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:
I glanced over at her. “I guess that’s an occupational hazard. Besides, you don’t want to see your grandfather make foolish moves when he’s getting along in years. That’s why Chip McGill put the heat under Stanley. He thought Andy was trying to roust him because, like any paranoid, he made it for a conspiracy.”
“When all it is is miscommunication,” Kitty suggested.
“All it is is Stanley trying to protect this guy.”
“From the rigors of the modern age,” she said.
“Yeah, well, my guess is that Creek Fortier has been lured into the modern age in a big way,” I said. “I think it’s the biker connection. Creek builds custom bikes. So long as people leave him alone to raise bees and build bikes, he’s got no kick with the twenty-first century. Stanley insulated him, but with Stanley gone he’d be on his own. If he didn’t think about it, somebody might have suggested it to him.”
She was ahead of me. “Chip McGill,” she said.
I stood on the gas to get around a pickup loaded with drywall. Kitty dug her feet into the floorboards as we swerved back into our own lane. “Creek was in the biker loop,” I told her. “I don’t mean he’s a card-carrying member of an outlaw club, but gear-heads know about each other. It’s word of mouth. So a Disciple comes by to talk bikes, and they hit it off. The guy sees an opportunity. Here’s a reclusive motorcycle freak living out in the sticks, no near neighbors. Kind of a Luddite even, except when it comes to tuning bike engines.”
“Which is what? Basically his only real social skill?”
“Exactly. And the Disciples persuade him his interests lie in diversification, expanding his horizons.”
“Including?”
“Better living through chemistry,” I said.
Her cell phone beeped. It was Tony. I’d slowed down coming into Groton. Kitty, the phone to her ear, pointed me up a back road north that led along the Nashua River, a tributary of the Merrimack. The narrow blacktop followed the contours of the hillsides that supplied the watershed and crossed the river on a covered bridge, coming into the foot of the village.
Pepperell is another one of those settlements that time forgot after the mills closed. It was as if the waters of a great flood had lapped at its doorstep and then left it high and dry. It was a dry town, literally. You couldn’t buy liquor there.
“Got it,” Kitty said into the phone. She glanced at me. “We go through town past the elementary school and take a right-hand fork at the Congregational Church,” she said.
I followed her instructions.
“Bald Hill Road,” Kitty said. “Okay.” She turned in her seat. “He’s starting to break up,” she told me. “We’re getting out of range.”
Cell coverage overlapped, but we were in a blind spot.
“I’m losing you,” Kitty said-to Tony. “Say again.” She listened, had him repeat it a third time, and then broke the connection. “We look for a side road up here on the left,” she said to me. “Unpaved but graded. There should be horse barns and a riding ring maybe half a mile in. A mile or so past that, there’ll be a split-rail fence and a dirt driveway and kind of a shed. I didn’t quite get that, but it’s the best I could do.”
We took the turn we thought we were supposed to, and half a mile in we passed the horse barns. There was nobody there. After a mile point two by the odometer there was a little lean-to up against a split-rail fence. Inside the lean-to was a shelf with jars of honey for sale and a coffee can where you left the money on the honor system. The property was heavily wooded, and we couldn’t see a house from the road. I drove past slowly and pulled up a hundred yards farther along.
“You thinking to go in on foot?” Kitty asked me.
“That’s the plan,” I said.
“And this is where you tell me to wait here, right? With a cell phone that doesn’t work and no idea what’s going on.”
I’d already had second thoughts about bringing Kitty along, but she was right. “You weird with guns?” I asked her.
“No more than the next girl.”
I took out the Smith, checked the magazine, and tucked it away in the small of my back. I reached under the seat and got the compact nine out of its spring clip. I worked the slide, safed it, and held it out to Kitty. “Point it, snap the safety off, squeeze the trigger,” I said, showing her what I was talking about. “Don’t use it unless they get close and you can hit them square in the upper body, no chance of a miss.”
She nodded and took the gun. “Combat nine millimeter, double-action-only, pre-Brady double-stack, thirteen rounds. I’ve got a concealed carry permit, Jack,” she said. “My mistake, I left my own gun in my other pants.”
I was going to remark that she wasn’t wearing pants, she had on a navy jacket and a skirt that showed off her legs, but I figured I’d embarrassed myself enough already. She tucked the nine in the waistband of her skirt, under her jacket and behind her back, the same as I had. “What are we likely to run in to?” she asked me.
“Maybe just an emotionally disabled vet,” I said. “Maybe your partner come to warn him—” I held up my hand when Kitty started to protest. “Or come to explain things to him,” I went on. “Or we could be about to step into the deep end of the pool, and land in the heavy. Are you ready for that?”
“No,” she said.
I sighed. “Neither am I,” I told her.
“Might as well get to it, then,” Kitty said. “It won’t get any easier if we wait.”
We stepped out of the car into the lingering late-afternoon light. The hum of insects buzzed in the grass, and birdsong sounded in the near distance. We walked back to Creek Fortier’s drive and started up it. The maples had turned, their leaves scarlet and bronze, the poplars lemon yellow, the birches dusty gold. It was quiet under the trees. The leaves smelled dry and spicy.
The road opened out into a meadow, and we stopped at the edge of the trees. There was a small clapboard farmhouse, and a shop building in back. Beyond the buildings was an apple orchard, untended but with beehives spaced between the trees, square boxes up on platforms, the orchard left for the bees, not for the apples. Fallen fruit lay on the ground, fermenting.
“Do bees hibernate?” Kitty asked.
“I think they go dormant in the winter, if they don’t die,” I said. “Maybe you have to take them in, like tomato plants or geraniums.”
“You’re full of vegetable lore,” she remarked, smiling.
I was looking at the open ground we had to cover. We’d be exposed to the house if anyone was watching for us. There were a couple of big bikes out back by the shop, and three cars — a GTO, vintage muscle; a ’53 Ford clunker; and a new Audi. “That’s his car, the Audi,” Kitty said.
“Andy’s?”
She nodded.
I blew out my breath, trying to think.
“Suggestion?” Kitty asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“What’s to keep me from simply going over there?”
“And your story’s what?”
She shrugged. “I’m just some yuppie twit from Boston,” she said. “A leafpeeper looking for local color.”
“Andy won’t give you away, you walk in on them?”
“Andy’s a trial lawyer, and a good one,” she said. “He can improvise.”