The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (46 page)

Peter was small and stocky. He looked like an accountant on a TV soap opera she used to watch at home with Edelmera. He was waiting by his car, a Kia sedan. Altagracia lay down on the floor in front of the back seat. She was between two large boxes packed with glass bottles. Elizabeth touched her shoulder. “Peter will take you to the bus station. Good luck.”

Elizabeth pulled a blanket over Altagracia and shut the door of the car. The car started and drove from the quiet neighborhood into an area of heavy traffic. The sounds of the city were all around her. The car slowed and stopped. She breathed shallowly, through her mouth.

“Across again?” A male voice. Spanish. It must be the border control.

“Emergency surgery at the clinic.” Peter's voice was light. His Spanish was good, but mispronounced: a strong American accent. “Got a panicked call. The technician needed some supplies. You know how it is.”

“Is that what's on the floor in the back seat?”

“Yeah, it's surgical kits, a new sterilizer, slides for the X-ray machine. Unless I've got lucky and it's a teenage girl.”

Altagracia stopped breathing.

The guard laughed. “You, get a girl? With that face?”

“Come on, it's not that bad.”

“Crossing back to the States again tonight?”

“As soon as I deliver the goods.”

“All right, then.”

The car accelerated again, and Altagracia breathed. She was in Mexico, she could go home. Again she pictured her mother's kitchen table; the white cloth with the blue embroidered edge, the stove, and the kettle; the silver pot for making chocolate, her father's gift to her mother.

They drove for several blocks. Peter stopped the car, got out, and opened the back door. “It's the bus station; you can get out now.”

Was she still asleep? She could hardly believe this had all gone according to plan. Peter walked next to her and stood aside as she bought the ticket she needed with Elizabeth's pesos.

“Are you hungry?”

Peter bought her a tamale and a Coca-Cola. He sat with her as she ate and waited with her until her bus was called. He stood at the bus station watching as the bus pulled out. She waved to him from the window.

No one on the bus paid any attention to her. No one took the empty seat beside her. It had all happened with such an easy logic: Elizabeth and Michael slowing to pick her up, driving her to Peter's place; Peter taking her across the border. Now she was on the bus, going home.

In Delicias, outside the bus terminal, she held out her hand for a cab. At first she was afraid. She was young and alone. Would he stop? Would he question her? Perhaps it was the American clothes that made her look older. The cabdriver nodded as she gave him the address, the address she had repeated to herself over and over in those rooms in Mexico City.

As she approached her neighborhood she felt a tightness in her chest, a sensation that she could not breathe deeply enough. She was going home; she could see her mother, her two brothers, her father. Would he be home from the factory?

The cab turned down the familiar street. The cab stopped; she paid the driver and got out. The house looked the same. But of course it would, she had not been gone all that long. She walked toward the door. The street seemed steep to her suddenly, as if in her absence she had indeed aged, had become an old woman, an old woman with weak legs, weaker lungs.

The door stood open; it was a warm day. She hesitated at the threshold. “Mama,” she said, “Mama.” Her mother looked up, startled, from her work at the sewing machine. Altagracia seemed to see everything with preternatural clarity. There it was, the table, covered by the white cloth with the blue embroidered edge that she had made when she was nine. Her mother's sewing machine, the table piled high with shirts to be altered, with trousers to be hemmed. She heard her brothers playing in the other room. Her mother stood up, stepped forward to embrace her, her face open and smiling. But the scene changed, the light on the silver coffeepot suddenly blinding.

“Mama,” Altagracia said again, and then she stopped, puzzled. An exploding pain was beginning in the back of her head; her vision went away in a searing heat of white light. “Mama,” she cried again, and fell forward.

