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

by Kelley Armstrong

  Instead, Short Guy rushed me.

  I think he was reading the scene from an adult perspective. Ray, the family bodyguard, has been with the Palmieris for years, so they’d know everything about him. They’d know he was a doofus. On the other hand, the new-hire bodyguard looks like a kid to them. Which I am. So, Short Guy figures, why pull a gun? Why make the witness statements more interesting?

  Instead he comes at me, a nasty smile breaking out on his face. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Tall Guy grab Ray by the shirt and shove him out of sight around the curving face of the castle wall. The tourists murmured. Not yelled, not screamed. There was a camera and a professional camera crew, and this looked like the sort of thing you’d see in movies. They probably had no idea this was what it was. Or they thought it was part of the shoot.

  “Shoot” being an unfortunate word, come to think of it.

  I have to admit, though, that as soon as these guys made the scene my heart rate jumped to something like machine gun fire and sweat broke out all over my body. I’m tough, sure, but definitely human, and this was scary as hell.

  Uncle Bear once told me, “Let your body get scared, young’un. Can’t help that. But keep your foot on the gas and the radio turned all the way up. After that it’s all rock ’n’ roll.” Not exactly Zen, but the meaning stuck with me.

  Short Guy reached for me. And that was what I was hoping for.

  I’m big for my age—six feet two and change, and I clock in at two oh five. Big enough. But in a fight it isn’t big that really matters. What matters is quick.

  And I have a whole lot of quick.

  It’s in the genes. The Quinns are all quick. Even Uncle Bear, who—like the grizzlies he resembles—is always faster than you think he’ll be.

  Short Guy grabbed for my shirt, and I moved in on him, slapped his hand away and down, and hit him in the nose, the throat, the short ribs, the solar plexus, and the nose again. At that speed, you don’t go for a knockout blow. You make the guy feel like he’s fallen into an industrial dryer filled with rocks. You hit him from every possible direction, and you keep hitting him until the bright lights in his eyes go dull and that crap-eating smile he wears cracks apart and his knee joints turn to overcooked rigatoni. Then you hit him some more. You don’t want to ever find out if he’s a good fighter. You don’t want him to show you why he won a Golden Gloves or an MMA belt. You want him to be very surprised and filled with personal disappointment as he slides into unconsciousness. That’s the Quinn Family Method. It works for Mom and Dad, for Uncle Bear and Aunt Dix. It works for Ayleen, and now I was finding out if it was going to work for me.

  Suddenly, Short Guy was falling before I was done hitting him.

  But out of the corner of my eye, I saw that pretty much the same thing—in reverse—was happening to Ray. Tall Guy was handing Ray his butt. Raw, on a platter. The only thing keeping Ray from falling was the other guy holding him up so he could keep hitting him.

  In my mind, Dad was saying, Don’t stop to admire your work. Move, move, move.

  So I moved. I was running before Short Guy hit the deck. I tapped the earbud I wore and yelled the right code phrase to call in the cavalry. Today’s call phrase was “hopscotch,” and I yelled it ten times as I ran.

  Carlo was still standing there, shocked and wide-eyed, no sign of understanding on his face, not even the beginning of a move toward safety. He even still held his plastic sword. The models had bolted; so had the photographer and most of the crowd. Not Carlo. Kids, y’know?

  Ray did one thing right. While he was in the process of falling down and passing out, he managed to cling desperately to Tall Guy’s arm for about a half second. That was fine. It was long enough to tilt Tall Guy over. It kept him from using that half second to whip open the flaps of his Hawaiian shirt and pull his nine.

  It gave me time to get there.

  Tall Guy shook loose of Ray and saw me, evaluated me, looked past me to see his buddy lying in a gurgling heap, reevaluated me, and went for his gun.

  By then I was there, by then I was in his face.

  I jumped the last few feet, and while I was in the air, I pivoted and put every ounce of my body weight into a hook punch that should have decked this guy and given his whole family a headache for a month.

