The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (33 page)

“You're killin' me, Will,” Antoine whined.

Then the loosest of thoughts flittered across Will's mind as the truck pulled up in front of the Lotus Blossom Massage Parlor. It wasn't just that there were more bags in front of the tiny storefront than usual, but straight up, why would a massage parlor have so much garbage?

Lost in that thought, Will lifted the first bag, the weight striking, almost making him miss the two dime-sized holes in the bag.

“Whoa, shit!” Will yelled.

“What is it now?” Antoine said.

“Holes in the bag.”

“You're fucking killing me.”

“You're mistaking me for heart disease, you tubby fuck.”

That shut Antoine up for a second. Then, “That was a little mean.”

Will rolled his eyes and put the bag carefully back down onto the sidewalk so he could find a better purchase for his grip. Then, as the bag flattened back out under its own weight, two purple-lacquered fingernails poked out through the holes. Fingernails that were still attached to fingers.

“Oh
fuck!
” Will jumped back like he'd found a live raccoon in the bag.

“What is wrong with you?” Antoine said, with even more exasperation than he'd already had in his voice for the past hour.

“There . . . there's a hand in there.”

“What?” Antoine hopped out of the cab. “No way. Just toss it in.”

“We have to call the cops.”

“No. No, we don't.” Even under the poor light of the streetlamps, Will could see the color draining out of Antoine's normally ruddy face.

Then Will made the observation that the bag was way too small to have a whole body in it. But then again, there were more bags than usual.

If Will had anything left inside, he might have thrown up again. But this time he might never stop. “Fuck that. I'm calling the cops.”

“You can't call the cops, you dumb little shit. You're gonna fuck me with the union that you're even here. Then you'll fuck yourself, and your old man. Put the bags in the fucking truck.”

Goddammit. Antoine wasn't wrong. Will shook his head. “Don't care. You can take off. I'll wait here until the cops come.”

“And then what?”

“I don't know! This is the first time I've discovered a fucking body.” Will dialed 911.

“Will, listen to me very carefully. Put . . . the bags . . . in the truck.”

Will didn't like the sudden change in Antoine's voice. He looked up. Antoine wasn't looking at Will or the bags anymore, he was staring a laser beam into the window of the Lotus Blossom Massage Parlor.

Will followed his stare.

911. What is your emergency?

Will looked at his phone.

“Hang up, Will.” There was a tremble in Antoine's voice that gave Will a shiver.

Against his better instincts, Will disconnected from the call, then followed Antoine's gaze.

In the window stood an elderly Chinese man smoking a thin cigarette. His expression was as warm as a marble statue, the only movement in the tableau being his smoke lifting on the breeze and the incessant
tick-tock
of a waving lucky cat statue on the sill.

“Will, no more fucking around now,” Antoine said.

Will swallowed a sour lump. “I'm not just going to throw her in the back. She was a person. Let's just go. I'll call the cops later,” he said in a harsh whisper.

Will looked back to the window. The old man hadn't so much as blinked. Then he flicked his fingertips toward Will, a long ash falling off the end of his cigarette, urging Will to get on with it.

Will shook his head. “No,” he said softly, nearly a croak. He tried to clear his throat, but it was only dryness in there. “No,” he said, a little louder.

The old man pursed his lips and looked to his left, nodded.

“Oh fuck,” Antoine said. “Who did he just nod to?”

“Let's just go,” Will said, hopping back on the truck's runner.

Then Will heard a series of locks disengaging behind the thick door of Lotus Blossom Massage.

“Fucking drive, Antoine!”

“Just toss the bags in! They seen us. They know who we are.”

“They don't know who we—”

“Listen to me, kid. Just throw the bags in.” Antoine's voice was calmer than it had been for the last five minutes. Deathly calm.

Click.

The sound came from everywhere and nowhere, the sound carrying on the city night air.

Antoine's face went ghost-white. “What was that click?”

