The Best American Mystery Stories 3

by Edited by James Ellroy

  “You need a fry cook?”

  Shorty laughed beside him. Even Happy Joe King seemed amused. He crunched an ice cube. “I’m afraid those aren’t the particular skills to which I was referring.”

  “Oh.” Stephen sat, feeling like an idiot. He hadn’t been trying to be clever. He truly didn’t understand.

  “Allow me to clarify. As you may know, I’m something of an entrepreneur. My holdings are — well, let’s say my holdings are somewhat diversified. Being diversified, as they are, my professional success depends to a considerable degree on what some might consider a sophisticated accounting system. Don’t misunderstand: I realize the workaday bookkeeping we’re talking about here is a dip in the kiddie pool to a man of your training. But you’d be surprised how difficult it is to find qualified personnel in this area.”

  “Mr. King ...”

  “Professor. Please. I’ve told you: call me Joe.”

  “But I don’t. . .”

  “Bottom line,” Happy Joe King went on, “this is what I’m able to do for you. I’m able to settle your unfulfilled obligation with the Burkholder people. I’m able to buy out the remainder of your contract with the university. Finally — and from your perspective, perhaps most importantly — I’m able to set aside your not-inconsiderable monetary arrearage to me. I’m able to offer all of these things in exchange for your exclusive service in the position of Chief Financial Officer of my various business ventures.” King gestured with his drink. “I think you’ll agree that I offer an extremely competitive benefits package.”

  For a long, echoing minute, Stephen just sat, smelling like french fries, staring at some vague point between himself and Happy Joe King. Shorty said nothing. Happy Joe King said nothing.

  All Fielder could think to say was, “Don’t you already have an accountant?”

  “I did, yes. For many years.” King’s tone conveyed regret. “I’m sorry to say that your predecessor is no longer able to fulfill his duties due to health reasons.”

  “Health reasons?”

  “He got something in his eye,” Shorty explained.

  Fielder looked at the collector. “He got something in his eye?”

  Shorty shrugged. “Manner of speaking.”

  “The important thing,” Joe King said, “is that your eyes are perfectly fine. And I don’t just go around offering executive positions to every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a mark in the books. The important thing is that you have something to offer me. And that I have something to offer you. We can help each other.” King raised his glass. “So. Professor Fielder. Can I get you that drink?”

  It was as if Fielder’s lips formed the words without his permission.

  “I can’t,” he heard himself say.

  Happy Joe King’s eyes darkened. “Pardon?”

  “I. . . Mr. King, I can’t. I would. But I just. . . I just can’t.”

  King glanced at Shorty again. He looked at Fielder. He did not look happy. “Forgive me for saying so, Professor, but that’s a dumbfuck answer for a fellow in your position. I don’t mind admitting I didn’t expect such dumbfuckery from you. Shorty?”

  “Yup.”

  “Did you?”

  “I gotta say,” Shorty said, sounding amazed, “no.”

  “You don’t understand,” Fielder said quickly. “It’s not ... I wouldn’t. . . I’m just unable. Truly.”

  A quiet, awful minute passed.

  “It’s the numbers. I don’t know how to explain it.” He looked at King with a feeling of impending doom. “I’m not your man.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” Joe King finally said.

  “I really am sorry.”

  King sat quietly. He swirled his drink. “Are you quite sure you wouldn’t like to reconsider?”

  “I don’t. . . it’s not that ...” Fielder sighed. “I have a condition known as Nonspecific Acalculia.”

  “Forgive me, but what did you just say?”

  “Says he has nonspecific genitalia,” Shorty told him, then narrowed his eyes at Fielder. “You some kinda homo?”

  “Acalculia,” Fielder repeated. “It means that I can’t...” He struggled, gave up. What was the use?

  Happy Joe King said nothing.

  “Mr. King,” Fielder said, “please don’t think the generosity of your offer is lost on me.”

  King nodded along, appraising him.

  Fielder drew in a breath and forced himself to ask the question he didn’t want Happy Joe King to answer. “What happens under these circumstances? Being the case that I’m unable to accept the . . . position?”

  In reply, Joe King shrugged unimportantly, as if bygones were bygones as far as he was concerned. But he leaned forward to pluck the envelope from Fielder’s apron strings.

  “This feels light,” he commented.

  Fielder looked quickly to Shorty, who did not return his glance. “But it’s all there. I swear it is. You can count it.”

  “I count five hundred.”

  “Yes. Five hundred. It’s all there.”

  “The installment is eight.”

  “But I was told . . . Shorty said five.” Fielder looked at Shorty again, desperate for aid. Shorty offered none. “Five. It’s all there.”

  “Five? Yes,” King said. “Last week, five. This week, eight.”

  “But that’s…” Fielder’s stomach did a queasy roll. “I don’t understand.”

