Odd Partners
Page 1
Odd Partners is a work of fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Mystery Writers of America, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Anne Perry
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Individual story credits are located on this page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Perry, Anne, editor of compilation. | Mystery Writers of America.
Title: Mystery writers of America presents odd partners: an anthology / edited by Anne Perry.
Other titles: Odd partners
Description: New York: Ballantine Books, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018053271 (print) | LCCN 2018059337 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524799366 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524799359 (Hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery stories, American. | American fiction—21st century
Classification: LCC PS648.D4 (ebook) | LCC PS648.D4 M97 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.087208—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053271
Ebook ISBN 9781524799366
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Victoria Allen
Cover image: Anne Costello/Arcangel
v5.4
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by Anne Perry
“Reconciliation” BY ANNE PERRY
“The Nature of the Beast” BY WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER
“Sad Onions: A Hap and Leonard Story” BY JOE R. LANSDALE
“The Wagatha Labsy Secret Dogtective Alliance: A Dog Noir Story” BY JACQUELINE WINSPEAR
“Glock, Paper, Scissors” BY SHELLEY COSTA
“Blood Money: An Inspector Rutledge Story” BY CHARLES TODD
“The Violins Played Before Junshan” BY LOU KEMP
“What Ever Happened to Lorna Winters?” BY LISA MORTON
“Oglethorpe’s Camera” BY CLAIRE ORTLADA
“The Last Game” BY ROBERT DUGONI
“NO 11 SQUATTER” BY ADELE POLOMSKI
“A Cold Spell” BY MARK THIELMAN
“What Would Nora Do?” BY GEORGIA JEFFRIES
“Hector’s Bees” BY AMANDA WITT
“Georgia in the Wind” BY WILLIAM FRANK
“From Four till Late: A Nick Travers Story” BY ACE ATKINS
“Bite Out of Crime” BY ALLISON BRENNAN
“Songbird Blues” BY STEPHEN ROSS
“Security” BY JEFFREY DEAVER
Credits
About the Authors
About the Editor
Introduction
I have really enjoyed putting together this anthology, and I think you will enjoy it, too. When I was invited to edit it, I was also given the chance to decide on the subject that would bind all the stories together. Several ideas were put forward, but I was passionate about the idea of “odd partners.” I had in mind any two beings who had to cooperate with each other, willingly or by force of circumstances, to solve a crime.
I had already read with great pleasure Charles Todd’s series of mysteries featuring an officer from World War I who was haunted by the ghost of a man he was forced to execute, whose voice he still heard in his head, advising him on current cases. That was a fascinating and uncomfortable “other.” Charles Todd was the first person I invited to contribute a story. Happily, he accepted.
There are endless possibilities to work with. Partners may be “odd” because they are of different races, cultures, beliefs, or even have different purposes for solving a crime. Conflict, internal and external, is the heart of drama and perhaps the soul of its resolution. Conflict can provide insight into anything, but particularly into people, and into yourself.
The journey is eventful because all sorts of clashes can happen. There can be quarrels, misunderstandings, anger, and forgiveness. And, of course, always, the crime must be solved: who, why, and how? After all, we are the Mystery Writers of America!
I placed no limit on time or place, and there is a wide variety. More importantly, there was no restriction on the nature of the awkwardness or differences between the two people. Or that they had to be two people! Why not an animal? Especially a dog. Where would the police force, or the army, be without dogs—or horses? Cats are another subject, and make for a different kind of story, and detective—but never forget cats! Or wild animals. William Kent Krueger has contributed a marvelous story whose odd partners are a lover of the land and its life and beauty, and a wolf in the wild. And yet they are partners in this instance. It is a beautiful story. I read it smiling, with tears in my eyes. I will definitely read it again.
And there are other wonderful stories by writers you know, such as Joe R. Lansdale, Allison Brennan, Jeffery Deaver, Robert Dugoni, Jacqueline Winspear, and Ace Atkins, which you will love, and others by writers you will come to know. They each address “oddness” differently, some with wit, some with tragedy, others as triumph. Cooperation can be willing or unwilling.
Naturally there can be other kinds of odd partners as well. If you can have a ghost or a wolf, why not a diary that tells you things you didn’t know, and perhaps didn’t want to know—but now you do, you have to deal with it, and it leads you to the solutions of old crimes and new ones. The same could be true of a bundle of old letters or even a portrait painted by a particularly perceptive artist.
The odd relationship can lead to anything—or nothing at all.
But the heart of a story is the journey toward understanding of others, and, most of all, of yourself.
I hope you get as much pleasure from reading these stories as I did when I collected them.
