Which was the problem. I was a repeat offender in that department, and the right judge could get frisky.
I was mulling this when the bellboy brought the cute little prostitute—because that’s surely what she was—up to the door of 620. She had curly blond Annie hair and a sparkly blue minidress and looked about sixteen.
I could see Kratch, in a white terry-cloth Commodore robe, slip into the hall, give the bellboy a twenty, pat him on the shoulder, send him on his way, pat the prostitute on the bottom, and guide her in.
Knowing Kratch’s sexual proclivities, I didn’t feel I had much choice but to intervene. My .45 was tucked in the speed rig under my sport jacket, the passkey in my hand. It was about ten P.M. and traffic in the hall was scant—too late for people to be heading out, too early for them to be coming back.
So I stood by that door and listened. I could hear them in there talking. He was smooth, with a resonant baritone, very charming. She sounded young and a little high. Whether drugs or booze, I couldn’t tell you.
Then it got quiet, and that worried me.
What the hell, I thought, and I used the passkey.
I got lucky—they were in the bathroom. The door was cracked and I could hear his smooth banter and her girlish giggling, a radio going, some middle-of-the-road station playing romantic strings, mixed with the bubbling rumble of a Jacuzzi.
I got the .45 out and helped myself to a real look around this time—this was a suite, a sprawl of luxury. There was a wet bar, and I could see where he’d made drinks for them. In back of the bar I found the pill bottle, and a sniff of a lipstick-kissed glass told me the bastard had slipped her a mickey.
That wasn’t the most fun thing he had in store for her—I checked the three big suitcases, and one had clothes, and another had toys. You know the kind—handcuffs and whips and chains and assorted S&M goodies. Nothing was in the last big, oversize suitcase.
Not yet.
So he had a whole evening planned for her, didn’t he? But there’s always a party pooper in the crowd…
When I burst into the bathroom with the .45 in hand, he practically jumped out of the tub. The hot bubbles were going, and more drinks sat on the edge, but I motioned with the gun for him to sit down and stay put. The girl didn’t notice me, or anyway didn’t notice me much. She was half unconscious already, leaning back against the tub, a sweet little nude with hooded eyes and pert handfuls with tiny tips poking up out of the froth like flowers just starting to grow.
I held the gun on him as he frowned at me in seeming incomprehension and I leaned over and lifted the girl by a skinny arm out of the tub. She didn’t seem to mind. She might have been a child of twelve but for the cupcake breasts. If I hadn’t got here when I did, she wouldn’t have ever got any older. She managed to stand on wobbly legs, her wet feet slippery on the tile. I took her chin in my free hand. “I’m the cops. You want to leave. Wake up! This bastard doped you.”
Life leaped into her eyes, and self-preservation kicked in, and she stumbled into the other room. I left the door open as I trained the gun on Kratch.
He was a handsome guy, as far as it went, with a pockmarked ruggedness. His hair was gray and in tight Roman curls, his chest hair going white too, stark on tanned flesh.
And he frowned at me, as if I were just some deranged intruder—he didn’t have to fake the fear.
“My name is Grossman. I’m an insurance salesman from Nebraska. Take my money from my wallet—it’s by the bed. You can have it all. Just don’t hurt the girl.”
That made me laugh.
She stuck her head in. She was dressed now. Didn’t take long with those skimpy threads.
“Thank you, mister,” she said.
“I never saw you,” I said. “And you never saw me.”
She nodded prettily and was out the door.
I grinned at him. “Alone at last. Are you really going to play games, Kratch?”
He smiled. “Almost didn’t recognize you, Hammer. You’re not as young as you used to be.”
“No, but I can still recognize a piece of shit when I see one.”
“No one else will. I’m a respectable citizen. Have been for a long, long time.”
“I don’t think so. I think Grossman is just the latest front for your sick appetites. How many young girls like that have you raped and killed in the past ten years or so, Kratch? I will go to my grave regretting I didn’t kill you the first time around.”
“My name isn’t Kratch.” The fear had ebbed. He had an oily confidence—if I was going to kill him, he figured, I’d have done it by now. “It’s Grossman. And you will never prove otherwise. You can put all your resources and connections behind it, Hammer, and you will never, ever have the proof you need.”
“Since when did I give a damn about proof?”
The radio made a simple splash going in, like a big bar of soap, and he did not scream or thrash, simply froze with clawed hands and a look of horror that had come over him as the deadly little box came sailing his way. I held the plug in and let the juice have him and endured the sick smell of scorched flesh with no idea whether he could feel what I was seeing, the all-over blisters forming like so many more bubbles, the hair on his head catching fire like a flaming hat, fingertips bursting like overdone sausages, eyes bulging, then popping, one, two, like plump squeezed grapes, leaving sightless black sockets crying scarlet tears as he cooked in the gravy of his own gore.
I unplugged the thing, and the grotesque corpse slipped under the roiling water.
“Now you’re fucking dead,” I said.
