The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (29 page)

“Eamon!” called the fat man. “Eamon!”

More of the quiet. The ears of the fat man the color of raw beef.

Katie-bar-the-door. Standing there suddenly, the gun in her hands in front of her face, looking down the length of her arms over the pistol pointing straight at the fat man, like a right proper soldier, if not for the hot-pink housecoat hanging down, gaping open. “Drop it!”

The fat man in the same proper stance, feet wide, staring down both his arms over the pistol pointing at Katie, the sleeves of his brown jacket up to his elbows. “You drop it!”

Lafferty, slippery with sweat, caught a sweet scent of daffodil.

That was how they stood, squirming closer, squinting down their barrels. It seemed a long time passing. Lafferty off to the side, out of the line of fire, out of the line of vision, out of the picture altogether, might as well have never been there. A chill caught the sweat, and his back ached at how he was hunkered over and he sat up a bit, fearful of making himself too big. But nobody noticed.

“Drop it!” Katie said.

“You drop it!” said the fat man.

Katie creeping closer, her housecoat peeping open another inch, Lafferty staring at the glimpse of her nakedness, the shadows of the woman's body, the navel, the hair down below it, astounded at how it left him cold, at how utterly irrelevant was the clothing and the nakedness and the flesh at the end of the day. Invisible, didn't he keep growing bigger. The daffodils spread out flat and dead over his oul hoo-ha, the one part of him getting smaller.

“Drop it!” said Katie. “Drop it now!”

“You drop it! Now!”

It occurred to your man he could rise slow and easy and creep away, leaving them to their own devices, to settle it however they might, leaving them pointing their pistols at one another ad infinitum, or at least till tomorrow morning when Katie's first clients arrived to find the pair still standing there pointing their pistols yelling drop it. The skinny man he supposed was dead or mortally wounded, and he wondered where this warrior woman called Katherine the Great had come from, though he wanted nothing at all to do with it, whatever it was that it was. He wanted only to never be there. What he wanted, the only thing, was to be someplace else altogether where he could shake himself like a dog climbing out of the water and make it all fly away. He wasn't quite ready yet to stand up naked and tiptoe off, not yet, but the idea having planted itself in his mind was rooting around, searching for purchase, and was this close to finding it when the guns went off,
bang, bang,
one after the other within the span of the blink of an eye. The sound like a wind that boxed his ears, blowing his hair back, causing the sweat on his back to chill and dry in the instant.

Lafferty looked up blinking. Katie and the fat man were gone.

The scent of gunpowder bitter in his nose, the wind of the blast had sucked away all sound, leaving nothing but pure silence in which Lafferty sat for a while. When finally he heard a gurgle and a distant chirp of bird, he stood. Wobbly he was, his muscles like pudding. He dropped the flowers to the table. Katie and the fat man both lay on their backs, the fat man just off the L of the sofa, Katie's head in the doorway of the bedroom. The fat man, his stained brown jacket up past his elbows and squeezing the tips of his shoulders, was lying with his arms and legs flung out, looking at the ceiling with wide-open eyes, a patch of blood in the middle of the untidy white mound of shirt on his belly. Lafferty like a ghost in the quiet. Katie was lying the same, staring up at the top of the doorway, hot-pink housecoat spread open across the carpet, her naked body splayed, the scar, her emergency smile, smiling out from her bottom rib, the hole between her breasts still oozing. In the bedroom lay the skinny man humped up on his stomach, the eye on the side of his face wide open as well, staring under the bed.

Does nobody ever die with their eyes closed anymore?

In the bathroom, he put on his clothes. Without an ounce of consideration, with no premeditation at all, as though it were instinct, he took a small bath towel from the polished brass rail and wiped down the tub and the faucet, then all about the toilet. Taking the towel with him to the bedroom, he wiped off the doorknobs, the nightstand, the headboard, the shade of the lamp he'd admired. Then, in the lounge, the coffee table where he'd braced himself standing up. The back of the chair he'd grasped passing by. Any place he might have touched. Then he folded the bath towel, hanging it back proper on its polished brass rail.

