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:
He dialed the phone. When a machine answered, he told it, “Knuckles, on Wednesday you gotta make that West Coast delivery.”
Shoehorned with the technician into the closed van parked on a side street in the South Bay town of Milpitas near the Summitpointe Golf Course, Guildenstern asked Rosenkrantz, “What’s the leading sexually transmitted disease among yuppies?”
“Headaches,” said Rosenkrantz.
“I think that’s what we’ll be giving our boy Leone.”
“I especially liked the part about blood on the chop suey.”
“Conspiracy to commit?” suggested Guildenstern.
“At least,” agreed Rosenkrantz.
It was Wednesday again, and Knuckles was flying first class from Detroit to San Francisco. He was feeling good. No dry run today. The real thing. At SFO he went through the jammed, noisy, jostling terminal and down the two sets of escalators to the moving walkway. As he started along the angle-striped pedestrian walkway in the vast echoing underground garage, a tall elegant blonde with breathtaking thighs fell into step with him.
“Nice flight?” she asked. Her voice was soft, caressing.
“My name is Knuckles Drop-Your-Pants,” Knuckles said with his most winning smile. She handed him a set of keys.
“The gold Allante,” she said, and was gone among the endless rows of cars before he could think up another zinger.
He sighed, pulled on his thin rubber gloves, unlocked the Allante, got in. He knew damn well he would never be able to buy anything like that in his entire life. The black violin case was on the passenger seat. He unsnapped it and raised the lid. Yeah.
But as he was setting it upright on the bucket seat there was a knock on the window. The blonde. She had a cell phone up to her ear and was gesturing at him to roll down the window.
“Open the trunk.” As she spoke she reached through the open window for the instrument case. “Hurry, there’s no time.”
She tossed the case into the trunk, slammed the lid, came back to slide into the front seat next to him.
“Terrorist bomb threat. They’re searching all the cars with single men in them, so our only chance is to get you and that hardware out of here before they bottle up the garage.” When he did nothing, she yelled angrily at him, “Move it!”
Knuckles had no experience of a woman like this. He put the car in gear, followed the arrows toward the exit as if on automatic. Just before the ramp down to the ticket booths, a hard-eyed red-haired man in his fifties stepped out in front of the car and held up a badge wallet with a freckle-splotched hand. He came around to Knuckles’s side of the Allante.
“FBI. We’re going to have to take a look in your trunk.”
“You got a warrant?” demanded the suddenly strident blonde. “This is harassment! My husband has just picked me up from a seven-hour flight and I’m not going to have you getting filthy pleasure from pawing through my underwear looking for drugs.”
“It isn’t...” The redhead stopped and sighed and stepped back. “And they wonder why,” he muttered under his breath. He gestured wearily. “On through, the pair of you.”
Once they were on the exit road from the airport, she told Knuckles to pull over at the Standard station. She got out.
“Open the trunk. I’ll get your case for you.” She recited a phone number. “Remember it.”
She retrieved the violin case, slammed the trunk lid, put the case back in the car, and finally leaned in his open window.
“If the heat’s still on here at the airport when you’re finished, call me and report,” she told him.
This was the kind of thing Knuckles understood. He’d make damn sure the heat would still be on at the airport.
“If it is, maybe you and me can—”
“Sure. Whatever you want, Knuckles. Leone said to treat you right.” She gave him a suddenly wicked, even debauched smile. “You’ll be staying over at my place.”
A freaking dream come true. Yeah! Do the Chink, call the blonde, then do her. All night. Paradise on a platter. In a feather bed, rather.
Knuckles turned the dead-bolt knob on the front door and flipped the OPEN sign over to CLOSED. Only when he was going down the aisle did he see that there were a couple of customers with the dead man. On the killing ground that was how he always thought of his prey: the dead man.
One customer was a tall blond guy with a hawk nose, the other a shorter, wider jig with a shaved head. Sexual excitement rippled through Knuckles. His first triple-header! Tonight he’d give that freaking blonde a ride she’d never forget.
All three men were eating ice cream cones, for Chrissake! Goddamn pansies, maybe. He set his violin case on the counter.
“I told you I’d be back,” he said roguishly to the Chink. He opened the case, reached in. “The back room. All of you.”
“Or?” said the jig.
“Or this,” said Knuckles, and brought up from the violin case — a violin. He gaped down at it.
The Chink stuck an ice cream cone into his left eye. He yelled and clawed at the icy mess, and the white guy kicked him explosively in the balls. Pain shot through his entire being. As he coiled down on himself, mouth strained open in a rictus of pain, the black guy caught him with a terrific right cross that knocked three teeth right out of his head.
Knuckles Colucci came around sitting behind the wheel of the gold Allante in a no-parking zone at SFO’s domestic terminal. His savaged mouth was bleeding and his groin was pure pain. Beside him on the other bucket seat was the violin case.
It was the blond bitch who had made the switch, of course. She’d had a second violin case in the trunk, and after the redheaded federal agent had been bluffed out... No! Not an agent. Part of the con. He’d been hidden by a pillar from the ticket-takers in the booths. No terrorist bomb. Nothing. But why?
Later for that. Get out of here, fast. He somehow pulled himself together enough to reach for the ignition keys.
There were no ignition keys.
Both front doors opened. Two hulking men, one bald and the other with a thatch of sandy hair, peered in at him.
“Knuckles Colucci, you are under arrest for attempted murder,” said the bald one. He was opening the violin case.
“With a freakin’ violin?” asked Knuckles hoarsely.
“No, with this,” beamed the bald man. His hand came out with a stubby machine pistol wearing a silencer as long as it was. “Looks to me like an Ingram M11 using a .380 ACP. Heard it was your weapon of choice, Knuckles, ’cause it’ll just fit in a violin case. Frilled barrel with a wire screen, a baffle—”
“And two spirals to decelerate the gases so the gun doesn’t make any noise at all,” said the one with hair, slipping the cuffs on the dazed Knuckles’s wrists.
The bald one put his nose down and sniffed. “It’s been fired, too. The report I got said he shot up the Chinaman’s place pretty bad...”
“You know, Knuckles,” said the other one, shaking his head, “you’re a real birdbrain, aren’t you?”
All five of them were feasting at the House of Prime Rib on Van Ness Avenue. It just seemed the kind of occasion to saw at slabs of blood-rare beef two inches thick and to hell with diets and cholesterol and a size six dress.
Ballard raised his glass. “To Ray. For shooting up his own grocery store.”
“All that fun, and it’s covered by insurance,” said Bart.
“You make a hell of a Feeb,” Giselle was saying to O’B.
O’B pulled down the lower lid of his right eye. “And you make a hell of a con woman. You hit him with everything all at once, never gave him a moment to think...”
They all drank. O’B, who was facing the door, gestured. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern were threading their way through the tables. They came up and looked over the company with benevolence. Rosenkrantz spoke first.