—ANNE PERRY
Reconciliation
ANNE PERRY
Jack had to find Private Richards before he did something stupid, and irrevocable. Damn the men who had tormented the new recruit with what they had said was his cowardice. They might have thought they were teasing him, teaching him to stand up for himself, but Richards was barely seventeen. It was too soon—only a couple of months ago he had been a school boy! Now he was a soldier in the Flanders trenches, with a rifle in his hands.
Jack rounded the bend in the trench, keeping his head low. But Richards was nowhere in sight along this stretch. He was not among the men sitting on the duckboards, smoking their Woodbines, reading letters from home, making bad jokes. They knew how to hide their fear. Richards didn’t, not yet. He was frightened out of his wits, deafened by the noise of gunfire, sick with the smell of death clogging his senses, and above all trying to do the right thing, trying to belong.
Jack Barrick was a veteran; he was twenty-three and had been here since the beginning, two years ago, at the end of that blazing hot summer of 1914. Home by Christmas, they had said. Over a million casualties later, it looked as if they woul
d be here forever. Some of them really would be, God help them. Buried in the Flanders clay. What is forever when you are seventeen and the average life expectancy is a matter of weeks?
But Jack was not going to lose Richards because some irresponsible idiot had made him think he was a coward and not fit to be one of them.
Everything was quiet now, Jerry must be taking a nap! Jack’s feet rattled on the duckboards. Think! Where would Richards go? Where would he feel safe? Double back to the supply trench. Jack went down the connecting trench, still keeping low. A careless hand—or worse, head—could still attract a sniper’s bullet.
Jack asked everyone he passed if they had seen Richards. No one had. But then he encountered a worried-looking sergeant far too concerned with his own problems to listen to anyone else’s.
“Ah! Captain Barrick,” said the man as he grabbed Jack’s arm. “You seen anyone come this way carrying a gas canister? Probably had it wrapped up in something. Could look like anything—clothes.”
“You missing one?” Jack caught his alarm. Gas was everyone’s nightmare. Ever since it had first been used at Ypres last year, the thick, poisonous fumes haunted them all, worse than drowning in the mud, or being caught on the barbed wire, riddled with bullets. Equal, maybe, to the sapper’s fear of being trapped in the endless tunnels beneath no-man’s-land in a flood or a cave-in, slowly crushed, unable to breathe. Jack knew that fear personally. He was a sapper himself.
“Yes,” the sergeant admitted. “Saw a young soldier hanging around, you can always tell the latest lot. The fear in their eyes that isn’t quite the thousand-yard stare, but you know that if they live, it will be. He could have taken it; stupid little sod might not realize what it is.”
Jack felt a knot tighten in his chest. “About my height, fair hair? Seventeen?”
There was no relief in the sergeant’s face. “Yes. That’s him.”
Jack wanted to doubt, but the sick certainty inside him left no room. “Which way did he go?” he asked, although he knew already.
“Toward the front.” The sergeant indicated the front line, and no-man’s-land and the German lines beyond. “Do you know him? Where’s he gone?”
“Just lost, I hope,” Jack said fervently. “Please God—”
The sergeant still had hold of Jack’s arm. His grip tightened. “Lost? You want the poor little devil lost? What’s wrong with you, man?” He was almost shouting.
Jack freed his arm. “I’m hoping he’s wandering around trying to think what to do. Or better still, how to get the gas back without anyone knowing.”
“But?”
“But I’m afraid I know where he’s going—”
“Where? God in heaven!” The sergeant’s face was white now. “He’s not going to gas those stupid gits who were teasing him, is he?”
“No…I think he’s hoping to prove his courage by going into the tunnels and letting the gas out…on the other side.” Jack remembered the taunts he’d heard and some harebrained idea that gas in the German lines would decimate them the same way they had decimated us. Only nobody had the guts to take it there. It was just stupid talk.
But Richards had heard it. He had even asked where the entrances to the tunnels were from this side. No one had answered him. It was a carefully guarded secret. Only the sappers went down there, new men, and the remnants of those who had dug them. Sappers’ casualty rates were high. It was something Jack knew but refused to think of.
The sergeant was staring at him. “What do you want me to do?”
“Keep quiet for the moment.”
“You going after him?”
“Yes.”
“Would it…would it be so bad if he put a gas canister in their trenches for a change?”
Jack closed his eyes to conceal his fury. “It would be very bad indeed, Sergeant,” he answered quietly. “Our trenches are a little lower than theirs. Slope of the land. And we dug a bit deeper. It gives us an advantage in some ways. The friable topsoil where they are tends to collapse more easily. Ours is more clay, thicker, less likely to give way. And wetter, of course. Water finds its own level—”
“I know all that,” the sergeant interrupted.
