The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (21 page)

He heard the owl again and he could feel the deep woods behind him.

The woods . . .

For perhaps a quarter of an hour more he remained in the shadows, thinking, asking himself questions and groping for the answers, and finally he knew what he would do.

His hand went up the rough bark of the tree to steady him as he got to his feet. He moved along the edge of shadow until the station wagon was between him and the house, then stooped slightly, instinctively, and ran across the yard to his car.

With his hand on the door handle he noticed the ventipane partly open. He pulled it out to a right angle, then put his arm in, pressing his right side against the car door, rolled down the window, brought out his veterinary kit, and stooped to the ground with it.

The inside pocket,
he thought, remembering putting his instruments away after delivering the calf that afternoon. His hand went in, came out with a three-ounce bottle of chloroform; went in again, felt the mouth speculum—
no, too heavy
—then his fingers closed on the steel handle of a hoof knife and he drew it out, a thin-bladed knife curved to a sharpened hook.

The rifles,
he thought then.
No, they won't follow you without the rifles.
Just bring them out.

From the edge of the drive he picked up a rock twice the size of his fist, walked to within six feet of the station wagon, and hurled it through the windshield. He waited until the front door swung suddenly open, then ran for the trees, hearing Cal's voice, then Ray's, hearing them on the steps—

“There he is!”

“Get the guns!” Ray's voice as he ran to the station wagon.

Cal came out of the house with the rifles, and Ray said, “Come on!”

“Where'd he go?”

“Not far without shoes.”

From the shadows again, but deeper into the trees, Evan watched them for a moment. They stood close together, Perris talking, describing something with his hands, then taking a rifle from Cal, the two of them separating and coming toward the trees. Evan moved back carefully, working his way over to where Cal would enter. Perris was nearer the road, perhaps thirty yards away.

Evan crouched, waiting, hearing the rustling, twig-snapping sound of them moving through the scrub growth and fallen leaves. Cal was coming almost directly toward him.

He let Cal pass—one step, another—then rose without a sound and was on him, one hand clamping Cal's mouth, the other pressing the hoof knife against his side hard enough that he would feel the blade. He felt Cal go rigid and he pushed against him, turning him to make him walk to the left now, broadening the distance between them and Perris.

About twenty yards farther on Evan stopped. His hand came away from Cal's mouth, went to his shirt pocket, and brought out the chloroform.

Cal didn't move, but he said, “Ray's going to beat you blue.”

Evan said nothing, putting the hoof knife under his arm. He drew his handkerchief and saturated it with chloroform, then retuned the bottle to his pocket. “How is Julie?”

“She locked herself in the bedroom.”

“Did he touch her?”

“Ask him.”

“All right, Cal. Call him over.”

“What?”

“Go ahead, call him.”

Cal hesitated. Suddenly he screamed, “Ray, he's over here!”

The sound of his voice cut the stillness, rang through the darkness of the trees and was loud in Evan's ear as he clamped the handkerchief against Cal's face and dragged him as he struggled into dense brush. In a moment Cal was on the ground, unconscious. Evan picked up the rifle and started running. He heard Ray's voice and the sound of him hurrying through the foliage and he called back over his shoulder, “Come on!”

He kept running, driving through the brush, feeling sharp stabs of pain in his stocking feet, and twice again he called back to Perris, making sure he was following. Within a hundred yards he reached the end of the woods.

The first quarter moon showed an expanse of plowed field and, far off on the other side, a shapeless mass of trees against the night sky. He turned right along the edge of the field for a few yards, then moved silently back into the woods. Not far in, he crouched down to wait.

There was little time to spare. In less than a minute Perris reached the field and stopped. He scanned it, his eyes open wide in the darkness.

“Cal?”

There was a dead stillness now, without even the small, hidden night sounds in the background.

“Cal, where are you?”

Perris turned from the field. Uncertain, he hesitated, then started into the trees again.

