Kwik Krimes (34 page)

“Go to waste anyway,” she said. “Charlie never let me drive the truck. No way I’ll get this stuff to the hotel.”

I took a few bites, and I could feel perfection slipping away. “I could drop them off.”

“I’d sure appreciate it,” she said, and she went over to comfort the dog.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He broke his leg. Ice got him.”

I made up my mind right there. If she’d been coldhearted, she’d have made something up or kept him out of sight. But now there was doubt, and the imperfect detective decided to run with scenario two, where Charlie Dunmore went out and started pulling off ice and got hit in the temple and cracked the back of his head when he fell.

I tried that scenario on Doc Wilson later after I had delivered the various pastries to the hotel and the dog to the vet. We were in the morgue, looking down at the earthly remains of Charlie Dunmore, a man hard on his wife, his dog, his stock, his neighbors.

Wilson adjusted his thin, wrinkled face a couple different ways until he found an expression that suited him. Basically he was thinking over the case. We could have an investigation without a weapon and no evidence except two bumps on the head, an investigation that would probably go nowhere and leave a bad taste and very likely deprive us of one of the few reliable pleasures of the town, namely Edith Dunmore’s pastries.

Or we could abandon all hopes of investigative perfection and come in with death by misadventure. After a few moments, Wilson said, “Unlikelier things have happened,” and signed the certificate.

Behind me the door opened, and my Edie looked out. “Mike gone already? I have his favorite muffins.”

“Deadline to meet.”

“Any interesting questions?”

“He asked if I’d ever known a perfect crime.”

A pause, something in her eyes. I’d never asked her, and she’d never raised the subject. But now I knew.

“And what did you say?”

“I said that there are no perfect crimes, only imperfect detectives.”

She gave the slightest smile. Edie has a partial plate now and a better smile than she had at twenty-five. “I think that’s about right,” she said.

Janice Law’s first novel,
The Big Payoff,
was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Her short stories have appeared in
The Best American Mystery Stories, The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense, Riptide,
and
Still Waters.
Her most recent story collection is
Blood in the Water and Other Secrets.
Her most recent novels are
The Lost Diaries of Iris Weed, Voices,
and
The Fires of London.
She lives with her husband, a sportswriter, in Hampton, Connecticut. Visit her website at
JaniceLaw.com
.

Adrian McKinty

M
ichael Coalhouse’s war against the council began when the refuse collectors refused to empty his yellow recyclable bin because it contained nonrecyclables. When he got home from work at the foundry, he found a notice pinned to the bin explaining that it “contained a nonrecyclable plastic bag” into which Coalhouse had thrown all his old beer bottles.

He called the council’s help line, but it was busy. He left messages on the council’s Facebook page, but got no response. On the fourth day, he went down to the council offices on High Street and was told that he needed to make an appointment by e-mail. He tried to make an appointment by e-mail, but the municipal website was experiencing technical difficulties. He went to Councillor Smith’s constituency surgery and told her all about his problem, but she sided with the refuse collectors and gave him a leaflet on eco-consciousness.

On the seventh day, the binmen came back and again did not empty his bin. On the eighth day, Coalhouse attended the meeting of the council’s Sustainability and Waste Management Subcommittee. He demanded to be heard, but he was tossed out by security. At work the next day, he was formally cautioned by a
police officer. When the cop had gone, the foreman said that he didn’t want any troublemakers and Coalhouse was “let go.”

Coalhouse brooded. On the fourteenth day, his bin was again not emptied. He drove to the council offices and protested. He was accused of “making a threatening gesture” and was asked to leave. He did so. When he got home the police were waiting for him, so he circled the block and drove out to his storage locker near the reservoir. He filled fourteen vodka bottles with petrol and put a rag in each of them. That night he firebombed the council offices and left a message with the local paper letting them know who had done it and why.

He lived in the bush for the next eleven months, coming into the city only to mount lightning guerrilla strikes and get supplies. He attacked the recycling plant on Gaia Street and destroyed the council vehicle depot on Evergreen Terrace, an incendiary attack that wiped out the city’s entire fleet of bin lorries. He sank a garbage barge anchored in the bay by means of a homemade limpet mine. He released baby alligators into the storm drains and used on-site methane to blow up the city’s main sewage plant. Two days after that outrage, Mayor Cunningham returned home from the Single Mother Initiative Open Day to find his house on fire and his garden gnomes beheaded.

You didn’t need to be Foucault to read the death-spiral subtext.

