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:
But he didn’t look back. He charged recklessly through the orchard, flailing at the aroused bees.
“Oh Jesus,” Kitty whispered.
I didn’t quite get what was happening. I saw Andy stumble and find his feet and then stumble again and go down.
Kitty had stopped where she stood, stricken.
Andy managed to stand again, his angry shouts turning into a terrified wail. The air around him was thick with insects, and bees had settled on him like a carpet, so many they obscured his shape. He fell a last time and didn’t get up.
The clamor of bees subsided in the gathering twilight, and the light breeze rustled through the maples.
We made a wide circle around the orchard, not speaking. If any of us had thoughts, we kept them to ourselves.
Stanley died two days later. He’d gone into a coma and hadn’t come out of it. Maybe it was for the best, since he didn’t have to learn about his grandson.
Andy had cut himself in on McGill’s racket early when Creek Fortier had come to ask his advice, not daring to bring it up with Stanley. I’d guessed right about that part at least.
Stanley had held the paper on Creek’s land, intending to put it in trust with Andy as trustee. The part I’d guessed wrong about was why Chip McGill had gone after Stanley. It was insurance, plain and simple, in case Andy got cold feet. McGill thought like a thug, which he was. What nobody figured out until afterward was that Andy had already decided he’d throw McGill over the side. If the Disciples thought McGill were a liability, they’d take him out for their own protection. Andy just needed a credible story, one that would sell on the street, and he had it in the case he was preparing, the townies who had bought product from McGill. If word got out they were going to plead down in exchange for giving him up, he was dead meat. His big name in the neighborhoods wouldn’t buy him a pass.
Why had Andy gone bad? Maybe somebody had finally met his price, but that doesn’t really explain it. Kitty Dwyer believed in him right up until she saw him with the pliers in his hand.
And that’s where my own thinking led me. Andy had gotten tired of living up to other people’s expectations. He stepped over the line because the line was there. They say in the trade that the dealer always gives you the first taste for free.
Then there was Max Quinn.
I knew that Kitty had terminated his contract with Ravenant & Dwyer, and by an unhappy coincidence I met him a couple of days later, lugging his files out of the office. I was there to take Kitty to lunch.
Max put the box he was carrying down on the tailgate of a station wagon parked in the loading zone and looked me over with bland venom. “You queered me good, pal,” he said, smiling.
The smile was for show. “Not my intention,” I said.
“Well, the good Lord save us from honest intentions,” Max said. He leaned back and rested his elbows on the carton. “You ever stop to think I had those vermin in the palm of my hand and I was ready to close my fist? I coulda had every one of the bastards, and what do you have to show for it? Chip McGill on a slab and a dead lawyer.” He shrugged. “ ’Course, I guess a dead lawyer ain’t the worst thing. You take the bitter with the sweet.” He smiled that crocodile smile again.
“I’m not arguing,” I said. “But our interests weren’t the same. You were looking for it to go your way. My client wanted a different outcome.”
He snorted. “Your client,” he said. “Jesus, you take the prize. Your client is dead, for Christ’s sake. He had one foot in the grave when he hired you. You should of showed me some professional courtesy, for openers. Not to mention that I saved your ass from a whipping.”
“I wasn’t forgetting,” I said.
“Me, either,” Max said.
“You had a personal axe to grind,” I told him, “and you were looking to buy chips so you could get back in the game.”
“Is that what you think?” Max shook his head. “You stupid s.o.b.”
“Don’t push it,” I said.
“I have an axe to grind, yeah,” he said hoarsely. “You want to know what it is? My daughter Olivia died on speed. She took a hotshot. And those bikers are out there peddling methedrine cut with rat poison. You’d better goddamn know I’ve got an axe to grind.”
“You were on the task force, state police, and DEA,” I said, finally seeing the forest for the trees.
“Now we’re playing catchup hall.”
There was nothing I could say. I tried anyway. “I’m sorry about your daughter,” I said.
“Sorry don’t do the trick, pal,” he said, and turned away.
I remembered what Stanley had said about flying over the Adriatic during bombing runs. It had looked so beautiful, like a blue mirror, but was hard as cement if you hit it going down. It was an appropriate metaphor.
Enemies are like that.
Max could smile his crocodile smile and pretend to carry on a civil conversation with me, like bygones were bygones, but he’d be looking for a chance to drop me in a hole, the deeper the better. It was a brute fact like the bright blue ocean below, unyielding as stone. I’d done Max an injury, and it didn’t matter that it was an honest mistake. He wasn’t going to give me room to make another.
Joe Gores
Inscrutable
From The Mysterious Press Anniversary Anthology
Knuckles Colucci wasn’t known as Knuckles because they dragged on the ground when he walked. Far from it. Oh, his jaws were blue enough, his nose was Roman, his eyes were mean, his lips had that Capone twist. But he was physically slight, not bulky. So while maturing into a classic Mafia soldier, and then graduating to Armani suits and Ferragamo shoes — which he invariably wore with parrot-bright aloha shirts — Knuckles needed some sort of physical edge. Thus the habit, in his youth, of carrying a set of brass knuckles as an equalizer.
Those days were long past. Now Knuckles was a frightener. He never demanded of some poor fool the vigorish due a local loan shark. He never broke knees or cut off thumbs. He wasn’t an enforcer. He warned people. Once.
If the warning was ignored, he killed them.
On this particular Wednesday he had flown first class from Detroit to San Francisco. A boring flight because today would be just a warning. He walked through the jammed, noisy, jostling airline terminal and down two escalators. The first took him past the luggage area, where he had no luggage to pick up. He never brought anything more lethal than sinus breath onto any of the numerous commercial flights that his profession demanded. He’d taken three falls in his thirty-nine years. If he took another he wouldn’t get up again, so he wasn’t about to take it.
The next escalator took him to a long slow-moving walkway. In the underground parking garage a bright-eyed kid in his twenties fell into step with him on the angle-striped pedestrian walk.
“Nice flight?” Knuckles merely grunted. The kid handed him a set of Lexus keys. “The red one,” he said, and turned off to lose himself among the endless rows of cars.
The Lexus was nestled between a hulking, sullen SUV and some sort of canary-yellow Oldsmobile convertible. Knuckles pulled on thin rubber surgeon’s gloves, unlocked the door, got in. There was a black violin case on the passenger seat. He unsnapped it, raised the lid, looked inside, grinned thinly, and closed and resnapped it. He set it upright in the bucket seat and snugged the seat belt about it, then followed the EXIT signs out of the labyrinth. His nose was already tingling from the exhaust fumes trapped in the garage. Too many freaking people. Kill ’em all.
“I need a frozen Milky Way,” said Larry Ballard.