IV

Altagracia lay on her face in the stones of Cottonwood Canyon. The bullet had caught her in midstride and her limbs now lay still in the terrible disarray of death. The rifleman lowered his gun. He had seen her turn just as the other girls had shouted
“Culebra! Culebra!”
He inspected his work. It was a good clean shot in the back of the head, exiting through the eye. He had spent many hours practicing his marksmanship over long distances and was justly proud of his well-made American rifle. Still, given the difficulty of hitting a moving target, it was an extremely lucky shot. He had hoped to bring her down with a bullet between the shoulder blades. The loss of the girl was regrettable. In the nine weeks at La Merced she had earned the syndicate almost nine thousand pesos, less the costs of her upkeep—food and clothing—since she had been a slave and had earned nothing for herself. And his bosses would have realized two thousand dollars for her from her purchaser in Arizona, but that would now not happen.

He stood and turned away from the body. “OK. Let's get going.”

A girl stepped forward. “You're just going to leave her here like this?”

Without a word he lifted the rifle and sighted down the barrel. The girl looked at her shoes and took a step back. He lowered the rifle.

The girl turned and followed the other girls. The footing was bad and the sun was hot as they made their way north, into Los Estados Unidos.

The rifleman followed. His boss had told him to expect losses in this part of the journey. Some girls died of exposure, some of snakebite. So far he had prevented that. And now the other girls would be more tractable. He reminded himself of a central fact of his business. More young girls were born and matured every day: this meant an inexhaustible supply of product. And there was an equally inexhaustible demand. He considered himself a fortunate man. He had found a place in the best business opportunity in the world.

BRIAN TOBIN

FROM
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
12, 1994, in my second week of college, I killed Russell Gramercy.

In the last eighteen years, how often have I gone over it all? Pearl Jam, the orange traffic cones, the young woman in white short shorts, the sound of kids playing, and then . . .

I had been driving alone back to my dorm from the lake. Despite what people claimed later, I had not been drinking—not one drop. I want to be clear about that. Even though there were coolers full of beer at our blanket, I was not intoxicated. It was about five-thirty on a beautiful balmy afternoon, the last twinge of summer in upstate New York. I wasn't speeding, nor was I driving in a “careless, reckless, or negligent manner,” which is the criteria for negligent homicide.

A song I loved, Pearl Jam's “Alive,” came on the radio, and I took my hand off the two position of the ten-and-two driving stance I had so recently been taught in driver's ed. I reached down and turned the volume up from loud to
really
loud. I was barely aware of the pedestrians on the sidewalk; they were indistinct, background. Vaguely I registered the sign
ROAD WORK AHEAD
. However, my registering Daria Gramercy's ass was anything but vague. She was wearing white short shorts; seen from behind, she was breathtaking. This figure of lust (I can't describe it in any nicer way that reflects better on me) was walking with two males. All three had been forced to abandon the sidewalk that paralleled Beach Road because of construction—for fifty yards the sidewalk had been jackhammered and it was cordoned off with orange traffic cones and yellow caution tape. Later, when I went back to the scene, I saw the clearly marked signs that warned pedestrians to cross to the other side of the road, that clearly told them not to walk on the shoulder. Weren't those signs implicit—no, definite—warnings that to proceed was dangerous?

At the time, I have to admit, I didn't notice those signs. Even though the radio was blaring “Alive,” I could also faintly hear children playing: a Pee Wee League soccer match was just beginning.

If only it could have stopped there. If only I could go back in time and slam the brake pedal, so that nothing more would have happened except Pearl Jam, the orange traffic cones, the young woman in white short shorts, the sound of kids playing. Then it all would have just faded, one of millions of trivial sense memories that disappeared.

But time didn't stand still.

My car—actually, the 1979 Impala my father had handed down to me—was going around forty miles per hour. I know I lied about it later to the police, telling them that I was doing the posted thirty-five, but I can honestly say I was going about forty. At that speed, a car travels fifty-nine feet a second. (In my support group,
everyone,
every last person regardless of education, has done the calculations, the feet per second, the reaction times.) The three figures on the road outside the cones and caution tape, one with an extremely sexy sashay, were approaching rapidly. (I know they weren't approaching, that in fact I was overtaking them, but that's how it seemed to me.) And then the largest of them, a man in khaki shorts, a navy blue T-shirt, and Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers, stumbled beyond the white line into the road. Into the path of my thirty-five-hundred-pound lethal weapon going fifty-nine feet per second.

