Harlan Coben

by The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

  The vice president came into her office at four P.M. with the director, who did all the talking. “We have a complete severance package we want you to look over. A year’s salary, medical, generous lump sum. But if you accept, we want you out of here by five.”

  She just glanced at the four pages. She had expected something like this after her lunch with Renée. A mentor to the end. Maybe. She tore the pages down the middle; Renée would not approve of such melodrama. “I don’t need anything from you.” She picked up her purse and walked out. She was free; they’d given up on her as a way to find Wayne. Probably. Maybe.

  On the way back to her flat she thought again about the duck tale. What she had never been able to compute was the image of a duck saving a child. She was too literal-minded or something. “A big dog, yes, but a fowl?” she had asked Wayne. “It’s the woman’s story,” he’d said. “You have to trust her version. I do.” Maybe it was a very large duck. Swan-sized.

  What was she going to do now? She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Renée’s brooch was on her lapel; she must have pinned it on at some point during lunch. A dinosaur dropping. It seemed fitting, somehow. She’d wear it on herjourney. A long one, cautious, circuitous. Looking for a statue of a duck.

  Flying Solo

  Ed Gorman

  FROM Noir 13

  “YOU SMOKING AGAIN?”

  “Yeah.” Ralph’s sly smile. “You afraid these’ll give me cancer?”

  “You mind rolling down the window then?”

  “I bought a pack today. It felt good. I’ve been wanting a cigarette for twenty-six years. That’s how long ago I gave them up. I was still walking a beat back then. I figure what the hell, you know. I mean, the way things are. I been debating this a long time. I don’t know why I picked today to start again. I just did.” He rolled the window down. The soft summer night came in like a sweet angel of mercy. “I’ve smoked four of them but this is the only one I’ve really enjoyed.”

  “Why this one?”

  “Because I got to see your face.”

  “The Catholic thing?”

  “That’s right, kid. The Catholic thing. They’ve got you so tight inside you need an enema. No cheating on the wife, no cheating on the taxes, no cheating on the church. And somebody bends the rules a little, your panties get all bunched up.”

  “You’re pretty eloquent for an ex-cop. That enema remark. And also, by the way, whenever you call me ‘kid’ people look at you funny. I mean, I’m sixty-six and you’re sixty-eight.”

  Ralph always portrayed himself as a swashbuckler; the day he left the force he did so with seventeen citizen complaints on his record. He took a long, deep drag on his Winston. “We’re upping the ante tonight, Tom. That’s why I’m a little prickish. I know you hate being called ‘kid.’ It’s just nerves.”

  I was surprised he admitted something like that. He enjoyed playing fearless.

  “That waitress didn’t have it coming, Ralph.”

  “How many times you gonna bring that up? And for the record, I did ask for a cheeseburger if you’ll remember, and I did leave her a frigging ten-dollar tip after I apologized to her twice. See how uptight you are?”

  “She probably makes six bucks an hour and has a kid at home.”

  “You’re just a little bit nervous the way I am. That’s why you’re runnin’ your mouth so hard.”

  He was probably right. “So we’re really going to do it, huh?”

  “Yeah, Tom, we’re really going to do it.”

  “What time is it?”

  I checked my Timex, the one I got when I retired from teaching high school for thirty years. English and creative writing. The other gift I got was not being assaulted by any of my students. A couple of my friends on the staff had been beaten, one of them still limping years after. “Nine minutes later than when you asked me last time.”

  “By rights I should go back of that tree over there and take a piss. In fact I think I will.”

  “That’s just when he’ll pull in.”

  “The hell with it. I wouldn’t be any good with a full bladder.”

  “You won’t be any good if he sees us.”

  “He’ll be so drunk he won’t notice.” The grin made him thirty. “You worry too much.”

  The moon told its usual lies. Made this ugly two-story flat-roofed cube of a house if not beautiful at least tolerable to the quick and forgiving eye. The steep sagging stairs running at a forty-five-degree angle up the side of the place were all that interested me. That and the isolation here on the edge of town. A farmhouse at one time, a tumbledown barn behind it, the farmland back to seed, no one here except our couple living in the upstairs. Ken and Callie Neely. Ken being the one we were after.

  We were parked behind a stretch of oaks. Easy to watch him pull in and start up those stairs. I kept the radio low. Springsteen.

  When Ralph got back in I handed him my pocket-sized hand sanitizer.

  “You should a been a den mother.”

  “You take a piss, you wash your hands.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  And then we heard him. He drove his sleek red Chevy pickup truck so fast he sounded as if he was going to shoot right on by. I wondered what the night birds silver-limned in the broken moonlight of the trees made of the country-western song bellowing from the truck. A breeze swooped in the open windows of my Volvo and brought the scents of long-dead summers. An image of a seventeen-year-old girl pulling her T-shirt over her head and the immortal perfection of her pink-tipped breasts.

  “You know what this is going to make us, don’t you? I mean, after we’ve done it.”

  “Yeah, I do, Tom. It’s gonna make us happy. That’s what it’s gonna make us. Now let’s go get him.”

