The Best American Mystery Stories 2005
- Автор: Хиггинс Джордж, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51744-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
The men’s room was small. A urinal hung on the wall to their left, brimming with dark urine and blackened cigarette butts. A cracked mirror hung above a blue-green stained sink. The metallic rattle of a worn, useless ventilation fan clamored. The stench of disinfectant surrendered to — what? — vomit? Yes, vomit.
The single stall stood against the wall before them. The door was closed. Feet showed beneath it.
McQueen reached for his Clock and watched as Rizzo slipped an ancient-looking Colt revolver from under his coat.
Then Rizzo leaned his weight back, his shoulder brushing against McQueen’s chest, and heaved a heavy foot at the stress point of the stall door. He threw his weight behind it, and as the door flew inward, he stepped deftly aside, at the same time gently shoving McQueen the other way. The door crashed against the stall occupant and Rizzo rushed forward, holding the bouncing door back with one hand, pointing the Colt with the other.
Peter Flain sat motionless on the toilet. His pants and underwear lay crumpled around his ankles. His legs were spread wide, pale and varicosed, and capped by bony knees. His head hung forward onto his chest, still. McQueen’s eyes fell on the man’s greasy black hair. Flain’s dirty gray shirt was covered with a brown, foamy, blood-streaked vomit. More blood, dark and thick, ran from his nostrils and pooled in the crook of his chin. His fists were clenched.
Rizzo leaned forward and, carefully avoiding the fluids, lay two fingers across the jugular.
He stood erect and holstered his gun. He turned to McQueen.
“Morte,” he said. “The prick died on us!”
McQueen looked away from Rizzo and back to Flain. He tried to feel what he felt, but couldn’t. “Well,” he said, just to hear his own voice.
Rizzo let the door swing closed on the sight of Flain. He turned to McQueen with sudden anger on his face. “You know what this means?” he said.
McQueen watched as the door swung slowly back open. He looked at Flain, but spoke to Rizzo.
“It means he’s dead. It’s over.”
Rizzo shook his head angrily. “No, no, that’s not what it fucking means. It means no conviction. No guilty plea. It means, ‘Investigation abated by death’! That’s what it means.”
McQueen shook his head. “So?” he asked. “So what?”
Rizzo frowned and leaned back against the tiled wall. Some of the anger left him. “So what?” he said, now more sad than angry. “I’ll tell you ‘so what.’ Without a conviction or a plea, we don’t clear this case. We don’t clear this case, we don’t get credit for it. We don’t clear this case, we did all this shit for nothing. Fucker would have died tonight anyway, with or without us bustin’ our asses to find him.”
They stood in silence for a moment. Then, suddenly, Rizzo brightened. He turned to McQueen with a sly grin, and when he spoke, he did so in a softer tone.
“Unless,” he said, “unless we start to get smart.”
In six years on the job, McQueen had been present in other places, at other times, with other cops, when one of them had said, “Unless...” with just such a grin. He felt his facial muscles begin to tighten.
“What, Joe? Unless what?”
“Unless when we got here, came in the john, this guy was still alive. In acute respiratory distress. Pukin’ on himself. Scared, real scared ‘cause he knew this was the final overdose. And we, well, we tried to help, but we ain’t doctors, right? So he knows he’s gonna die and he says to us, ‘I’m sorry.’ And we say, ‘What, Pete, sorry about what?’ And he says, ‘I’m sorry about that girl, that last pretty girl, in the subway. I shouldn’ta done that.’ And I say to him, ‘Done what, Pete, what’d you do?’ And he says, ‘I did like I did before, with the others, with the knife.’ And then, just like that, he drops dead!”
McQueen wrinkled his forehead. “I’m not following this, Joe. How does that change anything?”
Rizzo leaned closer to McQueen. “It changes everything,” he whispered, holding his thumb to his fingers and shaking his hand, palm up, at McQueen’s face. “Don’t you get it? It’s a deathbed confession, rock-solid evidence, even admissible in court. Bang — case closed! And we’re the ones who closed it. Don’t you see? It’s fucking beautiful.”
