Life Is Short and Then You Die_First Encounters With Murder From Mystery Writers of America

by Kelley Armstrong

  Becker wiped his mouth. “What happened to your face, Grant?”

  Grant flushed. He didn’t answer. Instead he just picked up the backpack and set it down a little closer to Becker.

  Becker nodded. “Get the keys,” he said to Riddell. He stood up and picked up the backpack and started down the steps at the side of the deck. “Come with me, Grant.”

  Grant followed. Becker went to the SUV and opened the back door and put the backpack on the seat. He opened the front passenger door and jerked his head. “Get in.”

  Grant didn’t move. Becker sighed. “You’re holding the cards here, kid,” he said. “Grant. You’re gonna get what you want, but we’re going to do it my way.” Riddell came out of the front of the house and got in behind the wheel of the SUV. Becker gestured again at the open passenger door. Moving slowly, Grant got in. Becker closed the door behind him and got in the back seat.

  “Put your seatbelt on, Grant,” he said. “Awfully bumpy roads around here.” To Riddell he said, “Take us on up.”

  Riddell started the engine and pulled out onto the road. He drove confidently and quickly. When he turned onto the dirt road that would go up to the meadow, Grant clenched his fists.

  “So what’s the deal with your mom, anyway, Grant?” Becker might have been asking about the weather. “Your old man drive her away?”

  “She died,” Grant said. “When I was born.” The SUV was taking the back roads much more smoothly than his Escort. Grant would have been impressed if he wasn’t terrified. “Mr. Becker, I hope you understand I’m not threatening you.”

  “Do I seem threatened, Grant?” Becker said. “That’s a shame about your mom. I’m sorry. Really.”

  Riddell looked straight through the windshield. He turned onto an even smaller road, barely having to slow for the corner.

  “Why did you kill Mr. Jameson?” Grant blurted. He hadn’t known he was going to say it until he did.

  “You knew him?” Becker said. “Small town, I guess. Let’s just say, Grant, that his name wasn’t always Jameson, and he didn’t always know enough to keep his mouth shut.”

  “He’s got a daughter at my school,” Grant said. Stop talking, he told himself fiercely.

  “That’s a shame,” Becker said. “He should have thought about her more a while back.”

  Grant closed his eyes and bit his lip. His fists were clenched so hard that he could feel his nails biting into his palms.

  The car stopped. He didn’t have to open his eyes to know where they were. Riddell and Becker got out and then his door opened and he felt a hand on his arm, right where Henry had grabbed him the day before.

  “Come on, kid,” Becker said.

  “I don’t want to,” Grant said. He hated the whiny sound of his voice.

  “I know,” Becker said. “But let’s not play games here, Grant. We can make you.” He reached around Grant to release the seat belt and pulled the boy out of the car. “Let’s go.”

  The three of them started toward the meadow, Riddell taking the lead. Becker kept his hand lightly on Grant’s arm, steering him.

  Grant’s legs felt like rubber. He thought about what the three of them would look like from across the meadow, where the camera had been, and almost fell down. He moaned out loud. “I’m sorry.” They were halfway across the meadow now, almost to the spot where Jameson had turned and gone to his knees.

  “Nothing to be sorry for, Grant,” Becker said. Riddell had stopped. He turned and waited for them. Grant tried to stop walking, but Becker easily dragged him forward.

  “Don’t kill me,” Grant said.

  “I’m not gonna kill you, Grant,” Becker said. “I just want you to take a look at something.” He suddenly shoved Grant forward, releasing him. Grant stumbled and fell to his knees, just missing falling directly across Fred Jameson’s body. The stench and the sight hit him at the same moment, and his eyes widened in panic.

  “Birds have been at him,” Becker said. “You get, what, turkey vultures out here?”

  Grant recoiled. He scrambled and clawed at the ground and spun to get away from the thing, lurching to his feet and almost immediately falling again. He vomited, everything in him coming out in a rush of burning bile. Clutching his hands across his stomach, he tried again to get up and run and instead fell to the side. He felt Becker’s hand on his back.