Now,
Evan thought. He flipped the lever of the .30-30 down and up and a sharp metallic sound, unmistakable in the stillness, reached Ray Perris.

He stopped. Then edged back to the field.

“Cal?”

Evan waited. Through the trees Perris was silhouetted against the field. Watching him, Evan thought,
Now add it up, Ray.

He saw Perris turn to the field again and without warning break into a run. Evan brought the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Dirt kicked up somewhere close in front of Perris and he stopped abruptly, turned, stumbling, and went down as he reached the trees again.

Then—“Ev, what's the matter with you!”

Silence.

“Ev, we were just clownin' around! Cal says, ‘Come on out and see Julie.' I said, ‘Fine.' On the way out he says, ‘We'll throw a scare into Evan.' You know, for something to do, that's all. We'd had some beers and that sounded OK with me. What the hell, the way Cal talked I figured you for a real hayseed. Then we come here and you get on the muscle. Get mean about it. What am I supposed to do, let you throw me out? I'm not built that way.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Ev, I'll forget about the car. You were burned up—OK, I'll let it go. What the hell, it's insured.”

Silence.

“You hear? Answer me!”

Just like that,
Evan thought.
Forget all about it.
No, Ray, you're not scared enough yet.
You might want to come back.
He raised the rifle, aiming high, and fired again, and the sound rocked out over the field.

“Ev, you're a crazy man! They lock up guys like you!”

Now you're talking, Ray.

Minutes passed before Perris spoke again.

“Ev, listen to me, I'm walking back to my car, and if you shoot it's murder. You understand that? Murder!”

Suddenly Perris stood up. “Answer me!” He screamed it. “You hear what I said? I'm coming out, and if you shoot it's murder! . . . You go to Jackson for life!

“I'm coming now, Ev.” He started into the trees. “Listen, man, just hold on to yourself. You're burned up, sure, but it isn't worth it. I mean, not Jackson the rest of your life. You got to think of it that way.”

Perris started to run.

Evan was waiting. He gauged the distance, crawled to the next brush clump, and came up swinging the rifle as Perris tried to run past. The barrel slashed down against the .30-30 in his hands and he went back, dropping it, trying to cover, but was too late. Evan's fist whapped against his face and he stumbled. He tried to rush, bringing his hands up suddenly as the rifle was thrown at him, deflected it, ducking to the side, and looked up in time to receive the full impact of a right that was swung wide and hard and with every pound that could be put behind it. Evan kneeled over him and pressed the chloroformed handkerchief to Ray's face before carrying him back to the yard.

Julie was on the porch. She screamed his name when she saw Evan, but he talked to her for a moment and after that she was calm. He went back for Cal, then loaded both of them into the station wagon and drove down to the highway, turned left toward Detroit, and went about a mile before parking the station wagon off on the side of the road.

They would come out of the chloroform in fifteen or twenty minutes. If the state police found them first, let Perris tell whatever he liked. Even the truth, if he didn't mind the publicity that might result. It didn't matter to Evan what he did. It was over.

He crossed the plowed field and passed again through the woods, picking up his hoof knife on the way back to the house.

Julie held open the door. “Ev, what if they come back?”

“I doubt if they will.”

“Then we won't think about it,” she said.

They sat in the living room for a few minutes, then went out to the kitchen to finish the dishes.

EVAN LEWIS

FROM
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

J
UDGING BY THE
old man's hands, I'd have tagged him at sixty. The confidence and economy of his movements might shave ten years from that, but the truth was in his eyes. Those eyes had seen Lincoln shot and Caesar stabbed, and were probably watching when Cain killed Abel. Now they were watching me, and chilled me down to my toenails.

I decided that thinking of him as the “old man” was an understatement. At that moment, forever and always, he became the Old Man.

My letter informing the grand pooh-bahs of Continental Investigations that the head of their Portland bureau was in bed with the Mob had brought this stocky old coot to my door, and I'd brought him here to the Boom Boom Room. In this bright new year of 1953, our fair city boasted eight burlesque clubs, seventeen gambling hells, and forty-three houses of ill repute. As the sole establishment qualifying in all three categories, the Boom was pretty much our Grand Central Station of crime.