Peace feelers were sent out over Community Action Radio. Helicopters dropped leaflets on the forest where Coalhouse was suspected of being holed up. Coalhouse agreed to surrender himself if his yellow bin was emptied and Jimmy Carter, Stephen Hawking, and Fiona Apple were brought in as official witnesses. Only Carter was available, and Coalhouse said that that would do.

Coalhouse surrendered the same night and was remanded in custody without possibility of bail. He faced multiple counts of arson and criminal damage and a possibility of thirty years in prison.

The recyclable bin was emptied on the fifteenth. Jimmy Carter officially certified the fact a day later.

T
HIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED ON
A
DRIAN
M
C
K
INTY. BLOGSPOT.COM
.

Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He emigrated to the United States in the early nineties, finding work as a barman, gypsy cab driver, and construction worker. His first novel,
Dead I Well May Be,
was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and his novel
Fifty Grand
won the 2010 Spinetingler Award. His most recent book is
The Cold Cold Ground,
the first book in a prospective trilogy about DS Sean Duffy.

Charles McLeod

W
hen I was twelve my dad stole a payload from auger mines, a county north of where we lived. Mom had fallen off a truss bridge drunk the summer prior, and nothing, small or large, would bring her back. So my dad took to driving to battle the sadness, but gas costs good money, and to support his habit he began filching coal. His main problem was there aren’t many places to sell coal back to, except for other coal plants. Early mornings he’d wait near the tall link gates of the companies he knew of, the back of his pickup weighed down so heavy it looked like it might snap. He was brain-soft from the loss of his wife and best friend, and the foremen and plant managers and rig drivers would laugh at him while he stood there, soot covered and true, his tarnished flask in his flat, big hand.

No one ever bought the coal, but his story got around. We bred hounds to make ends meet, and our house was covered in red dirt that their paws tracked in. We spoke of the normal things a father and son can without a mother to run translation. On weekends Dad would drink heavy and we would line dance in our living room, a station from Lexington reaching our transistor. Behind the house the coal pile widened. Dad kept it under a green tarp next to the kennel, the plastic weighed down with rail
pins. The parents of a boy from school won small at state lotto and soon after bought a cable dish for their television. This family would invite me over, and we’d watch, in full color, all the things that got beamed in.

The dogs grew and got sold or had new dogs. The first weekend of springtime the two men broke in. They’d fed the hounds pills past midnight and returned before dawn and killed them. They explained this to me and my father while they tied us with wire to chairs. I was scared and thought about my mother and some of the shows that I’d seen on television. One of the men took my dad’s socks off and pulled his big toes back and broke them. I knew this was happening on account of the coal, though the men never said so. Outside the winds snapped the tarp.

When light broke the two men untied me. I don’t remember what either of them looked like, aside that they looked like men. Both of them had guns and chrome on their belt buckles. The taller man ejected the clip on his gun and handed the weapon to me. My father was passed out where he sat.

You’re gonna hit him until he gets awake, and then you’re going to hit him back to sleep again, said the man who handed the gun to me. If you don’t, I’ll put the clip back in.

I was barefoot and could feel the red dirt between my toes. I took the gun by its barrel and hit my dad across the face with it. He woke up and tried to move his arms against the wire and almost tipped the chair over. I was crying. I kept hitting at him. My eyes were closed, and I could hear the metal on his face and head. He made sounds but never told me to stop what I was doing. I went at it like that until one of the men grabbed my shoulders and took back the gun. Their pickup had a Virginia plate with a
T
and a
2
in it. I told this to police on the phone when they’d gone.

I live in North Dakota now, some miles west of Bismarck. I never married and do not want to. A wife will lead to children, and I’ve seen what they’re capable of.

T
HIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN
F
RIED
C
HICKEN AND
C
OFFEE
.

Charles McLeod is the author of a novel,
American Weather,
and a collection of stories,
National Treasures.
A Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, he is also a Pushcart Prize winner and series editor for the new, annual anthology,
California Prose Directory: New Writing from the Golden State.

M.B. Manteufel

N
ot that it mattered, but he wondered if the private investigator called him a loser behind his back, knowing now that his client couldn’t hold on to his wife. He chided himself for thinking about it. So what if some wannabe cop with a laminated license and a telephoto lens talked about him? He reached into the cupboard for a mug.

As he poured his coffee, he wondered what his in-laws would think once this was over. His own parents were long dead, but hers were as healthy as the day he first met them, going strong, he theorized, on the life they sucked out of everyone else around them. He imagined they would curse him. He stirred some cream into his cup and shrugged.