  Tall Guy had game, though.

  He spun with the punch, riding the force of it, turning all the way around and using that spin to put some real oomph behind a spinning backfist that very nearly took my head off. My left eye felt like it had been spooned out of my head.

  The guy could hit. Uncle Bear would have been impressed.

  Then Tall Guy tried to prove how really tough he was by throwing a few thousand other punches at me. It seriously sucks when someone tries to do to you what you just did to someone else. It steals your thunder.

  I backpedaled, using forearms and shoulders and elbows to block the shots. It hurt, but punching all that bone had to hurt him, too. I didn’t wait to look for it in his eyes, though. I pivoted my hip and tagged the outside of his knee with a side-thrust kick.

  And that was the ball game.

  In the movies, guys shake off all sorts of kicks, but here’s the news: You don’t shake off a solid kick to your knee. You fall down and try to remember what the deductible is on your health plan, and hope you know a really good physical therapist.

  I had to kick him again, though, because he realized that he could still use a gun with a sprained knee. He could not, as it turned out, use it while unconscious. The third time I kicked him wasn’t really necessary, but it felt really, really good.

  I wheeled around, looking for Carlo, making sure he was still okay.

  And that’s when I heard the roar of the car engine.

  Carlo was looking past me. Staring. Then screaming.

  All in a microsecond, and I turned to see the white SUV slam through a decorative chain barrier, smash aside a wire-mesh trash can, and race at Carlo at fifty miles an hour.

  5.

  There are moments when time seems to slow down. You read about that; you hear people who have been in combat or crisis talk about it. Time slowing down. I know that it’s probably some physiological thing. Adrenaline or something. This was the first time it ever happened to me.

  I saw the car coming. It was a white blur but oddly slowed inside that strange envelope of a stalled microsecond. I saw Carlo, standing there, too scared and confused to run. Staring at the driver, his eyes wide and mouth open. His finger pointing. I saw Ray, the useless payroll bodyguard on his hands and knees, too dazed and hurt to get out of the way. His mouth was open, too, and I could hear him yelling at Carlo, telling him to run.

  Ray knew he was going to die. Knew it. And he was using his last breath to warn the kid. That stabbed me right through the heart. It also made me furious.

  And, bang, suddenly time caught up and then sped up, ripping apart the moment and making everything happen at once.

  I was moving, running, scooping up one of the decorative rocks, pivoting, throwing it with all the power I could muster, like a shortstop throwing a runner out at first. Then hooking an arm around Carlo, snatching him off the ground, moving, moving, moving.

  We fell, rolled, and I covered him with my body as if that could somehow protect him from the grinding horror of the wheels.

  Sounds smashed together in the air.

  Glass shattering.

  A scream—weirdly high-pitched.

  The awful sound of the car hitting Ray. Crushing him. Destroying him.

  A fragment of silence.

  And then the horrible whump as metal and plastic struck something that rang like a church bell.

  I turned, still holding Carlo in my arms, and saw the car. The whole front end was wrapped with equal force around the statue of Captain Blackbeard. And once more time seemed frozen. Except that it wasn’t.

  All of the moving parts had simply stopped moving.

  Ray was gone, and I was thankful that I couldn’t see him beneat
h the totaled SUV. The crowds were ringed around us, staring in shock. Though, sick as it was, half of them had cell phones out and were taking photos or videos. Probably posting them to Twitter and Instagram or Snapchat.

  Beside me, Carlo was staring at the wreck. At the hole in the windshield I’d punched with the rock. At the face we could both see. Bloody but visible. The third guy had been small, and I figured that’s why he was the driver and not part of the pickup team.

  I was wrong. About that, and a lot of other things.

  Carlo stared at the driver’s face. At a face he knew so well and should have been able to trust. He said a word. A name. “Valeria…”

  But his sister was past the point of responding. Or explaining. Or … anything.