What happened took only milliseconds. There was a sickening jolt to the car; Russell Gramercy flew up over the hood. His shoulder and head shattered my windshield, then he disappeared over the roof of the Impala. I did not slam on the brakes until he had already landed on the highway behind me.

There was a faint whiff of something burnt—my tires on the asphalt—and Pearl Jam was still playing on the radio. Behind me someone was howling in pain and grief. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” Daria Gramercy.

Everything seemed in a heightened sense of unreality. I got out of the Impala, but immediately someone yelled, “Hey, put your car in gear.” So I got back in the car, which was slowly rolling, and did so, also turning off the engine. I noticed glass on the passenger's side seat; in the next moment I realized that little shards of glass, almost festively decorative, covered my shirt as well.

The body lay in the road fifty yards away—I had traveled half a football field
after
hitting him. Another pedestrian stood in the middle of the road behind Daria and the victim, waving a hot-pink beach towel to stop oncoming traffic.

Racing back, I thought, He'll have some broken bones. He may have to go to the hospital. Daria was leaning over her father, whimpering.

Then I got a clear view of Russell Gramercy's body. This wasn't a case of some broken bones. His entire body was broken. One shoulder and arm were tilted at an impossible angle away from the rest of him. Blood was pooling behind his head, which also seemed . . . broken. Daria said, “Hold on, Dad. Hold on.” But it was obvious to me that he could not hear, would never hear again.

And . . . I'm not proud of this, but I want to tell you exactly what it was like. Daria, in an attempt to stanch the ever-expanding pool of blood behind her father's head, took off her pale green sleeveless T-shirt and used it to compress the wound. She wore a white bikini top underneath. My eyes were drawn to her full breasts.

I had just killed a man, and I was ogling the daughter I had made an orphan.

There was probably a gap of time, but it seems to me now that the police cruiser arrived very quickly with short yelps of the siren and strobing of the Visibar. Walkie-talkies squawked, an ambulance came; someone shifted the cones from the sidewalk construction to the road. Daria was sobbing in the arms of her older brother, Chris. With a start, I realized I knew Chris; I had played baseball against him. Which meant I knew the victim as well.

Russell Gramercy was the coach of the Verplanck American Legion League baseball team of which his son, Chris, was the star pitcher. Russell Gramercy was also a chemistry professor at Howland College, the school I had just started two weeks earlier, though I wasn't in any of his classes. The previous year, the American Legion team I was on had played against Verplanck. Chris had been pitching, and he struck me out twice. He was by far the best player in our area, and scouts from the majors as well as LSU and Arizona State had shown interest in him. His father coached him that day, and I remembered Russell Gramercy putting his arm around Chris's shoulder with pride as he came off the field with another victory.

“Are you okay?” the paramedic asked me at one point. “Are you injured?”

“No, I'm fine,” I replied, knowing even then that it was a lie, though there was nothing physically wrong.

Later, as the first ambulance took Russell Gramercy away, I asked the same paramedic, “He's going to be okay, isn't he?”

He stared back at me, then, masking his true feelings, said, “Well, we can only pray.” After that, on instructions from one of the cops, he took my blood for a blood alcohol level test.

I gave my statement to three different police officers. The last one, a detective named Dave Pedrosian, interviewed me for a long time.

Pedrosian also questioned Chris and Daria. She had not seen the actual impact because she had been walking a few feet in front of her brother and father on the narrow shoulder. “I just heard this awful crunch, and by the time I turned around my dad was landing on the pavement,” I overheard her say. And then she lost control and gave loud gasping sobs. Her brother put his arms around her.

At some point I also heard Chris being interviewed. “We were walking and my father sort of stumbled. I don't know if he twisted his ankle or what. But he veered into the road. I reached out to grab him, but then . . . just this unbelievable impact with that car . . .”