to me and somehow seemed to fit into Ginger’s perspective — that was the container that would hold the story. So I put that in, too, which made the story darker and sometimes hard to write, but so goes the puzzling escapade of writing fiction.

  ~ * ~

  C. J. Box is the author of six novels, the most recent being In Plain Sight. He is the winner of the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 Award (France), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, the Barry Award, and an Edgar Award, and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Open Season (2001) was a New York Times Notable Book and three of the novels have been Book Sense 76 picks. Box lives with his family outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and is currently writing a stand-alone thriller called Blue Heaven.

  ■ When the editors of “Meeting Across the River” — an anthology based on the Bruce Springsteen song — approached me about submitting a story, my first thought was: I don’t do urban. Then I read the lyrics with their vague, mysterious references to planning a crime, the girl Cherry, a $2,000 score. While contemplating how to put my stamp on a story with those elements, my family vacationed in Yellowstone. As we left the park, we witnessed an unexpected and somewhat jarring scenario — dark, leather-clad, menacing Eastern Europeans loitering on the corners and sidewalks of little Gardiner, Montana. They were wildly out of place, like a pawnshop in a cow pasture. Turned out they’d come to the United States for jobs in Yellowstone but couldn’t get them. They had that look about them like they’d do just about anything for $2,000. At the time, my daughters were listening to Eminem. Suddenly, everything fit. Voila: “Pirates of Yellowstone.”

  ~ * ~

  James Lee Burke was born in 1936 in Houston, Texas, and grew up on the Louisiana-Texas coast. He attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now called the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and later the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he received an A.B. and M.A. in English literature.

  Over the years he has published twenty-five novels and one collection of short stories. The stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, The Southern Review, Antioch Review, and Kenyon Review. His novels Heaven’s Prisoners and Two for Texas were adapted as motion pictures.

  Burke’s work has received two Edgar Awards for best crime novel of the year. He is also a Breadloaf fellow and a Guggenheim fellow and has been a recipient of an NEA grant. He and his wife of forty-six years, Pearl Burke, have four children and divide their time between Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.

  ■ My best and oldest friend passed away three years ago, and I wrote “Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine” and two other stories in memory of him. The real “Nick Hauser” was a remarkable man and a great friend to have. Even though we were born in the Great Depression, the era in which we grew up was one that I do not think will come aborning again. The quiet tree-shaded street on which we lived was next to a horse pasture and a grove of live oaks that were perhaps two hundred years old. “Nick” and I had a shoeshine business, yard-service, and were masters at harvesting blackberries on property that was not ours and selling them in bell jars, door-to-door, for two-bits ajar. But our great loves were baseball and Cheerio yo-yo contests.