  “In an accelerated economy such as ours,” King explained, “sometimes lending institutions — and that’s, in a sense, how you can think of me from now on — are forced to raise interest percentages in order to keep expansion in line. It’s a systemic necessity, Professor. Please understand, these are market forces we’re up against. I don’t make the rules.”

  Fielder felt himself deflating.

  “Shorty?” said King.

  “Yup.”

  “I’ll need you to explain the matter of penalty fees to Professor Fielder. Bear in mind he has a condition.”

  As Shorty opened his door, and Stephen felt the collector’s heavy hand descend on his shoulder, it was as if time stopped, then accelerated. He looked at Shorty, hoping unreasonably for some slim possibility of shelter, finding only hard, dutiful eyes.

  ~ * ~

  Later, on the long but limp-free walk home to his building, Stephen told himself he’d made the only reasonable decision, under the circumstances.

  First, there was only sick fear, accompanied by visions of compound fractures, in his very near future.

  But several blocks after parting Shorty’s company, a giddiness came upon Fielder. There arose within Stephen’s breast a vague but euphoric tremor; a quick breath escaped him.

  And as he walked on — moving between pools of sodium light cast by the streetlamps overhead, narrowing the distance to his apartment stride by lengthening stride — Stephen Fielder began to feel something he hadn’t felt in as long as he could remember.

  Lucky.

  Maybe it was the delayed adrenaline rush of surviving a dicey situation. Maybe there was nothing like the hand of a professional motivator at your elbow to jolt you out of an unproductive frame of mind.

  Fielder didn’t know. He didn’t know if night birds always sang like this in this part of town, or if he’d simply never noticed them before now.

  All Stephen Fielder knew was that something important had happened this last half-hour. Something transformative.

  Because people lost limbs, for heaven’s sake. He understood that, now. Accidents maimed but did not kill. Careers in roaring environments slowly obliterated the ability to hear; viral infections robbed people of their eyesight. Awful diseases of the nervous and muscular systems impeded, immobilized.

  Time and time again over the course of this strange affliction, Stephen had returned to thoughts of his friend with brain cancer. And for the first time, he realized he shouldn’t have been thinking about his dead friend at all.

  He should have been thinking about a French magazine editor he’d on
ce read about.

  The journalist’s name was Bauby. Jean-Dominique Bauby. In the middle part of his life, Bauby had suffered a massive stroke that left him quadriplegic. And at forty-four — Fielder’s very age — the man had written his own memoirs, nearly two hundred pages worth, by blinking his left eyelid.

  Two hundred pages, all dictated in code. Character by character, one blink at time.

  People survived. Plenty of people survived unimaginable horrors each and every day. And then they woke up and survived them all over again the day after that. People adapted; they overcame. They developed tools and engineered workarounds. They persevered and recalculated. They plugged in variable after variable until their personal equations finally produced a gain.

  Fielder found himself awash in a tide of inspiration by the time he reached his apartment building. He was thinking in terms of visual recognition. How hard could it be to relearn the sight of a numeral? A symbol’s unique lines and curves? He thought in terms of computer aid: spreadsheets, graphing applications, microprocessors with far more raw calculating power than any human mind. He thought of tools he’d once taken for granted. Marvels of human engineering designed for the express purpose of taking the complicated . . . and making it simple.

  So lost in these thoughts was Fielder as he climbed the stairwell to his floor that it took him a moment to register that Rhombus waited for him in the hallway outside his door.

  “Rhombie,” he said, leaning down to scratch the dog behind the ears. “How did you get out here?”

  Rhombus just looked up at him with soulful brown eyes. Don’t look at me. Ask them.

  That was when Fielder noticed that his apartment door stood ajar.

  Four men waited for him inside. Two wore suits. One wore a sport jacket with jeans. One had doffed his sport jacket and draped it over the back of the couch, exposing a shoulder holster. Fielder noted the badge clipped to the man’s belt.

  “Professor Fielder,” said one of the men in suits. He met Fielder at the door with one hand extended, the other flipping open an ID wallet. “Forgive the intrusion. My name is Special Agent Corrigan.”

  Fielder shook the man’s hand robotically. Rhombus hung back, out in the hall.

  Agent Corrigan pointed around the apartment. “That’s my partner, Agent Klein. Detective Reese. Detective Carvajal.”

  The man in the shirtsleeves and shoulder holster raised his hand.

  Fielder looked at them. “What are you doing in my apartment?”

  “Professor Fielder,” said Agent Corrigan, “it would seem we’re in a position to help each other.”

  ~ * ~

  That night, Fielder dreamed he was playing checkers with Andie at a folding card table in an unfamiliar room. They were laughing and having fun together.

  He was about to say, King me! when a door opened, and a team of Burkholder’s lawyers jogged in. Fielder looked up, wondering how in the world they’d found him; the lawyers, all with matching briefcases, filed into a row.

  Just as he was about to demand an explanation for this interruption of his personal time with his daughter, another door opened. Happy Joe King appeared with Shorty in tow.