Contributors’ Notes
Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2010
Contributors’ Notes
Brock Adams is the author of Gulf, a collection of short stories. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, A capella Zoo, and Eureka Literary Magazine, among many others. He grew up in Panama City, Florida, and studied at the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida, where he received his MFA. He lives with his wife, Jill, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where they both write and teach at USC Upstate.
▪ “Audacious” had a simple beginning: I wanted to write a story about crowds. There’s something fascinating about the level of anonymity that can exist even when surrounded by hundreds of people. I knew who Gerald was, and I knew who Audi was, but I had nothing of the story planned other than them sensing each other’s loneliness in the midst of a crowd. They took it from there.
I’m amazed at the success that “Audacious” has had. When I wrote it, I had no idea if it worked at all. The others in my workshop panned it. They wanted to see Audi steal from Gerald. They wanted to see Gerald and Audi have sex. They wanted lots of things and I ignored them all, and the story works as it is: simple and sad. It taught me the most important thing I learned in school: you have to know when to listen, but sometimes you have to know when to ignore everybody else.
Eric Barnes is the author of the novel Shimmer (2009), an IndieNext pick that is a dark and sometimes comic novel about a person who’s built a company based entirely on a lie. He also has published short stories in Raritan, Washington Square Review, North Atlantic Review, Tampa Review, and a number of other journals. He has been a reporter, editor, and publisher in Connecticut, New York, and now Memphis. Years ago he drove a forklift in Tacoma, Washington, and then in Kenai, Alaska, worked construction on Puget Sound, and froze fish in a warehouse outside Anchorage. He has an MFA from Columbia University and is the publisher of three newspapers covering business and politics in Memphis and Nashville.
▪ I wrote the first version of “Something Pretty, Something Beautiful” a number of years ago, as part of a series of stories about Tacoma, where I grew up, and four friends who lived there. They are all very dark stories, and every time I reread one, I like them even more, yet am also slightly more disturbed that I was ever able to write them in the first place.
Lawrence Block has been doing this long enough to have collected lifetime achievemen
t awards from Mystery Writers of America, Private Eye Writers of America, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and the (U.K.) Crime Writers Association. He’ll be publishing two books in 2011, A Drop of the Hard Stuff and Getting Off.
▪ I’d written a couple of short stories about a young woman who picked up men for sex, went home with them, had a fine time in bed with them, and capped it off by killing them. I couldn’t get her out of my head, and found myself wondering why she was doing this, and how she got this way, and where she was going with it. “Clean Slate” was the result.
Max Allan Collins has earned an unprecedented sixteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations, winning for True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1993) in his Nathan Heller series, which includes the recent Bye Bye, Baby. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film.
Both Collins and Mickey Spillane (who died in 2006) received the Private Eye Writers Lifetime Achievement Award, the Eye.
▪ Mickey Spillane said to his wife, Jane, just days before his passing, “After I’m gone, there’ll be a treasure hunt around here—give everything you find to Max. He’ll know what to do.” Mickey was the hero of my adolescence, and the direct inspiration for my career. So it’s hard for me to think of a greater honor.
Jane, my wife, Barb, and I went through the voluminous files in Mickey’s three offices in his South Carolina home. Among the treasures discovered were half-a-dozen incomplete Hammer novels—all running 100 manuscript pages or more—and three of these (thus far) have appeared: The Goliath Bone, The Big Ban g, and Kiss Her Goodbye. We also discovered a number of shorter fragments that I felt would be better served as short stories.
“A Long Time Dead” was one of the most interesting of those fragments, and one that clearly appeared to be intended as a short story, not a novel. For the Spillane fan/scholar, this is particularly exciting, because Mickey published only a handful of Mike Hammer short stories in his lifetime. David Corbett is the author of four novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar), and Do They Know I’m Running?, published in March 2010 (“a rich, hard-hitting epic”— Publishers Weekly, starred review). Corbett’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, and his story “Pretty Little Parasite” was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2009. For more, go to www.davidcorbett.com.
▪ When Luis was in San Francisco being feted because The Hummingbird’s Daughter had been chosen for the One City One Book distinction, we met through a mutual friend, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, discovered we also had a mutual friend in John Connolly, and just basically hit it off. Then Luis, whose tastes are nothing if not eclectic, talked about collaborating on something in the genre realm, using his exhaustive knowledge of the border and Mexican arcana and my instincts for straight-ahead train-wreck plotting. It sounded like fun, but our other obligations kept us from doing anything but talking about it until Bobby Byrd, the editor of Lone Star Noir, approached Luis for a story and he (Luis) decided to throw me a bone. He had the main character, Chester Richard, already in mind, as well as the Cajun/zydeco musical background, the Port Arthur locale, and a few other impressionistic details. I added a few things of my own, we tossed a few other ideas back and forth, and then we agreed on a general story idea. I took first whack, Luis batted second, I did some minor cleanup, and we sent it on. It turned out to be strangely hassle-free, since Luis is both wildly imaginative and incredibly easy to work with.
