Harlan Coben

by The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

  “What are you doing?” I whisper, as loud I can.

  I can see he is talking, but I can’t hear him.

  ”What are you looking for?” I ask again.

  He is talking, his fingers running along the edges of the skylight, his head turned upward, and I think I hear more the echo of his voice, coming back to me off that window, and I’ve never known if he knew I was there.

  ”Something pretty,” Teddy whispers, “something beautiful.”

  I knew Coe would die. Like all of them. All of them would die.

  I climbed out a window, dropping to a covered porch, then jumping to the ground. I turned to the now ten people in the street and they stared at me and I fell on the ground, dizzy still, vomiting again, and they hadn’t moved.

  But when they did, I stood and I ran. Down an alley, through yards, across parking lots, finally into the park, across it, finding my car on the other side.

  I was already packed for Alaska. My clothes and tent and sleeping bag.

  I was in Bellingham by dawn. I crossed the border into Canada on foot. Stole a car. Stole a truck. I rode three freight trains, riding blind first north, then east, then west again. I did not hitch a ride. Did not eat in restaurants. Did not sleep in any motels. I broke into grocery stores at night. And I’m sure no one ever knew I’d been there.

  I rode the ferries as much as I could. Sometimes north, sometimes south. But I was on the Aleutians within two weeks.

  Alaska is a very big place.

  Within two years I was living in Arizona. Within three years I was out in New Hampshire. And that’s a long way from Tacoma.

  These things are not so hard to do.

  Once, in a house, Coe almost breaks a dining room table, falling off of it onto Teddy, and when we get outside, six blocks away, walking quietly like we usually did, Teddy then turns on Coe, in one motion hitting him in the face, falling on him, hitting him still, and Will Wilson steps back and smiles, and I step back and watch, and Teddy is saying something to Coe as he hits him again, something about trying to be more careful, about not fucking up all the time, about thinking about what he was doing.

  ***

  It was years before I managed to find an article about the fire. I drove to Tacoma just to read the stories. The only risk I ever took. Reading old newspapers in some cubicle in the bright light of a silent library.

  Will Wilson had managed to live.

  There were only two bodies in the house. Ted Selva. Michael Coe. Another kid had been seen climbing out of the house. When they identified the bodies a few days later, the police soon learned that the four kids ran as a group. That William Wilson and Brian Porter were gone.

  Two cars from Tacoma were soon found near the Canadian border. There were stolen cars found farther north into Canada.

  Both kids, the police said, had probably gone into Alaska.

  And sitting there in the library, I was leaning back now, looking around, expecting to see Will Wilson in a cubicle near mine. Reading about the four of us. Leaning back in his chair too, looking around for me.

  Michael Coe had died in the smoke, was found lying at the foot of the stairs.

  Ted Selva appeared to have been beaten badly before he died. Four fingers snapped. A few ribs fractured. His chin and eye socket broken.

  There was no manhunt. No detectives who ventured north. “Pretty soon,” a policeman said, “they’ll show up back here in Tacoma. Bragging about what they’ve done. Looking for a warm bed. They’re half scared out of their minds right now, alone up in the woods somewhere. They’ll come back home.”

  Will Wilson is out there. Living some life.

  And driving through Tacoma after I left the library that day, I thought about how, when I got in my car after the fire, my backpack next to me, my money in my pocket, how even then I knew I wasn’t just running from the police. I was running from Will Wilson, Coe, and Teddy. They were dead, I thought. But it didn’t matter. I knew I had to run. Running from my three friends and the life we’d had, a life I would not have been able to end.

  And now I’d spent five years forgetting.

  But Will Wilson is still out there.

  He could find me, I suppose.

  Or maybe I could try to go find him.

  Clean Slate

  Lawrence Block

  FROM Warriors

  THERE WAS A STARBUCKS just across the street from the building where he had his office, and she settled in at a window table a little before five. She thought she might be in for a long wait. In New York, young associates at law firms typically worked until midnight and took lunch and dinner at their desks. Was it the same in Toledo?

  Well, the cappuccino was the same. She sipped hers, making it last, and was about to go to the counter for another when she saw him.

  But was it him? He was tall and slender, wearing a dark suit and a tie, clutching a briefcase, walking with purpose. His hair when she’d known him was long and shaggy, a match for the jeans and T-shirt that were his usual costume, and now it was cut to match the suit and the briefcase. And he wore glasses now, and they gave him a serious, studious look. He hadn’t worn them then, and he’d certainly never looked studious.

  But it was Douglas. No question, it was him.

  She rose from her chair, hit the door, quickened her pace to catch up with him at the corner. She said, “Doug? Douglas Pratter?”

  He turned, and she caught the puzzlement in his eyes. She helped him out. “It’s Kit,” she said. “Katherine Tolliver.” She smiled softly. “A voice from the past. Well, a whole person from the past, actually.”

  “My God,” he said. “It’s really you.”

