The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (10 page)

The scene began to resolve: The guy from the red Scion was Bobito. He was working a pair of nunchucks (not a baton!) and instructing Tony Bennett to “Step off.” Tony Bennett appeared unsure what to do. With some difficulty, he removed the gun from his holster, which brought Bobito up short. Scarface had his hands out, palms up. This was all taking place behind a Dunkin' Donuts, in what one might call a low-traffic asphalt area.

Then a fourth figure became visible: his daughter Izzy in orange soccer shorts and shin guards; Izzy, who had inherited his big dumb nose—he felt terrible about it—what in God's name had he ensnared her in? She was marching toward Scarface and Tony Bennett from behind, at such an angle that she couldn't see the basic standoff scenario. “I told you guys, no being rough!” she yelled. Then, catching sight of the weapons, she shrieked: “Omigod-omigod-omigod!”

Loomis concurred. He did not ponder why his daughter had been shouting at Scarface and Tony Bennett. He did not think about anything but Izzy, who was still wearing her cleats, which he'd expressly told her not to do because nongrass surfaces wore the plastic down, but what did it matter, what did any of it matter? She was his baby girl, his number one; he had caught her at birth, her tender bluish body coated in hot slop. He rose up and staggered toward her, right through the line of fire. He was going to possibly die a hero, and this felt, for a gorgeous fraction of a second, true and good. He lunged and knocked Izzy to the ground and lay on top of her like a soggy rug, bellowing, “Please don't shoot oh god she's my baby daughter please don't shoot I beg you oh god I'm begging.”

This went on for a while.

Scarface gestured toward Bobito. “Who the hell is this guy?”

“Mr. Loomis's personal security detail is who I am, bitch.”

Loomis was too terrified to mention that this was not technically true.

“Drop the Chink sticks,” Tony Bennett said. He was trying to sound tough, but his voice strained for the effect, and Loomis, cowering below him, could see his hands trembling, as if the gun clasped between them weighed next to nothing.

“You first,” Bobito said.

“Please do it,” Loomis whimpered. “Please, Bobito. Please please.”

Bobito sneered and dropped the nunchucks. “For the girl.”

Tony Bennett had just lowered his weapon when a siren sounded. Suddenly all three men were yelling
shit
and
fuck
and glaring at Loomis as if this were all his fault. Bobito tossed his nunchucks in the dumpster. To Tony Bennett he said, “Ditch the piece, dammit.”

“Wait,” Tony Bennett said. “Wait wait.”

“Ditch it,” Bobito snarled.

The gun landed on the pavement with a hollow plasticky clatter. Loomis could see that the weapon, which lay a few feet away, had a tiny plug in back, to keep the water inside.

“What the fuck?” Bobito said.

“Here's the thing,” Scarface said. His cheeks had become damp with sweat; the scar now dangled.

“Let's just get out of here,” Tony Bennett murmured.

“Oh no you don't,” Bobito said. “You been terrorizing my client. You ain't going nowhere.”

“He was never in any danger,” Scarface said.

“Tell that to my man,” Bobito said. “He's on the ground, crushing his little girl, his head all bleeding.”

“Bleeding?” Loomis said. “Crushing?” He rolled off Izzy and wiped his temple with the back of his hand. The red made him gag. Scarface hurried over and offered a handkerchief. “Direct pressure,” he said with genuine remorse. “Head wounds bleed.”

Loomis struggled to process the new data. The gun was a toy. The scar was a fake. He was not going to die heroically, which was great news, terrific really, but also a little disappointing. Izzy seemed to be in some kind of shock. She kept sobbing that she was sorry, which was not a word he associated with her. The cops, yipping through red lights, were closing in on all of them.

Tony Bennett and Scarface began walking backward, toward the alley behind the dumpster.

“Don't you dare,” Bobito said.

“We were just doing a job,” Tony Bennett said.

“I got your license plate,” Bobito said. “I'll track you down.”

“Cut us some slack,” Scarface said, sounding notably less Italian. “We got downsized. You got any idea how hard it is to find work when you're over fifty and can't operate Excel?”