Brendan DuBois of New Hampshire is the award-winning author of twelve novels and more than one hundred short stories. His latest novel, Deadly Cove, was published in July 2011. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous other magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, published in 2000 and edited by Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler. His short stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and have also earned him three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America. Visit his website at www.BrendanDuBois.com.
▪ As a former newspaper reporter, I had scores of opportunities to go with police officers on ride-alongs, where I sat next to them in the front seat of police cruisers and got a firsthand look at “serving and protecting” the general public. Among the things I learned: ride-alongs at night are more productive; always take an anti-motion-sickness pill before leaving the station (cops are aggressive when it comes to braking and accelerating); and when responding at high speed with lights on and sirens racing, just relax—everything is out of your hands.
There are some slow evening shifts when the most important decision is what kind of muffin to buy, and there are other nights when you’re responding to an “officer needs assistance” call, barreling down a two-lane road, going one hundred miles an hour.
And you learn other things as well: that during night ride-alongs, when the majority of people are home and asleep, there’s a whole different breed of people who are out and about in one’s community—the lonely, the drinkers, and the troublemakers. A mixture that often leads to arrests and crime stories. In “Ride-Along,” I decided to make the troublemakers the ones inside the police cruiser, and not outside. It was a fun story to write, and I’m honored to have it appear in this anthology.
Loren D. Estleman‘s first novel was published in 1976. Since that time he has published sixty-five books, including mainstream and historical novels and the Amos Walker series, which debuted in 1980. In 2002 his alma mater, Eastern Michigan University, honored him with a doctorate in humane letters. He lives in Michigan with his wife, the author Deborah Morgan. Infernal Angels, the twenty-first Amos Walker novel, was released this past summer.
▪ When Tyrus Books asked me to compose a new story for Amos Waker: The Complete Story Collection, I started with the title “Sometimes a Hyena.” This was nothing new; most of my ideas start with a title, although years may pass before I come up with a story to stick on the end of it. In this case, a joke I’d heard in several versions led to speculation over how one news story can lead to another, and I began writing with no clear idea where I was going. Of course, the real mystery is, who knows what makes a joke work?
Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of three books of poems (Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables) and a book of nonfiction (Great with Child). She’s won a Pushcart Prize and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. Tom Franklin is the author of one collection of short stories (Poachers) and three novels (Hell at the Breech, Smonk, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter). He has won an Edgar and a Guggenheim. Fennelly and Franklin live in Oxford, Mississippi, and teach in the MFA program at Ole Miss. Together they have collaborated on short stories and short people (Anna Claire, nine, Thomas, five, and Nolan, three weeks).
▪ The seeds of “What His Hands Had Been Waiting For” began years ago, when Tommy wrote a bad story about zombies chomping through an apocalyptic wasteland and, thankfully, put it in a drawer. Later, he and Beth Ann were asked to contribute a story to an anthology of Mississippi blues tales. Feeling uninspired, he went to his drawer of failed attempts but couldn’t make much happen, though on rereading the zombie story he realized it had some potential. Tommy gave the story to Beth Ann to see if she could help resurrect it. She got rid of the zombies and set about researching the flood of the Mississippi River in 1927, figuring that sometimes what really happened with real live humans is much wilder than anything they could make up for zombies to do. They had so much fun writing this story together that now they are using it as the basis of an as-yet-untitled novel.
Ernest J. Finney is a native Californian and a sympathetic, though often amused and sometimes outraged, observer of daily life within that state. California figures large in all his fiction. His four
novels take place in the San Francisco Bay area, the Sierra, and the San Joaquin Valley. His short fiction appears often in literary journals and anthologies, including the O. Henry Prize Stories, in which his story “Peacocks” was a first-prize winner. Each of his two story collections received a California Book Award. His third collection, Sequoia Gardens: California Stories was published in February 2011. Finney lives and writes on Pliocene Ridge in Sierra County, California.
▪ “A Crime of Opportunity” began with a platter of General Tso’s chicken in a restaurant on Clement Street in San Francisco and a conversation about a novice public defender known as the Funeral Director by a host of unfortunate felons hoping for a life sentence but anticipating death row. Delilah emerged full-grown by the end of the meal. Renée was inspired by one of my mothers-in-law, who had a lot to say about life lessons.
Ed Gorman has published more than twenty mystery and suspense novels and seven collections of short stories. Over the years he’s won a Shamus, twice been nominated for the Edgar, won an Anthony, and been short-listed for a Silver Dagger. Two of his books have been filmed, one as a low-budget feature and one as a TV movie. Kirkus Reviews called him “one of the most original crime writers around,” while the San Francisco Examiner noted that “Gorman has a wonderful writing style that allows him to say things of substance in an entertaining way.” Presently he writes the Dev Conrad series, dark political thrillers, and the Sam McCain books, which have followed the life of a young attorney from the late fifties up into the seventies.
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