The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (25 page)

Crouching beside the truck, Officers Scott and Mullen paused and looked at each other. The old man stopped too. He felt around on top of his head for a second or two and, apparently realizing what had happened and that he was unhurt, lost all interest in engaging the enemy. Simply put, he got the hell out of the way.

The bag lady, unfortunately, did not.

At the sound of the gunshot, the gray-haired woman stopped dead, looked around in confusion, and then started running, pushing her cart blindly along in front of her.

The fleeing robber almost missed her—and would have, if she hadn’t run straight into his path. As things turned out, he slammed into the side of her shopping cart at top speed, tumbling it and her and himself onto the ground and spilling old shoes and magazines and clocks and black plastic garbage bags all over the pavement. Still holding the gun, the robber scrambled to his feet, glanced once at the cops, picked up the fallen duffel bag, and sprinted again toward the barred fence in the wall bordering the cul-de-sac.

“Freeze!” Officer Scott shouted, and fired into the air. The two cops couldn’t fire at the suspect; the woman in the coat and dress was waddling around gathering her belongings and jamming them into bags, directly between them and the escaping robber. As they watched helplessly, the suspect reached a gate in the fence and stopped there, tugging in vain at the vertical wrought-iron bars. Behind him Scott shouted again, and fired another warning shot.

That seemed to make up the robber’s mind. He shrugged out of his overcoat, dropped it, and—with stomach sucked in and head turned sideways—put his right leg between and through the bars, followed by his right arm, shoulder, head, and torso. The space between the bars couldn’t have been more than eight inches, and it seemed impossible that he could make it. But he did. Within seconds he eased the rest of his body through to the other side.

Except for his left hand.

The hand holding the black duffel bag.

The bag, packed full, was far too big to fit. Even from a distance, the cops could see his face. First it registered surprise, then frustration, then anger, then defeat. After another moment’s hesitation, the suspect released his grip and let the bag fall to the sidewalk beside his overcoat. He stared sadly through the bars at it for a second more, then turned and fled. Those in the street behind him saw him dash down a gloomy alleyway, jog left, and disappear.

Scott and Mullen broke cover and ran past the old lady to the gate. Mullen peered through it, then reached out to touch its bars, gauging the distance between them. “That was one skinny dude,” he said.

Scott picked up the dropped duffel bag, hefted it a couple of times, and unzipped the top. He stared for a moment at the bills stacked inside. “And almost a rich one.”

“Be careful,” Mullen said. “We need prints off of that.”

“No need—he was wearing gloves. On the hand holding this, at least.” Scott looked up at the ten-foot gate in the fence and added, “Wonder why he didn’t throw the bag over first.”

“Probably never thought of it. Things happened too fast. Besides, it looks heavy.”

“It is.”

A crowd was gathering. The old lady in the purple dress was still scooping up her treasures, packing them into her trash bags and the pockets of her coat and reloading her rickety cart. She was limping a bit and mumbling a lot, but looked more angry than hurt. Down the street, the mangy-looking poodle was walking around trailing its leash and finally sat down in the gutter beside the straw hat. Its owner, Scott thought, was probably still running.

Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance. A misty rain began to fall.

Officer Scott tucked the duffel bag under his arm, picked up the robber’s discarded overcoat, and studied the faces in the crowd. He knew the branch manager, Ramsey, but didn’t see him among the onlookers. It occurred to him that the bank folks might still be holed up inside. Or locked up. “We better check out the crime scene,” he said.

Mullen grinned. “I’m ready. One of the tellers—Debbie something?—she’s a knockout.”

Scott sighed, rolled his eyes, and headed across the cul-de-sac toward the bank.

“Nothing against your sister,” Mullen called.

The Palmetto branch probably hadn’t seen this much activity since its grand opening, Debbie Martingale thought. Twenty minutes after the incident, detectives and reporters and bank executives from downtown were all over the place, although none of them seemed to be accomplishing much. What did seem to be happening was a lot of back-slapping and congratulating. After all, the bag containing the money had been recovered, nobody had been killed, and the only person injured—the arrogant Cecil Woodthorpe—had turned his battle wound into an opportunity to be more obnoxious than ever. Secretly, Debbie Martingale wished the robber had aimed about four inches to the right.

