The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  His Sunday evening phone calls with James were little more than reminders—for James it reminded him that his father was still alive, and for Jeffers that his son was little more than a beggar, begging for a donation. Tonight James called asking about some article he’d sent Jeffers regarding blood circulation. Poor circulation: that was what was wrong with Jeffers, according to James.

  They sat in silence, Jeffers listening to his son’s breath and the hum of foreign ambience at the other end of the line. He yawned. He flicked off the lamp beside the chair and sat in the dark so he could see through the window to the little, unlighted house across the road. He opened his shirt and put a hand to his chest, his heart. His feet were cold in his bedroom shoes.

  “Any more thought given to what you’re going to do with the Ashcross place?”

  “Some,” Jeffers said.

  “I spoke to the United Methodist Ministries. They said if I could get the land, they’d help me with the church.”

  “That so?”

  “Yes.”

  James called it a perfect little hill to build a church upon. For Jeffers, property had to be earned. He had earned it, bought with monies he got paid from other lands, which he bought with monies he earned originally from labor in a dust-filthy mill. Everything he owned he’d earned. He wanted his son to earn it. James prated on about church, but Jeffers couldn’t listen to him. He was angry with RD, angry with himself. He was going to have to get rid of the little man, evict him.

  “Anything else going on up there?” James asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you get the squatters out of the house?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You can’t do anything with the place until you get them out.”

  Jeffers let out a meek huh, which his son didn’t respond to. He flicked the light back on and saw himself in the blackened window with a hand across his chest as if he were taking a pledge. His face was sullen. He smiled at himself, mirthless, false. When he stopped smiling the leaden expression returned. His son wasn’t speaking. Who was his confidant? Jeffers wondered.

  “Don’t make any decision about that place before talking to me,” James said.

  Jeffers didn’t respond.

  James sighed on the other end and told his father goodnight.

  Jeffers got up the next morning surprised he’d had a good night’s sleep. His feet were warm and when he stood he could feel them—he could feel the coolness of the floor. He was still angry, but he felt good and up to running off squatters. He would have to deal with RD soon, and getting Ashcross taken care of would be one less thing to worry about. He’d foregone calling the police. In years past, just telling the squatters to leave did the trick. Sometimes he’d flash his pistol.

  When he got to Ashcross he knocked on the front door and a young woman with a gaudy bloom of red- and yellow-dyed hair answered. She was very pregnant, and she smiled so brightly that Jeffers couldn’t help thinking of a flower he wished he could pick. The young woman said her name was Lucinda, but that everyone called her Panky.

  He didn’t mention that he’d seen her before. He began by telling her that she was a squatter and that the property belonged to him. If she didn’t clear out immediately, he would have her arrested for trespassing and demand back rent by garnering future earnings.

  The young woman stood quietly as Jeffers finished speaking. After a few moments she spoke. “Someone told me and Toby it was empty and we could just stay a while until Toby got a job.”

  “I am the landlord. I charge rent on the people who live here.”

  “But it’s been empty for a long time.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “But we have nowheres to go.”

  He’d never felt sorry for squatters or tenants, but Panky’s festival hair, spray of freckles across her nose—her belly—released an unexpected shock of tenderness in his chest. He looked away, toward the trees and the catfish heads, as she continued to talk about their plucky intentions to stay briefly, have the baby, find a job for herself, find a better place. She just needed a little more time.

  He hustled his pants around his haunchless hips. The weight of the pistol tugged on his trousers. His feet were going numb.

  She was silent for a moment, and he looked back to see why she’d stopped talking. Then she said, “We could do some repairs on the house. Toby’s good with that. Let us stay here and we’ll fix it.”

  He hustled his pants again. He felt squirmy. His legs were being subsumed. His mind snarled with untethered thoughts. The woman before him, unpleasantly steady, continued to plead for more time. Her words became senseless in his ears.

  He needed her. Or someone like her. This sudden upstroke of clarity frightened him. He needed someone to relieve him of the unrelenting loneliness of the last few years, someone to care for him. He was going to need care. He was dying and she was about to give life. She couldn’t help it. Panky carried it inside her freely. He saw that.

