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:
“Hear about the blonde who got an AM radio?”
“It took her a month to figure out she could play it at night,” said his partner.
Giselle, as the only blond woman present, said, “What’s SFPD Homicide’s version of the Miranda warning?”
“You have the right to remain dead,” said Larry Ballard.
“Have a seat, gents,” suggested Bart Heslip.
Guildenstern shook his head and chuckled.
“We got an all-nighter going. Knuckles is in a cage downtown and squawking like a parrot, trying to get a deal. He’s giving us everything he ever knew about anybody in the mob.”
“Witness relocation?” asked Giselle.
“Four-time loser? No chance. We don’t need him anyway. The feds are busting Two-Ton Tony back in Detroit right now — he took the conspiracy across state lines. He can buy the local heat but he can’t buy the feds. He’s going down.”
“Leone?” asked Bart.
“We got him on tape talking about blood and chop suey. He’ll get a five-spot at Q, be out in two — but by then somebody’ll have eaten his lunch down there in the South Bay.”
Ray Chong Fat asked almost timidly, “Mr. Li?”
Guildenstern said, “What do you call someone who’s half-Apache and half-Chinese?”
“Ugh-Li,” said Rosenkrantz. He clapped Ray on the shoulder. “Seems he made a bookkeeping mistake. You’re all paid up with him forever, and you don’t have to run any more games.”
Ray looked at him for a long time. There was a great deal in the look. Then he said, “Chinaboy cook at dude ranch. One ranch hand, every day he come in, say, ‘What’s fo’ dinner?’ Chinaboy say, ‘Flied lice.’ Pretty soon, ranch hand always asking, ‘Flied lice? You got flied lice fo’ dinner?’ Every day. So Chinaboy get book, study English. Next time ranch hand come in, say, ‘Flied lice? Flied lice?’ Chinaboy say, ‘We have a very great sufficiency of fried rice — you plick!’ ”
Rosenkrantz beamed down at the others.
“What d’you think he means by that?” he asked.
“If you stand by the river long enough,” said Ballard, “the body of your enemy will float by.”
“Huh?” said Guildenstern.
James Grady
The Championship of Nowhere
From Murder on the Ropes
Gene Mallette and the kid named Sandy were wildcatting a double shift on an oil derrick fifty-five afternoons before Independence Day. Drill and generator motors pounded May’s prairie air. Sandy laughed about something and smiled. Then a drill chain broke, whipped like a silver tie around his neck, and rocketed him to the top of the fifty-foot rig. His body swung there while pipes clattered and a driller screamed and all Gene could think about was Sandy’s teenage face smeared oil black except for his happy eyes and the glint of white teeth.
The chain unraveled with a spin and Sandy crashed to the derrick floor.
Gene and another guy rode to town in back of the flatbed truck with Sandy’s body laid at their boots. There’d been a spring snow two weeks before, so the truck didn’t kick up much dust from the dirt road. The earth smelled damp and good. He heard the foreman in the truck cab say maybe the drought was over. They saw a skinny deer grazing by the walls of a deserted sod house. They saw the blue misted Sweet Grass Hills rising from the yellow prairie between them and Canada. Those three volcanic crags would have been mountains anyplace else but here in Montana. The foreman drove to the Shelby undertaker parlor. As they lifted Sandy off the truck, Gene heard the mortician’s hand jingling silver dollars for those happy eyes.
“I’m done,” said Gene, and walked to the boarding house.
He put a shower and a tub soak on his tab. Sat at the dinner table with other boarders and ate stew he didn’t taste. Walked out to the sidewalk to sit on a bench, watch the people and cars around the Front Street speakeasies, and make himself think about nothing, nothing at all.
Least I got that, he thought.
Just before sunset a rancher named Jensen staggered out of a speakeasy called the Bucket of Blood, walked to a roan horse cinched to one of the new electric light poles, pulled out a silver pistol, and shot the horse smack between the eyes. The roan plopped to the ground so hard it snapped the cinch. Jensen pumped slugs into the beast, filling the town with the roar of the gun. He had gone through a full reload of the revolver and had its cylinder swung open for more bullets when the black Ford with a big white star painted on each of its front doors pulled up behind the dead horse. Texas John Otis unfolded his grizzly bear body to climb out of the car, sheriff’s badge on the left lapel of his black suit, a dead German sniper’s ten-inch broomstick handle Mauser in his right hand. Sheriff Otis ripped the shiny revolver away from Jensen and slammed the Mauser against the rancher’s skull.
“You dumb son of a bitch!” roared the Sheriff. “You shot your own damn horse!”
But by then Jensen lay draped unconscious across that bloody roan.
Gene turned away and saw her walking toward him.
He’d seen her before, back in ’06 when she was nine and he was fourteen. Her white father moved her and her kid brother off the Blackfeet Rez to educate in Shelby instead of being sentenced to an Indian boarding school. Gene’d seen her every day when he was a high school senior. She’d skipped a grade so she was a shy freshman who wore her black hair like a veil. Gene just knew she wouldn’t talk to him. Then he couldn’t talk to her while she was still in high school and he was a graduated adult doing a man’s job as a gandy dancer building railroads to bring homesteaders out West and ship the loot of the land back East. He’d seen her almost every week, often trying to corral her wild brother. Gene had seen her at the train depot the day he shipped out to the Marines for the Great War against the Kaiser. That day, damned if he wouldn’t before he died doing what had to be done, he’d gone up to her, said: “Goodbye.” She’d flinched — then lanced the gloom with her smile. When he came home from Europe with no visible scars, he’d seen her in the Shelby cemetery putting flowers on the influenza graves of the homesteader she’d married who’d been old enough to be her dad and the baby girl she’d let that dreamer father. After bloody California, as Gene’s parents and their ranch died, he had seen her move to town when the great winds of 1920 ate the homestead she’d tried to keep going while working the schoolmarm job her husband had been white enough to let her get and the town had been Chrisdan enough to let her keep for the full year of widow’s black. Gene had watched as she waitressed at the Palace Hotel where she lived in the back room, sometimes with her brother when he was in town trying to find dollars for ivory powder he pumped into his arm. And Gene’d seen her sad smile two months earlier when he’d asked her out. She’d whispered: “I got nothing that’s worth it for you.” He’d seen her not believe him when he swore she was wrong, seen her walk away so she wouldn’t see tears fall she couldn’t catch.
But that night, he saw her and knew she was walking toward him.
She blocked the red ball of the setting sun as she drew near. They were together inside a crimson lake. He could barely breathe and the water of this moment turned her walk into a slow swim toward him, her hair undulating out from her shoulders, her dress floating around her calves. He remembered forever that dress was the blue of morning sky. She wore no makeup on her skin, which was the color of milked coffee. The scent of purple lilacs came with her. Gene felt like Sandy spinning free of the chain that hung him high above the earth as he fell into her midnight eyes.