The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

by Otto Penzler

  But I held onto all that and shook my head, said “No, just a mug of chicory, if you don’t mind.” Said it to the counter top rather than face Patsy, knowing full well that by refusing to look up I was giving her another dead-on shot of my Daddy’s son’s hellish baptism. It was still better than looking the cunt in the eye. Either way, she was gonna know all about me — she had the knack, it flowed around her like vapor trails when you got too much strychnine — but facing her straight ahead would have forced me to see what she saw. And I already knew what she saw, knew I didn’t want to see the stretched-thin junkie sitting at her counter wearing out an already threadbare joke about her menu. It was like algebra when the teacher would squeak an especially tough problem on the board and we’d all look down so he wouldn’t call on us to answer; if we couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see us. That was my approach with Patsy now because it had always worked in the past: with Faith, with Daddy, with God.

  “No appetite, huh?” she joshed, sloshing thick liquid as she slid the mug across the counter and into my hands until we each cradled a half as though it were a chalice and not a nicked enamel crock with loose grounds swimming at the bottom. “The only men I ever seen in here not hungry was love sick,” she teased, making the word love into a several-syllable abortion, drawing out “you love sick?” the same singsong way she’d called out “you hungry?” Yep, saw right through me. Like when you told the man at the deli “thin, for sandwiches,” and he held up the first slice and you could see his questioning glance through it and you had to backtrack and say “uh, not quite that thin, Tex.” Patsy must have come to work every night and built a Dagwood from the little glimpses she stole from her patrons.

  “You know how Karl Marx summed up capitalism’s inherent shortcoming?” I asked, knowing full well she’d be trying to puzzle out whether Karl was the one who carried the bicycle horn and never spoke. “He said your employer will never pay you the true value of your work because he keeps more for himself.” I took a mouthful of the rich chicory and swallowed bitterly, even though the liquid was syrupy sweet. “I think love works the same way.”

  In retrospect, stopping and chatting was the worst thing I could have done. My stoned intentions were good: be invisible by being brazen. Like an art thief defiantly hanging his booty in the foyer, I gambled that no one would suspect a Das Kapital-quoting would-be trucker of murdering a drug-importing riverboat casino operator. It was naked foolishness, a rash thing that I should believe will bring about my capture. But somehow I don’t. Something about the way Patsy asked her patrons “you hungry?” No, not so much how she asked, or even that she asked, but that having drawn out the confession she already took for granted, she set about satisfying the need.

  An hour later I abandoned I-io for 49, figuring to run south to Gulfport and catch 90 east to Biloxi. My craving was hitting hard and I thought a slightly slower road might ease my anxiety. The distance on 49 between the off-ramp from 10 and the on-ramp to 90 is so short that you couldn’t even play football on it; you’d have to play Arena Ball. Nevertheless, having rounded the spaghetti circle that officially welcomed me to sixty yards of due southerly travel, I managed to incur such a withdrawal-induced cramp that I whirled the car hard onto the soft shoulder, picked up a piece of nail-infected lumber, and spun 180 degrees trying to control the blowout. Facing north on the sideline of a due south highway, I listened to my heart beat out Babalu for a couple minutes before popping the trunk to free the donut. It was sad, really, how badly I was going to limp into Biloxi — strung out, on three-and-a-half wheels, shooting a twenty-year-old pistol—just so I could crawl back home with enough room on my available credit limit to start the process all over again. Once I had the jack on and was working the lug nuts loose, I realized that I could not go on repeating the cycle indefinitely: eventually I would run out of fingers. Maybe next time, I thought ruefully, I could convince Lazarus to settle for a toe.

  Mulling such thoughts took what little of my concentration wasn’t incessantly chanting smack smack smack and I never even saw the trooper’s car approach until the nose of his cruiser was headlamp to headlamp with my Jetta. He popped his lamps to bright, and when he opened the door I could hear the faint hum reminding him his keys were in the ignition. It was close to the sound Chase’s nightmare opium had buzzed me with and for a moment I felt certain I would flash back and begin writhing in turmoil. But for once my subconscious was just that — sub — and I was able to endure the rattlesnake hum by focusing on what to say, what to do to end the conversation quickly.

