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:
The noises started up again. Granny was right. It did sound like a piece of cutlery caught in the dishwasher. But then it stopped — Antone’s breathing, the mattress springs, Molly’s little muffled grunts — they just stopped, and they didn’t stop naturally, if you know what I mean. I’m not trying to be cruel, but Molly’s a bit of a slut, and I’ve listened to her have sex more times than I can count, and I know how it ends, even when she’s faking it, even when she has to be quiet, and it just didn’t sound like the usual Molly finish at all. Antone yelped, but she was silent as a grave.
“Antone, what are you doing?” his granny asked. Antone didn’t answer. Several minutes went by, and then there was a hoarse whisper from the bedroom.
“Um, Kelley? Could you come here a minute?”
“What was that?” his granny asked.
I used the remote to turn up the volume on Judge Judy, “DO I LOOK STUPID TO YOU?” the judge was yelling. “REMEMBER THAT PRETTY FADES BUT STUPID IS FOREVER. I ASKED IF YOU HAD IT IN WRITING, I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ALL THIS FOLDEROL ABOUT ORAL AGREEMENTS.”
When I went into the bedroom, Molly was under Antone, and I remember thinking — I was a little high, remember — that he made her look really thin because he covered up her torso, and Molly does have good legs and decent arms. He had a handsome back, too, broad and muscled, and a great ass. Brandon had no ass (con), but he had nice legs (pro).
It took me a moment to notice that Antone had a pair of scissors stuck in the middle of his beautiful back.
“I told him no,” Molly whispered, although the volume on the television was so loud that the entire apartment was practically reverberating. “No means no.”
There was a lot of blood, I noticed. A lot.
“I didn’t hear you,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t hear you say any words.”
“I mouthed it. He told me to keep silent because his grandmother is here. Still, I mouthed it. ‘No.’ ‘No.’” She made this incredibly unattractive fish mouth to show me.
“Is he dead?”
“I mean, I was totally up for giving him a blowjob, especially after he said he’d give me a little extra, but he was, like, uncircumcised. I just couldn’t, Kelley, I couldn’t. I’ve never been with a guy like that. I offered him a hand job instead, but he got totally peeved and tried to force me.”
The story wasn’t tracking. High as I was, I could see there were some holes. How did you get naked? I wanted to ask. Why didn’t you shout? If Granny knew you were here, Antone wouldn’t have dared misbehaved. He had clearly been more scared of Granny than he was into Molly.
“This is the stash house,” Molly said. “Antone showed me.”
“What?”
“The drugs. They’re here. All of it. We could just help ourselves. I mean, he’s a rapist, Kelley. He’s a criminal. He sells drugs to people. Help me, Kelley. Get him off me.”
But when I rolled him off, I saw there was a condom. Molly saw it, too.
“We should, like, so get rid of that. It would only complicate things. When I saw he was going to rape me, I told him he should at least be courteous.”
I nodded, as if agreeing. I flushed the condom down the toilet, helped Molly clean the blood off her, and then used my purse to pack up what we could find, as she was carrying this little bitty Kate Spade knockoff that wasn’t much good for anything. We found some cash, too, about $2,000, and helped ourselves to that, on the rationale that it would be more suspicious if we didn’t. On the way out, I shook a few more potato chips on Granny’s plate.
“Antone?” she said. “Are you going out again?”
Molly grunted low, and that seemed to appease Granny. We walked out slowly, as if we had all the time in the world, but again I had that feeling of a thousand pairs of eyes on us. We were in some serious trouble. There would have to be some sort of retribution for what we had done. What Molly had done. All I did was steal a few potato chips.
“Take Quarry Road home instead of the interstate,” I told Molly.
“Why?” she asked. “It takes so much longer.”
“But we know it, know all the ins and outs. If someone follows us, we can give them the slip.”
About two miles from home, I told her I had to pee so bad that I couldn’t wait and asked her to stand watch for me, a longtime practice with us. We were at that point, high above the old limestone quarry, where we had parked a thousand times as teenagers. A place where Molly had never said “No” to my knowledge.
“Finished?” she asked, when I emerged from behind the screen of trees.
“Almost,” I said, pushing her hard, sending her tumbling over the precipice. She wouldn’t be the first kid in our class to break her neck at the highest point on Quarry Road. My high school boyfriend did, in fact, right after we broke up. It was a horrible accident. I didn’t eat for weeks and got down to a size four. Everyone felt bad for me — breaking up with Eddie only to have him commit suicide that way. There didn’t seem to be any reason for me to explain that Eddie was the one who wanted to break up. Unnecessary information.
I crossed the hillside to the highway, a distance of about a mile, then jogged the rest of the way. After all, as my mother would be the first to tell you, I went for a run that afternoon, while Molly was off shopping, according to her mom. I assumed the police would tie Antone’s dead body to Molly’s murder and figure it for a revenge killing, but I was giving the cops too much credit. Antone rated a paragraph in the morning paper. Molly, who turned out to be pregnant, although not even she knew it — probably wouldn’t even have known who the father was — is still on the front page all these weeks later. (The fact that they didn’t find her for three days heightened the interest, I guess. I mean, she was just an overweight dental hygienist from the suburbs — and a bit of a slut, as I told you, But the media got all excited about it.) The general consensus seems to be that Keith did it, and I don’t see any reason to let him off the hook, not yet. He’s an asshole. Plus, almost no one in this state gets the death penalty.
Meanwhile, he’s telling people just how many men Molly had sex with in the past month, including Brandon, and police are still trying to figure out who had sex with her right before she died. (That’s why you’re supposed to get the condom on as early as possible, girls. Penises drip. Just fyi.) I pretended to be shocked, but I already knew about Brandon, having seen Molly’s car outside his apartment when I cruised his place at 2 A.M. a few nights after Brandon told me he wanted to see other people. My ex-boyfriend and my best friend, running around behind my back. Everyone feels so bad for me, but I’m being brave, although I eat so little that I’m down to a size two. I just bought a Versace dress and Manolos for a date this weekend with my new boyfriend, Robert. I’ve never spent so much money on an outfit before. But then, I’ve never had $2,000 in cash to spend as I please.
Ed McBain
Improvisation
From Dangerous Women
Why don’t we kill somebody?” she suggested.
She was a blonde, of course, tall and willowy and wearing a sleek black cocktail dress cut high on the leg and low at the neckline.
“Been there,” Will told her. “Done that.”
Her eyes opened wide, a sharp blue in startling contrast to the black of the dress.
“The Gulf War,” he explained.
“Not the same thing at all,” she said, and plucked the olive from her martini and popped it into her mouth. “I’m talking about murder.”
“Murder, uh-huh,” Will said. “Who’d you have in mind?”
“How about the girl sitting across the bar there?”