The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (51 page)

But it wasn't until he was trying to cut, then yank off the chained purse around her neck that he recognized the woman in her T-shirt and sunglasses as the bitchy doctor who ran the hospital in Chitipa, whom he had bumped into that day two weeks ago in the town. The stupid lady with the bulging purse in her pocket! Then the doctor, suddenly thrusting her head up as she tried to shake him off, said with surprise, “You're the one who stole my purse!” and, flattered, Hastings wanted to say something boastful to her, like,
Hey, Doktorama, you'd better learn not to carry purses and backpacks when I am around, because see what could happen.

But people were beginning to run out of the hotel and down the driveway, and a taxi driver, stopped to let someone off, got out of his car, so Hastings and his friends knew it was time to go. After a few more yanks and jabs with the knife until the chain came apart, Hastings and his friends ran off, the loot later distributed in the rented room they shared with two others.

Meanwhile Dr. Gaynor—arterial blood spurting out from Hastings's knife cuts, blood she was trying to stem with her hands—kept calling out more and more feebly, “Help me, call an ambulance, for God's sake! I'm bleeding to death! I can pay! I can pay!”

The next morning Hastings was at his stand at the huge outdoor Wall Market, a place filled with hundreds and hundreds of tables and stalls, around which people milled and bargained. Hastings was squeezed on his left by Mr. Swembe, a
sing'anga
or witch doctor from Tanzania who was selling bat's blood as a cure for AIDS. On the other side was Mrs. Champire's stall; she ironed items brought to her by customers from the secondhand clothes market, using one of her three flatirons kept heated over a charcoal brazier.

On this day Hastings had laid out on his small table, two crates put together, the profits from his gang's raids the day before, which included wallets, purses, and Ray-Ban sunglasses, as well as a lot of capsule containers that the others gave Hastings because they had no use for them. He also got most of the stuff they got off Dr. Gaynor, who had really tried to hurt him. Let her suffer now like everyone else!

But she had been right. Her possessions were almost all practical and medical. He could sell the Band-Aid boxes and syringes, but maybe not the rolls of funny paper tape, because when he had tried using some of the tape for his bruised face, the tape broke too easily. There had also been bottles of pills that Hastings had never heard of before but decided to push as the newest brand to help men with problems down below.

Hastings was proud of his table, for he catered mostly to clients searching for things to make them feel better. He had a lot of stuff he got from the chemists' shops, pills and cough medicines that had expired a long time ago, so they sold them cheap to vendors like him. Other wares came from tourists like the doctor. Tourists always carried a lot of pills on them to ward off death. Besides his medical supplies, Hastings also sold food cans—especially condensed milk cans whose expiration dates were long past—paperbacks either stolen or discarded by tourists, and stolen credit cards, which had to be used fast, before their owners reported the thefts.

A woman carrying a screaming baby on her back came and looked over Hastings's wares. After a while Hastings couldn't take it and asked her why was her baby yelling so, did it need to be fed? It wasn't good for his business. Something had hurt her son on his head, the mother replied, unconcerned, examining the bottles, shaking one of them and watching it cloud up. So Hastings came out from his table and looked at the baby, who was trying to work himself out of the
chitenge
material holding him fast to his mother's back. He could see the baby had been bitten by something on the head, causing a big ugly red abscess to fester above his left ear.

Hastings, who considered himself as knowledgeable as anyone about sicknesses, told the mother she should take the baby to see a doctor to have the abscess opened up and the poison let out. If a dog had bitten the baby, the mother should take it to the hospital to see if the baby had rabies, which would kill him and maybe her too if she didn't act fast. Meanwhile he would use one of his powerful cleaning fluids on it, then bandage it with one of the new Band-Aids he had in stock. Some were Band-Aids for children and had little smiley faces on them.

