The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17

by Lisa Scottoline

  After an hour’s more wandering, Burke returned to his rooms, lit a lamp, and sat at his desk. The slaves were frightened of something—he could see that in their emptied gathering places and in the eyes of the bozal. But what was the connection to Marcita’s disappearance? He thought of the head found outside the city, and of the street where Marcita disappeared. He could sense a tie between them, but try as he might, his brain failed to take hold of it. Outside, the sereno called the second hour of morning. Burke took a cigarette from the canister on his desk—Fernandita had just restocked them with the don’s money—and struck a match. As he brought the light to the cigarette tip, he stopped, letting the match burn down and singe his fingers. The labels in Marcita’s room—the shop in the Calle O’Reilly with the too-high prices—the cigarette factory next to the field where the slave was found. He recalled now that its owner, Pedroso y Compañia, had gone bankrupt two months before. Theirs was the Gallitos brand, theirs the shop where Marcita must have disappeared.

  “Fernandita!” he shouted. “Fernandita!”

  After the fourth shout she emerged from her closet, cursing and blinking.

  “Go to the captain-general’s palace. He’ll be up, playing cards. Give him this message.” As Burke spoke, he quickly scrawled a letter telling the captain-general he was acting in the affairs of Don Hernán and asking him to send troops to the Pedroso y Compañia factory without delay.

  “Why? What’s happening?” Fernandita looked about the room, as if someone else might be there.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Burke said, the unlit cigarette still in his mouth. He shoved the letter in Fernandita’s hands. “But I’m going to find out.”

  At that he left his rooms and ran through the dark streets until he found an idle volanta waiting near the cathedral. Dropping a handful of reales into the postilion’s palm, Burke yelled for him to drive to the Calle de la Soledad, outside the city. “Race the devil!” he shouted. Then he threw himself into the volanta’s seat and the man took off.

  They came past the field where the head had been found, then to an empty lane just off the paseo—the Calle de la Soledad. The volanta pulled to a stop, and Burke got out, telling the driver to wait. The white macadam glowed in the light of the moon, and the air carried the scent of meat cooked over a fire. A night bird called from a far line of trees, but otherwise everything was still. Just up the lane stood the three factories Burke had seen earlier that day when he’d come to inquire about the murder. The snuff mill lay dormant, and Burke stepped quickly, carefully past its low, silent hulk. Just beyond it was the yard of the cigarette factory. He halted. The factory’s yard was untended, overgrown with weeds and littered here and there with bottles, but light shone through the cracks in its shuttered windows, and once he stilled his own breathing, Burke could hear the murmur of men talking.

  He knew he should wait for the captain-general’s soldiers, but he couldn’t hold himself back. What were these men up to? Might Marcita still be alive, trapped inside? He crept to one of the windows and edged open a shutter and looked. In the factory’s single hall, where women once worked rolling cigarettes, a black-skinned body hung from a hook. It was being stripped by one man while two others worked at one of the old rolling tables, turning a grinder. The grinder jammed and one of the men working it kicked at the table while the other shouted. The man stripping the body, cutting meat from the legs, just whistled. Burke recognized him as the corpulent, red-haired tobacconist from the Gallitos shop.

  It took Burke a moment to understand, and once he did he felt his reason trickle away. He couldn’t turn away—the ghastly sight held him. Instead, without noticing, he leaned forward. His hand was still on the shutter, and it creaked. At that all three men looked up from their work. Burke let go of the shutter and it creaked again, and now they saw him. Burke tried to move—tried to run—but his legs felt suddenly weak. A lightness was washing forward from the back of his skull. The men at the grinder snatched knives from the table, and the one stripping the body picked up an ax. Burke watched, paralyzed. He could hear the cannibals’ footsteps—they were out of the factory now, on the grass, closing. At last Burke beat back the lightness, pulled his feet from the morass, and ran. Just as he made it to the volanta, he heard the trumpets of the captain-general’s troops. The men chasing him turned, but two cavalrymen appeared in the street and ran them down. Burke, wishing to see nothing more, ordered the volanta’s driver to take him home.