McQueen looked back at the grotesque body of the dead junkie. He felt bile rising in his throat, and he swallowed it down.
He shook his head slowly, his eyes still on the corpse.
“Jesus, Joe,” he said, the bile searing at his throat. “Jesus Christ, Joe, that’s not right. We can’t do that. That’s just fucking wrong!”
Rizzo reddened, the anger suddenly coming back to him.
“Kid,” he said, “don’t make me say you owe me. Don’t make me say it. I took this case on for you, remember?”
But it was not the way McQueen remembered it. He looked into the older man’s eyes.
“Jesus, Joe,” he said.
Rizzo shook his head, “Jesus got nothin’ to do with it.”
“It’s wrong, Joe,” McQueen said, even as his ears flushed red with the realization of what they were about to do. “It’s just wrong.”
Rizzo leaned in close, speaking more softly, directly into McQueen’s ear. The sound of people approaching the men’s room forced an urgency into his voice. McQueen felt the warmth of Rizzo’s breath touching him.
“I tole you this, kid. I already tole you this. There is no right. There is no wrong.” He turned and looked down at the hideous corpse. “There just is.”
David Means
Sault Ste. Marie
From Harper’s Magazine
Ernie dug in with the tip of his penknife, scratching a line into the plastic top of the display case, following the miniature lock system as it stepped down between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. At the window, Marsha ignored us both and stood blowing clouds of smoke at the vista... a supertanker rising slowly in the lock, hefted by water... as if it mattered that the system was fully functioning and freight was moving up and down the great seaway. As if it mattered that ore was being transported from the hinterlands of Duluth (a nullifyingly boring place) to the eastern seaboard and points beyond. As if it mattered that the visitor’s center stood bathed in sunlight, while behind the gift counter an old lady sat reading a paperback and doing her best to ignore the dry scratch of Ernie’s knife, raising her rheumy eyes on occasion, reaching up to adjust her magnificent hair with the flat of her band. — I’m gonna go see that guy I know, Tull, about the boat I was telling you about, Ernie announced, handing me the knife. He tossed his long black hair to the side, reached into his pants, yanked out his ridiculously long-barreled .44 Remington Magnum, pointed it at the lady, and said — But first I’m going to rob this old bag. — Stick ’em up, he said, moving toward the lady, who stared over the top of her paperback. Her face was ancient; the skin drooped from her jaw, and on her chin bits of hair collected faintly into something that looked like a Vandyke. A barmaid beauty remained in her face, along with a stony resilience. Her saving feature was a great big pool of silvery hair that rose like a nest and stood secured by an arrangement of bobby pins and a very fine hairnet. — Take whatever you want, she said in a husky voice, lifting her hands out in a gesture of offering. — As a matter of fact, shoot me if you feel inclined. It’s not going to matter to me. I’m pushing eighty. I’ve lived the life I’m going to live and I’ve seen plenty of things and had my heart broken and I’ve got rheumatoid arthritis in these knuckles so bad I can hardly hold a pencil to paper. (She lifted her hand and turned it over so we could see the claw formation of her fingers.) — And putting numbers into the cash register is painful. — Jesus Christ, Ernie said, shooting you would just be doing the world a favor, and too much fun, and he tucked the gun back in his pants, adjusted the hem of his shirt, and went to find this guy with the boat. Marsha maintained her place at the window, lit another cigarette, and stared at the boat while I took Ernie’s knife from the top of the display case and began scratching where he left off. Finished with the matter, the old lady behind the gift counter raised the paperback up to her face and began reading. Outside, the superfreighter rose with leisure; it was one of those long ore boats, a football field in length, with guys on bicycles making the journey from bow to stern. There was probably great beauty in its immensity, in the way it emerged from the lower parts of the seaway, lifted by the water. But I didn’t see it. At that time in my life, it was just one more industrial relic in my face.