Killer Year

by Lee Child

“You don’t know where they are,” he pointed out. “Just like the dead assholes.”

  “I could call the cops, turn you in. There’s bound to be a reward.”

  “After all this time? Insurance company’s settled that a long time ago. Besides, the stones’re worth more than any fucking reward.”

  He had stopped wheezing, and sounded pretty sure of himself for a guy that was tied up and beat half to death.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I should just go.”

  “Go? And leave the diamonds?”

  “What would I do with a bunch of diamonds? I wouldn’t know the first thing about getting rid of them.”

  More silence. The tied-up guy had run out of talk.

  “I’m out of here,” I said, and turned to go.

  As soon as I turned around I heard him come after me. I knew he would do that. He didn’t want me out there spreading the word, and was looking for a repeat of his soccer match with the guy on the floor.

  But I was ready, sort of. I turned around and let him have it with the gun. At least, I meant to. But nothing happened when I tried to pull the trigger. Maybe it was empty, or jammed, or something, or maybe the safety was on. I don’t know shit about guns.

  Anyway, no big noise, no bullet.

  The guy had stopped when I turned around. Now he said sympathetically, “What’sa matter, gun not working?”

  I didn’t say anything; my thumb was groping around the side of the gun like a caterpillar.

  “The safety, that’s like a little lever on the side of the gun?”

  “On some guns.” The guy sounded a lot closer.

  My thumb felt something, a little lever, and pushed it forward. I pulled the trigger; the gun went off. A big piece of the roof disappeared. I could see stars through it.

  The noise of the gun going off made me completely deaf, so I couldn’t hear the guy coming after me. I could see a big black silhouette coming straight at me, though, and tried to swing the gun down on it. I was too slow.

  But it didn’t matter. Because the black shape suddenly disappeared. The guy had tripped on something coming after me and done a face plant on the garage floor. He was just laying there in the dark. I couldn’t hear his wheezy breathing anymore.

  When I put the flashlight on him, I could see where his head had caught the sharp corner of some rusty metal shit lying on the floor, right in the temple. I ran the beam around, looking for what had tripped him, and saw a little sparkle, down by his shoes. I bent over and picked it up.

  A diamond. A good size one, I guess. I didn’t know much about diamonds, but it seemed pretty big.

  I shone the light around to see if I could find any more. I did. Quite a few diamonds, big ones and small ones were lying around. I picked up about a dozen out of the litter of broken wood on the floor.

  Now I was getting excited. There had to be more than just twelve diamonds. I started digging through the pile of broken beams, got all the way down to the body of the kill-simple guy without finding anything.

  Running the flashlight over the stuff I had thrown aside to make sure I didn’t miss anything, I noticed something funny. I picked up one of the broken beams for a closer look.

  The two-by-four was broken off a couple inches from the end. It looked like somebody had drilled out the end of the beam, made a big hole six inches deep. No wonder it had snapped off under my weight.

  I knocked the beam with the heel of my hand, like a ketchup bottle. Another diamond rolled out of the hole and fell on the floor.

  I moved the beam around the garage and picked up lots of sparkle on the floor. A shitload of jewels must have been hidden in those hollow joists.

  It didn’t take me long to pull down the rest of the beams. They were each just held in place with a couple nails. I even found a rusty crowbar on the floor that made the job go a lot faster.

  Every beam had had its ends drilled. Every beam was stuffed with stones—mostly diamonds, some rubies, emeralds, sapphires, some stones I didn’t know the names of. And one string of pearls.

  I never worked so hard in my life.

  I swung the flashlight across the floor to check and see if maybe one of the other guys would come to and give me shit, but they were still out. They looked like they would be out forever.

  Just then the whole world lit up. It looked like an A-bomb test had just gone off in the driveway; beams of light poured through every crack and hole in the garage walls. There were quite a few cracks; it was amazing the building was still standing.

  A megaphone voice cracked out: ‘Police’ Put down your weapons and come out of there slowly. Put your hands on your heads. If we see a weapon, we’ll fire!”