“I got three teenagers at home to feed,” Tony Bennett said in an imploring tone. “Let's forget this ever happened, okay? Okay?”

But no, it was not okay. A cop car pulled up behind them, and a black female officer stepped out, her stout partner emerging from the other side of the car. The officers spotted Izzy, Loomis, the blood, and drew their weapons. Everyone raised their hands in unison, like a dance troupe.

“This gentleman fell,” Tony Bennett called out. “He had some kind of seizure.”

“Is that true, sir?” the black cop demanded.

“My dad's a diabetic,” Izzy said suddenly. “He gets dizzy when he gets low blood sugar.” She squeezed his hand and looked at Bobito imploringly.

Loomis made his head nod. “I came here to get a doughnut, but I got lightheaded. I guess I fell.”

“We got a report of a dispute,” the other cop said.

“That was me, officer,” Izzy said tearfully. “Because, you know, it's my dad. These guys came by to help me. I was sort of panicking.”

The black cop lowered her weapon. “I'm going to call an ambulance.”

“Omigod,” Izzy said. “Are you taking him to the hospital?”

“Please, officer,” Loomis said. “I'm fine. These gentlemen have been very kind. We'd really just like to walk home. It's only a few blocks, and my daughter is quite upset.”

The officer cocked her head.

Loomis stood up and smiled and showed her that the wound was no big deal, just a small gash. The sun was drawing their shadows across the parking lot. Loomis felt a strange elation, a sense of things cohering, of some larger force having summoned him to this moment. It made no sense, but he wanted to thank everyone: Bobito for watching over him without his permission, Tony Bennett for keeping a cool head, Scarface for the handkerchief, the black lady cop for, in her own way, trying to warn him.

He lifted his daughter and hugged her to him as the others walked back into their own lives. But there was something amiss—a hard object pressed against his tender ribs, and he knew at once what it was: the toy pistol, which Izzy had stashed inside her shirt to conceal it from the cops. He thought of how she had spoken to Tony Bennett and Scarface when she first appeared, and he realized what she had done, and then why. Izzy must have sensed his revelation because she began to weep again. And then he was weeping too, because she was right, she had seen it more clearly than he had, how fragile their little family was, how easily daddies lost faith in themselves, and how this made families fall apart. And this made him think (for whatever blessed reason) of those first few seconds of her life, how slippery she had been, how easily he might have dropped her, and up above, Kate, her lovely face smeared red with joy.

They'd have to explain to her that he'd fallen and hit his head. Or maybe they'd confess to the whole crazy thing. It didn't matter. He'd ask forgiveness too. But that was the easy part: finding the right words. The hard part, the part he'd been fighting all along, would be facing who he'd become. How did one find a way back to grace?

Loomis held on—to the memory of Izzy and the truth of her, lashed between rage and mercy like the rest of humankind, precious, alive, his number-one girl smelling of grass and bubblegum.

MATT BELL

FROM
Tin House

T
HE MORNING OF
the first snow, Kelly drove an unexplored length of the zone, coasting the truck slowly from driveway to driveway, assessing doors left open, windows missing, porches collapsed by the removal of their metal supports. Some of the houses had been scrapped already, but he knew he would find one more recently closed, with boards in the windows and an intact door. A space empty but not yet shredded. The farther he moved toward the center of the city, the more the neighborhoods sagged, all the wood falling off of brick, most every house uninhabited, the stores a couple thousand square feet of blank shelves, windows barred against the stealing of the nothing there. Paint scraped off concrete, concrete crumbled, turned to dust beneath the weather. Wind damage, water damage. Fire and flood. Before the zone, Kelly had never known rain alone could turn a building to dust. But rain had flooded the Great Lakes, ice had sheered Michigan's cliffs, had shaped the dunes he'd dreamed of often after he'd left the state, before he'd returned to find these fading city streets, the left-behind houses abandoned to this latest age of the state's greatest city.

As Kelly drove he saw how the zone sprawled beneath the falling snow, casting its imperfection wider than he could accept, but eventually he chose a house—two floors, blue paint on the siding, gray boards over the windows, a yellow door, surrounded on both sides by vacant lots, with only a burnt shell standing watch across the street—then went to the door and knocked, yelled greetings loaded with question marks.