The most surprising thing was, no one seemed overly concerned that the robber had gotten away. And, though no one had asked her opinion, Debbie had a theory about that.

The first two policemen at the scene—one, she thought, resembled Francis Muldoon on the old
Car 54, Where Are You?
reruns—were saying that the suspect would probably be easy to locate because he’d been forced to flee on foot, and thus his getaway car was probably still parked somewhere up the street. When they found it, DMV records could produce a name, address, etc.

Debbie thought they were wrong. She had watched, through the glass of the front door, as the robber jogged down the bank’s tall steps. She’d seen him shoot the hat off the old man’s head, crash into the bag lady, and run straight toward that gate in the fence. And she was fairly convinced that any hesitation he’d shown before squeezing his body past those iron bars was play-acting, plain and simple. She thought he’d known very well beforehand that he could fit between those bars if he had to. No getaway car would be found, because he hadn’t planned that kind of getaway. He had planned to walk out—either down the street or through the fence.

But her scenario, like the fence, had holes in it. What about the money? Had he forgotten to throw the bag over the gate first, or—in all the excitement—not had time to? And where exactly had he planned to walk, if he’d not been forced to exit through those bars? Those were big questions, big enough to keep her from voicing her theory. Besides, she had other things to think about at the moment. Cecil Woodthorpe, who was standing in a knot of reporters, had turned and was pointing at her. As she watched, he left the group and marched in her direction.

Great, she thought.
Now what?

In a third-floor hotel room a quarter mile from the bank, a woman in a bathrobe and slippers stood at the room’s only window, watching the drizzle and smoking a cigarette, rubbing the bruise on her hip. Her hair was still damp from the rain; she’d wrapped a white towel around it.

She idly studied the traffic in the street below. People walking and people driving, here and there and everywhere. How did the song go?
Like a circle in a spiral.
To her, all those people mattered not one whit. It didn’t even matter that the room she was in, like most in this part of town, was old and seedy.

She heard a knock at the door. She tensed, cinched the bathrobe’s belt a bit tighter, and crossed the room. The door had neither peephole nor chain, so she put one hand on the knob and one ear against the wood, listening. “Who’s there?” she called.

Immediately she heard the quiet clicks of doors opening up and down the hallway. They wouldn’t be opening far, she knew—just enough for a quick look. She’d checked into the room two days ago, knowing that most of the other guests in this hotel were either pushers or users, and thus generally uninterested in anyone who was not.

“Department of Human Services,” a voice answered. “May I come in?”

Still listening, she heard those same doors clicking closed again. She could sense the sighs of relief, and the thoughts:
Welfare Department. Not the cops.

The woman took a last draw on her cigarette, unlocked and opened the door, and limped back across the room to drop the butt into an empty Coke can. Behind her, Owen McKay stepped through the open door into the room. His baseball cap was gone, his sweatshirt was soaked, and one knee of his blue jeans was ripped from the same collision that had bruised her hip.

She turned to face him, and when she did, he raised his shirttail and drew a pistol from his belt. Then he took a roll of yellow masking tape from the pocket of his jeans.

“I assume you’re not really from the DHS,” she said.

“You assume correctly,” he replied, smiling. “Come here.”

Cecil Woodthorpe leaned forward and said, with solemn intensity, “We need a count.”

He and Debbie Martingale were standing together in the back room. He had one hand cupped gingerly over his now-bandaged war injury; the other was holding the still-zippered black duffel bag that he had so energetically packed full of vault cash thirty minutes earlier.

“Why?” Debbie asked.

He hefted the bag onto the table between them. “The reporters need to know exactly how much money was involved in the robbery attempt. When you’re done counting, report the total to Ramsey.” Branch manager Donald Ramsey, who was currently being interviewed by one of the less-known reporters, had arrived at the bank moments ago looking like a kid who’d received a birthday balloon after the party was over.