  I can take a hint. I took the gun out of the waistband of my trousers and put it down—a lot of good it did me, anyway—laid down the flashlight—there was plenty of light to see by now—and put my hands on my head.

  I walked out of there, nice and slow. I didn’t fall down, and I didn’t get shot.

  As I left I kicked the door closed behind me. It slammed; there was that weird groaning noise again, and the whole building tilted sideways. It didn’t quite go over, though.

  The cops were surprised to see me, but even more surprised when they saw the pile of jewel thieves and diamonds on the garage floor. I thought of what I could tell them that they would believe, but couldn’t think of anything. So I just told them what had happened.

  I was right about one thing—they didn’t believe me. The hardest thing for them to believe was that I was working a regular job. (Like I said, I knew some of these guys.)

  “LoDuco,” Sergeant Halligan said to me—I’d gone to high school with him—“You have a job? You expect me to believe that?”

  But when they called the contractor, the foreman vouched for me. I bet anything he would like to have said he’d never seen me before, but he backed me up.

  The housewife at the sink had kept an eye peeled, it turned out. She saw me sneak in the garage, and kept peeking through the curtains, waiting for me to come out. She saw the jewel thieves pull up, and when the ruckus started she called the cops.

  The cops couldn’t believe I had nothing to do with the jewel robbery, but I didn’t, and after a while they let me go. The newspapers had fun with the story. The tied-up guy—he lived, but probably wished he hadn’t—was wanted bad for the robbery, which everyone in town still remembered. The guy I fell on went back inside for violating his parole—after he got out of the hospital. And the guy who got kicked pretty good was still dead.

  That left me still standing. The papers decided to make a hero out of me, though I notice they never printed my picture. That might have spoiled the illusion. Still, I got some good headlines for a while.

  And the wheezy guy was wrong about the insurance company. The reward was still out. The jewelry store came through, too, big time. It seems there was a reward outstanding for the missing jewels and the missing robber, and after some deliberation they gave it all to me.

  So between the reward and the big-ass diamond I had pocketed—I I forgot to tell the cops about it in the confusion, and then I was too embarrassed to mention it—I made out all right.

  Good thing, too, because there was no way that foreman was ever going to hire me again.

  Runaway

  by Derek Nikitas

  You know from the first sentence of a story or novel if the writer has the chops to bring a tale to life. Ten seconds after I began reading Derek Nikitas’s “Runaway”—which you are about to have the pleasure of reading—I knew I was in the hands of a unique and fresh voice in fiction. As the story lived—because this one is alive and kicking—I no longer thought about the writer, but had opened my eyes into the world of the story itself.

  Derek Nikitas is one of the brightest new voices in fiction. From the opening of his short story “Runaway,” to its last breath, the mark of great things to come is in every line, every thought. It is like reading Joyce Carol Oates for the first time, or Truman Capote—the
story counts, it has meaning, the world it occupies is a world of contradiction, the irrational lives side by side with the reasonable, the dream exists in the open eyes of the awakened.

  The centerpiece of the story is a girl named Rhonda, who intrigues and attracts the two boys—Auden and Jeremy—with her mysterious presence. The suburban world looms around them, a growing gothic cathedral of the ordinary. Into this, through their secret hideaway in the earth, Rhonda appears and could just as well be a phantom of mythology as a runaway—first seen “jabbing a serrated kitchen knife at them, baring her teeth, squinting at the summer daylight flooding in,” and smelling “like Far East spice and hot asphalt.” She is an intrusive force of nature—a wilderness breaking through into the swiftly changing landscape of forest turned to suburban tract.

  The world of these two boys has changed in an instant. Their perceptions of their surroundings also transform until the story’s devastating conclusion. “Runaway” is intense and brief, and you will not forget Rhonda once you’ve met her. I hope you will not forget Derek Nikitas’s name, either—watch for his fiction. Look for it. Ask for it.