He waited, yelled again.

He raised his hood, returned to the truck for a pry bar. He moved out of the front yard and along the side of the house, the brown grass crunching beneath the snow. Beside the blue house was a metal gate in a chain-link fence, but the gate wasn't latched. At the first window he pulled back the covering board, found the glass gone. He peeked in, searched for furniture, a television or a radio. Instead, stained carpet, signs of water damage, a kitchen with no dirty dishes but an intact gas range, a sink and faucet he could wrench from the countertops.

He lifted himself through the window. Leading away from the kitchen was a staircase to the second floor and also a basement door, closed and latched with a padlock. He'd cut the lock later, after the other work was done. Upstairs, the bedrooms were small, their ceilings sloped to fit beneath the peaked roof, but there was enough room to swing a sledge. Back downstairs he opened the front door—the door not even locked, but he hadn't thought to check before climbing in the window—then crossed the snowy yard to the truck for the rest of his tools. Already his first footprints were buried beneath the accumulation and afterward he wouldn't be able to convince himself there had been others, no matter how insistently he was asked.

In the master bedroom he flicked the light switch to check the power, then aimed above the outlets and swung. He took what other scrappers might have left behind. With a screwdriver he removed each metal junction box from the bedroom, then in the bathroom he cut free the old copper plumbing from under the sink and inside the walls. He smoked and watched the snowfall through a bedroom window, the world quiet and wet under its weight. In the South he'd forgotten the feeling of a house in winter, the unexpected nostalgia of watching the world disappear under snowfall. He put his forehead to the cool glass, watched the stillness fill the pane.

Downstairs, he dismantled the kitchen, disconnected the stove from the wall, cut the steel sink from the counter. He worked quietly in what he thought was the wintry hush of the house, but later he would be told about the amateur soundproofing in the basement, about the mattresses nailed to the walls, about the eggshell foam pressed between the basement rafters.

The soundproofing meant the boy screaming in the basement wasn't screaming for Kelly but for anyone. There would be talk of providence, but what was providence but a fancy word for luck? If the upstairs of the blue house had been plumbed with PVC, Kelly might not have gone down into the basement. But then copper in the bathroom, but then the copper price.

It wasn't until he cut the padlock's loop and opened the basement door that he heard the boy's voice, the boy's hoarse cry for help rising out of the dark.

As soon as Kelly heard the boy's voice the moment split, and in the aftermath of that cry Kelly thought he lived both possibilities in simultaneous sequence: there was an empty basement or else there was a basement with a boy in a bed, and it seemed to Kelly he had gone into both rooms. Kelly thought if he had fled and left the boy there and disappeared into the night he might never have had to think about it again, couldn't be held responsible for everything that followed. Instead he had acted, and now there would be no knowing where this action would stop.

Kelly climbed downward, descending the shaft of light falling through the basement door. His clothes clung to the nervous damp of his skin as he stepped off the stairs toward the bed at the back of the low room, toward the boy restrained there, all skin and skinny bones, naked beneath a pile of blankets and howling in the black basement air.

One by one each element of the scene came into focus, the room's angles resolving out of the darkness, each shape alien in the moment, the experience too unexpected for sense: the humidity under the earth, the musky heat of trapped breath and sweat, piss in a bucket; the smell of burrow or warren, then the filth of the mattress as Kelly slid to his knees beside the bed, his headlamp unable to light the whole scene; the boy atop the stained and stinking sheets, confusing in his nudity, half hidden by the pile of covers, a nest of slick sleeping bags and rougher fabrics partially kicked off the bed, and beside the pile of blankets a folding metal chair.

The boy's screaming stopped as soon as Kelly lit his features, but Kelly knew the boy couldn't see him through the glare. He shut off the headlamp, removed the glow between them, let their eyes readjust to the dimmer light. He leaned closer, close enough to hear the boy's rasping breath, to smell his captivity, to touch the boy's hand. To try to bring the boy out of abstraction into the sensible world.