  Jeffers’s mouth palsied inward before he stammered, “Do I look sick to you?”

  Panky took a step back. “Maybe a little.”

  Jeffers stumbled forward. “How little?”

  “Your face.”

  “What about my face?” He took another, cautious step forward.

  She parried his gaze and reached back for the doorknob.

  Something uncoiled itself within his body. For a moment, he believed he might have pissed himself, and he patted his crotch, checking for dampness. He took another step toward Panky. He murmured—he wasn’t sure what he had intended to say. He reached for his crotch, still not convinced that he hadn’t soiled his trousers. He felt his mouth gape inexplicably. Panky blurted, “Mister, I don’t know what you want.” He stumbled forward and clasped his hand on her shoulder. She smacked at his hand. His thumb bit into the meat between her collarbone and rib cage. Panky grimaced and threw Jeffers’s hand away.

  He lurched forward. “I want you to tell me what I look like.”

  “You look sick. Like an old man,” she said, swatting his hand as it reached out again.

  “I am sick.”

  “Do you need me to get help?”

  “Yes. Yes.” He then turned and left the porch—Panky already behind the door. Jeffers heard scraping as if heavy furnishings were being drawn to block entry.

  He cranked the truck and drove out of the pea-gravel drive. He wanted to howl or squall. He sensed he was running out of something. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly he felt the rubber give loose of the wheel inside the tubing.

  He clenched his jaw until his partial denture bit into his gums and he could taste blood. He belched a laugh, or maybe it was a cry. He was stunned by how empty he felt. His crotch wasn’t wet, but the numbness swarmed his legs and was advancing upward, a gripping numbness combined with a pressure that seemed to gnaw at the bone. He could no longer sense how deeply he pressed the accelerator or the brake. He let out a yowl and then wondered for a half second if there was someone else in the pickup with him. And then he did it again.

  When he got home, RD was on his porch steps, smoking a pipe.

  Jeffers hissed.

  He pulled his truck into the yard, coming as close to the porch as he could, got out, with the pistol in his hand, and walked slowly, purposefully, painfully the few steps to where RD sat, puffing, his lips drawn into a mirthful grin. All the bags of pennies were gone.

  “That yours?” Jeffers asked, snatching the pipe out of RD’s mouth.

  “Just smoking a little. There’s a god-awful smell over there and just wanted to smell something sweet for a little bit.” RD cocked his head at the pistol. “That’s a nice one.”

  “Maybe it’s that haint of yours stinking up the place. Is it house-trained?”

  “Where you been, landlord? You do some shooting?”

  “What do you want, RD?”

  “Money.”

  “Charity?”

  “Call it what you like. It’s a
ll the same to me.”

  Jeffers collapsed in his porch chair, put the pistol across his lap, and cleaned RD’s spit off the mouthpiece of the pipe with a handkerchief.

  “Smells like something died over there, Jeffers.”

  “Well, she did.” Jeffers swatted at a fly that had landed on his arm.

  RD looked at him darkly. “Something new.”

  “Maybe you ought to clear out then, RD. Maybe it’s that haint. Or it might be my wives wanting the house for themselves. Maybe they’re tired of your laying about.”

  “Maybe.” RD turned to leave. He spat a brown streak of spit in the yard. “When you’re ready to settle up, you know where I live.”

  When RD was behind the pines, Jeffers exhaled a short strangled laugh, and then another, but it was more like a gasp. He placed the pistol on the little table beside him. His right leg twitched, his left crackled as if its very veins and capillaries were bursting. He rapped the pipe on the porch railing to clean out the tobacco RD had been smoking. He took out his pocketknife and scraped the chamber clean; he lighted a match and burned the mouthpiece a little. He sighed and let his body rest for a few moments.

  He reached under the chair where he kept a pack of tobacco. Its weight was wrong—too light. Jeffers spread the bag open. Dust, ash, dirt? He wasn’t sure. He leaned over and poured out the contents. Teeth fell out. Fragments of bone. The dog’s? LaRae’s? Another copy of the funeral bill lined the bottom of the tobacco bag. A small deduction had been made for the tobacco RD had smoked and the pennies.