  They saw the lawyers. The lawyers saw them. Shorty snarled.

  And all at once, a third door burst off its hinges; Agents Corrigan and Klein rushed into the room, sidearms drawn. Detectives Reese and Carvajal hustled in after them.

  Fielder tried to stand out of his chair, but he couldn’t move.

  FBI!, shouted Corrigan, leveling his gun at Shorty across the checkers table.

  Still snarling, Shorty reached inside his jacket and drew a gun of his own. Back off, asshole, he said. The math man’s ours.

  Fielder felt a hot salty lump in the back of his throat. He tried to speak. He tried again to stand. Andie looked at him, shaking her head. She said, You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve.

  At that moment, the row of lawyers simultaneously dropped to their knees, popped latches, and dove into their briefcases. They stood up armed with guns of all shapes and sizes.

  Sorry, said one of the lawyers, suddenly crisscrossed over his suit with ammo belts. But we’ll be taking the professor with us.

  I’m not a professor anymore! Fielder wanted to shout. But his mouth was stuffed full by some unidentifiable wad. Looking down, he saw an empty Bronco Burger wrapper in his hands.

  But before he could expel the foul obstruction, everybody opened fire.

  Pinned down with Andie in the center of the triangle, Stephen noticed that the guns fired mathematics instead of bullets; numbers left muzzles in a flash of flame and floated slowly, as if weightless, across the room.

  One of the lawyers riddled Agent Corrigan with a salvo of spinning sevens. Shorty capitalized on the vulnerability and shot the attorney in the neck with a nine. Klein hit the floor and rolled; Detective Carvajal covered him, snapping fraction after fraction over the lawyers’ heads.

  Andie watched the crossfire with an awe-dazed grin. Dad! Look at this! She reached up with an index finger and touched a passing greater-than/equal-to symbol, sending it spinning off course. They’re so beautiful!

  She never noticed the lawyer over her left shoulder, drawing down on Detective Reese. By the time she turned to see the discharge floating her way, it was too late for her to react.

  Able to move at last, Fielder sprang up, lurching forward to shield his daughter.

  Just as he reached her, arms outstretched, he took one in the shoulder. The force of the impact spun him around toward Happy Joe King.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Fielder saw Shorty’s gun buck, and he raised his hand defensively. But in the dream, somebody had turned off the slow motion, and he got a speeding pi in the face before he went down.

  ~ * ~

  In the end, Fielder lasted almost two months before Shorty caught him wearing the wire.

  It was a fluke. The collector had come to Bronco Burger to get Fielder for their weekly staff meeting in the back of Happy Joe’s limo. On the customary walk to the parking lot of the used furniture store, Shorty made some joke and followed up with a quick play jab to Fielder’s midsection. Stephen hadn’t been paying attention, and he failed to juke away in time. Shorty’s play fist brushed the transmitter device taped to Fielder’s ribcage.

  He reached again to check.

  Then his face darkened, and the fist exploded into Stephen’s belly for real. . .

  . . . and when he could finally breathe again, Fielder found himself in the back of the limo — Bronco Burger shirt torn open, welts raising on the skin of his chest where the adhesive tape had been ripped away — facing Joseph “Happy Joe” King for what he knew would be the last time.

  The old crook sat looking at the FBI-issue paraphernalia in his hand as though pondering some high-tech rune. Fielder could feel Shorty beside him, brewing like an electrical storm.

  But Happy Joe just sat in silence for what seemed like ages.

  At last, King spoke only two words: “How long?”

  “A couple of months,” Stephen admitted, for there was no use playing games at this stage. “Six, seven weeks maybe.”

  Joe King nodded. And Fielder couldn’t be sure, but he thought he recognized the expression on the man’s face. It was the look of a man who suspects he’s in the process of losing something. Something he’s always had.

  Or maybe it was the look of a man on the verge of admitting to himself what he already knows he lost some time ago.

  At last, Shorty could no longer contain himself. He erupted with a primal bellow of rage, and when the big gun in his hand connected with the middle of Fielder’s face, Stephen felt his nose give way.

  Cheek against the opposite window, pressed there by the muzzle of Shorty’s gun at the hard bone above his opposite temple, Fielder gargled blood as the collector screamed at him, close enough to spray saliva in Stephen’s ear.

  “We trusted you!” Shorty shouted. “We trusted you, you miserable fuckin’ fuck!”

 
; Before he blacked out, Fielder saw Happy Joe King call off his collector with a slight shake of the head. Shorty roared again and gifted Stephen with one final, thunderous kidney punch.

  Then chaos ruled.

  Light flooded the world; doors came open, other doors slammed. Hard voices shouted commands. People appeared and scurried about; somebody had a megaphone.

  Later, sitting in the open back end of the paramedic’s rig, holding a bloody ice pack to his split lips and broken nose, Fielder saw Andie break free from a uniformed cop, cross the yellow tape, and sprint his way.