  I heard the trooper’s boot crunch the loose asphalt as he took his first step toward me. Far away, a lone rig approached us, barely seen and as yet unheard. I imagined the conversation in my head. Very simple. Picked up a tar tack. Need help? No sir, I can manage, good to do a little work during a long drive anyway, clear the head. Long haul, eh? Yes sir, clear to Tallahassee. Well, see you get that tire patched and keep it under fifty with that spare on. Yes sir.

  The rig finished rounding the off-ramp and approached, its whine slowly eating into the buzz of the cop’s Chrysler. I practiced the conversation again, head down, thinking in rhythm with the crunching of his boots. The third time through the script I saw the fatal error, but it was too late. Parked nose to nose, with my left rear wheel blown, the cop would have to come around the trunk of my car to get to my side, to get to “need help?” Come around the open trunk. The one with the bag holding a loaded syringe, the one with an uncovered Colt pistol lying plainly in sight.

  He was a step away from rounding my Jetta’s back side when the rig roared by. My subconscious burst on the scene and my mind splintered eighteen different ways at once. I saw the cop spotting the firearm, cuffing me and taking me in, and getting a bust for possession in the bargain; I saw Lazarus getting the word to someone on the inside who owed him; I saw myself getting a tracheotomy with a toothbrush in the hoser at the Mississippi state pen — like father, like son. I saw Faith raising Emily to believe “Daddy was killed when the mine collapsed, before you were born,” not wanting to admit to her brood, much less to herself, that her judgement could have been so flawed.

  A defiant scream erupted as the rig blew past, knocking the trooper’s hat off. “Goddammit,” he insisted and bent to pick it up, even as the tail end of the trailer completed its “woosh,” leaving only a vacuum of receding yellow reflectors. When the trooper replaced his hat and turned to finally check on me, I crushed him square in the jaw with my tire iron.

  The sound was anticlimactic. Bones don’t “crunch” as advertised, nor do they crack or splinter. I heard a dense wet thud, as though I were splitting logs that had just come in from a three day drizzle. Blood exploded from his mouth and his tongue protruded dumbly, forked by a deep gash running from tip to root. I swung again, then again, mesmerized by the soggy, absorbing slap of the blows and the off-beat metallic ping that preceded each one. Only later did I discover that each back-swing had cost my Jetta a tail light, a trunk lip, a dinged fender.

  His eyes stayed open throughout. I kept waiting for oncoming cars but the only time in my life when things went my way happened to be the time I bludgeoned a police officer to death. You have no idea how resilient the human spirit is until you are forced to extinguish one. To pound a man’s skull with a two-foot piece of steel and have him continue to gawk at you: why, it’s all the proof of the existence of the human soul you can ever need. It took me ninety seconds to spill enough of his brains on the hardpan to ensure my escape, and then I had to scrape the pieces of his scalp from my tool so I could finish applying the spare.

  And now it is a day-and-a-half later and I-90 (and I-10 for that matter) is just a memory since I hit 95 north in Jacksonville. There’s no point in fulfilling my vision quest after doing one of Mississippi’s finest. A dead cop and a dead gambler inside an hour would only help draw a line through the big red dots I left behind. A line that would form an arrow pointing straight to good old Creole. It comes down to fight or flight an
d I’ve done my share of the former. It’s time to do some of the latter, or more accurately to do some of the latter by doing some more of the former. And maybe not alone either. Not ifl can help it.

  Charlotte is an hour away and I’ll make my true destination by nightfall. It’s been a long sobering drive in the dark and I have very little reason for hope. I left the cop’s dead body in the short grass by the side of the road, his car door still open, brights still blazing. No doubt I left a breadbox full of forensic evidence as well. That rig driver could remember spotting us. Patsy probably doesn’t get Marx quoted to her all that often. Yet, very little reason or no, I remain hopeful.