  “In the sausage!” Don Hernán repeated, his face green. He was sitting in Burke’s bedchamber, slumped in a cane chair. “Oh, my poor cinnamon! To think I—” He stopped. It seemed for the moment he could not bring himself to mention the sausage again.

  Burke lay on his cot. When he’d returned to his rooms, he’d felt the lightness return, a sickness overtaking him, and he’d not been able to stand or sit. Now, morning having come, he was explaining his findings to the don. Fernandita stood by the door folding and refolding a cleaned sheet as she listened.

  “The shop was a ruse. That’s why the price on the cigarettes was so high, to keep people away. Marcita must have wandered in, looking for new labels for her collection, and that’s when they took her.”

  What he’d seen through the window of the cigarette factory flashed again before Burke’s eyes.

  “All of Havana eating slave flesh!” the don said. “Horrible.” When the don first arrived, his skin was tinged green. But already he seemed to be recovering a little. “What I can’t understand is why. I’ve thought over the numbers. There couldn’t have been much money in it, not nearly as much as the slaves were worth in the field.”

  “For that,” Burke said, “I’m afraid I’ll never have an answer.”

  Once the don had left, Burke called to Fernandita to help him to the window. She held him by the arm, and he pushed aside the curtain and looked out. The sun shone brightly on the harbor ships, ignorant of all that had just passed.

  In the moment of his discovery, along with horror, along with disgust, Burke had felt relief. In the end, he had been working to save slaves, not trap them. But in the light of the morning his relief had begun to crumble.

  “I took this case before I knew the slaves were in danger,” he said now. “I didn’t like it, I fashioned excuses, but I was willing to hunt Marcita for pay.”

  Below him a bell was tinkling—a procession of priests taking the viaticum to a dying man. He turned back from the window. Fernandita, grown uncomfortable, smiled uncertainly up at him.

  “Oh, I think I shall never loose these villains from my mind,” he said, and, shaking free of Fernandita’s hand, he stepped back toward his cot. In taking this case, had he become the equal of the men he caught, had he stepped irrevocably away from the goodness he’d not long ago imagined his? This he wondered as he sat. To these questions, too, he worried he’d never have an answer.

  HANNAH TINTI

  Bullet Number Two

  FROM Tin House

  Hawley hadn’t been in the desert since his mother died. That was four years ago. The hospital had tracked him down with the news and he’d taken the bus all the way from Cheyenne to Phoenix. They made him identify her body in the morgue. The place was dank and cold compared to the heat outside and smelled of chemicals and bleach. He stood underneath the fluorescent lights and they rolled his mother out of a drawer in the wall.

  She’d been dead for more than two weeks. Her face had sunken in and most of her teeth were gone, but she still had that square chin and those long, delicate fingers, the ones he remembered running through his hair in the dark when he was a kid. He buried her alone in a cemetery near the hospital. Then he took the bus back to Cheyenne.

  Now Hawley had a car of his own, an old Ford Flareside, and he opened up the engine on the highway, the windows rolled down and the blazing hot air channeling through, the sand blowing against his skin and the red cliffs of Arizona stretching into the distance. Behind his seat were a twenty-gauge Remington shotgun, a 9mm Beretta, a Sig S
auer pistol, a crossbow tire iron, his father’s rifle from the war, and $7,000.

  He’d gotten a postcard from his old partner, McGee, who was working in Colorado at an Indian casino. McGee had dreams of buying a boat and sailing it down the East Coast, but he had a bad habit of burning through his money fast. Now he had an angle for ripping off the casino, and he’d asked Hawley if he wanted in.