  I met Ralph Francis McKenna in the chemo room of Oncology Partners. His was prostate, mine was colon. They gave him a year, me eighteen months, no guarantees either of us would make it. We had one other thing in common. We were both widowers. Our kids lived way across the country and could visit only occasionally. Natural enough we’d become friends. Of a kind, anyway.

  We always arranged to have our chemo on the same day, same time. After the chemo was over we both had to take monthly IVs of other, less powerful drugs.

  Ralph said he’d had the same reaction when he’d first walked into the huge room where thirty-eight patients sat in comfortable recliners getting various kinds of IV drips. So many people smiling and laughing. Another thing being how friendly everybody was to everybody else. People in thousand-dollar coats and jackets talking to threadbare folks in cheap discount clothes. Black people yukking it up with white people. And swift efficient nurses Ralph Francis McKenna, a skilled flirt, knew how to draw in.

  Once in a while somebody would have a reaction to the chemo. One woman must have set some kind of record for puking. She was so sick the three nurses hovering over her didn’t even have time to get her to one of the johns. All they could do was keep shoving clean pans under her chin.

  During our third session Ralph said, “So how do you like flying solo?”

  “What’s ‘flying solo’?”

  “You know. Being alone. Without a wife.”

  “I hate it. My wife knew how to enjoy life. She really loved it. I get depressed a lot. I should’ve gone first. She appreciated being alive.”

  “I still talk to my wife, you know that? I walk around the house and talk to her like we’re just having a conversation.”

  “I do pretty much the same thing. One night I dreamed I was talking to her on the phone and when I woke up I was sitting on the side of the bed with the receiver in my hand.”

  Flying solo. I liked that phrase.

  You could read, use one of their DVD players, or listen to music on headsets. Or visit with friends and relatives who came to pass the time. Or in Ralph’s case, flirt.

  The nurses liked him. His good looks and cop self-confidence put them at ease. I’m sure a couple of the single ones in their forties would probably have c
onsidered going to bed with him if he’d been capable of it. He joked to me once, shame shining in his eyes, “They took my pecker, Tom, and they won’t give it back.” Not that a few of the older nurses didn’t like me. There was Nora, who reminded me of my wife in her younger years. A few times I started to ask her out but then got too scared. The last woman I’d asked out on a first date had been my wife, forty-three years ago.

  The DVD players were small and you could set them up on a wheeled table right in front of your recliner while you were getting the juice. One day I brought season two of The Rockford Files, with James Garner. When I got about two minutes into the episode I heard Ralph sort of snicker.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You. I should’ve figured you for a Garner type of guy.”

  “What’s wrong with Garner?”

  “He’s a wuss. Sort of femmy.”

  “James Garner is sort of femmy?”

  “Yeah. He’s always whining and bitching. You know, like a woman. I’m more of a Clint Eastwood fan myself.”

  “I should’ve figured on that.”

  “You don’t like Eastwood?”

  “Maybe I would if he knew how to act.”

  “He’s all man.”

  “He’s all something all right.”

  “You never hear him whine.”

  “That’s because he doesn’t know how. It’s too complicated for him.”

  “‘Make my day.’”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  Ralph laughed so hard several of the nurses down the line looked at us and smiled. Then they tried to explain us to their patients.

  A nurse named Heather Moore was the first one. She always called us her “Trouble Boys” because we kidded her so much about her somewhat earnest, naive worldview. Over a couple of months, we learned that her ex-husband had wiped out their tiny bank account and run off with the secretary at the muffler shop where he’d been manager. She always said, “All my girlfriends say I should be a whole lot madder at him, but you know, when I’m honest with myself I probably wasn’t that good of a wife. You know? His mom always fixed these big suppers for the family. And she’s a very pretty woman. But by the time I put in eight hours here and pick up Bobby at daycare, I just don’t have much energy. We ate a lot of frozen stuff. And I put on about ten pounds extra. I guess you can’t blame him for looking around.”

  Couple times after she started sharing her stories with us, Ralph made some phone calls. He talked to three people who’d known her husband. A chaser who’d started running around on Heather soon after their wedding day. A slacker at work and a husband who betrayed his wife in maybe the worst way of all—making constant jokes about her to his coworkers. And she blamed herself for not being good enough for him.

  Then came the day when she told us about the duplex where she lived. The toilets wouldn’t flush properly, the garbage disposal didn’t work, both front and back concrete steps were dangerously shattered, and the back door wouldn’t lock. Some of her neighbors had been robbed recently.

  The landlord was a jerk—lawyer, of course—named David Muldoon. Despite the comic-book surname he was anything but comic. Ralph checked him out. A neo-yuppie who owned several income properties in the city, he was apparently working his way up the slumlord ladder. Heather complained to the city and the city did what it did best: nothing. She’d called Muldoon’s business office several times and been promised that her complaints would soon be taken care of. They weren’t. And even baby lawyers fresh from the diploma mills wanted more than she could afford to take Muldoon on.

  We always asked her how it was going with Muldoon. The day she told us that the roof was leaking and nobody from his office had returned her call in four days, Ralph told her, “You don’t worry about it anymore, Heather.”

  “How come?”

  “I just have a feeling.”