The Old Man fished a pack of Fatimas from his pocket, got one burning, and examined me sourly through the smoke.

I could imagine what he saw: a punk kid, just back from fighting Commies in Korea, playing at the gumshoe game. A punk kid who'd accused his boss—a man with thirty years of crime-fighting under his belt—of betraying his own kind.

I picked up my drink, Dewar's neat, and rolled some over my tongue. It tasted clean and strong, the opposite of the way I felt.

“You've made serious allegations,” the Old Man said. “Have any evidence to keep them company?”

He read the answer on my face.

I slumped in my chair, wishing the bigwigs had sent somebody—
anybody
—else.

He'd told me his name, but warned me not to use it, and with good reason. It was dynamite. In detective circles, this Buddha-shaped relic was a legend. Scuttlebutt said he'd been a real fire-breather during Prohibition—particularly around San Francisco—and the list of swindlers, yeggs, and killers he'd brought to justice would fill a rogues' gallery to the brim. But sometime in the forties the Continental had put him out to pasture, and he'd spent the years since killing a vegetable garden, sneering at golf courses, and not catching fish. The agency's call to investigate my claims had come just in time to save him from a life of perpetual bingo.

Still, the guy intimidated me. I'd never met anyone so confident, so self-contained, so utterly uncaring of other people's opinions. The last thing I wanted was this all-knowing, all-seeing Master of Detectives judging my every move.

I fished for a way to begin. “How well do you know Portland?”

The Old Man's shoulders rolled in a noncommittal way. “We've cuddled,” he said, “but never kissed.”

At a table near the stage, next to a placard reading
THIS WEEK ONLY—LADY GODIVA AND HER PRANCING PALOMINO
, five men eyed each other over cards. I pointed my forehead at them.

“That bruiser with the gold teeth and glass eye is captain of the North Precinct. The slick gent sporting the five-carat pinkie ring is our illustrious mayor, and likely our next governor.”

The Old Man gave that the attention it deserved: a shrug.

“But here's the kicker. The mottle-faced man peeking at the mayor's cards runs the East County slot-machine racket. The bozo in the rainbow bow tie collects twenty percent every time some john buys a jane. And the sharp-nosed lad with the pince-nez has slaughtered more men than Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson combined.”

The Old Man shrugged again, but this one lacked conviction.

I went on. “This town is a disease. It gets into the blood and rots people from the inside out. And my boss is no exception. He's taking orders from the local crime lord.”

The Old Man's lips grew thin as knife blades. “And who's that?”

I was about to name him when a thin citizen with undertaker eyes and a waxed mustache appeared at our table, a highball glass in each well-manicured hand.

He was Nick Zartell, owner of the Boom Boom Room, and one of the five or six most dangerous men on the West Coast. He was also the reason I'd left home at sixteen and joined the army as soon as they'd take me.

I said, “Times must be tough, Nick, you waiting your own tables.”

He grinned without humor, displaying the points of sharklike teeth. “Evening, Pete. This your grandpappy? Must be past his bedtime.”

The Old Man's eyes glinted like bullets.

“It's his birthday,” I said. “He just turned a hundred and fifty. Something on your mind?”

“Thought maybe we had something to celebrate,” he said. “You here to accept my job offer?”

He placed one of the drinks carefully on the table in front of me, lifted the other to his lips and downed it.

I turned a tarnished silver ring around my finger, rubbed a thumb over the smooth jade stone. The ring had been my father's, and was all that remained of him.

I pushed the glass away. “Not today.”

Zartell nodded at the stage. “You staying for the burly-que? You'd make your ma proud.”

A coolness washed over me. “She's here?”

“Not today. But she'd hear about it.”

From him, no doubt. And it would give my mother great satisfaction to know I was as human as the next chump. It was a satisfaction I was determined to deny her.