  “Okay, kid, take it easy,” Becker said. “You don’t have to look again. Take a few minutes to calm down, and we’ll take you home.”

  It took more than a few minutes. The two men stood and watched him as he slowly stopped shaking, as he wiped his eyes and mouth on his shirt, finally as he rolled to his knees and, moving like an old man, rose to his feet.

  Becker took his arm again, more gently now, and the three of them walked back to the SUV. Without being told, Grant got in the passenger seat and buckled his seat belt. Becker got in the back and Riddell got behind the wheel and started back down the hill.

  Grant slumped against the door. He felt more exhausted than he could ever remember feeling before.

  They stopped outside Grant’s cabin. He was relieved to see that his father wasn’t home yet. He reached for the door handle, but Becker put his hand on his shoulder and pulled him back.

  “Deal’s a deal, Grant,” he said. He put Grant’s backpack on the wide center console between the front seats. From somewhere in the back he produced a handgun and held it out between the seats and popped out the magazine.

  “This is a Glock 19,” he said. “It’s one of the most common handguns in America. I’m sure you can find all kinds of stuff online on how to clean it and everything.” He put the gun and the magazine into the backpack. He reached somewhere in the back seat again and held up two more magazines. “You wanted ammo, right?” He put the magazines in the backpack, zipped it up, and put it against Grant’s chest.

  Grant didn’t move. He stared out the windshield at the house he’d grown up in.

  Becker’s other hand came to rest lightly on his shoulder. The man leaned forward and spoke calmly in his ear. “This is what you wanted, Grant. Now, I might be of the opinion that your redneck cops here have never done anything in their lives but write DUIs, fish dead people out of the lake, and try to stop people from beating on their wives. And I might be of the opinion that your clever little pictures won’t be worth a damn once I’m twenty miles out of town. But I am, by God, a man of my word, Grant, and I expect you to be as well. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?”

  Grant nodded. His breath was coming in fits and starts.

  “So take the damn gun, Grant.” The fingers tightened on his neck, and the backpack ground into his chest until Grant’s arms came up and tightened around it.

  “Am I gonna be seeing you on the news any time soon, Grant?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good boy. Now get out of my car.”

  He got out and watched as the SUV drove smoothly back down toward their cabins.

  That night, his father told him that Becker and Riddell had left suddenly because of an emergency. Grant wondered if his father had ever heard Riddell speak, but he didn’t ask.

  * * *

  Monday morning Grant acted sick enough to stay home from school. He didn’t have to do much acting. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast Sunday, or slept at all overnight.

  Lying in his bed, he had tried to conjure up the visions of Saturday night, visions of Henry Spears on his knees, begging. Henry in tears, soiling himself, pledging never to say anything about Grant again. Visions of himself, cool and smooth, the gun held out in front of him, sideways like in the movies, almost casual in his consideration of Henry’s groveling pleas. He couldn’t see any of it anymore. All he could see now, eyes open or eyes shut, was Fred Jameson’s body. The smell was still in his nostrils, and he could still feel where Becker’s fingers had dug into his neck.

  And then, early in the morning, rising out of the swirl of exhaustion and nausea, came the face of Jameson’s daughter. He still couldn
’t remember her name, but a choking sob escaped him at the shame of how he’d failed her. Becker was right. It was too late to do anything now.

  As soon as Grant was sure his father was on his way into town, he retrieved the backpack from where he had hidden it in the crawl space under cabin 23. He shoved rocks into the bag until it was bulging, and he could barely zip it closed. He took one of the rowboats from the main dock and went out a couple of hundred yards from shore.

  The first few real summer guests had arrived over the weekend, and a few of the cabins bustled with activity. He could hear voices and laughter echo over the lake.

  Grant slid the backpack into the water, and watched it vanish from sight.

  A DIFFERENT HERO’S DAY

  By Anthony Franze and Barry Lancet

  For the first time it has a name: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I’ve heard of it, of course. From kids in class. From the movies. I heard my mom whispering about it on the phone the day I came home suspended from school. The mighty ADHD.