Will's skin turned icy. His old man had taught him enough about guns on the range in Staten Island for him to recognize the sound.

Will couldn't explain the sensation, but he suddenly felt like the back of his head had a target hanging off it.

“Fuck this noise,” Antoine said, reaching for the door handle.

“I don't think we should move right now, Antoine.”

Even though Antoine might not have recognized the sound of a bullet being chambered, he certainly understood the seriousness in Will's tone. He froze.

With the gentle jingling of a hung bell, the door to the massage parlor opened.

A woman of indeterminate age due to the long shadows under the neon emerged from the parlor. She was dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans cut off at the knees, but moved with a grace one would normally associate with someone in a ball gown.

She walked over to Will, a slight smile on her lips. Closer, and under the streetlights, Will made her out to be somewhere in her midforties, maybe older.

With a dancer's grace, she lifted the first bag, the one with the poke holes in it from the painted fingernails. She walked it over to the truck and dropped it in the compactor well.

Will was frozen. He felt like a mouse trapped in the glare of a cobra.

“Wasn't that simple?” the woman said, just a breath of an accent left in her English.

“You . . . you can't do this. That's a person,” Will said, hating the tremor he heard in his own voice.

The woman
tsk-tsked
at him like he was a child who simply didn't understand. “That is not true, young man. What's in these bags is not a person.” She picked up a second bag, placed it next to the first. “Not anymore. What's in these bags is an assortment of meat, bones. Nothing more.”

“She . . . was.”

“Was what? Was, was, was. Why do you even care, garbage man?”

Her question caught Will by surprise.

She stared at him, through him. She waited for his answer.

“I . . . I don't know,” he finally said.

The woman picked up a third bag. Will noticed that her fingernails were painted the same color as those on the hand inside that first bag. “We called her Amy. It was the name she'd chosen for herself when she came to America. Did you know that many Chinese adopt Western names when they come here?”

Will shook his head.

“It makes it easier for your kind to remember us, our given names being too exotic for your lazy minds and tongues.” She picked up another bag, dropped it in the well with a wet plop. “After a while we forget our real names. Who we were.”

The woman tried picking up another, larger bag, but its weight caught her. “Help me with this one, please,” she said, her voice dripping with a poisonous honey.

Will could still feel the target on the back of his head. He reached down and grabbed the bag toward the bottom, ignoring the sensation that he was embracing part of a torso, that it was the softness of a breast under the fingers of his left hand.

The two of them tipped the bag over the lip of the truck, where it joined the others.

“Thank you,” the woman said. “Was that so hard?”

Will almost replied, but kept silent.

“Her real name was Chao-xing. Do you know what that means?”

Will shook his head.

“In Chinese, it means ‘morning star.' Just like the ones we can't see in this city. Too much light pollution. We forget that they're up there, but they are. Just like our old names. I used to look up in the sky, wondering where the stars were. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be an astronomer. But after so many years, I forgot where they were supposed to be.”

The woman gave a wave over the bags in the truck.

“Amy never forgot. She never forgot who she once was, that she wanted to be a dancer. She was going to be in the New York Ballet. She should have forgotten, but she couldn't. She cried a lot. Her crying was bad for business. She tried to leave. She tried to forget, but tried to forget the wrong things—forget who she'd become . . . and who Amy owed debts to.”

With a light flourish, the woman tossed the last two small bags into the truck.

“Why?” Will asked.

“Why what?”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

The woman beamed. “You said that the flesh in those bags was a person. You were not incorrect. Now you know who that person was. Now you tell me, the ending of the story being the same no matter what you know about who Amy used to be, do you feel any better knowing?”

Will shook his head.

“Didn't think you would.” The woman pulled the lever, activating the rear compactor. The bags crunched wetly, disappearing under the hydraulic press. After the machine completed its cycle, she wiped her hands on her jeans, then pulled a few bills from a pocket sewn tightly to her side.