Outside it was nearly dark, air clean and sweet. Lafferty shook his face into it, washing off the scent of the gunpowder, the smell of the blood, the odor of fear. Making it all fly away. He made his way down the road toward Kilduff, scarcely aware of his legs as they marched, nor his arms as they swung, exchanging nods with the odd sheep at the side of the road. Into Kilduff he walked, past the green where the Kilduff Cross stood, its once intricate Celtic design having been washed away by decades of Kilduff rain. It had been erected in loving memory of someone, but the inscription had long since vanished, and no one remembered the identity of the dearly departed, a sad anonymity. Lafferty strolled into the dark and friendly confines of the Pig and Whistle.

There sat Pat Gallagher in the heat of battle, the complexion of him like that of a boiled lobster, arguing with Francie Byrnes, a bald and bitter barber, and a clutch of others. Pint in hand, arse on stool, Lafferty entered the fray. His opinion was as strong as the next man's when it came to how realistic the mechanical contraption that portrayed the great shark in the film
Jaws
had been, and when the argument escalated to the question of whether or not Elvis had ever been in the employ of the CIA, and then on to the British conspiracy responsible for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, Lafferty was able to hold his own there as well. They argued well into the night.

He was there next morning with Peggy in the kitchen, her roof yet over his head, a fine splash of sun coming in through the green of the curtain. Wasn't he there. Her hands were shaking. He made her tea, rattling the spoon in the cup. Listened to her tall tale. She bit into her muffin, and he watched the buttery crumb on the edge of her lip in a mesmerizing state of flux as the words flowed out of her. She was still excited, still in shock, still incredulous over the goings-on at St. Christopher's.

We sat there, in the same room with her, Terrance, you and me.

Sure, the IACP never heard of the woman. It was all a bloody hoax.

Nobody knows who she is. They're saying all kinds of things. They're saying she was a supergrass and the IRA clipped her. They're saying she was IRA and it was MI-5 took her out. They're saying she was Colombian cartel and it was a Mexican hit squad done her in.

There's no record of her at all. Nothing, nowhere.

Can you imagine if we'd been there? Can you just imagine?

MICHAEL NOLL

FROM
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

T
HE WOMAN WHO
could have been the love of my life lived in a duplex with a black metal railing held to cement steps by loose bolts. I was nineteen years old and out of my league with a tall blonde who'd already graduated from community college. I wanted to hold the door and let her walk down the steps first the way a gentleman is supposed to do—or that's what I'd heard, what I knew about dating—but she came outside too fast, purse in hand, on the move, and if I wanted to be polite, it would have meant leaning against the rail to make room for her, and how would it look to fall into a bush before you'd even sat down to dinner? So I cut ahead of her and kept moving all the way to my truck so that I could at least hold that door open. She had on black pants and a sparkly shirt of sequins all sewn together, like she'd been dancing on a stage somewhere and then walked behind the curtain and straight into our town. I tried to sweep the seat clean. All it did was send a dust cloud in the air.

“Well,” she said, “my mom always said not to shoot for the moon.”

Then she said, “I'm kidding.” The maple trees were red and vast over the street. She could have painted every breath I took. “So, what's the plan?”

I'd given this some thought, which meant I'd asked Rob where to go, and he'd explained that there was only one place in town worthy of a date. “You've got those glass lamps and sparkly cups.” Which was true. And also the photos of old people in Italy.

“Pizza Hut,” I said, which made her laugh, and so I laughed too, until she stopped.

“No, really.”

I stopped the truck right in the middle of the street. “Hey,” she said, but I hit the gas and took the next corner too sharp. “Did you, um”—she edged toward the door and gripped the handle—“forget something?”

“Yeah,” I said. “My brain.”