  I slip the report back into the envelope as I head down the broken escalator into the mouth of the subway. I wasn’t supposed to read it. The envelope was sealed tight, and Mom said take it directly to the office at school. But what’d she expect? I have impulse control problems—it says so right in the report.

  The platform is crowded this morning. Not the usual cast of commuters. Today it’s packed with kids my age, all wearing the same shirt. A bright orange monstrosity that reads NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL LEADERSHIP SOCIETY, WASHINGTON, D.C., SUMMIT. I’m not quite sure what this “society” is, but they look pretty pleased with themselves. I bet none of them have ADHD.

  I think of the report again. Twenty full pages, single spaced. It’s hard to understand and lists all these tests I took that day at the doctor’s: BAI, BDI-II, BASC-3, D-KEFS, HTP, MACI. Alphabet soup. But I get the gist: twenty pages of all the ways I’m screwed up.

  Kyle has deficits in executive functioning, especially in the cognitive regulation domain.

  Kyle has difficulty with attention, major limitations in ability to complete daily tasks.

  Kyle has limitations in his basic perceptual-motor and integration skills. Kyle’s past impulsivity issues suggest earlier testing was warranted.

  And so on. I don’t need a stupid report to tell me that I have struggles. I live with them every day. The schoolwork I forget to turn in, the tests I don’t finish on time, the constant feeling of restlessness. It’s annoying to see pages and pages of negatives in the report and only five sentences of “positive” aspects of the condition.

  I hear a ping and pull out my phone and read the text:

  Remember to take the report to the office. Love you!

  Wow, no emojis, a first for my mom. One of the guys in the orange shirts eyes my flip phone. Yeah, that’s right, flip phone. Mom won’t let me have a smartphone—says I don’t do well with screen time.

  I hear the kid say, “Is this a subway or time machine?” The other pumpkins laugh with him.

  I feel the breeze from the train pushing into the station. I think again about the report, the five positive lines, trying to do the math: five sentences out of twenty pages. If each page has fifty sentences, that’s one thousand sentences, making the positive-to-negative ratio …

  My calculations are interrupted by the sound of gunfire.

  1.

  “CHILDREN WITH ADHD ARE CALM UNDER PRESSURE.”

  I duck behind one of the trash bins, the large cement ones that look like they’re designed to take the blast of a bomb hidden inside. The kids are screaming. The train pulls into the station, and there’s a mad dash of orange shirts into the cars. I peer around the concrete cylinder. There’s a man curled up on the grimy platform floor, not moving. Worse, there’s another man wearing a ski mask. He’s pointing a handgun at one of the kids in the orange shirts, a girl. There’s chaos all around me, but everything seems to be in slow motion, and my head is surprisingly clear, hyper-focused. I feel calm, in control. The ski mask guy grabs the girl with one hand, tucking the gun into his pants with the other.

  The lights lining the track are flashing as students cram into the train to escape the mayhem. The masked man picks up the girl and starts to carry her away. She’s bucking and kicking, a blur of orange.

  Before I can think things through, I charge out from behind the trash bin and run toward him. He’s a big guy, a scary guy. With a gun! But he’s turned away from me, and he’s distracted with the girl.

  I take my backpack, heavy with schoolbooks, and swing it hard. It connects with the back of his skull and he stumbles forward, the girl weighing him down, pulling him off balance. They topple to the ground. She’s now trapped under him. The man clings to her as she desperately tries to pull herself free.

  I lash out with my backpack again. It smashes into his head, slamming his face into the hard tiled floor. He stops moving. I yank the girl’s hand and drag her out from under the bulky body of her would-be abductor.

  Her eyes are wide with terror, but I also see determination. As she struggles upright, the man’s hand snakes out and grabs her ankle.

  The rail car chimes. The doors are closing. If they do, we’ll be stuck on the platform with this lunatic. This armed lunatic.

  One ankle still clamped in the man’s grip, the girl twists around and stomps on his arm with her other foot. He roars in pain and releases the leg. She grabs my hand, and we race into the train car just before the heavy doors clamp shut.