  It was night by the time Hawley crossed into the Four Corners. He’d taken Route 191 to 160, and for more than an hour his was the only car for miles. When he looked in the rearview it was nothing but blackness, and when he looked out the windshield it was nothing but blackness and he could see only to the end of his own headlights beaming into the dark. An hour later he was in the middle of a dust storm, tumbleweeds flashing past like ghosts, sometimes hitting the grate or getting caught under the body of the truck. The wind swept down in gusts, shimmying the Ford left and right. It was late and his eyes were already bleary and now he had to struggle with the steering wheel to keep his tires on the highway.

  After a long while of this he saw a light ahead, a motel standing all by itself at the crossroads. He pulled into the parking lot and went into the office to get a room. The guy at the desk was a Navajo Indian. He was wearing a red bowling shirt with a white collar and a pair of pins embroidered over the heart. Behind the desk was a small back room, and Hawley saw another Navajo and a freckled guy at a table playing cards. It was close quarters and they looked like they’d been going all night, empty bottles of beer lined up on the floor and ashtrays full.

  “You’re big blind,” the man with the freckles called out.

  “Just take it from my stack,” said the Navajo in the bowling shirt. “Want to join us?” he asked Hawley.

  The other two men leaned forward in their chairs. The Navajo gave Hawley the once-over and returned to his beer. But the one with the freckles kept staring. He had hair the color of motor oil and marks that blossomed across his face and neck like a rash. There was something about those freckles that made Hawley’s stomach ache.

  “What’s the game?”

  “Hold ’em.”

  Hawley was tempted. He hadn’t held cards in nearly a week. He watched as the man with the freckles reached over, grabbed some chips from the Navajo’s pile, and threw them in the center of the table. The sleeves on the freckled man’s sweatshirt were pushed up and his forearms were covered with homemade tattoos, the kind done in prison. One was a poorly drawn figure of Christ on a cross; the other was the number 187, the section of the California penal code for murder. The ink was still blue. The edges had not faded.

  The Navajo slid a key across the counter.

  “Thanks,” said Hawley, “but it’s late. I’ll pass.”

  He made his way back to the truck, holding his shirt over his face to keep the sand out of his eyes, then drove around to the back of the building and pulled into the parking spot with his room number spray-painted on the asphalt. He climbed the stairs to the landing, carrying his bag full of guns and clothes and the money, which he’d been keeping in a jar of black licorice. The bills were stuffed at the bottom of the jar and the thin strips of candy were layered on top, like a pile of shoelaces. He hated licorice and he figured most people didn’t like it either.

  The motel room smelled like corn chips and cigarettes, and there was a hole punched through one of the walls. On the bedside table was a clock, the digital kind with glowing numbers. He stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes for a few minutes, and when he opened them he noticed the clock hadn’t changed—the numbers were stuck on 4:16. His own watch had stopped outside Flagstaff, and he had no idea what time it was. He unzipped the side pouch of the bag and took out his Beretta and set it on the bedside table. Then he put the bag with the rest of the guns in the closet.

  When Hawley was a boy, he had trouble keeping his hands still while he was shooting. His mother taught him to set a quarter on the barrel, but it would fall off, again and again. Take a breath, she told him, take a breath and let half of it out. She’d said it so often that he nearly always breathed this way, even when he didn’t have a gun in his hands. He took in what he could and he held half of it back, and that’s how he kept himself steady, day to day, year to year, every time he squeezed the trigger.

  Hawley went into the bathroom and turned on the light. He had a bad case of trucker’s tan—his left side all burned from keeping his arm out the window. He turned on the shower and stepped into the cold water and washed the sand out of his hair. When he finished, he wrapped a towel around himself and then he got back into his jeans. He’d just turned on the TV when he heard a knock on the door.

  It was a girl, maybe twenty years old. She was rail-thin and nearly as tall as Hawley. She had a black eye, and her blond hair was pulled back tight in a bun. Seven or eight piercings lined the sides of her ears, tiny hoops looped one after the other and a purple feather dangling from the top like some kind of fishing tackle.

  “I’m locked out,” she said.

  Hawley kept his hand on the door frame. “Can’t the front desk let you in?”

