The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
- Автор: Грейди Джеймс, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2002
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-12494-7
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2002». Краткое содержание книги:
Another sunny day, hot but the air was dry, with little humidity. Richard was back at his position near first base, waiting. It was the bottom of the sixth inning and the score was tied, 0 to 0, but his boy Sam was on third base. He rubbed his hands together, could feel the anticipation in the air, as the next Pine Tree Rotary batter came to the plate, little Leo Winn, holding his baseball bat strong and true.
The stands were nearly full, and there was Olivia, keeping score again with the large notebook on her tiny lap. Today Carla had taken the afternoon off and she was there as well, and he waved at them both, but neither waved back, as they were talking to each other. Maybe later, he thought.
He wiped his hands on his pants legs. It was a beautiful day, the best so far this summer, and there was the first pitch...
Thump! as the ball went into the catcher’s mitt. Denny Thompson was umpiring again today, and he slowly got up. “Ball!” came the shout.
“Good eye, Leo, good eye!” Richard called out, and he looked up in the stands again, and sure enough, there was Leo’s dad George, sitting there stiffly. Richard thought about waving at George but decided that would be pushing it.
Another pitch, and this time Leo swung mightily at it, and missed. Another thump! of the ball into the glove.
“Strike!”
Richard clapped his hands. “That’s fine, Leo, that’s fine. You’re doing all right,” and even his teammates in the dugout joined in, calling out to Leo, encouraging him, telling him to take his time, to swing at a good pitch. It was a good sound, a wonderful sound, made even better by the fact that no one was shouting insults, no one was shouting threats. Like he had mentioned the other night in the van to his son, sometimes a team was like a family, looking out for each other. Richard looked up in the stands again, and there was George, sitting still, sitting quietly.
He clapped his hands again, “Come on, Leo, the next one’s yours!”
But of course, George had no choice, for George was sitting there, jaw wired shut, after somebody broke into his house and smashed his jaw with what the police believed to be a length of lead pipe. Funny how things happen, Richard thought, and then he looked over at Carla, and waved at her.
And she raised her arm and waved back, and even at this distance, he could see the slight pain in her eyes, for she had quite the workout the previous day, and wielding a lead pipe with such a slender arm could cause some soreness. He smiled as the other team’s pitcher began his windup, remembered the meeting last week with the two feds, and how even to this day, they couldn’t figure out why he had gotten away with eleven killings in his previous life. It was simple, really, if you looked at it as a game, as a family game, and he waved once more at his lovely wife.
The pitch flew by and this time, oh, this time, there was a powerful crack! as Leo swung his bat and the ball flew up and out, heading so far out into the sky, and the people in the stands began cheering as little Leo chugged up the baseline, his face so alive and excited, and true enough, this was just a game, but it was the best damn game in the world.
David Edgerley Gates
The Blue Mirror
From Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
“You know how long a tail gunner’s supposed to last in combat?” Stanley asked me. “Twenty-four minutes, on average. Me, I beat the odds, did my fifty missions, came back to the States, went on a bond tour.” He shook his head ruefully. “Now the cancer’s got me, I won’t live out the year.”
I’d known Stanley Kosciusko most of my life. He came from Fitchburg, just north of Leominster, where me and my brother Tony grew up. There were quite a few Poles up there, close to the New Hampshire border, and a fair number of Finns, oddly.
The Poles had come originally to work in the paper and textile mills, the Finns to make furniture — Windsor chairs and dining room sets. Stanley had married a Finnish girl himself after the war. Maria Aho.
“You got to have an appreciation for life’s little ironies, ain’t it the truth?” he remarked.
Did his wife know? I wondered out loud.
“About the cancer, sure. This other thing, no.” It was the other thing he’d come to talk to me about.
“I lied about my age,” he went on. “Enlisted when I was seventeen. Wound up in a B-24 Liberator, flying out of Sicily bombing the Ploesti oilfields. Froze your ass off in those planes, but man, you’d sweat bullets when the German fighters came at you, Fockes and Messerschmitts. Anybody claims they weren’t scared stiff is retarded or just plain crazy.”
I was thinking about how old he was. Fifty-odd years since D-Day. Add it up, and Stanley was in his mid-seventies. He still seemed vigorous enough, but now that I knew what to look for. I saw the tightness around his eyes from holding in the pain, and a metallic cast to his skin, tarnished and dull. In the afternoon sunlight coming in my office windows I noticed he’d used some kind of rouge or blush to give his face the color it lacked. I figured that was harmless enough.
“Your dad was in the war, wasn’t he?” he asked.
“Different war,” I said. “Korea.”
Stanley nodded. “I knew that,” he said, as if it were important for me to understand he still had all his buttons. He’d dressed for the occasion, too, like he had to impress me.
Stanley was a retired auto body man. Tony and I had hung around his shop on Saturday mornings when we were kids because Stanley could fix anything. You could take him your bike or a broken kitchen appliance your mom was ready to throw out or a Lionel locomotive with a bad armature, and he’d make it work. He loved tools, not just what he used on the job, breaker bars and socket sets and orbital sanders, but old hand tools like rabbeting planes and Yankee drills, miter boxes and shake splitters, anything that had a purpose, because Stanley himself was purposeful. Me and Tony would hunt up objects in the abandoned mills and the local landfill just to have Stanley tell us what they were for. He’d examine a rusty, weathered thing, a spokeshave or a bit-and-brace with a corroded ratchet, and take it apart, clean it up, hone the bit or the blade, and put it back together so he could show you how well it suited your hand, you wanted to make a paper-tight join or dowel a table leg. He could repair a grandfather clock or a .22 rifle, and the trick was his curiosity, that certain knowledge that somebody else had made it, whatever it was, had designed it with a use in mind.
“I blame myself,” Stanley said. “You have to own up to the responsibility for what you’ve done or haven’t done.”
“Cancer’s not your fault, Stanley,” I said.
“You think I don’t know that?” He shifted his weight awkwardly, his suit making him self-conscious. “Jack, there’s somebody looking to hurt me. Or my family, which amounts to the same thing.”
His namesake was a Revolutionary War general who later went home to Poland and led a hopeless revolt against the Russians.
“Here’s what I need you to do for me,” he said. “I’m dying on the vine here. I got to have me a surrogate.”
I could still see him breaking some Cossack’s neck with his bare hands.
“See, if the damn Commies hadn’t killed Stosh over in Vietnam, things’d be different,” he said. “The way it is, I’m stuck with it. But me, I can’t hardly lift a glass.”
Life’s little ironies. If somebody’s going to be dead inside a year, what do you threaten him with? But more to the point, how do you turn him down when he asks you for help?
Here’s the rest of what Stanley told me. I was explaining it to my brother Tony over a beer.
“Stanley junior died in Vietnam, right?” he asked.