The Best American Noir of the Century

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Through the bullet hole in the windshield, I could see an inch or so of starry sky.

  It was a long alley, and we must have gone a quarter block before he said, “I’m going to sit up. I think we lost him.”

  “So do I.”

  “Look at the frigging windshield.”

  Not only was the windshield a mess, the car reeked of spilled beer.

  “You think I should turn on the headlights?”

  “Sure,” I said. “We’re safe now.”

  We were still crawling at maybe ten miles per hour when he pulled the headlights on.

  That’s when we saw him, silver of eye, dark of hair, crouching in the middle of the alley waiting for us. He was a good fifty yards ahead of us, but we were still within range.

  There was no place we could turn around.

  He fired.

  This bullet shattered whatever had been left untouched of the windshield. Neil slammed on the brakes.

  Then he fired a second time.

  By now, both Neil and I were screaming and cursing again.

  A third bullet.

  “Run him over!” I yelled, ducking behind the dashboard.

  “What?” Neil yelled back.

  “Floor it!”

  He floored it. He wasn’t even sitting up straight. We might have gone careening into one of the garages or Dumpsters. But somehow the Buick stayed in the alley. And very soon it was traveling eighty-five miles per hour. I watched the speedometer peg it.

  More shots, a lot of them now, side windows shattering, bullets ripping into fender and hood and top.

  I didn’t see us hit him, but I felt us hit him, the car traveling that fast, the creep so intent on killing us he hadn’t bothered to get out of the way in time.

  The front of the car picked him up and hurled him into a garage near the head of the alley.

  We both sat up, watched as his entire body was broken against the edge of the garage, and he then fell smashed and unmoving to the grass.

  “Kill the lights,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Kill the lights, and let’s go look at him.”

  Neil punched off the headlights.

  We left the car and ran over to him.

  A white rib stuck bloody and brazen from his side. Blood poured from his ears, nose, mouth. One leg had been crushed and also showed white bone. His arms had been broken, too.

  I played my flashlight beam over him.

  He was dead, all right.

  “Looks like we can save our money,” I said. “It’s all over now.”

  “I want to get the hell out of here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So do I.”

  We got the hell out of there.

  ~ * ~

  7

  A month later, just as you could smell autumn on the summer winds, Jan and I celebrated our twelfth wedding anniversary. We drove up to Lake Geneva, in Wisconsin, and stayed at a very nice hotel and rented a Chris-Craft for a couple of days. This was the first time I’d been able to relax since the thing with the burglar had started.

  One night when Jan was asleep, I went up on the deck of the boat and just watched the stars. I used to read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs when I was a boy. I always remembered how John Carter felt — that the stars had a very special destiny for him and would someday summon him to that destiny. My destiny, I decided that night there on the deck, was to be a good family man, a good stockbroker, and a good neighbor. The bad things were all behind me now. I imagined Neil was feeling pretty much the same way. Hot bitter July seemed a long way behind us now. Fall was coming, bringing with it football and Thanksgiving and Christmas. July would recede even more with snow on the ground.

  The funny thing was, I didn’t see Neil much anymore. It was as if the sight of each other brought back a lot of bad memories. It was a mutual feeling, too. I didn’t want to see him any more than he wanted to see me. Our wives thought this was pretty strange. They’d meet at the supermarket or shopping center and wonder why “the boys” didn’t get together anymore. Neil’s wife, Sarah, kept inviting us over to “sit around the pool and watch Neil pretend he knows how to swim.” September was summer hot. The pool was still the centerpiece of their life.

  Not that I made any new friends. The notion of a midweek poker game had lost all its appeal. There was work and my family and little else.

  Then, one sunny Indian-summer afternoon, Neil called and said, “Maybe we should get together again.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Its over, Aaron. It really is.”

  “I know.”

  “Will you at least think about it?”

  I felt embarrassed. “Oh, hell, Neil. Is that swimming pool of yours open Saturday afternoon?”

  “As a matter of fact, it is. And as a matter of fact, Sarah and the girls are going to be gone to a fashion show at the club.”

  “Perfect. We’ll have a couple of beers.”

  “You know how to swim?”

  “No,” I said, laughing. “And from what Sarah says, you don’t either.”

  ~ * ~

  I got there about three, pulled into the drive, walked to the back where the gate in the wooden fence led to the swimming pool. It was eighty degrees, and even from here I could smell the chlorine.

  I opened the gate and went inside and saw him right away. The funny thing was, I didn’t have much of a reaction at all. I just watched him. He was floating. Face-down. He looked pale in his red trunks. This, like the others, would be judged an accidental death. Of that I had no doubt at all.

  I used the cellular phone in my car to call 911.

  I didn’t want Sarah and the girls coming back to see an ambulance and police cars in the drive and them not knowing what was going on.

  I called the club and had her paged.

