Until stones rustled ahead.
He twisted toward the sound with the M4A1 leveled, ready to shoot. Senses keyed, mouth gone dry. The volume of the world cranked up into the red, the sight of it sharpened to crystal clarity. Feeling the assault rifle start to grow hot in his grasp, expended 7.62 mm shells about to do their airborne dance before clamoring to the gravel and stones below.
A mountain goat pranced onto the path, regarded him briefly, and then moved on. But the goat had done him a favor. Really. Its hooves had disturbed the ground enough to reveal fresh khuf prints stopping at a steeply angled rock face that led to a trio of cave mouths peeking out from a narrow ledge.
HK Kerr moved on. Got safe from view of the cave mouths and ducked between twin boulders to wait for nightfall. When it came he retraced his steps to the steep path rising up the rock face. Climbed it slowly, pushing with his legs and pulling with his hands.
Three cave mouths.
I’m the AQ. Which one would I hide in?
The first in the row—no. The last—also no. The middle made for the most defensible position. The middle provided the extra second that could make the difference between dying and killing.
HK Kerr headed for the middle. Looping in from the side to leave no hint of shadow or shape ahead of him. He lurched into the cave mouth, built-in major candlepower light piercing the darkness with flashbulb brightness. A cascade of bullets ready to follow down the iridescent tunnel, when his finger froze just short of squeezing.
Because the light had found a boy, twelve or thirteen, huddled against the cave’s rear with a crutch lying by his side. Grime coated his face. Fear filled eyes that looked too big for his face. He tried to speak, but all that emerged from his trembling lips was air. All the toes on his left foot were missing.
I almost shot Tiny Tim.
It would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so damn sad. Kerr’s tenth notch would have to wait.
“Sorry, kid,” he said, lowering his M4A1 and starting to turn.
Never saw the kid grab his crutch and fire it. Felt something intensely hot and then frigidly cold hit his spine even as he hit the cave floor facedown, eyes open and sightless.
The kid rose, limped toward him, supported by the crutch that held a rifle in disguise.
Never saw that coming, did you?
The kid kicked at Kerr’s body, making sure he was dead. And only then did he raise his gun-crutch enough to dig a nail into the sawed wooden butt that fit neatly under his arm.
Adding a tenth notch to the nine already in place.
Jon Land is the critically acclaimed author of thirty-two books, including the best-selling series featuring Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong that includes Strong Vengeance and the forthcoming Strong Rain Falling (August 2013). He has more recently brought his long-time series hero Blaine McCracken back to the page in Pandora’s Temple. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
THE EAR
* * *
* * *
Joe R. Lansdale
It was a third date. The first date had been dinner and a movie and a kiss good night, dropped off at her door, that sort of thing. The second they ended up in a hotel room. Tonight, she was at his place, had driven over. They were going to have dinner at his house, then go to a movie. All very casual. Nothing highly romantic. She liked that. It made her comfortable; two lovers who were starting to know each other well enough not to do anything fancy.
When she got there he let her in before she could knock, like he had been watching. The place was lit up, and she could hear the TV going and could smell cooking. He was wearing one of those novelty aprons that said “Kiss the Cook.”
“This is it,” Jim said, waving his arm at the interior of the house. It was nice. Nothing fantastic, but nice. He was neat for a guy, especially a traveling salesman who went all over the states and didn’t stay home much.
“You wore the earrings?” he asked.
“You asked me to. You like them that much?”
“Liked them when I bought them for you,” he said.
“Date three, thought they might get a little old,” she said.
“Not yet. You want a drink?”
“Sure,” she said, and followed him into the kitchen. The TV prattled on in the other room. He poured her a drink.
“You know,” she said, “we could stay here tonight.”
Jim was at the stove, stirring spaghetti in a pot of boiling water. He turned and looked at her. “You want to?”
“You got some movies?” she asked.
“Yeah, or we can order one off the TV.”
“Let’s do that, and then let’s go to bed. You can fix me dinner tonight and breakfast in the morning.”
“That sounds fine,” he said, smiling that killer smile he had. “That sounds really nice.”
“I hoped you’d think so,” she said. “Bathroom?”
“Down the hall, around the corner to the left.”
She walked down the hall and turned the corner, opened the door to the left. She had missed the bathroom. It was the bedroom. She started out, saw a dresser drawer slightly open. He was neat, but not that neat. She, on the other hand, had a thing about open doors and drawers. She slipped over quickly, started to push it shut, saw what was blocking it. An ear.
Taking a deep breath, she thought, surely not.
Sliding the drawer open, she got a better look. There was a string running through the ear. She pulled it out of the drawer. There were a number of dried ears on it. They had a faint smell, a combination of decay and the smell of pickles; they had been in some kind of preservative, but the flesh was still losing the battle. Something sparkled on one of them.
“It’s from the war,” he said.
She turned, gasping. He was standing in the doorway, his head hung, looking silly in that apron.
“I’m sorry,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say.
“My brother, he was in Afghanistan. Brought it home with him. This will sound odd, but when he died, I didn’t know what to do with it. I kept it. Thought I had it put away better. I should throw it away.”
