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:
5:00 P.M., April 20
Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada
Without pausing for so much as a perfunctory hello to the clerk on duty, Pansy Reynard strode past the reception desk of the regional office of the Department of Fish and Game and straight back to the pathology lab. Pansy had showered and changed from her dirty desert camouflage BDUs — battle-dress utilities — into sandals, a short khaki skirt, and a crisp, sleeveless linen blouse; adaptability, she knew well, is the key to survival.
She opened the lab door and walked in. When Lyle, the so recently absent Lyle, looked up, she placed a large bundle wrapped in a camouflage tarp onto his desk, right on top of the second half of a tuna sandwich he happened to be eating, and then she flipped her sleek fall of hair over her shoulder for effect.
Eyes wide, thoroughly nonplused, Lyle managed to swallow his mouthful of sandwich and to speak. “What’s this?”
“I went back to the nest this afternoon after the sandstorm blew out.” Pansy unfastened the bundle and two long, graceful wings opened out of the tarp chrysalis. “I found her in the canyon.”
“Oh, damn.” Lyle stood, ashen-faced now, tenderly lifted the mother Aplomado falcon and carried her to a lab bench. He examined her, discovered the deep crimson wound in her black chest. Through gritted teeth he said, “Poachers?”
“Looks like it,” Pansy said.
“What about the hatchling?”
“He’s okay but he has to be hungry.” With reverent sadness, Pansy stroked the mother falcon’s smooth head. “Another week or two and the baby will be ready to fend for himself. But in the meantime, someone needs to get food to him. Or he needs to be brought in to a shelter.”
Lyle sighed heavily. He was obviously deeply moved by this tragedy, a quality that Pansy found to be highly attractive.
“What are you going to do, Lyle?”
“I’ll ask for a wildlife team to come out,” he said. “Someone will get up there tomorrow to rescue the hatchling. Too bad, though. We’ve lost a chance to reestablish a nesting pattern.”
“Tomorrow?” There was a flash of indignation in her tone.
“He’ll be okay overnight.”
“What if the poachers come back tonight?”
Again he sighed, looked around at the cluttered lab and the stacks of unfinished paperwork. Then he turned and looked directly into Pansy’s big brown eyes.
“Pansy, I need help,” he said. “Will you watch the nest tonight?”
“Me?” She touched her breastbone demurely, her freshly scrubbed hand small and delicate-looking. “Alone? Lyle, there are people with guns out there.”
“You’re right,” he said, chagrined. “Sorry. Of course you shouldn’t be alone. You shouldn’t have been alone last night and this morning, either. It’s just I got jammed up here in the office with a possible plague case in a ground squirrel, Chamber of Commerce all in a lather that word would get out. I couldn’t break away.”
“Ground squirrels aren’t in danger of extinction,” she said.
“I am sorry, very sorry,” Lyle said, truly sounding sorry. “Look, Pansy, I really need you. If I join you, will you be willing to go back to the nest tonight?”
She took a long breath before responding, not wanting to sound eager. After a full ten count, during which he watched her with apparent interest, she nodded.
“The two of us should be able to handle just about anything that comes up,” she said. “I’ll meet you out front in five minutes.”
“In five,” he said as he peeled off his lab coat. “In five.”
Andrew Klavan
Her Lord and Master
From Dangerous Women
It was obvious she’d killed him, but only I knew why. I’d been Jim’s friend, and he’d told me everything. It was a shocking story in its way. I found it shocking, at any rate. More than once, when he confided in me, I’d felt the sweat gathering under my collar, on my chest. Goose bumps, and what in a more decorous age we would have called a “stirring in the loins.” Nowadays, of course, we’re supposed to be able to talk about these things, about anything, in fact. There are so many books and movies and television shows claiming to shatter “the last taboo” that you’d think we were in danger of running out of them.
Well, let’s see. Let’s just see.
Jim and Susan knew each other at work, and began a relationship after an office party, standard stuff. Jim was Vice President in charge of Entertainment at one of the larger radio networks.
“I don’t know what my job is,” he used to say, “but by gum I must be doing it.” Susan was an Assistant Manager in Personnel, which meant she was the secretary in charge of scheduling.
Jim was a tallish, elegant Harvard grad, thirty-five. On the job, he had a slow, thoughtful manner, a way of appearing to consider every word he spoke. Plus a way of boring into your eyes when you spoke, as if every neuron he had was engaged in whatever tedious matter you’d brought before him. After hours, thankfully, he became more satirical, more sardonic. To be honest, I think he considered most people little better than idiots. Which makes him a cockeyed optimist, if you ask me.
Susan was sharp, dark, energetic, in her twenties. A little thin and beaky in the face for my taste, but pretty enough with long, straight, black, black hair. Plus she had a fine figure, small and compact and gracefully, meltingly round at breast and hip. Her attitude was aggressive, funny, challenging: You gonna take me as I am, pal, or what? Which I think disguised a certain defensiveness about her Queens background, her education, maybe even her intelligence. In any case, she could put a charge in your morning, striding by in a short skirt, or drawing her hair from her mouth with one long nail. A Watercooler Fuck, was the general male consensus. In those sociological debates in which gentlemen are prone to discuss how their various female colleagues and acquaintances should be coupled with, Susan was usually voted the girl you’d like to shove against the watercooler and take standing up with the overnight cleaning crew vacuuming down the hall.
So at a party one February at which we celebrated the launch and certain failure of some new moronic management scheme or other, we watched with glee and envy as Jim and Susan stood together, talked together, and eventually left together. And eventually slept together. We didn’t watch that part, but I heard all about it later.
I’m a news editor, thirty-eight, once divorced, seven years, two months and sixteen days ago. Sexually, I think I’ve pretty much been around the block. But we’ve all pretty much been around l he block these days. They probably ought to widen the lanes around the block to ease the traffic. So, at first, what Jim was telling me brought no more than a mild glaze of lust to my eyes, not to mention the thin line of drool running unattended from the corner of my mouth.
She liked it rough. That’s the story. Now it can be told. Our Susan enjoyed the occasional smack with her rumpty-tumpty. Jim, God love him, seemed somewhat disconcerted by this at first. He’d been around the block too, of course, but it was a block in a more sedate neighborhood. And I guess maybe he’d missed that particular address.
Apparently, when they went back to his apartment, Susan had presented Jim with the belt to his terrycloth bathrobe and said, “Tie me.” Jim managed to follow these simple instructions and also the ones about grabbing her black, black hair in his fist and forcing her mouth down on what I will politely assume to be his throbbing tumescence. The smacking part came later, after he’d hurled her bellyward onto his bed and was ramming into her from behind. This, too, at her specific request.