  For one thing, what I said to Patsy was honest, and that’s a start. If

  I can confess my horrific concept of love as a house-rules gamble to a stranger, how hard can it be to do the same with my wife? And once I tell her, maybe she can help me find my way back to seeing it as I did when I first fell in love with her. For another, if I can write all this down for you — you whove never even set eyes on me and have every right, every reason to believe me a monster — if I can set all this down for you, what do I have to hide from Faith? And still another: I saw that cop coming and saw my future and fought back. Inherent in that slaying must be the conviction that a better, alternate future is possible. For the second time in as many days, I had a gun at my head, but this time I chose a new path.

  So all signs point to a trust my subconscious has yet to make public but might. Maybe I can beat heroin. Maybe I can find my wife and my daughter in Baltimore, a scant ten hours away, and convince them I — we — deserve another chance. Maybe we can dodge Lazarus long enough for him to lose interest, get a job in San Luis Obispo, or Cincinnati, or Canada. Maybe we can live happily ever after and all that shit.

  Keller on the Spot

  from Playboy

  Keller, drink in hand, agreed with the woman in the pink dress that it was indeed a lovely evening. He threaded his way through a crowd of young marrieds on what he supposed you would call the patio. A waitress passed carrying a tray of drinks in stemmed glasses and he traded in his own for a fresh one. He sipped as he walked along, wondering what he was drinking. Some sort of vodka sour, he decided, and decided as well that he didn’t need to narrow it down any further than that. He figured he’d have this one and one more, but he could have ten more if he wanted, because he wasn’t working tonight. He could relax and cut loose and have a good time.

  Well, almost. He couldn’t relax completely, couldn’t cut loose altogether. Because, while this might not be work, neither was it entirely recreational. The garden party this evening was a heavensent opportunity for reconnaissance, and he would use it to get a close look at his quarry. He had been handed a picture back in White Plains, and he had brought that picture with him to Dallas, but even the best photo wasn’t the same as a glimpse of the fellow in the flesh, and in his native habitat.

  And a lush habitat it was. Keller hadn’t been inside the house yet, but it was clearly immense, a sprawling multilevel affair of innumerable large rooms. The grounds sprawled as well, covering an acre or two, with enough plants and shrubbery to stock an arboretum. Keller didn’t know anything about flowers, but five minutes in a garden like this one had him thinking he ought to know more about the subject. Maybe they had evening classes at Hunter or

  NYU; maybe they’d take you on field trips to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

  He walked along a brick path, smiling at this stranger, nodding at that one, and wound up standing alongside the swimming pool. Some 12 or 15 people sat at poolside tables, talking and drinking, the volume of their conversations rising as they drank. In the enormous pool, a young boy swam back and forth, back and forth.

  Keller felt a curious kinship with the kid. He was standing instead of swimming, but he felt as distant as the kid from everybody else around. There were two parties going on, he decided. There was the hearty social whirl, and there was the solitude he felt in the midst of it all, akin to the solitude of the swimming boy.

  Huge pool. The boy was swimming its width, but that dimension was still greater than the length of your typical backyard pool. Keller wasn’t sure if this was an Olympic-size pool, but he figured you could just call it enormous and let it go at that.

  Ages ago he’d heard about some college-boy stunt, filling a swimming pool with Jell-O, and he’d wondered how many little boxes of the gelatin dessert it would have required, and how the college boys could have afforded it. It would cost a fortune, he decided, to fill this pool with Jell-O, but if you could afford the pool in the first place, he supposed the Jell-O would be the least of your worries.

  There were cut flowers on all the tables, and the blooms looked like ones Keller had seen in the garden. It stood to reason. If you grew all these flowers, you wouldn’t have to order from the florist. You could cut your own.

  What good would it do, he wondered, to know the names of all the shrubs and flowers? Wouldn’t it just leave you wanting to dig in the soil and grow your own? And he didn’t want to get into all that, for God’s sake.

