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 didn’t have anything better.
“You flank the house,” Kitty said, and off she went.
Flank? I thought. She sounded like a platoon sergeant. I let her get out in the open where she could be seen and worked my way around the meadow, keeping under cover of the trees.
Kitty was halfway to the house, and then she paused for a second, leaning down to straighten her heel or pick a stone out of her shoe. She didn’t look in my direction.
I froze where I was, wondering if she was trying to send me a signal, but I didn’t see that anything had changed. The place was completely still except for a few late-season cicadas sawing in the tall grass, and the air felt hot and somnolent.
Kitty went on up the drive, approaching the house without any obvious apprehension, like somebody who’d run out of gas and needed to use the phone.
I’d stopped circling, watching her.
She went up onto the small porch and peered in the windows, and then she went around back toward the shop.
I waited to see if something happened, but nothing did.
Kitty came back out front and made a shrugging gesture, her hands out at her sides. I hobbled across the grass, favoring my bad leg. “Nobody home, tiddley-pum,” she said.
The sun was just below the tree line, the light taking on a metallic quality, sharp and coppery. A slight breeze lifted the leaves of the maples. There was the scent of water, a stream or a spring nearby, and something else, not acrid but steely, like a whiff of ammonia.
“What is that?” Kitty asked, sniffing the wind. “It smells like nail polish remover.”
“Acetone,” I said. It was very faint, though. From what Frank Dugan had told me about cooking meth. I’d expected more of a piercing odor.
“They’re here, then,” she said.
Did she still think Andy was an innocent bystander in this?
I didn’t ask her out loud.
We went through the orchard, moving carefully.
“Are bees territorial?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Social insects, mated to their hives. They kill intruders, but beekeepers work around them all the time and don’t get stung.”
I wished I knew what I was talking about. The bees were everywhere under the apple trees, but they seemed sleepy, headed home with dusk. You could brush them aside gently, and they’d go on about their business. We were no more than objects in the way, and they went around. There was nothing angry about them.
“Jack,” Kitty said, stopping short.
A few trees off the path a bunch of bees were swarming, confused and without any apparent purpose, rising in a cloud and then settling again, like moths. It was uncharacteristic.
I ducked under the branches and went closer. The bees were agitated and uncertain. I didn’t want them any more worked up.
He lay his length on the ground, staring at the sky. I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years, but I knew it was Creek Fortier. The bees kept lighting on him, almost plucking at his hair, his clothes. I’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t credit them with a dog’s intelligence or loyalty, but there it was. They seemed to be trying to coax him up. With the back of his head blown off, I didn’t think he’d rise to the occasion.
I backed away. “We got big trouble,” I murmured to Kitty.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“It’s not Andy, it’s Creek,” I told her.
She looked relieved.
“We should go to the car, and to town, and get some backup,” I said.
“Not if Andy’s down there,” she said.
“We’re in over our heads,” I said.
“You, maybe,” Kitty said, turning away.
Below the orchard the ground sloped off to a brook overhung with poplar and birch. We moved into a stand of trees to our left and worked our way down to the water. From there we made our way downstream, using what cover we could, and found what we were looking for.
“Like a moonshiner’s,” Kitty whispered to me.
It was a small shed built on a platform over the brook with outside ductwork to a hood on the roof and a tangle of copper piping that went under the surface of the water. It was a distillery, in effect, to condense and filter the residue, disguising the smell. Creek’s work, I figured.
“A peculiar genius,” Kitty remarked.
I nodded. “But why did they kill him?” I asked.
“They’re closing down,” she said.
Which made sense if the operation was compromised, but how sure of that were they?
We made our approach to the shed incrementally, move and then crouch, move and crouch, trying to make as little noise as possible. The running water chuckled in the stream bed loudly enough that we weren’t heard. When we got next to the little outbuilding, we hunkered down outside the windowless plywood sheathing. Nobody had raised an alarm.
Whoever was inside wasn’t listening for trespassers. They were too intent on something else. There was an indistinct murmur of voices and then an involuntary whimper and ragged, heavy breathing. What it sounded like was an interrogation, and a painful one.
Kitty and I probably had the same thought at the same time: Andy was being tortured.
We ducked around the corner of the shed and took up our positions on either side of the plank door, both of us with guns up, cocked and locked, fingers alongside the trigger guards. There was another sharp whimper of pain.
I nodded to Kitty, stepped back, and kicked the door open. We were inside before anybody had time to react.
Everything stopped for maybe a long three count, all of us taken by surprise.
Three guys, one tied in a chair. The guy in the chair was battered and bruised, but it wasn’t Andy. It was the redheaded biker from Charlestown. Andy was standing behind him with a pair of bloody pliers in his hand. The third guy was in front of the chair, caught in a half crouch, looking over his shoulder at us. I knew he was Chip McGill.
Sometimes things slow down, like it’s happening under water, but this was sudden and abrupt. McGill snapped out of his crouch, coming up with a stainless autoloader in his right hand. It was incredibly stupid of him, and he made the same mistake I’d made in back of the Blue Mirror, not watching the girl. Kitty shot him twice in the chest with the nine, punching two holes in him you could have covered with a quarter. He was dead when he hit the floor.
Andy jumped back, and Kitty shifted her aim. I thought for a second she was going to shoot Andy, too.
“Oh God, Kitty,” Andy bleated, dropping the pliers. “Look what he made me do.”
Kitty wasn’t having any. “Shut up,” she said tiredly. “Don’t give me any more reason to hate your guts.” But at least she lowered the gun.
They’d wired Red’s wrists together behind his back, and I had to use the pliers to get it off. I tried not to think about what else they’d been used for. “DEA,” he croaked, rubbing his hands together to bring back the circulation. “Working undercover with the state police.”
Well, at least he’d gotten my gun away from the speed freak before she killed me with it, I remembered.
We started back up toward the house. Red needed my help, which I didn’t wonder at. He was in bad shape. Kitty seemed to have gone numb, too, which I didn’t wonder at, either. It was a delayed reaction from shooting McGill. You don’t shake it off that easily.
We were still below the orchard when Andy took it into his head to make a run for it. He just suddenly bolted, pumping his legs through the tall grass, plowing uphill. None of us had the energy to chase him, and there wasn’t much point in shooting him. How far was he going to get, after all? Maybe he thought he could outrun his disgrace, his life in a shambles.
“Andy,” Kitty called after him wearily.