  A fly landed on his hand.

  By the time he walked to the squat-gable house, he was sweating and quaking with a chill. The numbness in his legs scoured him bone to flesh. He didn’t know why he hadn’t driven the short distance. Impatient with RD’s games, he’d gotten out the lawn chair and shoved his pistol in his right front pocket and descended the porch steps half blind with anger.

  He entered the front door with his own key and limped into the tiny living room, bare except for a tattered recliner and an empty TV stand with a midden of chicken bones and stale French fries littered across it. The smell of the dog was monstrous.

  In the kitchen, empty bean cans lined the counter and most of the cabinet doors hung open. A spoon, crusted and unpolished, reclined in the sink. Jeffers could hear RD moving around in the back of the house. He listened for a few moments before continuing down the hall. He passed a slender closet, empty except for a lone, bent coat hanger. He passed the bathroom, darkened and faintly urinous.

  When he reached the bedroom, he was surprised by the vision of RD seized in a blade of dust-speckled sunlight—shirtless, his bones seemingly lifted to just under his skin. It was as if Famine itself stood before Jeffers in a swirl of ash and red-brown light. RD smiled at him.

  As if heat lightning passed through the little house, he glimpsed a future and past. He reimagined the death rictus of his Ashcross renter long ago. His first wife’s closed coffin. He saw his own death—the paralysis, the absolute loss of modesty. His son, robed, offering up thanks to heaven for his father and for land. Jeffers removed the pistol from his pocket, pointed it at RD, and pulled the trigger. The little man snapped up in the dusty air and landed on his back.

  He looked down upon the little man gasping, observed his twitching, witnessed a tiny spring of blood bubble up and then flow. RD grasped at his chest, his breath already shortening.

  “What do you see?” Jeffers demanded.

  “What?” RD spat.

  Jeffers crouched over RD and moved in close enough to feel the other’s moist breath. “What do you see? ”

  A half smile, half grimace palsied RD’s face. “I see you.” He rolled over and tried to stand.

  Jeffers shoved RD back to the floor. He stepped to the window and drew the copper-colored curtains.

  “You goin to get me some help?”

  Jeffers turned from the window and in the cheap light raised the pistol and shot RD again. A shallow splatter of blood leapt from RD’s chest, a near-inaudible grunt left his mouth. Jeffers resumed his position over RD’s face.

  “And now, do you see anything?”

  RD squinted. “You got to help me.”

  “What do you see?” Jeffers roared.

  “You don’t have to pay that bill.”

  Jeffers stepped away from the spread of blood. He pointed the pistol at RD again, but then didn’t shoot. He thought he saw some change in the little man. “What do you see?”

  “You,” RD gasped. “I see you. Help me.”

  Jeffers asked him again and again what he was seeing, but it didn’t change. Jeffers was in disbelief that he was awaiting a man so given to lies as RD to tell him the truth. RD tried to crawl. Jeffers struck him, and then again, thrashing like a man at labor. The little man curled tighter and clutched his head after each blow.

  Finally both men were still. Jeffers leaned in. He turned RD’s head and held his crumpled cheek tenderly as a nurse might do. “What’s there? What do you see?”

  There was no answer. RD was dead.

  Jeffers sat for a spell in the recliner. With his index finger he pushed at the pile of dry chicken bones and withered fries. He could no longer smell the stench of the dog rotting in the chimney. He could feel his legs and feet, but knew it wouldn’t last long. He could sense the numbness creeping in again, and he removed his shoes and socks so he could rub his toes. We are perched atop nothingness, Jeffers thought, we make up heavens, but we are atop nothing. He didn’t want to go home. He called his son.

  They took his pistol, his belt, and the laces of his shoes and put him in the back of the patrol car. His son was running his mouth to the police. He couldn’t hear what was being said. He wanted his pipe, which still rested on the porch railing where he’d left it.

  He was numb up to his waist.