“It’s pretty awful,” she said, lowering the ears back into the drawer, pushing it shut.
“Forgive me for having it, for keeping it.”
“He died in the war?”
“Cancer. Came home from the war with his collection, those ears. Come on, forget it. I’ll throw them out.”
She went back to the kitchen, and later they ate dinner. When he went into the den to pick a movie, she slipped out the front door and drove home, trying to remember if she had told him where she lived, then thinking, even if she hadn’t, these days it wasn’t so hard to find out. Easy, really.
In her house, sitting in the dark with a fresh drink, she felt stupid to have fallen for Jim so quickly, to not know him as well as she should have. A guy like that wasn’t a guy she wanted to know any more about.
She finished her drink and went to bed.
In the middle of the night she was startled awake, sat up in bed, her face covered in a cold sweat.
She remembered Jim said on their first date he was an only child, but tonight he said he had a brother, said the ears were from Afghan warriors. Several thoughts hit her like a barrage of arrows. She hadn’t just awakened. She had heard something moving in the house; that’s what brought her awake with her mind full of thoughts and questions. That sound was what woke her up. And in the moment she realized that all those ears had been small and one of them had something shiny on it. She knew now what it was. She had only glimpsed it, but now she knew. A woman’s earring. Not too unlike those she had worn tonight.
Something banged lightly in the other room, and then her bedroom door opened.
Joe R. Lansdale has written thirty novels and numerous short stories. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, writer in residence at Stephen F. Austin State University, and has had several stories filmed. His novel The Bottoms won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best N
ovel in 2000. His most recent novel is Edge of Dark Water from Mulholland Books.
THE IMPERFECT DETECTIVE
* * *
* * *
Janice Law
Mike Brinley closed his notebook and turned to me. “I think that will do it, Chief. I’ll run the piece next Thursday for your last day, and I’ll drop off some extra copies for the grandkids.”
“Thanks, Mike. I’m sure you’ll make me sound like the Valley’s answer to Sherlock Holmes.”
He laughed at that. “Your record’s pretty damn good. No perfect crimes in Fisher Valley, eh?”
That was a question I didn’t need to answer, but I heard myself say, “There are no perfect crimes, only imperfect detectives.”
He had the notebook out again, quick as a lizard’s tongue. “Perfect,” he said as he scribbled. “Just the right note to end on.”
We shook hands, and I watched him drive away: a good friend and a good reporter, off with a quote more apt than he could imagine. But true, and standing there on the porch in the summer sunshine, I was once again back at the start of my career, bouncing over the frozen ruts of a farmyard to find the corpse of Charlie Dunmore, a bastard and a bully who had gone to his final reward via a chunk of ice.
That’s what his wife, Edith, had screamed over the phone. “Come, come right away. The ice hit him. I can’t move him. Please.”
So there I was, standing in the Dunmores’ farmyard. Icicles hanging three and four feet long off the house. Ice backed up in all the gutters and hanging off the cowshed. Ice underfoot and wet snow in the air.
I walked around the side of the house to where Charlie was lying under an old tartan rug. Footprints everywhere—man, woman, and dog—plus a trail where she’d tried to move him. I uncovered him and saw a scrape across his temple and found blood on the back of his head. Two icicles. Odds of that? I noticed chunks of ice now half buried in the snow. The light was fading, and I thought it was going to be mighty hard to tell which ones had hit him.
“He was trying to clear the gutters.” I turned to see Edith Dunmore. She was a slight woman who had once been pretty. Now she was thin and pale with a darkening bruise under one eye and a couple of missing teeth.
Inside I called for the ambulance. Frozen as he was, Charlie wouldn’t fit in the backseat of my cruiser. Then I sat at the kitchen table and took her statement. She’d been busy with the day’s baking because the hotel wanted extra for the holidays. Charlie said he’d try to clear the gutter, and she hadn’t noticed how long he’d been gone. Then she went out and found him.
As we talked, she iced trays of streusel and coffee cakes. I noticed the big earthenware bowls and the heavy pots on the stove. Edith Dunmore was slight, but she had strong arms and capable hands.
I looked at her black-and-white spaniel, too. It lay on a blanket in the corner, whimpering and licking its right front leg. Broken, I guessed, from the way it was limping. I was being the perfect detective, and I had a little scenario all worked out: Charlie had hit her once too often—or maybe he was hurting the dog—and she’d followed him out, picked up one of the fallen icicles, and let him have it. That was the perfect detective’s scenario, though I didn’t yet see how to prove it.
Edith finished the icing and cut me a thick slice of one of the pecan cakes. I should mention that she was the best baker west of Paris, France. The perfect detective hesitated.
“Go to waste anyway,” she said. “Charlie never let me drive the truck. No way I’ll get this stuff to the hotel.”
I took a few bites, and I could feel perfection slipping away. “I could drop them off.”
“I’d sure appreciate it,” she said, and she went over to comfort the dog.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He broke his leg. Ice got him.”