  —Douglas Clegg,

  author of The Machinery of Night and The Hour Before Dark

  The two boys pumped their dirt bike pedals, sweating and heaving through backwoods trails and into Jeremy’s yard where they found that their fort, rebuilt from tree-house debris that had fallen after an ice storm, had been breached—the blue tarp bunched aside, the padlocked hinge on their secret cellar trapdoor busted. Auden kicked aside the useless padlock and lifted open the door. There in the dark underbelly was a black girl their age they’d never seen before, and she was jabbing a serrated kitchen knife at them, baring her teeth, squinting at the summer daylight flooding in. She was down as deep as a grave, so even her head was underground and the sun didn’t shine past her shoulders.

  “Holy shit,” Auden said, but he didn’t budge even when her knife tip sliced across the empty eyelets on his hightops. Behind him, Jeremy gasped at the girl and stumbled back against a flimsy plywood wall.

  The boys were both fifteen, three weeks short of tenth grade. Just that morning they’d biked almost five miles out to a construction site, taking one pit stop at the Quickie on Rural Route 104 for tubes of Necco wafers and Slushee ice drinks that they drowned with every flavor until it turned black. Jeremy also bought Junior Mints even though, or because, he hated how much he ate, hated being able to squeeze the blubber around his belly like it was raw pizza dough. In the trees on the edge of a cabbage field they’d drunk their tongues purple, then chewed some tobacco that Auden had stolen from the store and stuffed in a cargo pocket on his camouflage shorts. They spit out the chew and then ate Neccos to kill the putrid aftertaste. For a while Auden told Jeremy that story about visiting his older brother’s college for the weekend, how Auden got drunk on Goldschläger and kicked the shit out of this college guy and fingered this chick who thought he was a high school senior. Jeremy had heard it all before, but he liked the details—gold flakes in the booze, meaty punches, the girl’s warm wetness.

  They stood on the pedals when the canal path got steep and grunted through the pain, both of them—Auden in the lead, shirtless and sunburnt, Jeremy trailing in a drenched-out HARD ROCK CAFÉ ORLANDO tee. The construction site was mostly plain orange earth tilled up by backhoes. Where weeks before there had been forest, now there were twelve cinder-block foundations scattered on twelve acres of ground. It was almost like how the boys had excavated their bunker with spades and then dragged over the old fallen tree-house carcass to conceal it.

  With Jeremy as lookout, Auden sat inside a backhoe cab and cranked the gears. He climbed down a concrete wall and scored a wayward nail gun and fired it at the dirt and at the sun. He acrobat-walked a plank laid across somebody’s someday basement, and he bounced until the plank bowed and crackled. Auden was all taut-strung tendons, visible veins, and skinned-chicken muscles. He had a rat tail worming down between his shoulder blades and a scar branded where collar meets shoulder—an inch-long slit that whitened when the rest of him got scorched.

  Jeremy stood where gravel would soon become an asphalt rink for street hockey, for darting pets, for SUV tires easing home in the workday dusk. He saw how the road would someday feed into driveways and into homes. He read the contractor’s spiel on a billboard—YOUR DREAM HOUSE IS BECOMING A REALITY! TEN ROOMS! A HUNDRED CUSTOM CHOICES! STARTING LOW 200S!—and he thought about his own house just over the county line, a half mile from the trailer park where Auden lived. It was one floor, two bedrooms, with unpainted siding, no basement, no air-conditioning, oil heat from a tank outside—hardly better than the tree house that Jeremy’s dad had built for him one year before splitting from upstate New York for higher pay and warmer winters in Virginia.

  Jeremy lifted his bike from where it was propped against a lumber pile. He didn’t want to be here anymore. He wanted to leave before one of the sleeping yellow machines sparked to life and crushed him into grist for making lawns grow green. Auden saw him retreating and trotted over, heckling, powdered with sawdust. He aimed the nail gun at Jeremy’s head and said, “You don’t deserve to live.”

  Jeremy collapsed onto the dirt and pressed his face into his shoulder.

  Auden said, “I’m just messing, dude. Look at these houses not even built and I want to burn them already. They’re gonna all look the same when they’re done, just like all the assholes who are gonna come live in them.”

