Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006
- Автор: Бетанкур Джон Грегори, Jr. William J. Carroll,
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines/Crosstown Publications
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
The sun rose over the Detroit River, and by that time the soles of his shoes had picked up a few more identifying nicks and dents of their own.
He phoned Detective Donaldson, but all he got was voice mail.
He went to school because they wanded for weapons at school, and at least he would be safe there for a while.
He called his ma and pa and said he was okay, and his ma asked, “Where are you?”
“At school, ma. Same as always. Papa Smurf show up?”
“No, son, he didn’t.”
That made him feel good.
He went inside, the security guard wanded him, and once he got past the checkpoint, he knew he could rest easy.
He went to his homeroom, Mr. Constanza’s class, was the first one there as usual, but after a while the jackals drifted in, and they all stared at him as if they couldn’t understand why he wasn’t a piece of carrion freezing in a back alley yet.
Dilbert came in, and Dilbert kept glancing at the ceiling like he thought it was going to cave in. Niveda arrived and she looked bewildered, as if she had studied for a science exam all night only to discover it was an English exam. Mr. Constanza came in and gave Linc a quick glance, a grin on his face, the kind of grin you saw on dogs when they were having their bellies scratched.
Linc waited for Papa Smurf, but the Smurfmaster didn’t show up.
Instead, two officers from the thin blue line arrived, and Mr. Constanza went out to talk to them.
A minute later he came back, and it was, “Niveda, Dilbert, could you please come out to the hall?”
Niveda and Dilbert went out to the hall. Some of the jackals looked at Linc, as if they couldn’t figure out how someone so low on the food chain could still be alive, but Linc kept his eyes down. Mr. Constanza came in, and Linc heard footsteps fading down the hall, the door to the stairwell opening, then closing, then silence, Dilbert and Niveda being led away by the men of the thin blue line.
Mr. Constanza stood at the front as if in a trance. He gave Linc another glance, the same glance he sometimes gave Madmaxx when Madmaxx had A-plussed a test, then told the class to turn to page 187, they were going to look at alkalies today. Madmaxx, his main man, always at the top of the class, and now hovering with remarkable clarity above page 187.
After a minute, Linc couldn’t concentrate on page 187. He stared out the window at the parking lot. The two men from the thin blue line led Niveda and Dilbert to a police car. And Linc thought, X plus Y equaled Z after all, because which was worse, pulling the trigger, or watching someone else pull it?
On his cell to Detective Donaldson later, he learned that the equation was a little more complicated than X plus Y equals Z, that it had the complexity of adding an oxygen atom to an ammonia molecule.
“We picked Alexander up late last night. Alexander says Dilbert did it, and Dilbert swears Alexander did it, and Niveda’s waiting to see what she can get out of the deal before she decides which way she’ll go. It doesn’t matter. They’re all going down.”
“So you got the shoes?”
“They were one of a kind, Lincoln, just like you said.”
Linc asked if he could have Madmaxx’s shoes back. “Got to give ’em to Mrs. Sameer.”
Linc got them back after one week.
He walked down the long, bungalow-lined street to Mrs. Sameer’s house. Linc wondered what Mrs. Sameer thought of all this, her life in America, coming from Qatar twelve years ago, a widow, wanting a fresh start for Ahmed, only to have Ahmed’s blood freezing in a back alley, life’s long road leading her to a place she never wanted to go.
He knocked on the door and she answered. She looked shrunken, worn by grief, her brown face as wrinkled as the shell of a walnut, her gold earrings hanging like desert flowers on her sagging lobes.
“Thank you,” she said, her English sounding strange. “Thank you.”
That’s all she said because Mrs. Sameer had never mastered English.
Had gotten Madmaxx to translate everything for her.
Now she would have to learn.
Linc walked away, wondering if doing the right thing had made a difference. He didn’t feel good, the way he thought he would.
He just felt it was over.
And was that good enough?
The wind picked up and blew snow against his legs.
Maybe that’s all he could hope for. It wasn’t the same as having Ahmed walk through the classroom door every morning, but at least he now felt the music coming back. He lifted his collar around his neck to protect it from the cold. The crampiness was leaving his hands, and the sweetness was coming back to his ears. And because of that, he knew the riffs would come easily tonight.
He would play for Ahmed when he got home.
And Ahmed would be there, in the music.
A part of the beat.
Elevating the blues. Becoming the blues.
His main man, once again.
After the Fall
by Elaine Viets
Mort was walking down the street Monday morning when a woman landed splat! on the sidewalk, right in front of him.
She burst like a water balloon, and Mort was splashed with a tidal wave of blood and little dots of gray-white that he couldn’t identify. Then he could and his stomach heaved. He was already dizzy from the coppery smell of the blood. He was starting a sickly sway when a man in a dirty white apron ran out of Sammy d’s Deli and said, “Whoa, pal, where are you hurt? You been shot? Don’t worry, we’ve called an ambulance.”
“It’s not my blood,” Mort said. “It’s hers.” He pointed to the small twisted figure on the sidewalk. That steadied him somehow, and he was able to go on without fainting or throwing up.
“Jesus,” the deli man said. “She must have jumped.”
They both looked up and saw curtains flapping out of an open window far, far above them.
“You’re darn lucky,” the deli man said. “A few inches more and she would have landed on you. She would have killed you dead.”
The EMS people told Mort he was lucky too, as they took him to the hospital, where he was scrubbed down with a horrible harsh disinfectant that clogged his sensitive nasal passages. It smelled of cherries, like some perverted candy.
“Sorry,” the nurse said when he complained of the smell, “but we have to do this for your protection. Bodies are crawling with bacteria.”
Mort felt queasy all over again at the unseen horrors invading his sensitive skin, burrowing into his nose and distorting his taste buds. For Mort Heffern was an ordinary man in every way but one. He was average height: five feet seven. He was ordinary looking, with a little round paunch and small brown eyes. His thin, tan hair was receding. Well, to be honest, it had already receded.
Yet ordinary Mort enjoyed many extraordinary delights, including a luscious blond wife, a five-bedroom house in Nyack, New York, and a bottle-green Range Rover because of one unusual feature. Mort’s sense of taste was superbly sensitive. It was so sensitive that he was a coffee taster for a top New York firm. Mort’s taste buds could distinguish Kona (which he considered overrated) from Kenya AA. He could even tell you the slope where the coffee beans grew.
To protect his precious taste buds and their ally, his nose, Mort never smoked. He’d only had one cigarette in his life, back when he was sixteen, before he decided to become a taster and forsake smoking for the rarer and more exquisite pleasure of tasting. Sometimes, he thought about that one smoke. But mostly he thought about all the good things his taste buds brought him because he didn’t smoke.