Jack opened his eyes. “Do you also know that the gas is heavier than air? That it finds the lowest level it can? It will start off in their tunnels and then seep into ours—”
“Through the earth?” The sergeant’s disbelief was thick in his voice—doubt, mockery.
“No,” Jack said patiently. “Through the places where the tunnels come close to one another. Through the walls that are so thin in places, we can hear them talking to one another as if there were just a piece of plaster board between us and them. Sometimes we accidentally break into one of their tunnels, or they do into one of ours. If he lets the gas go in one of theirs, you can bet your last penny it will end up in ours, too. Would you like to be trapped underground in a dark, narrow tunnel where you have to stoop to miss hitting the roof and carry a lantern to see where you are going—there’s no light underground, Sergeant. Absolutely none at all. Then smell gas? Would you?”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” The sergeant crossed himself, his face pasty white.
“So which way did he go?” Jack repeated.
“You’re not…going down there after him? You can’t!”
“No, I’m just going to let it happen,” Jack snapped. He could not bear to think about it and then do it. He could do it only if he thought about something else.
The sergeant grunted without saying anything else.
* * *
—
Jack went straight to the camouflaged entrance of the nearest tunnel. To his mind, it seemed the most likely one for Richards to have found. Although the thought that the boy had stumbled across it so quickly was worrying. It was obviously not as well hidden as he had believed. Something to pay attention to another time.
He pulled back the sacking over the entrance and went in, letting it fall back into place after him, concealing it again. He shone his lantern ahead of him. The corridor was long and low, rising at the end until the way forward became invisible. His eyes would get used to it. He breathed in slowly. Even now, the smell of wet earth almost suffocated him. It brought back too many memories, going far into his childhood and time spent with his father down the coal mines of Durham County, in the mining village where Jack was born. He could remember the huge, ragged wind-torn skies, the endless views from the moors, and place names that haunted you, like Pity Me. Mining country.
Miners were hard men. They had to be. Hard men with soft hearts. Funny how many of them could sing so gloriously. You didn’t know music till you had heard a Welsh male voice choir. Break your heart, it would.
Jack was walking firmly now, as if he were on a well-trodden path. And so he was. Other men like him had built this tunnel, going far under no-man’s-land, right under the German lines—men from other mining villages in England and Wales. Lots from Wales, from the richly coal-seamed valleys. It didn’t really matter where a mining village was, they all had something in common—England, Wales, even Germany. The soil was different, but the darkness was the same, the sense of the earth tightening itself against the invader, closing in. And, of course, the incessant dripping of water.
Water is necessary for life, and yet, underground, it is also the enemy. Over time, it rots all the wooden supports that hold up the cross beams. You could not always see it in the half-light. You had to know the places where it collected. Water goes down, following the way of least resistance. He was sure some preacher had made the most of that in a sermon! Look for the rot where the water collects.
Jack had to think of something other than the light almost invisible around him, and the fact that he was going deeper all the time. He had to keep out of the way of the German tunnels. Last thing he wanted was to break through into one of theirs! Of course, bet
ter straight into it than over, and fall in on top of them. An injury down here was worse than in the open. Easy enough to do. The worst of all would be a rockfall pinning you down, trapped here forever. Who would dig you out? Touch the walls where they had given way and you could bring them all down.
He came to another arch built of timber. He could remember building this one. He and Colin had worked on it. Seemed like a long time ago. And Colin had been dead a year now. Still down here, somewhere. A cave-in. There was nothing they could have done.
He did not want to think about it. The sight of the arch had brought it all back. He touched it with one hand, as if in some way he were touching Colin himself, forever built into this tunnel. He even spoke to him. Stupid thing to do, as if he could hear.
Jack looked at the ground. Was there anything at all to indicate that Richards had come this way? What would tell him? Footprints? Hardly. How would you tell the marks of one army boot from another? There could be a hundred thousand men with a size ten boot, and every boot was near enough the same.
Did Richards expect to come back? Yes. To tell the men who had accused him of cowardice that he had gone through the tunnels alone and put gas right where the enemy lived. Then he might have made some mark to recognize on his return and know that he was going the right way.
It was five impatient minutes before he found it. Just a tiny DR scratched on the upright, above eye height. You had to be looking for it. Miners tended not to be tall men. Short, stocky, could laugh hard, and weep hard, and sing like angels.
Jack had a pretty good sense of direction. If you work underground, you have to have that. There’s nothing to guide you. No stars, no shadows except your own, cast by the lamp.