  The kid put his face in his hands and began to cry.

  6.

  My uncle Bear came running. He arrived less than two minutes after I called.

  The cops showed up right after. Then my folks. Then the Palmieris.

  They tore Carlo away from me and held him as if he was going to suddenly fly off the planet. They barely looked at the car and did not, as far as I could tell, look at the face of the driver.

  Valeria.

  I stood with my family. Mom hugged me. Dad put his hand on my shoulder—which was a lot of emotion for him to show. Uncle Bear wrapped his arm around me and kissed the top of my head. He, of all of them, had lived in the skin I was in now. He’d been in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  He leaned down and spoke very quietly so that only I heard him.

  “You saved that kid’s life, Dylan. Hold on to that. You hold on to that because it’s going to matter. You’re gonna need it. Do you know why?”

  I couldn’t speak at all. I just shook my head.

  “’Cause you just crossed a line that most people never do. You killed someone. Yeah, I said it, and you have to hear it, because from right now that’s always going to be part of who you are, kiddo. You’re a killer.”

  My mouth was dry as dust.

  “But listen to me, Dylan, and you listen good,” continued Uncle Bear. “Being a killer isn’t the definition of who you are. It’s something you did. Something you had to do. You’re not a monster, and I know you’re going to have some long, bad nights thinking you are. But it’ll never be true. Not unless killing is something you get your jollies from. Or unless it doesn’t mean a dark thing to you, like taking out trash. If it ever turns into that, you go running, kid. You go talk to me or to someone, because it’ll mean some wiring’s come loose.”

  “How … how…,” I began. Stopped. Tried again. Fighting tears. Fighting how big this all was. “How do you … let it be real? I mean, how—”

  “I know what you mean, Dylan,” he said gently. We watched them cutting open the car to retrieve the body. Guys were there with jacks, too, to lift the car to get to Ray. “Here’s the thing. It’s all about perspective, it’s about the practical details, you dig? This was Valeria trying to get rid of Carlo so she’d inherit. Basic greed. The goons were probably someone she found out about online. She had money, so anything can be arranged. We’ll find out when we interrogate them. They’ll talk. There’s no such thing as honor among thieves. And for the record, she slipped something into Ayleen’s Diet Coke, and she’s still unconscious. Okay, but out. That’s on Valeria, too. The real villain here is Antonio. He’s a greedy, small-minded, vindictive piece of whale crap, and the things he did twisted his daughter into this shape. Doesn’t make her less a villain, but makes him complicit. That’s a fact.”

  “But I—”

  “You did what you were here to do. You stopped the bad guys and you saved a little kid’s life. And you did that after everyone, me included, told you this was a nothing gig and that it was just you out here with training wheels. We were wrong. Should have been one of us working the kid’s detail. So, we have to own this, too. Just like we got to own what this is going to do to you. That’s on us. We put you in this situation. But, Dylan … you stepped up. You saved the kid. Carlo’s maybe the only innocent in the whole freaky family. And you saved him. You hear me? You saved his life.”

  “I killed Valeria.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “you did. And she killed Ray and—here’s the truth of it—she killed herself by forcing you to do what you did. That’s on her.”

  I pushed away from him and walked over to the car and watched them remove a slim, pretty girl who I’d killed. I could feel my heart shift, dropping to some lower place in my chest, and I knew that it would stay there. Forever.

  Then I looked around. At my folks, seeing them as different people now. For all their experience in the trade, I’d now crossed a line and stood in a different place than they did. I was a different kind of person than they were. And I always would be.

  I looked at the Palmieris. Hating them. Feeling sorry for them, too. I saw Carlo watching me from inside the circle of arms that held him. We stared at each other for a long time. He gave me a small, sad little smile, and I gave him one back. He, too, had moved into a different place. People had died for him. Maybe something like that wouldn’t matter much to his father, but I’m pretty sure I knew how it would affect Carlo. Sometimes apples do fall pretty far from the tree.

