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:
“Wasted,” answered Harry.
“Can you still lie and do it good enough to save your sister?”
Harry stared at ghosts standing witness. Licked his lips, told Gene: “I’m the kind of guy who says whatever and then believes it’s true. Believing a lie helps sell it. So you’re telling me that for once in my stupid life, what I gotta do is just be myself? Even I can’t screw that up.”
Can’t do it like Billie, thought Gene as he saddled the black horse while lecturing her brother: “If Doyle beats me back, tell him I took the horse to ride out my crazies. Sell him that. If I get back first, we got to get this horse in his stall like he never left it.”
As he galloped away, Gene didn’t look back at the man slumped in the barn door.
Way he figured it with Billie’s talk about the Pythagorean theorem, from the barn on the ranch south of Shelby to the farmhouse east of that town was just under fourteen miles. But that was one way, and across fenced rolling prairie and farmland where somebody might see him.
Somebody, but not Doyle. He’d be busy. In town. With Billie.
Gene boot-heeled the horse’s flanks. Not for nothing. Not all this for nothing.
Misted indigo humps of the three Sweet Grass Hills rode a horizon of blue sky. Fields of wheat Gene and the horse charged through were losing green to gold, baking to an early harvest in the ninety-five-degree heat. The horse reeked of wet sweat. Would Doyle’s nose pick up that scent rubbed on a man? When he got back. With Billie. A circling hawk watched Gene cut the first of many barbed-wire fences. I’m just like an old-timer now, he thought as he rode through the savaged fence. What was it like for them? Fields of horse-belly-high buffalo grass instead of sodbuster-ruined scrub and wheat planted for starving Boston urchins. What was it like for Billie’s people who rode this endless open with a hundred million buffalo? Gene heeled his horse.
He spotted the farmhouse. Nobody else had seen him, though he’d seen a wagon ferrying a Hutterite family in their religion’s strange black pants, homemade checkered shirts, and plain faces. They’d ignored a frantic horseman who galloped past them, cutting fences before they were even out of sight. They’d tell no one outside their colony what they’d seen: nothing outside their community of God mattered.
Gene sat in the saddle on the heaving horse. Watched the farmhouse for ten minutes. Saw nothing move. He made the horse trot forward.
“Hello?” he called. No answer. He reined in the horse by a garage window. Gene peered inside: dusty sunlight showed him a coupe with Alberta license plates. And only two seats.
Took him one loop around the farmhouse to spot what he hadn’t found at Woon’s ranch. Behind a shed was a freshly shoveled solo hole in the earth, six feet long and four feet deep, its dirt pile waiting beside that gaping maw.
Call me a lucky man, thought Gene. Not many people get to see this.
Doyle, you lazy bastard. Four feet isn’t deep enough for even one in this coyote country.
From the saddle, he nudged open the shed door and saw three sacks of quicklime.
Gene pulled the door shut, then jerked the reins and kicked the frothing horse home.
In a gully a mile from the Woon barn, the horse staggering beneath him, Gene glanced over the ridge toward the highway: two cars turned off that main road toward the ranch.
“Go!” he kicked his boot heels. The exhausted black beast stumbled through the rocky gully circling Woon’s ranch. If Gene rode low and kept the horse’s head down, maybe no one driving up in a car would spot him. He risked a scouting peek over the sage-brushed ridge.
Saw Doyle’s Ford and the toad Taylor’s Cadillac closing in on the ranch.
From the barn ran Harry, stumbling into the path of the cars so they had to stop, had to not get to the ranch as he waved his arms and ranted like a man poisoned with monsters.
“Hya!” Gene charged the horse through the gully, around the back of the ranch, up out of its shelter, and into the barn as car engines whined closer. Gene rode the white-foamed black horse into the open stall, flipped off the saddle and almost ripped the teeth out of the wheezing horse’s mouth as he stripped off the bridle, let it fall to the stall floor as car engines stopped. Gene raced toward the mass of sunlight filling the barn door—
Out, charging toward the two cars emptying of Doyle and Taylor and caught-a-ride Harry. And Billie. Gene yelled: “Where the hell have you been!”
“In town!” called Billie. Her face told him the truth: “Just in town.”
Gene whirled to Taylor: “Why the hell are you here?”
“The town dispatched me to brief you on their plans.” The toad smiled. “And I’ll tell you ours. All that sweat: you’ve been working out. Good. But rest now. Hot out here. Let’s go inside.”
Gene snapped: “The barn?”
“I’m no animal,” said Taylor, and led everyone into the house.
Sitting in the Woon living room, Gene told Taylor: “Sounds like we ain’t going to have a fight. The radio says the chartered trains from back East have all canceled. No money, no fight, nothing for us to steal. Dempsey’s boss Jack Kearns says—”
The toad lunged across the room to scream at the sitting boxer: “The fight is happening! Don’t you say that! The fight is happening and we’re... we’re...”
“You’re wound tight,” said Gene. “Just as tight as one of the real boosters.”
“Worry about you!” Taylor’s hands shook. “You got to fight fifteen rounds and still be workable! Don’t worry about Kearns! The fight’s going to happen! They’re meeting in a bank right now getting seed money! People will show up with cash they owe for tickets! And the chartered trains! They’re going to run full speed from St. Paul and Chicago and fifty dollars ringside! They’re bringing all that money so we can take it! Nobody’s going to keep it from us!” Gene shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
Saw Doyle staring at the trembling toad.
“Yes,” said Taylor. “Yes I am. And this is how it works.
“Under that wooden arena are four rough dressing rooms, one for each fighter. And a collection room for all money coming through the gate. By the sixth round of the Main Event, accountants figure ninety percent of the gate cash will be in. To get it to the bank, they’ll send a posse in the seventh round. Kearns will make Dempsey take it that long so people get their money’s worth. Everybody knows Dempsey can put Gibbons away, so they will all be glued to the ring for the first rounds, for the quick knockout. Guards will be on the gates leading down into the dressing rooms and collection area. But inside there’ll only be fighters, their trainers, a couple counting room clerks — and all that cash.
“You’ve got to take Eric the full fifteen rounds so you’ll have an excuse to still be inside when the Dempsey fight starts. Change fast. Pillowcase masks and gloves go inside with you. Soon as the crowd roars with the bell starting Round One, you three run to the counting room, muscle inside, tie up the clerks, grab the cash, walk out with everything stuffed in your gear bags. Billie picks you up out front during the fifth round while the posse is still at the bank. You’re gone before anybody knows anything is wrong.”
“No killing,” said Gene.
“I’m not a necktie fool,” said Doyle. “We got handcuffs and tape suips for the clerks. Shouldn’t be more than two of them. I’ll be gun man, you truss them up, Harry scoops up cash.”