“A doctor gave them to me to sell,” Hastings told the mother. “But I'll let you have it free!” And as he painted the baby's sore with the red stuff out of one of his bottles and put a yellow Band-Aid over the wound, he whistled cheerfully.

Let the Chitipa doctor see him now!
I'm a doctor!
Hastings mimicked to himself as the mother thanked him formally. Yes, God was good! No exceptions!

Later, did Hastings repent? Did he become a changed man, turn himself in, especially after the American Embassy offered a large reward of five thousand
kwacha
for information that led to the perpetrator or perpetrators of this unconscionable crime, the murder of Dr. Helen Gaynor?

Of course not. Hastings, after a year's stay in Nairobi—until interest in the doctor's death died down—moved on from his medicine table to a small pharmacy, then expanded to own several more, not just in Lilongwe but also in Blantyre, in the south. He married the daughter of a highly placed government official and had many children, for his life wasn't some work of fiction. His life, and Dr. Gaynor's, they were part of God's great plan at work, as Dr. Gaynor's former assistant Robinson said often and indignantly to the doubters, even back when he, with his now-dead boss's office key finally in hand, swept and kept Dr. Gaynor's office safe until the new doctor from Holland arrived.

Megan Abbott
is the Edgar Award–winning author of seven novels, including
Dare Me,
The Fever,
and her latest,
You Will Know Me.
Her stories have appeared in several collections, including
Detroit Noir,
The Best American Mystery Stories 2015,
and
Mississippi Noir.
She is also the author of
The
Street Was Mine,
a study of hardboiled fiction and film noir. She was the 2015 winner of the International Thriller Writers and Strand Critics awards for best novel. “The Little Men” was nominated for a 2016 Edgar Award. She lives in Queens, New York.

• The idea for “The Little Men” sprang from real life, a decades-old bit of Hollywood lore. Years ago I read about the sad fate of one of the most successful and charismatic booksellers of Tinseltown's golden age. His untimely death in 1941 took place in his apartment in one of those lovely courtyard bungalows that loom so large in Hollywood tales, from
In a Lonely Place
to
Day of the Locust
to
Mulholland Drive.
Over the years I remained haunted by the real-life story, and I'm generally a sucker for Hollywood tales anyway—especially ones with dark twists. So when Otto Penzler asked me to set a story with a bookstore/bookseller focus, I finally had my chance to dive deep into that jacaranda-scented world of golden-age Hollywood where everything is beautiful and, quite possibly, deadly.

Steve Almond
is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the
New York Times
bestseller
Against Football.
His short stories have appeared in the Best American and Pushcart anthologies. His most recent story collection,
God Bless America,
won the Paterson Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Story Prize. His journalism has appeared in the
New York Times Magazine,
the
Washington Post,
and elsewhere. Almond cohosts the podcast
Dear Sugar Radio
with Cheryl Strayed. He lives outside Boston with his wife and three children.

• “Okay, Now Do You Surrender?” emerged from one of those thought experiments endemic to the domesticated suburban husband: what would happen if one's spousal missteps were monitored by mafiosi rather than marriage counselors? It would be idiocy to deny that personal authorial guilt played a formative role. I had no intentions of writing a whodunit, but the moment the mobsters waylaid our hero outside his workplace, the die was cast. We're all living under surveillance at this point—and always have been. Our conscience does the legwork. It's what sets us apart from the serpents and the badgers and the whatnots. I'm just happy to have found an unorthodox way to write about marital anguish. It remains one of the essential human mysteries.