  I’d killed someone.

  I’d seen someone murdered, too.

  I looked around. At the sky, the sea. The day was the same, but the world was different.

  In five days, school was going to start. I’d have to go back and try to be me again. Dylan. High school kid. I wondered what Emily Ito would see when she looked at me? What would the other kids at school see?

  I had no idea.

  There was a breeze off the ocean, and I moved to where it would wash over me.

  The only thing I knew for sure about things was that I now knew what I was going to do when I graduated. After high school, after college, I was going to go into the family business. Carlo was alive because I was here. The thought of what would have happened if I wasn’t here was so big, so ugly.

  I was here, though.

  Someone else might need me to be there, too. And someone else after that.

  That was a broken thought. It was damage talking.

  It was real, though. I could feel Uncle Bear watching me. Being afraid for me. Willing me to be okay with this.

  I turned and nodded to him. I touched the little silver pin on my shirt. The family symbol. The solar cross. He saw me do it. I saw him wipe a tear from his eye with the back of his hand.

  He touched his pin, too.

  Mom and Dad didn’t see any of this. But, really, they weren’t meant to.

  THE THINGS WE DON’T TALK ABOUT

  By Stephen Ross

  My mouth was full of dirt and I was going to die. I tried to scream and choked on the earth. I had been buried alive. I was going to die.

  I woke up.

  But I didn’t wake up.

  I was caught between asleep and awake. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even open my eyes. My mind was severed. A fury of energy rippled through my body as I tried to shake myself fully awake. I could hear the bedsprings. I could hear a low, guttural cry crawl from my throat. I fought like an animal caught in a trap.

  The alarm clock on my phone went off and I immediately opened my eyes.

  Six. Daybreak slid through my bedroom window.

  I sat up.

  I was hyperventilating. My hands were numb. I hadn’t had sleep paralysis since I’d hit puberty.

  My name is Dean. People call me Dee. You can call me whatever you want. This is a story about Birdy, me, and Frank; Birdy could run faster than me and Frank, and I would do anything for him. Anything.

  It all began a week ago, when my girlfriend, Cristina, messaged me:

  She didn’t reply.

  I checked her status: Cristina is in a relationship with Frank.

  I threw the phone at my bedroom wall. My mom called out something from another room. I needed to get my own place. I was eighteen. I had a job.


  My relationship status: It’s complicated AF.

  Frank.

  Frank was dangerous, if you didn’t know him. He was a hurricane of heterosexual rage wrapped up in a tight body of flesh, blood, and bone. Intense. Silent. Staring. And if he didn’t know you, you sure didn’t want to mess with him. A kid called me a name once. Frank broke his nose. I loved his rage; it came from the same place as mine: rejection.

  I had known Frank since grade school; same with Birdy. The three of us were veterans of the Education System of the United States of America, and we could run. We had been the stars of our high school track team. Glory days.

  Frank and me had jobs at the Cooper Fulfillment Center, south on the I-65. Birdy was interning at the mayor’s office; after the summer, he was going to college to study political science. The high school yearbook had said he was the most likely to succeed. It had said nothing about Frank and me. We had gotten expelled.

  Welcome to Divine, Alabama.

  Welcome to my shitty life.

  Headlamps lit up my bedroom wall through the open window, and I heard the tires of Birdy’s Volkswagen minivan on the short gravel driveway that led up to my mom’s house. We lived on the edge of town in a small three-bedroom; just the two of us. My dad walked out one day and never came back. I have zero interest in where he went.

  Everyone knew a Birdy, everyone wanted to be with a Birdy; Birdy was the irresistible guy who made everything he did look easy. He lived effortlessly.

  He climbed out of his minivan and walked over. He leaned in through the window.

  “You doing anything?”

  “Nope.”

  Birdy had blue eyes like pale sapphires, and a welcoming smile, with full lips you always wanted to kiss.

  “Get in the van. I have something important to tell you.”