  I told her what I’d found. I let her cry. I didn’t know what to say. I never do.

  In the distance, I could hear the ambulance working its way toward the Neil Solomon residence.

  I was just about to get out of the car when my cellular phone rang. I picked up. “Hello?”

  “There were three of us that night at your house, Mr. Bellini. You killed two of us. I recovered from when your friend stabbed me, remember? Now I’m ready for action. I really am, Mr. Bellini.”

  Then the emergency people were there, and neighbors, too, and then wan, trembling Sarah. I just let her cry some more. Gave her whiskey and let her cry.

  ~ * ~

  8

  He knows how to do it, whoever he is.

  He lets a long time go between late-night calls. He lets me start to think that maybe he changed his mind and left town. And then he calls. Oh, yes, he knows just how to play this little game. He never says anything. He doesn’t need to. He just listens. And then hangs up.

  I’ve considered going to the police, of course, but it’s way too late for that. Way too late.

  Or I could ask Jan and the kids to move away to a different city with me. But he knows who I am, and he’d find me again.

  So all I can do is wait and hope that I get lucky, the way Neil and I got lucky the night we killed the second of them.

  ~ * ~

  Tonight I can’t sleep.

  It’s after midnight.

  Jan and I wrapped presents until well after eleven. She asked me again if anything was wrong. We don’t make love as much as we used to, she said; and then there are the nightmares. “Please tell me if something’s wrong, Aaron. Please.”

  I stand at the window watching the snow come down. Soft and beautiful snow. In the morning, a Saturday, the kids will make a snowman and then go sledding and then have themselves a good old-fashioned snowball fight, which invariably means that one of them will come rushing in at some point and accuse the other of some terrible misdeed.

  I see all this from the attic window.

  Then I turn back and look around the poker table. Four empty chairs. Three of them belong to dead men.

  I look at the empty chairs
and think back to summer.

  I look at the empty chairs and wait for the phone to ring.

  I wait for the phone to ring.

  <>

  * * * *

  1996

  JAMES CRUMLEY

  * * *

  HOT SPRINGS

  James (Arthur) Crumley (1939-2008) was born in Three Rivers, Texas, and grew up in south Texas. After serving in the Army in the Philippines, he received his BA in history (1964) from the Texas College of Arts and Industries, to which he had received a football scholarship, then got his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing (1966) from the University of Iowa, where he began his first novel, One to Count Cadence, as his masters thesis; it was published in 1969.

  After that Vietnam War novel, he turned to mystery fiction with The Wrong Case (1975), introducing the first of his two private eye characters, Milo Milo-dragovich, who also appeared in Dancing Bear (1983) and The Final Country (2001). His tougher PI, C. W. Sughrue, made his debut in The Last Good Kiss (1978), which many contemporary mystery writers, such as George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, and Dennis Lehane, regard as among the most influential crime novels of the second half of the twentieth century. This memorable novel opens with one of the most famous and perfect first lines in crime fiction: “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” Sughrue also appeared in The Mexican Tree Duck (1993), The Right Madness (2005), and Bordersnakes (1996), in which Milo also features. Inexplicably, and to its everlasting shame, the Mystery Writers of America never gave Crumley any award, or even nominated him for one — a seemingly impossible scenario when one considers the power and importance of his work, as well as the nearly overwhelming beauty of his prose.

  “Hot Springs” was first published in the anthology Murder for Love (New York: Delacorte, 1996).

  ~ * ~

  A

  t night, even in the chill mountain air, Mona Sue insisted on cranking the air conditioner all the way up. Her usual temperature always ran a couple of degrees higher than normal, and she claimed that the baby she carried made her constant fever even worse. She kept the cabin cold enough to hang meat. During the long, sleepless nights, Ben-bow spooned to her naked, burning skin, trying to stay warm.

  In the mornings, too, Mona Sue forced him into the cold. The modern cabin sat on a bench in the cool shadow of Mount Nihart, and they broke their fast with a room-service breakfast on the deck, a robe wrapped loosely about her naked body while Benbow bundled into both sweats and a robe. She ate furiously, stoking a furnace, and recounted her dreams as if they were gospel, effortlessly consuming most of the spread of exotic cheeses and expensively unseasonable fruits, a loaf of sourdough toast, and four kinds of meat, all the while aimlessly babbling through the events of her internal night, the dreams of a teenage girl, languidly symbolic and vaguely frightening. She dreamed of her mother, young and lovely, devouring her litter of barefoot boys in the dark Ozark hollows. And her father, home from a Tennessee prison, his crooked member dangling against her smooth cheek.

  Benbow suspected she left the best parts out and did his best to listen to the soft southern cadences without watching her face. He knew what happened when he watched her talk, watched the soft moving curve of her dark lips, the wise slant of her gray eyes. So he picked at his breakfast and tried to focus his stare downslope at the steam drifting off the large hot-water pool behind the old shagbark lodge.