She walked over to Will and slid the money into his chest pocket, the paper crinkling. Her other hand brushed a caress against his hip. In his ear, she whispered, “Best massage in New York, if you're ever back in the Chinatown.”

Without his feeling their movement, the woman's fingers were suddenly in front of Will's face, the wallet from his back pocket wiggling between them. She stepped back, opened his wallet, and took out his driver's license.

“Hmmm,” she said. “Mr. William Pokorski, 4489 37th Avenue, Queens.”

Will swallowed hard as her eyes studied his face intently. A suddenly warm smile spread across her face.

“You must be Lee's son,” she said.

Her words hit Will like a gut punch. “How . . . how do you know my father's name?” He realized he'd taken her bait as the words fell out of his mouth.

As she walked to the storefront door, she tossed Will's wallet over her shoulder. Without looking back, she said, “Always nice to see you too, Mr. Gutierrez.”

Will shot Antoine a look. “How does she know your name, Antoine?”

Antoine's lips were pursed tight. His eyes dropped and moved around the filthy street, looking anywhere but at Will.

“How the fuck does she know you and my dad, Antoine?”

Antoine silently climbed back into the truck and shut the door.

Will looked at Antoine's face, set like stone, reflecting back in the rearview.

Then, with numb fingers, Will pulled himself back onto the truck's runner.

“Young man!” the woman called to him before Antoine could put the truck into drive.

Despite his better instincts, Will looked back.

The woman was still smiling. “Do you remember what her Chinese name was?”

Will couldn't. His silence hung in the air like the humidity.

“Didn't think so.” She waved as she closed the door, wiggling her purple fingernails at him.

Antoine and Will didn't speak again for the rest of their blessedly short route. When they pulled into the depot on Long Island, the sun was already up, the early heat soaking through Will's coveralls. The stink returned to his senses with a vengeance. Will hadn't even noticed the smell for the last hour of the shift.

Before walking into the garage, Will pulled out the money from his pocket.

Four hundred dollars.

He looked up. Antoine was staring at the bills with an odd expression. Will peeled two of the hundreds off the top and offered them to Antoine. Antoine didn't say no, didn't even shake his head. He just pulled his backpack out of the truck's cab and walked inside the garage.

Will looked at the bills in his hand.

Her name was Chao-xing.

Will crumpled the bills and tossed them in the back with the rest of the trash.

He hoped he would forget.

But he didn't.

KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

FROM
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

“W
ILL
S
ANTA KNOW
how to find us?” Anne-Marie asked as she hopped out of the van.

“Of course he will, honey,” Rachel said, just like she'd said every time they'd stopped.

Anne-Marie didn't answer. She slammed the door hard enough to shake the entire vehicle, and hurried across the empty ice-covered parking lot. Somehow she kept her balance and didn't fall, despite the pink tennis shoes she wore. Her red mittens hung off a string threaded through her pink coat. She'd lost three pairs so far, which Rachel figured had to be some kind of quiet rebellion.

Eight hundred, maybe nine hundred, miles to go, she thought to herself. She hadn't been willing to check the GPS. She wasn't sure if it transmitted the van's location.

Even though she had never even seen the van before she removed it from a storage unit in Winnemucca, Nevada. Even though the van, its license plates, and that storage unit weren't in her name. Even though she had taken a taxi to the units from that weird hotel and casino.

She'd left a trail. It was impossible not to. If someone had followed her, they would have figured it out. She'd had to leave Anne-Marie with the casino-provided babysitting service, which frightened Rachel more than anything. Then the taxi driver kept talking about how unusual it was to have a woman take a cab to a storage unit. He pressed his card into her hand, told her to call him if her ride didn't show up.

I know you're in trouble, little lady,
he'd said through teeth broken so long ago the cracks had turned yellow from the cigars he smoked.
So you just call me and I'll make sure you get back to the hotel, no problem.