  “No one’s there,” she said, “and I saw your light on.”

  Hawley wondered if she was a hooker. Then he saw that she was carrying a baby. It was about six months old, and she had it in a sling with her coat zipped up around it.

  “Wait,” Hawley said. He closed the door on her and took the licorice jar out of the duffel bag. He made sure the lid was screwed tight, then put it in the toilet tank. He grabbed the Beretta and slid the chamber to see that it was loaded and tucked it into the back of his jeans and pulled his shirt over it. Then he opened the door again. “I’ll go check with you,” he said.

  They went through the storm to the front side of the building. The girl walked backward against the wind, holding up the collar of her coat to protect the baby. The door to the motel office was locked and the lights were out. Hawley put his hand to the glass and peered in. It was too dark to see anything.

  “I told you,” the girl said.

  Hawley banged on the door. He considered busting the lock. The baby started fussing, and the girl bounced up and down on her toes. Then another big gust of wind came and they both got sand thrown in their faces and the baby started to cry.

  “Let’s go back,” said Hawley. He put the girl behind him this time and held his arms out so he’d get most of the sand and not her and the baby. When they reached his room, he let them in.

  “Those guys will probably be back in a minute or two,” he said.

  The girl unzipped her coat. Her eye was only a few days old, still bloodshot, with a streak of black along the nose. “Is it okay if I change him?” she asked.

  “Go ahead,” said Hawley.

  She took the baby out of the sling and put him on the bed. He was dressed in pajamas printed with elephants. There were snaps along the insides of the legs, and the girl pulled them open and undid the diaper and then she grabbed both of the baby’s legs with one hand and lifted his bottom in the air and slid the diaper out. The baby stopped crying as soon as she did this.

  “How long you been here?” Hawley asked.

  “About a week,” the girl said. “Only ones in the place, besides that guy from Kansas.” She opened her purse and took out a fresh diaper and put it under the baby. Then she took out a tube of white cream and rubbed some between the baby’s legs and across his behind before she closed the diaper and snapped the pajamas up. The baby stared at her face from the bed and kept waving his arms back and forth and opening and closing his fists, reaching for her the whole time.

  The girl rolled the dirty diaper and used the plastic tabs to close it. “Where’s your trash?”

  Hawley looked around the room. “Maybe in the bathroom. Here.” He reached out and she gave the dirty diaper to him and he carried it across the room. It was warm and heavy against his fingers, like a living thing. He put the diaper in the trash can and washed his hands. When he came back, the girl was sitting on the bed and sh
e had a bottle of vodka on the table.

  “You want a drink?” she asked.

  Hawley always wanted a drink. “Sure.”

  “I don’t have any glasses.”

  Hawley went back into the bathroom and got the plastic-covered cups by the sink. He handed her one, and they ripped open the little bags and slid their cups out. She poured a finger for each of them. “Cheers,” she said.

  Usually Hawley drank only whiskey or beer. In his mind, vodka was the drink alcoholics drank, because you couldn’t smell it on them. It was what his mother used to drink. He remembered the bottles. He’d even saved one for a while, after she’d left, until his father found it and threw it out. This vodka was cheap stuff, and it burned Hawley’s throat on the way down. The girl swigged hers fast and poured another.

  “What’s your name?” Hawley asked.

  “Amy,” she said.

  “That’s a pretty name,” he said.

  She looked at him strangely, the black eye like a shadow splitting her face in two. Hawley didn’t want her to think he was hitting on her, so he moved farther away, toward the door, and leaned against the wall there. She was still sitting on the bed. The baby had fallen asleep beside her, his cheek to the side and his arms over his head like he was in a holdup.

  “Did those hurt?” Hawley asked, pointing at her ears.

  Her fingers floated to the hoops, caressed the purple feather. “The ones up top did,” she said. “But now I don’t even think about it. I get a piercing whenever something important happens, something I want to remember.” Amy poured a third drink for herself. She threw it back like a shot and sighed. “Is that the right time?”