  “I was having a cup of coffee,” she said, “and looking out the window and wishing I knew somebody in this town, and when I saw you I thought you were a mirage. Or that you were just somebody who looked the way Doug Pratter might look eight years later.”

  “Is that how long it’s been?”

  “Just about. I was fifteen and I’m twenty-three now. You were two years older.”

  “Still am. That much hasn’t changed.”

  “And your family picked up and moved right in the middle of your junior year of high school.”

  “My dad got a job he couldn’t say no to. He was going to send for us at the end of the term, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. We’d all be too lonely is what she said. It took me years before I realized she just didn’t trust him on his own.”

  “Was he not to be trusted?”

  “I don’t know about that, but the marriage failed two years later anyway. He went a little nuts and wound up in California. He got it in his head that he wanted to be a surfer.”

  “Seriously? Well, good for him, I guess.”

  “Not all that good for him. He drowned.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Who knows? Maybe that’s what he wanted, whether he knew it or not. Mom’s still alive and well.”

  “In Toledo?”

  “Bowling Green.”

  “That’s it. I knew you’d moved to Ohio, and I couldn’t remember the city, and I didn’t think it was Toledo. Bowling Green.”

  “I’ve always thought of it as a color. Lime green, forest green, and bowling green.”

  “Same old Doug.”

  “You think? I wear a suit and go to an office. Christ, I wear glasses.”

  “And a wedding ring.” And before he could tell her about his wife and kiddies and adorable suburban house, she said, “But you’ve got to get home, and I’ve got plans of my own. I want to catch up, though. Have you got any time tomorrow?”

  It’s Kit. Katherine Tolliver.

  Just saying her name had taken her back in time. She hadn’t been Kit or Katherine or Tolliver in years. Names were like clothes: she’d put them on and wear them for a while and then let them go. The analogy went only so far, because you could wash clothes when you’d soiled them, but there was no dry cleaner for a name that had outlived its usefulness.

  Kat
herine “Kit” Tolliver. That wasn’t the name on the ID she was carrying, or the one she’d signed on the motel register. Once she’d identified herself to Doug Pratter, she’d become the person she’d proclaimed herself to be. She was Kit again—and, at the same time, she wasn’t.

  Interesting, the whole business.

  Back in her motel room, she surfed her way around the TV channels, then switched off the set and took a shower. Afterward she spent a few minutes studying her nude body and wondering how it would look to him. She was a little fuller in the breasts than she’d been eight years before, a little rounder in the butt, a little closer to ripeness overall. She had always been confident of her attractiveness, but she couldn’t help wondering what she might look like to those eyes that had seen her years ago.

  Of course, he hadn’t needed glasses back in the day.

  She had read somewhere that a man who has once had a particular woman somehow assumes he can have her again. She didn’t know how true this might be, but it seemed to her that something similar applied to women. A woman who had once been with a particular man was ordained to doubt her ability to attract him a second time. And so she felt a little of that uncertainty, but willed herself to dismiss it.

  He was married, and might well be in love with his wife. He was busy establishing himself in his profession, and settling into an orderly existence. Why would he want a meaningless fling with an old girlfriend, who’d had to say her name before he could even place her?

  She smiled. Lunch, he’d said. We’ll have lunch tomorrow.

  Funny how it started.

  She was at a table with six or seven others, a mix of men and women in their twenties. And one of the men mentioned a woman she didn’t know, though she seemed to be known to most if not all of the others. And one of the women said, “That slut.”

  And the next thing she knew, the putative slut was forgotten while the whole table turned to the question of just what constituted sluttiness. Was it a matter of attitude? Of specific behavior? Was one born to slutdom, or was the status acquired?

  Was it solely a female province? Could you have male sluts?

  That got nipped in the bud. “A man can take sex too casually,” one of the men asserted, “and he can consequently be an asshole, and deserving of a certain measure of contempt. But as far as I’m concerned, the word slut is gender-linked. Nobody with a Y chromosome can qualify as a genuine slut.”

  And, finally, was there a numerical cutoff? Could an equation be drawn up? Did a certain number of partners within a certain number of years make one a slut?

  “Suppose,” one woman suggested, “suppose once a month you go out after work and have a couple—”

  “A couple of men?”

  “A couple of drinks, you idiot, and you start flirting, and one things leads to another, and you drag somebody home with you.”

  “Once a month?”

  “It could happen.”

  “So that’s twelve men in a year.”

  “When you put it that way,” the woman allowed, “it seems like a lot.”

  “It’s also a hundred and twenty partners in ten years.”

  “Except you wouldn’t keep it up for that long, because sooner or later one of those hookups would take.”

  “And you’d get married and live happily ever after?”

  “Or at least live together more or less monogamously for a year or two, which would cut down on the frequency of hookups, wouldn’t it?”

  Throughout all of this, she barely said a word. Why bother? The conversation buzzed along quite well without her, and she was free to sit back and listen, and to wonder just what place she occupied in what someone had already labeled “the saint-slut continuum.”

  “With cats,” one of the men said, “it’s nice and clear-cut.”

