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:
“I’m thirty next month, born on Christmas Day, same as Baby Jesus.”
Louly smiled. She couldn’t help it, seeing Joe Young lying in a manger with Baby Jesus, the three Wise Men looking at him funny. She asked Joe how many times he’d had his picture in the paper.
“When I got sent to Jeff City they’s all kinds of pictures of me was in there.”
“I mean how many different times, for other stickups?”
She watched him sit back as the waitress came with their supper and he gave her a pat on the butt as she turned from the table. The waitress said, “Fresh,” and acted surprised in a cute way. Louly was ready to tell how Charley Floyd had his picture in the Sallisaw paper fifty-one times in the past year, once for each of the fifty-one banks robbed in Oklahoma, all of them claiming Charley as the bank robber. But if she told him, Joe Young would say Charley couldn’t of robbed that many since he was in Ohio part of ‘31. Which was true. An estimate said he might’ve robbed thirty-eight banks, but even that might cause Joe Young to be jealous and get cranky, so she let it drop and they ate their chicken-fried steaks.
Joe Young told her to pay the bill, a buck-sixty for everything including rhubarb pie for dessert, out of her running-away money. They got back to the tourist court and he screwed her again on her full stomach, breathing through his nose, and she saw how this being a gun moll wasn’t all a bed of roses.
In the morning they set out east on Highway 40 for the Cookson Hills, Joe Young driving the Model A with his elbow out the window, Louly holding her coat close to her, the collar up against the wind, Joe Young talking a lot, saying he knew where Choc liked to hide. They’d go on up to Muskogee, cross the Arkansas and head down along the river to Braggs. “I know the boy likes that country around Braggs.” Along the way he could hold up a filling station, show Louly how it was done.
Heading out of Henryetta she said, “There’s one.”
He said, “Too many cars.”
Thirty miles later leaving Checotah, turning north toward Muskogee, Louly looked back and said, “What’s wrong with that Texaco station?”
“Something about it I don’t like,” Joe Young said. “You have to have a feel for this work.”
Louly said, “You pick it.” She had the.38 he gave her in a black and pink bag her mom had crocheted for her.
They came up on Summit and crept through town, both of them looking, Louly waiting for him to choose a place to rob. She was getting excited. They came to the other side of town and Joe Young said, “There’s our place. We can fill up, get a cup of coffee.”
Louly said, “Hold it up?”
“Look it over.”
“It’s sure a dump.”
Two gas pumps in front of a rickety place, paint peeling, a sign that said eats and told that soup was a dime and a ham-burg five cents.
They went in while a bent-over old man filled their tank, Joe Young bringing his whiskey bottle with him, almost drained, and put it on the counter. The woman behind it was skin and bones, worn out, brushing strands of hair from her face. She placed cups in front of them and Joe Young poured what was left in the bottle into his.
Louly did not want to rob this woman.
The woman saying, “I think she’s dry.”
Joe Young was concentrating on dripping the last drops from his bottle. He said, “Can you help me out?”
Now the woman was pouring their coffee. “You want shine? Or I can give you Kentucky for three dollars.”
“Gimme a couple,” Joe Young said, drawing his Colt, laying it on the counter, “and what’s in the till.”
Louly did not want to rob this woman. She was thinking you didn’t have to rob a person just ‘cause the person had money, did you?
The woman said, “Goddamn you, mister.”
Joe Young picked up his gun and went around to open the cash register at the end of the counter. Taking out bills he said to the woman, “Where you keep the whiskey money?”
She said, “In there,” despair in her voice.
He said, “Fourteen dollars?” holding it up, and turned to Louly. “Put your gun on her so she don’t move. The geezer come in, put it on him, too.” Joe Young went through a doorway to what looked like an office.
The woman said to Louly, pointing the gun from the crocheted bag at her now, “How come you’re with that trash? You seem like a girl from a nice family, have a pretty bag... There something wrong with you? My Lord, you can’t do better’n him?”
Louly said, “You know who’s a good friend of mine? Charley Floyd, if you know who I mean. He married my cousin Ruby.” The woman shook her head and Louly said, “Pretty Boy Floyd,” and wanted to bite her tongue.
Now the woman seemed to smile, showing black lines between the teeth she had. “He come in here one time. I fixed him breakfast and he paid me two dollars for it. You ever hear of that? I charge twenty-five cents for two eggs, four strips of bacon, toast and all you want of coffee, and he give me two dollars.”
“When was this?” Louly said.
The woman looked past Louly trying to see when it was and said, “Twenty-nine, after his daddy was killed that time.”
They got the fourteen from the till and fifty-seven dollars in whiskey money from the back, Joe Young talking again about heading for Muskogee, telling Louly it was his instinct told him to go in there. How was this place doing business, two big service stations only a few blocks away? So he’d brought the bottle in, see what it would get him. “You hear what she said? ‘Goddamn you,’ but called me ‘Mister.’”
“Charley had breakfast in there one time,” Louly said, “and paid her two dollars for it.”
“Showing off,” Joe Young said.
He decided they’d stay in Muskogee instead of going down to Braggs and rest up here.
Louly said, “Yeah, we must’ve come a good fifty miles today.”
Joe Young told her not to get smart with him. “I’m gonna put you in a tourist cabin and see some boys I know. Find out where Choc’s at.”
She didn’t believe him, but what was the sense of arguing?
It was early evening now, the sun going down.
The man who knocked on the door-she could see him through the glass part-was tall and slim in a dark suit, a young guy dressed up, holding his hat at his leg. She believed he was the police, but had no reason, standing here looking at him, not to open the door.
He said, “Miss,” and showed her his I.D. and a star in a circle in a wallet he held open, “I’m Deputy U.S. Marshal Carl Webster. Who am I speaking to?”
She said, “I’m Louly Ring?”
He smiled straight teeth at her and said, “You’re a cousin of Pretty Boy Floyd’s wife, Ruby, aren’t you?”
Like getting ice-cold water thrown in her face she was so surprised. “How’d you know that?”
“We been making a book on Pretty Boy, noting down connections, everybody he knows. You recall the last time you saw him?”
“At their wedding, eight years ago.”
“No time since? How about the other day in Sallisaw?”
“I never saw him. But listen, him and Ruby are divorced.”
The marshal, Carl Webster, shook his head. “He went up to Coffeyville and got her back. But aren’t you missing a automobile, a Model A Ford?”
She had not heard a word about Charley and Ruby being back together. None of the papers ever mentioned her, just the woman named Juanita. Louly said, “The car isn’t missing, a friend of mine’s using it.”
He said, “The car’s in your name?” and recited the Oklahoma license number.
“I paid for it out of my wages. It just happens to be in my stepfather’s name, Otis Bender.”
“I guess there’s some kind of misunderstanding,” Carl Webster said. “Otis claims it was stolen off his property in Sequoyah County. Who’s your friend borrowed it?”