  But then she switched to her daydreams about their dubious future, which were as deadly specific as a .45 slug in the brainpan: after the baby, they could flee to Canada; nobody would follow them up there. He listened and watched with the false patience of a teenage boy involved in his first confrontation with pure lust and hopeless desire.

  Mona Sue ate with the precise and delicate greed of a heart surgeon, the pad of her spatulate thumb white on the handle of her spoon as she carved a perfect curled ball from the soft orange meat of her melon. Each bite of meat had to be balanced with an equal weight of toast before being crushed between her tiny white teeth. Then she examined each strawberry poised before her darkly red lips as if it might be a jewel of great omen and she some ancient oracle, then sank her shining teeth into the fleshy fruit as if it were the mortal truth. Benbow’s heart rolled in his chest as he tried to fill his lungs with the cold air to fight off the heat of her body.

  Fall had come to the mountains, now. The cottonwoods and alders welcomed the change with garish mourning dress, and in the mornings a rime of ice covered the windshield of the gray Taurus he had stolen at the Denver airport. New snow fell each night, moving slowly down the ridges from the high distant peaks of the Hard Rock Range, and slipped closer each morning down the steep ridge behind them. Below the bench the old lodge seemed to settle more deeply into the narrow canyon, as if hunkering down for eons of snow, and the steam from the hot springs mixed with wood smoke and lay flat and sinuous among the yellow creek willows.

  Benbow suspected, too, that the scenery was wasted on Mona Sue. Her dark eyes seemed turned inward to a dreamscape of her life, her husband, R. L. Dark, the pig farmer, his bull-necked son, Little R. L., and the lumpy Ozark offal of her large worthless family.

  “Coach,” she’d say — she thought it funny to call him Coach — interrupting the shattered and drifting narrative of her dreams. Then she would sweep back the thick black Indian hair from her face, tilt her narrow head on the slender column of her neck, and laugh. “Coach, that of R. L., he’s a-comin’. You stole somethin’ belonged to him, and you can bet he’s on his way. Lit’l R. L., too, prob’ly, ‘cause he tol’ me once he’d like to string your guts on a bob-wire fence,” she recited like a sprightly but not very bright child.

  “Sweetheart, R. L. Dark can just barely cipher the numbers on a dollar bill or the spots on a card,” Benbow answered, as he had each morning for the six months they’d been on the run. “He can’t read a map that he hasn’t drawn himself, and by noon he’s too drunk to fit his ass in a tractor seat and find his hog pens...”

  “You know, Puddin’, an ol’ boy’s got enough a them dollar bills, or stacks a them Franklins like we do,” she added, laughing, “he can hire-out that readin’ part, and the map part too. So he’s a-comin’. You can put that in your mama’s piggy bank.”

  This was a new wrinkle in their morning ritual, and Benbow caught himself glancing down at the parking lot behind the lodge and at the single narrow road up Hidden Springs Canyon, but he shook it off quickly. When he made the fateful decision to take Mona Sue and the money, he vowed to go for it, never glancing over his shoulder, living in the moment.

  And this was it. Once more. Leaving his breakfast untouched, again, he slipped his hand through the bulky folds of Mona Sue’s terry cloth robe to cradle the warm ripening fullness of her breasts and the long, thick nipples, already rock-hard before his touch, and he kissed her mouth, sweet with strawberry and melon. Once again, he marveled at the deep passionate growl from the base of her throat as he pressed his lips into the hollow, then Benbow lifted her small frame — she nestled the baby high under the smooth vault of her rib cage and even at seven months the baby barely showed — and carried her to the bedroom.

  Benbow knew, from recent experience, that the horse wrangler who doubled as room-service waiter would be waiting to clear the picnic table when they came out of the house to finish the coffee. The wrangler might have patience with horses but not with guests who spent their mornings in bed. But he would wait for long minutes, silent as a Sioux scout, as Mona Sue searched her robe for his tip, occasionally exposing the rising contour of a breast or the clean scissoring of her long legs. Benbow had given him several hard looks, which the wrangler ignored as if the blunt stares were spoken in a foreign tongue. But nothing helped. Except to take the woman inside and avoid the wrangler altogether.

  This morning Benbow laid
Mona Sue on the featherbed like a gift, opened her robe, kissed the soft curve of her swollen belly, then blew softly on her feathery pubic hair. Mona Sue sobbed quickly, coughed as if she had a catfish bone caught in her throat, her long body arching. Benbow sobbed, too, his hunger for her more intense than the hunger growling in his empty stomach.

  While Mona Sue had swelled through her pregnancy, Benbow had shed twenty-seven pounds from his blocky frame. Sometimes, just after they made love, it seemed as if her burning body had stolen the baby from his own muscled flesh, something stolen during the tangle of love, something growing hard and tight in her smooth, slim body.