  On the way home, they left the canal trail and climbed down a grassy ravine toward a shallow pond where before they’d seen tadpoles churning like black sperm. They were trespassing on someone’s marshy backyard where a lopsided swing set was sinking into the ground and where a dull brown Chihuahua yapped furiously at them, tearing up grass divots at the limit of its chain. The tadpoles were now thumb-size frogs that Auden scooped up from the reeds and loaded into his cargo pocket. Jeremy watched from the property line. Auden climbed eight pegs on a telephone pole and hung one-handed from that height, grabbing handfuls of frogs from his pocket and chucking them at the Chihuahua. The dog squealed and flipped and sneezed so hard its whole head shuddered, even though it was never exactly hit. Finally, the corkscrew spike ripped from the dirt and the dog sprinted off through the woods with that spike on the end of its chain leaping along behind it.

  That was just minutes before they discovered that their safe hideaway had been invaded by this girl from out of nowhere threatening with her knife and yelling, “You fuckers back up. I said back up!”

  “Hey, chill out,” Auden said. He showed her his palms, but he couldn’t keep from snickering and tossing wide-eyed nods at Jeremy. He wasn’t afraid. He was like a dog made to beg for a treat.

  “Who you people?” the girl asked.

  “This is our fort, man. Who’re you?” Auden said.

  “I don’t got to tell.” She was straining to peer at them over the edge of the hole, and her outstretched arm was resting on the floor now, easy enough for one of them to stomp on her wrist and pry her knife away—but Auden was closer and didn’t seem to want this to end fast or simple.

  “Look, if you’re in trouble we ain’t gonna turn you in. Right, Jere?”

  Jeremy nodded. He pressed a hand against the plywood wall, against the jutting nails he and Auden had driven in by the handfuls last summer when they’d stitched this broken refuge back together again. He pressed until the nails almost punctured his skin.

  The girl said: “You want to know what? I just busted out from juvey.”

  “Where’s that?” Auden said. “Nowhere near here.”

  “I come all this way walking and hitchhiking. For real.”

  “It’s cool,” Auden told her. “We won’t say nothing to nobody.”

  The girl snorted “uh-huh,” but she withdrew her arm anyway. Her fingers were empty when they came back up from the dark. She said, “Help me out.”

  Auden helped yank her onto the fort floor. Jeremy watched as she rose from
that trench he’d dug from scratch, that he’d stocked with empty beer bottles and broken action figures, smut mags, a liter jug of Morley’s Discount Vodka that he’d bought with lunch money from Auden’s older brother, a couple flashlights to browse the magazines with.

  She’d been inside there—this girl who was like nobody he’d ever known, not even like the couple of black kids at his school—and now she surfaced in nothing but a pair of jeans and a grimy gray bra, soiled tennis shoes for her bare feet. Her skin was such a deep shade that it was almost purple, much darker than her rusty hair twined in thin cornrows. Her lips were dry brown except where her tongue slicked them moist. She smelled like Far East spice and hot asphalt, and she grabbed him by the shoulder to right her balance. In fifteen years Jeremy had never been touched by anyone who was so alien that only her palms and her fingertips, colored like his own, seemed believable.

  “What’s your name?” Jeremy said.

  “Never mind that. What was I thinking, running off? Might as well turn me in for all I care. Look. I had to steal these pants that’s too small.” She slapped both sides of her unbuttoned waistband to show where it dug tracks into her skin. Jeremy saw that she’d also stuck her knife through a belt loop on her hip, keeping it close at hand.

  He asked, “Are you hungry?”

  “Naw. I was drinking some a that hard shit y’all got down there.”

  “You know,” Auden said, “you didn’t need to tell us you were from juvey.”

  “I ain’t. I lied. Really I took off from home ’cause I hate my dad. I been on the road five days and—shit—I don’t even know where I am, tell the truth.”

  “You’re nowhere, that’s where,” Auden said.

  “I can get you some food, really,” Jeremy said.

  “Might as well,” she said. “And call the cops while you at it, tell them you got Rhonda Peach trapped in your little elf house.”

  “Don’t do that,” Auden said, grabbing Jeremy’s wrist to prove he was serious.