The Best American Mystery Stories 2006
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Хантер Эван
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51746-6
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
Fat Tommy began sobbing again. After a few minutes, he confessed that he had raided the emergency stash in the bathroom and had done a couple of lines to calm his nerves. He suggested that they do what was left. There was only a half-bindle left anyway. He never did crack; the high felt like a suicide jump. Crack was for kids; toxic, cheap-ass shit meant to sell, not do. Fat Tommy was old school — White Girl all the way. Powder, he believed, was classier, mellower than rock cocaine.
Bea retrieved the emergency bindle out of the bottom of a box of sanitary napkins where she and Fat Tommy stored it. There was only a portion of an eight ball — an eighth of an ounce — left from the half-pound Fat Tommy liked to keep around the pad for Laker games and birthdays and other special occasions. Bea used her mother’s Sears card to line out six hefty tracks of the white powder on the dresser top. Rolling their last hundred-dollar bill into a straw, the couple snorted quickly, sucking the lines of blow into their flared nostrils like shotgun blasts fired straight to the back of their brains.
Quickly, the drug began to take effect: it eased its frigid tendrils down the back lanes of their breathing passages, deadening the superior nasal concha, the frontal and sphenoid sinuses, creeping along their soft palates like a snotty glacier before it slid down the interiors of their throats, chilling the lingual nerves and flowing over the rough, bitter fields of papilla at the back of their tongues and ascending, like a stream of arctic ghosts up through their pituitary glands, their spinal walls and veins, and into the uppermost regions of their brains. The pupils of their dark brown eyes became dilated and sparkling.
“Damn, that’s good shit,” Fat Tommy said, feeling the cold drip of the snow, liquefied and suffused with snot, glazing the commodious interiors of his head and throat.
Fat Tommy shut his eyes tight. The darkness inside his mind began to fill with amorphous, floating colors. His big body seemed to be shapeless and floating, too. He looked down at the drifts of sugary dust remaining on the dresser. Almost four hundred bucks’ worth of Girl — gone in six vigorous snorts. As Fat Tommy admired the smeared patterns of residue on the dresser top, Bea leaned down and broadly licked the last thin traces of powder.
Then she swept her lovely, manicured, forefinger across the dresser top, along the trail of spittle her tongue had left, sopping up the final mists of blow. She dabbed this viscous salve along her teeth and gums. Normally Fat Tommy prided himself in always managing to lick up the leftovers before Bea got to them. But he was immobilized with grief; and too, he was froze from his nose to his toes. Now Bea was froze numb, too. The coke was ninety percent pure. It’d only been stepped on once. Chilean. Cream of the Andes. Bea blinked hard and looked up at her husband.
“I’m straight now,” Bea said, noting a half moon of white powder showing around the alar grooves of Fat Tommy’s right nostril. “Your slip is showin’, baby,” she said, and pointed to his reflection in the mirror. Fat Tommy pinched his nostrils closed, shut his eyes, and took a sharp snort. The lumps of powder were swept from the grooves in his face, shooting brilliantly past his nasal vestibules and septum in white-hot pellets of snot. His heart began to race. Neither one of them said a word for a few minutes. They closed their eyes and surrendered to the high. When Fat Tommy finally opened his eyes, Bea was staring at him with a beatific look on her face.
“You look nice,” Bea said. “Innocent... Don’t let ‘em punk you, Tommy. Just wear the shit outta this shirt and tie. Dr. King’ll bring you through. All business. You know how to talk to white folks. Don’t go in there like no G... talking all bad and shit, like you was that goddamn Cut. That’s what they want. Give them your A game, and you’ll be all right. Remember. You wasn’t there. You didn’t see nothing. You don’t know nobody. We ain’t gonna get kilt over some asshole.”
Fat Tommy got in the car, gripping his Bible, sobbing and praying and assuring Bea and the Lord he loved them. He promised — between his sobs — he would savor her instructions and repeat them like a mantra: Don’t say nothing that’s gonna get us kilt over some asshole. She reminded him that his stupid-ass Uncle Bunny had done a nickel at Folsom on a break-in after Bunny talked too much. So — don’t talk too much. Don’t do nothing that will make you look guilty. They got nothing, Bea reminded Fat Tommy. That was the bottom line. They agreed if he was cool and smooth he had a chance to ease his way out of the beef with short time.
3.
The cops were nice to him at first; they said he was a stand-up guy for turning himself in and helping out with the investigation. They interviewed him all day. Fat Tommy told them he didn’t “need no lawyer.” He wasn’t guilty. The cops didn’t seem to be concerned about his coke business so much as they wanted to find out what he knew about the recent murder of the undercover cop — Simpson — right in the middle of the projects on Fat Tommy’s home turf, La Caja. Fat Tommy assured him he didn’t “have no ‘turf,’ not anymore, not in La Caja, not nowhere.” Moreover, he didn’t know anything about a cop killing.
“We know you ain’t no killer, Moises,” Vargas told him a few minutes into the interrogation. “But you grew up in La Caja, where this murder went down. We figure you might know something. Point us to the bad guys. We know you’re in bed with the Columbians. They’re all over La Caja these days. One of them called you by name... called you Moises. We got him on tape. He’s quite fond of you. Says you’re a big shot. You’re looking at some serious time if you don’t play ball, Moises... Play along and help us catch this killer... you’ll be all right...”
Vargas offered him a jumbo cup of lemonade and four jelly doughnuts. Vargas said that the pretty cop who had processed him that morning had asked to make the lemonade especially for him.
Fat Tommy said, “That was sure nice of her.”
“Yeah. Officer Ospina is a sweetie. Drink up. That’s the last of it... we need to get started,” Vargas said, and smiled at him.
Braddock took the empty cup, crushing it, and banked it into the wastebasket in the back of the interrogation room.
“Great shot,” Fat Tommy said. “Three-pointer.”
Braddock and Vargas said nothing. Braddock walked to a chair somewhere behind him and Vargas turned on a tape recorder and intoned: “This is Detective Manny Vargas of the Homicide Detail, Criminal Investigation Division of the Van Nuys Police Department. I am joined with Detective Will Dockery and DEA special agent Roland Braddock. This is a tape-recorded interview of Thomas Martin O’Rourke, a.k.a., ‘Fat Tommy’ O’Rourke, a.k.a., Tommy Martin, a.k.a., Pretty Tommy Banes, a.k.a., SloJerry-T, a.k.a., Bigjerryjay, a.k.a., T-Moose, a.k.a., Moises Rockafella...”
“Uh, my name ain’t Moises,” Fat Tommy protested, interrupting as politely as he could. “Some bad people started calling me that. But I don’t let nobody call me that no more.” He tried his sexiest grin.
Vargas looked at him blankly and continued: “This a homicide investigation under Police Report number A-55503. Today’s date is March 28, 2005, and the time is now 1349 hours.” Then Vargas looked at Fat Tommy and said, “Could you state your name once more for the record?”
“I’m Thomas Martin O’Rourke.”
“Address?”
Tommy gave them his parent’s address. That’s where he got his mail now.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-four, officer,” Fat Tommy said.
“Employed?”
“I was assistant manager at the Swing Shop...”
“Was...?”
“I got laid off.”
“When was that?”
“1992.”