Matt Bell
is the author most recently of the novel
Scrapper,
a Michigan Notable Book for 2016. His previous novel,
In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods,
was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. He is also the author of two collections of fiction and a nonfiction book about the classic video game
Baldur's Gate II.
His next story collection,
A Tree or a Person or a Wall,
is a fall 2016 publication. A native of Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

• The finding of the boy in “Toward the Company of Others” came to me after a couple months of writing about Kelly scrapping metal in the abandoned buildings of Detroit. I'd wanted to write about metal scrapping and about the urban abandonment in my home state for a while, but I knew very little else when I started. For most of those early weeks, Kelly didn't even have a name: he was simply “the scrapper,” and I knew very little about him other than his occupation, his deep isolation and loneliness. I went forward with two rules: I would keep him acting, describing the work he did, and I would try to learn who he was by the way he saw the empty schools and churches and houses he gutted for steel and copper. (Most revealing in those days was the habit he had of seeing the abandoned parts of the city as
the zone.
) I wrote this episode much the way the reader experiences it: I wrote Kelly scrapping the house, unaware there was a boy held in the basement; I then wrote a few sentences where it seemed that Kelly had already found the boy, splitting him into a person who had and had not yet done so, an awareness the reader (and the writer) would share for a moment; and then I wrote the saving of the boy. It was a surprise, but it changed everything else I wrote about Kelly: How would this loner be transformed by saving another person? What new responsibilities would he take on, and how would he discharge the duties they suggested? And if he came to love the boy in the days to come, might he learn that the boy was still in peril, and then how far would he be willing to go to keep the boy safe?

Bruce Robert Coffin
began writing seriously in 2012, several months before retiring from the Portland, Maine, police department. As a detective sergeant with twenty-eight years of service, he supervised all homicide and violent crime investigations for Maine's largest city. Following the terror attacks of 9/11 he worked for four years with the FBI, earning the Director's Award (the highest honor a nonagent can receive) for his work in counterterrorism. Coffin's short fiction has been shortlisted twice for the Al Blanchard Award. He is the author of the John Byron mystery series. He lives and writes in Maine.

• I wrote this story several years ago while trying to finish my first novel. As so often happens, ideas creep in and take hold of the creative reins. I've learned not to fight it when this happens. Setting the novel aside, I began to write the tale of an ill-contrived escape attempt from the former Maine State Prison in Thomaston. The story was written in only two sittings, followed by untold hours of rewrites and edits, until eventually it became “Fool Proof.”

Lydia Fitzpatrick
was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2012 to 2014. She received an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a Hopwood Award winner, and she was a 2010–2011 fiction fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is also a recipient of an O. Henry Award and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her work has appeared in
One Story,
Glimmer Train,
Mid-American Review,
and
Opium.
Lydia lives with her husband and daughter in Los Angeles. She is working on her first novel.

• “Safety” came from a mix of memory and fear. The first line came from a memory: the gym in my elementary school had skylights and high ceilings, and all this dust floating up there in the light, and I remember being little, lying on my back during the wind-down, staring up into space, and feeling completely relaxed and safe. I wrote the first couple of lines hoping to tap into that emotion and transfer it to the reader before it's broken by the sound of the gunshot.

There's that Donald Barthelme quote about writing what you're afraid of, which is, I think, usually an organic process. As the story evolves, the writer's fears surface, and her job is not to shy away from them. With “Safety” that relationship was reversed: it began as a fear that I felt compelled to write about. I began writing it just after the one-year anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when that tragedy was very much in the public eye. I'd just had a baby, and all of a sudden my fears all involved this new person and the safety of her current self, over which I had some control, and her future self, over which I have no control. I didn't have any connection to the victims at Sandy Hook, but I couldn't stop thinking about them, and this story was the best way I could find to express those fears.

Tom Franklin
, from Dickinson, Alabama, published his first book,
Poachers: Stories,
in 1999. Its title novella won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story and has been included in
The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century
and
The Best American Noir of the Century.
It is currently optioned for film by James Franco. Franklin's novels include
Hell at the Breech, Smonk,
and
Crooked Letter,
which was nominated for nine awards and won five, including the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller, the UK's Golden Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel, and the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. Franklin's latest novel,
The Tilted World,
was cowritten with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly. Winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and, most recently, a fellowship to the American Academy in Berlin, Franklin lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where he teaches in the MFA program.