  As Jeffers began to close his eyes, the glimpse of a specter stopped him. In the distance, crouched between pine trees, he saw something beautiful. She was unmistakable, with an ornate flourish of hair, her round pregnant belly. She had come to his house, had come to see him, to help him. Jeffers stared at her, hoping that she would turn and look his way, see him behind the glass, give some forgiveness. He needed that gift. But she looked past him, watching James and the police. He wept dryly, knowing that he had earned nothing today. She turned to walk back into the pines. Jeffers watched the disappearing carnival of hair and the bubble of a cry burst from his lips.

  JOE DONNELLY AND HARRY SHANNON

  Fifty Minutes

  FROM Slake: Los Angeles

  THE CLIENT IS a balding, sunburned man with soft, forgettable features. Running late, he enters the office at 7:02 p.m. and nearly knocks a small Buddha statue from its wooden base. He closes the waiting room door behind him and pauses, unsure of the protocol. From behind his desk, Dr. Bell watches intently. Experience has taught him that a new client will give you 90 percent of what you need just walking through the door. Dr. Bell sees that Mr. Potter is mildly agitated—perspiration rings the armpits of his Hawaiian-print shirt and his breathing is rapid. Not unusual for a first-timer, Dr. Bell thinks. The psychotherapist smiles wryly and motions for Potter to sit on the green couch. Mr. Potter collapses into the cushions and sets his leather shoulder bag in front of him. His khaki slacks are a size behind the times.

  “How long does this last?” Mr. Potter asks. “An hour?”

  “Fifty minutes,” Dr. Bell says pleasantly.

  The new client stares at Dr. Bell for a moment, takes a deep breath, and pulls a small-caliber pistol from under his shirt.

  “Fine,” Mr. Potter says, waving the gun at Dr. Bell. “Then you have fifty minutes to live.”

  An aluminum taste floods Dr. Bell’s mouth. Trauma patients have told him this is what true fear tastes like, but until now he’d never taken them literally. Sure, every shrink has stories about unhinged patients. A client in the middle of a manic episode once threatened to scratch out Dr. Bell’s eyes with her car keys if he
didn’t introduce her to her soul mate, Johnny Depp, but nothing has prepared him for this.

  Coherent thoughts vanish in the vacuum of fear. Struggling to find a way back, Dr. Bell takes a quick inventory. The landline is across the room on an end table, and besides, what would he do with it? Propped against the wall, also out of reach, is his souvenir baseball bat, a gift from a professional ballplayer Dr. Bell helped get back on track after he washed out on coke and hookers. Should I yell, scream, lunge for the gun? Or can this guy be reasoned with? Dr. Bell wonders. Despite the beads of sweat on Mr. Potter’s upper lip, he appears relatively stable. His eyes aren’t darting and he’s not pumping his legs. His resolve appears to be genuine, possibly deadly. Dr. Bell tries to remain calm and go with what he knows. Talking.

  “Clearly, you’re quite upset. I’m sorry.”

  “You are?”

  “I don’t like to see anyone in pain.”

  “Really, Dr. Bell? Is that so?”

  Dr. Bell looks into Mr. Potter’s eyes, trying to project empathy.

  “Yes. I believe that’s why I chose this profession, Mr. Potter, and why, I suppose, I’m so highly regarded in my field.” Dr. Bell thinks he sees Mr. Potter relax just a bit. He presses on. “May I call you by your first name?”

  “No, you may not,” Mr. Potter says firmly. “I know what you’re trying to do. It won’t work. I hated seeing her in pain, too, Dr. Bell.”

  “Who, Mr. Potter?”

  “You know.”

  “Forgive me, I don’t believe I do. And needless to say, for the purposes of this discussion, that places me at a serious disadvantage. Please, tell me who you are talking about.”

  Mr. Potter crosses his legs and his pants ride up too high, revealing short black socks. Dr. Bell can see that his new client’s shin is badly bruised and a bandage covers a fresh wound. Dr. Bell takes a long look at the man’s shoulder bag. A slot on the front flap has a laminated name tag of the sort frequent fliers fill out. Mr. Potter glances at his watch, purses his lips as if about to give the time, but says nothing. Dr. Bell tells himself to stay in control of the situation.