  “Cats can be sluts?”

  He shook his head. “With women and cats. A woman has one cat, or even two or three cats, she’s an animal lover. Four or more cats and she’s a demented cat lady.”

  “That’s how it works?”

  “That’s exactly how it works. With sluts, it looks to be more complicated.”

  Another thing that complicated it, someone said, was if the woman in question had a significant other, whether husband or boyfriend. If she didn’t, and she hooked up half a dozen times a year, well, she certainly wasn’t a slut. If she was married and still fit in that many hookups on the side, well, that changed things, didn’t it?

  “Let’s get personal,” one of the men said to one of the women. “How many partners have you had?”

  “Me?”

  “Well?”

  “You mean in the past year?”

  “Or lifetime. You decide.”

  “If I’m going to answer a question like that,” she said, “I think we definitely need another round of drinks.”

  The drinks came, and the conversation slid into a game of truth, though it seemed to Jennifer—these people knew her as Jennifer, which had lately become her default name—it seemed to her that the actual veracity of the responses was moot.

  And then it was her turn.

  “Well, Jen? How many?”

  Would she ever see any of these people again? Probably not. So it scarcely mattered what she said.

  And what she said was, “Well, it depends. How do you decide what counts?”

  “What do you mean? Like blowjobs don’t count?”

  “That’s what Clinton said, remember?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, blowjobs count.”

  “And hand jobs?”

  “They don’t count,” one man said, and there seemed to be general agreement on that point. “Not that there’s anything wrong with them,” he added.

  “So what’s your criterion here, exactly? Something has to be inside of something?”

  “As far as the nature of the act,” one man said, “I think it has to be subjective. It counts if you think it counts. So, Jen? What’s your count?”

  “Suppose you passed out, and you know something happened, but you don’t remember any of it?”

  “Same answer. It counts if you think it counts.”

  The conversation kept going, but she was detached from it now, thinking, remembering, working it out in her mind. How many men, if gathered around a table or a campfire, could compare notes and tell each other about her? That, she thought, was the real criterion, not what part of her anatomy had been in contact with what portion of his. Who could tell stories? Who could bear witness?

  And when the table quieted down again, she said, “Five.”

  “Five? That’s all? Just five?”

  “Five.”

  She had arranged to meet Douglas Pratter at noon in the lobby of a downtown hotel not far from his office. She arrived early and sat where she could watch the entrance. He was five minutes early himself, and she saw him stop to remove his glasses, polishing their lenses with a breast-pocket handkerchief. Then he put them on again and stood there, his eyes scanning the room.

  She got to her feet, and now he caught sight of her, and she saw him smile. He’d always had a winning smile, optimistic and confident. Years ago, it had been one of the things she liked most about him.

  She walked to meet him. Yesterday she’d been wearing a dark gray pantsuit; today she’d paired the jacket with a matching skirt. The effect was still business attire, but softer, more feminine. More accessible.

  “I hope you don’t mind a ride,” he told her. “There are places we could walk to, but they’re crowded and noisy and no place to have a conversation. Plus they rush you, and I don’t want to be in a hurry. Unless you’ve got an early afternoon appointment?”

  She shook her head. “I had a full morning,” she said, “and there’s a cocktail party this evening that I’m supposed to go to, but until then I’m free as the breeze.”

  “Then we can take our time. We’ve probably got a lot to talk about.”

  As they crossed the lobby, she took his arm.

  *** />
  The fellow’s name was Lucas. She’d taken note of him early on, and his eyes had shown a certain degree of interest in her, but his interest mounted when she told the group how many sexual partners she’d had. It was he who’d said, “Five? That’s all? Just five?” When she’d confirmed her count, his eyes grabbed hers and held on.

  And now he’d taken her to another bar, a nice quiet place where they could really get to know each other. Just the two of them.

  The lighting was soft, the décor soothing. A pianist played show tunes unobtrusively, and a waitress with an indeterminate accent took their order and brought their drinks. They touched glasses, sipped, and he said, “Five.”

  “That really did it for you,” she said. “What, is it your lucky number?”

  “Actually,” he said, “my lucky number is six.”

  “I see.”

  “You were never married.”

  “No.”

  “Never lived with anybody.”

  “Only my parents.”

  “You don’t still live with them?”

  “No.”

  “You live alone?”

  “I have a roommate.”

  “A woman, you mean.”

  “Right.”

  “Uh, the two of you aren’t…”

  “We have separate beds,” she said, “in separate rooms, and we live separate lives.”

  “Right. Were you ever, uh, in a convent or anything?”

  She gave him a look.

  “Because you’re remarkably attractive, you walk into a room and you light it up, and I can imagine the number of guys who must hit on you on a daily basis. And you’re how old? Twenty-one, twenty-two?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “And you’ve only been with five guys? What, were you a late bloomer?”

  “I wouldn’t say so.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m pressing and I shouldn’t. It’s just that, well, I can’t help being fascinated. But the last thing I want is to make you uncomfortable.”