  Heather wasn’t the only one wondering what the hell he was talking about. So was I. He said, “You got the usual big night planned?”

  “If you mean frozen dinner, some TV, maybe calling one of my kids who’ll be too busy to talk very long, and then going to bed, yes.”

  “Maybe watch a little James Garner.”

  “Yeah, or put on Clint Eastwood and fall asleep early.”

  “Glad you don’t have plans, because we’re going on a stakeout.”

  “I go to bed at nine.”

  “Not tonight. Unless we get lucky. Maybe he’ll get laid and get home before then.”

  “Who?”

  “Muldoon, that’s who.”

  “You know for a fact that he’s got something going on the side?”

  “No. But I always listen to my gut.”

  I smiled.

  “I say something funny?” Sort of pissed the way he said it.

  “Do all you guys watch bad cop shows before you graduate? Your ‘gut’?”

  “Most of these assholes cheat.”

  I thought about it. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Kid, I’m always right.” Grin this time.

  Turned out it was the secretary in the law firm on the floor below Muldoon’s. Not even all that attractive. He was just out for strange in the nighttime.

  We waited leaning against his new black Cadillac.

  “Who the fuck are you two supposed to be?”

  “We’re supposed to be the two guys you least want to hear from.” I was happy to let Ralph do the talking.

  “Yeah?” All swagger.

  “Yeah. You’re taking advantage of a friend of ours.”

  “Get the fuck out of my way. I’m going home.”

  “It’s a bitch getting rid of that pussy smell on your clothes, isn’t it? Wives like to pretend they can’t smell it.”

  Dug out his cell phone. Waggled it for us. “I don’t know who you two assholes are, but I’ll bet the police won’t have any trouble finding out.”

  “And your wife won’t have any trouble finding out about the snatch in that apartment house behind us either.”

  I didn’t realize what had happened until I saw the counselor bend in half and heard him try to swear while his lungs were collapsing. He fell to his knees. Ralph hit him so hard on the side of the head Muldoon toppled over. “Her name’s Heather Moore. She’s one of your tenants. She doesn’t know anything about this, so don’t bother trying to shake her down for any information. You’ve got two days to fix everything wrong in her apartment. Two days or I call your wife. And if you come after us or send anybody after us, then I not only call your wife, I start looking for any other bimbos you’ve been with in the past. I’m a retired homicide detective, so I know how to do this shit. You got me?”

  Muldoon still couldn’t talk. Just kept rolling back and forth on the sandy concrete. He grunted something.

  That was how it started. Heather asked us about it once, but we said we didn’t know anything about it. Heather obviously didn’t believe us, because two weeks later a nurse named Sally Coates, one neither of us knew very well, came and sat down on a chair next to the IV stand and told us about her husband and this used-car salesman who’d sold them a lemon and wouldn’t make it right. They were out seven grand they hadn’t been able to afford in the first place, but they had to have a car so her husband could get to the VA hospital, where he was learning to walk again after losing his right leg in Afghanistan. The kind of story you watch on TV and want to start killing people.

  All innocence, Ralph said, “Gosh, Sally, I wish we could help you, but I don’t see what we could do. There isn’t any reason he’d listen to us.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Sally said the next time we saw her. “Bob got a call the day after I told you about this salesman. The guy said to bring the car in and they’d get it fixed up right so we wouldn’t be having any trouble with it. And there wouldn’t be any charge.”

  “I’ll bet you did a lot of praying about it, didn’t you, Sally?”

  “Of course. We have two little ones to feed. Keeping that car running was b
reaking us.”

  “Well, it was the prayers that did it, Sally.”

  “And you didn’t have anything to do with it?”

  “Ask him.”

  I shook my head. “What could we have done, Sally? We’re just two old guys.”

  After she left, Ralph leaned over from his leather recliner and said, “The only good thing about dying this way is we don’t have to give a shit about anything. What’re they gonna do to us?” That grin of his. “We’re already dead.”

  I developed a uniform. A Cubs cap, dark aviator glasses, and a Louisville Slugger. According to Ralph I was “the backup hood. They’re scared enough of me. Then they see this guy with the ball bat and the shades—they’ll do anything to cooperate.” He didn’t mention how old we were.

  The nurses kept coming. Four in the next three months. A nurse who was trying to get a collection of family photographs back from an ex-boyfriend she’d broken up with after he’d given her the clap, spurned boyfriend stealing the collection and keeping it for her breaking up with him; the nurse whose daughter’s boyfriend was afraid to visit because two bully brothers down the block always picked on him when he pulled up; and the nurse who liked to sit in on poker games with five guys who worked at an electronics discount house and thought it was pretty damned funny to cheat her out of forty to sixty dollars every time she sat down. It took her four months of playing twice a month to figure it out.

  No heavy lifting, as they say; no, that came with a tiny, delicate young nurse named Callie. We noticed the bruises on her arms first, then the bruises on her throat, despite the scarf she wore with her uniform. Then came the two broken fingers and the way she limped for a couple of weeks and finally the faint but unmistakable black eye. A few of the other nurses whispered about it among themselves. One of them told us that the head nurse had asked Callie about it. Callie had smiled and said that “my whole family is clumsy.”