I didn't want her to jump out and I didn't trust that I could explain myself, so I sped up. At Walmart, I got out of the truck and threw the keys at her. “You stay here,” I said. “I'm just going to run in and—” I almost said, “get some things,” but part of me knew that if I said that, she'd drive away and leave me there, so I just came out with it. “I'm going to buy a charcoal grill and some charcoal and lighter fluid, and I'm going to buy two steaks and some peppers and onions and a loaf of some kind of bread and some spreadable butter and a bottle of some kind of wine, and then I'm going to come back and we're going to drive—” I almost said, “to City Lake,” but I was slowing down, listening to my own thoughts and how I'd sound like a rapist, so instead I said, “to the courthouse and we'll park on the street and put the grill in the back and I'll cook up that food and then we'll eat on the tailgate while looking at downtown. Because one thing we've got here, if you haven't noticed, is a pretty nice-looking downtown. Does that sound okay to you?”

We ended up going into the store together. Afterward, we parked on the post office side of the courthouse because the kids don't drive back there when they're cruising, which means the cops wouldn't find our grill, and we cooked everything up and sat on the tailgate in the dark and watched the shadows of the trees and buildings grow long in the dark. You could see the outline of the town clock against the sky.

Nobody was using the word
steady
anymore, not even me. I don't even know where it came from. Sure, I was nervous. I'd been going on dates with Marissa and hanging out with her for a month. We were sitting in her backyard, drinking beer because it turned out neither of us knew what to do with wine.

“Did you just call it going
steady?
”

“Or whatever it's called. Are we a thing?”

“That depends what kind of thing you have in mind.”

“You know,” I said, and she shook her head.

“You'll have to do better than that.”

“A together thing.”

“You mean marriage?” she said, and I blushed so hard that even if I'd turned around, the hair on the back of my head probably would have been red. “I'm just messing with you,” she said. “I'm never going to get married.”

“Why?”

“Because my parents got married, and look at them. My dad's gone, and I don't talk to my mom.”

“Why?”

She reached into the cooler for another beer but took out a piece of ice instead and threw it at me. “What are you, Barbara Walters? Because when it was time for me to go to college, there wasn't any money left. That's why.”

“Times get tight,” I said, and she shook her head.

“It wasn't like that.”

This was an unheard-of idea, this not talking to someone. In my world, you stuck with people. You sat in the same room, watching the same TV show, and never spoke a word—not talking still counted as talking. But this was something different. “Does she live in town? Does she try to talk to you?”

“She tries.”

“And what do
you
do?”

Now she threw a bottle cap at me. “You know what I like? Things. Do you like things?”

Sometimes you can feel something happening. You can even see it, I've learned, like a thread of spider silk hanging between you, and if you lean forward, and if she leans forward, the thread grows into a window that you can duck into. Other times, someone just barrels you over. I said, “That depends. What kind of things?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Maybe we should find out.” She got up, went to the back door, and turned around. “You coming?”

She asked me, of course, what I did for a living, and I told her about delivering pizzas and newspapers, going door-to-door with vacuum cleaners. “I guess you could say I'm into sales.”

“A real go-getter,” she said, and I smiled.

“I'm actually picking up a fourth job. Seasonal work at an elevator.”

“You saving up for something?” she asked. “Like, maybe, a ring?”

“Or baseball cards,” I said. “You never know.”

She leaned over, nibbled on my ear, and whispered, “I bet a baseball card can't do this.”

The elevator job started with unloading grain trucks, but grain wasn't the point, not to me. The elevator was in one of the small towns out in the country, the kind with a closed grocery store, closed post office, and closed school. The only business left was the elevator, and for six months out of the year there was just one guy working, the foreman. During harvest, he hired another guy to help and kept him on through the first part of winter, when farmers applied anhydrous ammonia to their fields.

Anhydrous is a liquefied gas that, when released from the tank, immediately bonds to the first water it can find: in the ground, ideally, or, less ideally, in your eyes or lungs. It comes in big white tanks that slosh around when you're pulling them and come to a stop. The foreman showed me how to connect the tanks to the blue applicators that we rented out, like plows with hoses that injected the ammonia into the ground as fertilizer. He said farmers sometimes sent their kids to pick up the tanks, and the kids could barely walk and chew gum, so you had to make sure they didn't get themselves killed in case their dads told them to hook the tanks up to the applicator. “If you value your life, you won't mess around with this stuff.” He went through the whole process again. “You think you got it?”