  So maybe he’d just forget about evening classes at Hunter, and field trips to Brooklyn. If he wanted to get close to nature he could walk in Central Park, and if he didn’t know the names of the flowers he would just hold off on introducing himself to them. And if —

  Where was the kid?

  The boy, the swimmer. Keller’s companion in solitude. Where the hell did he go? The pool was empty, its surface still. Keller saw a ripple toward the far end, saw bubbles break the surface.

  He didn’t react without thinking. That was how he’d always heard that sort of thing described, but that wasn’t what happened, because the thoughts were there, loud and clear. He’s down there. He’s in trouble. He's drowning. And, echoing in his head in a voice sour with exasperation: Keller, for Christ’s sake, do something!

  He set his glass on a table, shucked his coat, kicked off his shoes, dropped his pants and stepped out of them. Ages ago he’d earned a Red Gross lifesaving certificate, and the first thing they taught you was to strip before you hit the water. The six or seven seconds you spent peeling off your clothes would be repaid many times over in quickness and mobility.

  But the strip show did not go unnoticed. Everybody at poolside had a comment, one more hilarious than the next. He barely heard them. In no time at all he was down to his underwear. Then he was out of range of their cleverness, hitting the water in a flat racing dive, churning the water till he reached the spot where he’d seen the bubbles, then diving, eyes wide, barely noticing the burn of the chlorine.

  Searching for the boy. Groping, searching, then finding him, reaching to grab hold of him. And pushing off against the bottom, lungs bursting, racing to the surface.

  People were saying things to Keller, thanking him, congratulating him, but it wasn’t really registering. A man clapped him on the back, a woman handed him a glass of brandy. He heard the word hero and realized people were saying it all over the place, and applying it to him.

  Hell of a note.

  Keller sipped the brandy. It gave him heartburn, which assured him of its quality; good cognac always gave him heartburn. He turned to look at the boy. He was a little fellow, 12 or 13 years old, his hair lightened and his skin bronzed by the summer sun. He was sitting up now, Keller saw, and looking none the worse for his near-death experience.

  “Timothy,” a woman said, “this is the man who saved your life. Do you have something to say to him?”

  “Thanks,” Timothy said, predictably.

  “Is that all you have to say, young man?” the woman asked.

  “It’s enough,” Keller said, and smiled. To the boy he said, “There’s something I’ve always wondered. Did your life actually flash before your eyes?”

  Timothy shook his head. “I got this cramp,” he said, “and it was like my whole body turned into one big knot, and there wasn’t anything I could do to untie it. And I didn’t even think about drowning. I was j
ust fighting the cramp, ’cause it hurt, and about the next thing I knew I was up here, coughing and puking up water.” He made a face. “I must have swallowed half the pool. All I have to do is think about it and I can taste vomit and chlorine.” “Timothy,” the woman said, rolling her eyes.

  “Something to be said for plain speech,” an older man said. He had a mane of white hair and prominent white eyebrows, and his eyes were a vivid blue. He was holding a glass of brandy in one hand and a bottle in the other, and he reached with the bottle to fill Keller’s glass to the brim. “‘Claret for boys and port for men,”’ he said. “‘But he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.’ That’s Samuel Johnson, though I may have gotten a word wrong.”

  The woman patted his hand. “If you did, Daddy, I’m sure you just improved Mr. Johnson’s wording.”

  “Dr. Johnson,” he said, “and one could hardly do that. Improve the man’s wording, that is. ‘Being in a ship is like being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.’ He said that as well, and I defy anyone to comment more trenchantly on the experience, or to say it better.” He beamed at Keller. “I owe you more than a glass of brandy and a well-turned Johnsonian phrase. This little rascal whose life you’ve saved is my grandson, and the apple — nay, sir, the very nectarine — of my eye. And we’d have all stood around drinking and laughing while he drowned. You observed, and you acted, and God bless you for it.”