  2.

  “CHILDREN WITH ADHD ARE CREATIVE THINKERS AND PROBLEM SOLVERS.”

  Once inside, an adrenaline rush slams me.

  I bend at the waist, hands on my thighs to catch my breath. I look up. The train is crowded with a sea of orange shirts. Where are all the grown-ups? Maybe they ran out of the station. Or are in other cars. I hear crying. Panic hangs in the air.

  Someone floats a water bottle in front of my face. I grab it, straighten up, and chug down the cool liquid in huge gulps.

  A bulked-out high school jock is standing in front of me, his muscles stretched against his shirt. At least it isn’t orange, like the rest of them. He’s either not with the group, or had the good sense to break the rules and nix the shirt. Or he’s absentminded like me and forgot it.

  A look of admiration flits across his pale face.

  “Nice moves out there,” he says. “You okay?”

  I nod, still breathing hard.

  The girl who was attacked is being consoled by three other girls, though she’s not crying. Her brown face is defiant.

  She sees I’ve risen and pushes past the girls. She looks at me with large brown eyes. “Thank you,” she says. She has a slight accent, but I can’t place it.

  And I’m taken aback for a moment. I hadn’t realized she was so pretty. “It was nothing,” I say, trying to sound cool, though I can feel my hands shaking now.

  The train rattles over a rough section of tracks and the kids get quiet, in shock maybe. We’ve all grown up on “active-shooter” drills at school, but the problem is we’re not at school. I think about sending my mom a text to say I’m okay, but there’s no service in the tunnels. And, besides, I don’t want to rock the flip phone in front of the girl.

  “What’s your name?” she asks.

  “Kyle,” I say, feeling my face turn red.

  She sticks out her hand. “I’m Natalia.”

  I take her hand. It’s delicate, but her grip is firm. “Are you all right?” I ask. “I mean, that guy was trying to kidnap you or something.”

  The meathead who made fun of my phone butts in. He has a ruddy face and mean eyes.

  “Who are you?” he barks at Natalia. “Why’d he try to grab you?”

  I’m surprised, since they all have on the same shirt. Shouldn’t he know her?

  Natalia doesn’t answer.

  “I asked you a question,” the kid says, a barb in his voice.

  “Lighten up, man,” the jock says.

  I n
od, backing the jock. I like him. And I don’t like bullies. “Let’s everybody calm down,” I say. I look over at all the scared faces in the car. “Everything is gonna be okay,” I add in a loud voice. “They have protocols. Security plans for things like this.”

  I’m making it all up as I go, but it sounds good. Reassuring. I see some of the anxiety in the crowd lift. Natalia relaxes, and I feel good about that.

  Then, we’re all flung forward as the train jolts to a stop.

  And the lights go out.

  * * *

  It’s dark, an inky black. Kids are wailing again. My heart is thrumming in my ears. What’s going on?

  As my eyes adjust to the gloom, I see nothing but dark piles of kids, arms and legs flailing. Then Natalia’s face is hovering over mine. She offers me a hand, and with her help I scramble to my feet.

  The kids are rising, and the crowd pushes about, a swell of bodies. A ripple in the pack knocks Natalia against me. I try to give her space because I don’t want to be a creep, but our bodies are pressed together by the surge. We exchange a look, and I manage to back off an inch or so, my thoughts ping-ponging from the smell of her hair to the terror of the darkness.

  I take hold of the railing above, and I feel her hand on the same handle. As my thoughts start to settle, the car grows quiet, everyone realizing we’re stuck a hundred feet underground, maybe more. I wonder if this is a terror attack, like my mom always feared when I started taking the subway to school. Or maybe the authorities stopped the train to get things under control. Or maybe they did it because things are out of control. Maybe there are more gunmen and they stopped the train.

  Natalia nudges me. “We need to do something.”

  It’s so dark. I keep hoping the train lights will come back on, but they don’t. “Do you have your phone?” I ask.

  I feel her moving about, and then a smartphone is jabbed into my chest.