I made up my mind right there. If she’d been coldhearted, she’d have made something up or kept him out of sight. But now there was doubt, and the imperfect detective decided to run with scenario two, where Charlie Dunmore went out and started pulling off ice and got hit in the temple and cracked the back of his head when he fell.
I tried that scenario on Doc Wilson later after I had delivered the various pastries to the hotel and the dog to the vet. We were in the morgue, looking down at the earthly remains of Charlie Dunmore, a man hard on his wife, his dog, his stock, his neighbors.
Wilson adjusted his thin, wrinkled face a couple different ways until he found an expression that suited him. Basically he was thinking over the case. We could have an investigation without a weapon and no evidence except two bumps on the head, an investigation that would probably go nowhere and leave a bad taste and very likely deprive us of one of the few reliable pleasures of the town, namely Edith Dunmore’s pastries.
Or we could abandon all hopes of investigative perfection and come in with death by misadventure. After a few moments, Wilson said, “Unlikelier things have happened,” and signed the certificate.
Behind me the door opened, and my Edie looked out. “Mike gone already? I have his favorite muffins.”
“Deadline to meet.”
“Any interesting questions?”
“He asked if I’d ever known a perfect crime.”
A pause, something in her eyes. I’d never asked her, and she’d never raised the subject. But now I knew.
“And what did you say?”
“I said that there are no perfect crimes, only imperfect detectives.”
She gave the slightest smile. Edie has a partial plate now and a better smile than she had at twenty-five. “I think that’s about right,” she said.
Janice Law’s first novel, The Big Payoff, was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Her short stories have appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense, Riptide, and Still Waters. Her most recent story collection is Blood in the Water and Other Secrets. Her most recent novels are The Lost Diaries of Iris Weed, Voices, and The Fires of London. She lives with her husband, a sportswriter, in Hampton, Connecticut. Visit her website at JaniceLaw.com.
MICHAEL COALHOUSE
* * *
* * *
Adrian McKinty
Michael Coalhouse’s war against the council began when the refuse collectors refused to empty his yellow recyclable bin because it contained nonrecyclables. When he got home from work at the foundry, he found a notice pinned to the bin explaining that it “contained a nonrecyclable plastic bag” into which Coalhouse had thrown all his old beer bottles.
He called the council’s help line, but it was busy. He left messages on the council’s Facebook page, but got no response. On the fourth day, he went down to the council offices on High Street and was told that he needed to make an appointment by e-mail. He tried to make an appointment by e-mail, but the municipal website was experiencing technical difficulties. He went to Councillor Smith’s constituency surgery and told her all about his problem, but she sided with the refuse collectors and gave him a leaflet on eco-consciousness.
On the seventh day, the binmen came back and again did not empty his bin. On the eighth day, Coalhouse attended the meeting of the council’s Sustainability and Waste Management Subcommittee. He demanded to be heard, but he was tossed out by security. At work the next day, he was formally cautioned by a police officer. When the cop had gone, the foreman said that he didn’t want any troublemakers and Coalhouse was “let go.”
Coalhouse brooded. On the fourteenth day, his bin was again not emptied. He drove to the council offices and protested. He was accused of “making a threatening gesture” and was asked to leave. He did so. When he got home the police were waiting for him, so he circled the block and drove out to his storage locker near the reservoir. He filled fourteen vodka bottles with petrol and put a rag in each of them. That night he firebombed the council offices and left a message with the local paper letting them know who had done it and why.
; He lived in the bush for the next eleven months, coming into the city only to mount lightning guerrilla strikes and get supplies. He attacked the recycling plant on Gaia Street and destroyed the council vehicle depot on Evergreen Terrace, an incendiary attack that wiped out the city’s entire fleet of bin lorries. He sank a garbage barge anchored in the bay by means of a homemade limpet mine. He released baby alligators into the storm drains and used on-site methane to blow up the city’s main sewage plant. Two days after that outrage, Mayor Cunningham returned home from the Single Mother Initiative Open Day to find his house on fire and his garden gnomes beheaded.
You didn’t need to be Foucault to read the death-spiral subtext.
Peace feelers were sent out over Community Action Radio. Helicopters dropped leaflets on the forest where Coalhouse was suspected of being holed up. Coalhouse agreed to surrender himself if his yellow bin was emptied and Jimmy Carter, Stephen Hawking, and Fiona Apple were brought in as official witnesses. Only Carter was available, and Coalhouse said that that would do.
Coalhouse surrendered the same night and was remanded in custody without possibility of bail. He faced multiple counts of arson and criminal damage and a possibility of thirty years in prison.
The recyclable bin was emptied on the fifteenth. Jimmy Carter officially certified the fact a day later.
THIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED ON ADRIANMCKINTY. BLOGSPOT.COM.
Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He emigrated to the United States in the early nineties, finding work as a barman, gypsy cab driver, and construction worker. His first novel, Dead I Well May Be, was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and his novel Fifty Grand won the 2010 Spinetingler Award. His most recent book is The Cold Cold Ground, the first book in a prospective trilogy about DS Sean Duffy.
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