“Ramsey,”
Debbie said to herself. This morning it would’ve been “Mr. Ramsey.”
New career plans, Cecil?

When Woodthorpe turned to leave her to her task, she unzipped the heavy bag, looked inside, and, despite herself, murmured, “Whoa.”

Woodthorpe stopped and turned. “What is it?”

“There must be a fortune here.” She reached in to touch a bound packet of bills. “Packs and packs of tens, all the way to the top.”

He frowned. “Good God, Martingale. No wonder your cash drawer doesn’t always balance. You can’t tell a ten from a hundred.”

“What?”

“Hundreds,” he said patiently. “The idiot told me he wanted big bills only. I filled the bag with hundreds.”

Now Debbie was the one frowning. Carefully, she fanned one of the packets with her thumb, examining each bill. She
had
been wrong, she noticed. It wasn’t a packet of tens. But it wasn’t hundreds either. It was a packet of blank paper with one ten on top. Barely breathing, she took out more bundles. They were all the same: one ten-dollar bill on top, ninety-nine rectangles of plain paper beneath it. Digging underneath the top packets, she made another discovery. The rest of the bag was filled with stacks of old newspapers.

She looked up into Woodthorpe’s suddenly pale face.

“Which idiot are you referring to?” she said.

Owen McKay kept his eyes on the woman as he tore off a strip of masking tape and cut it with his teeth. His eyes flicked away only once, to sweep the room. The suitcases packed and ready in the corner, the shirt and trousers laid out neatly on the bed, the black duffel bag sitting open and empty on the table, along with dozens of bundles of bills, stacked in groups of ten bundles each. On the floor beside the table stood a shopping cart full of trash bags. One of the bags was outside the cart now and in the woman’s hands; she was holding it open in front of him. He focused again on her face.

“The garbage collection business seems to be doing well,” he said.

She shrugged. “I can’t complain.”

“How much?” he asked as he worked with the tape.

“Nine hundred sixty thousand. If I counted right.” She was still looking at him, still holding the mouth of the trash bag open for him. The only sound in the room was the patter of cold rain on the window.

Finally Owen finished wrapping his pistol with masking tape. It was, he had read, the only way to be sure that metal detectors would never locate it. Then he dropped the gun and the roll of tape into the open bag, followed by his sunglasses and the false mustache he’d peeled from his upper lip. He could see that the bag already contained a gray wig, a purple flowered dress, a ragged black coat, and some kind of makeup kit.

She closed the trash bag, secured its top with a twist-tie, and set it aside. “What took you so long?”

“Cops were just down the street. I walked back down to Jefferson and came in from the other way.” He nodded toward the window. “How about the van?”

“Loaded and ready.”

Owen smiled as a thought occurred to him. “How many pillows did you have to use to fill out that dress?”

“Not as many as I’d thought I would,” she said, and laughed. “Too many pizzas lately.” She uncoiled the towel from around her hair and handed it to him. He used it to dry his rain-wet face, then turned his gaze again to the money on the table and the clothes she’d laid out for him on the bed.

“Old woman,” he said, “you do good work.”

Molly Fremont McKay laughed and ran her fingers through her blond hair. “I have good help,” she said. And stepped forward, into his arms.

As they embraced, two thoughts were foremost in his mind. The first was that it was finally over. The plan had worked.

The other was how much he loved hearing her laugh.

SCOTT GRAND

FROM
Thuglit

E
VERYONE KNOWS THIS KID
. He is dirty and dumb and sits in a corner, lonely, but not alone. His face has an involuntary twitch, and when he makes eye contact, his lids and cheeks squeeze his eyes shut. We call him Blinky. Blinky rolls with it, though, smiles big and toothy when kids shout his name across the schoolyard.

It is late fall and coat season in the eastern part of northern California. Our mothers stuff us into puffy jackets, force homespun beanies all the way over our eyes, both to be ditched as soon as we break onto the playground. We throw them over the scalloped tips of a chain-link fence; fill the yard with sounds of tetherball leather-slapping hammerfists, the creaking of chain links on the swing set, and children hollering.