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:
Please don’t stab me, he thought.
“How about this one?” Jessica asked.
“Looks awfully big for the job,” Susan said.
“Slit his fuckin’ throat good,” Jessica said, and laughed.
“See if he sits there like a dope then,” Susan said.
“Get some kind of reaction out of him.”
“Help us to feel something.”
“Now you’ve got it, Sue. That’s the whole point.”
Will’s chest was beginning to feel tight. He was beginning to have difficulty breathing.
In the kitchen, the girls laughed again.
Why were they laughing?
Had they just said something he couldn’t hear? Were they going to do something else with that knife, other than slit his throat? He wished he could take a deep breath. He knew he would feel so much better if he could just take a deep breath. But he... he... he didn’t seem to be... to be able to...
“Hey!” Jessica said. “You! Don’t poop out on us!”
Susan looked at her.
“I think he’s gone,” she said.
“Shit!” Jessica said.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking his pulse.”
Susan waited.
“Nothing,” Jessica said, and dropped his wrist.
The sisters kept looking at Will where he sat slumped in the easy chair, his mouth still hanging open, his eyes wide.
“He sure as hell looks dead,” Jessica said.
“We’d better get him out of here.”
“Be a good exercise,” Jessica said. “Getting rid of the body.”
“I’ll say. I’ll bet he weighs at least a hun’ ninety.”
“I didn’t say good exercise, Sue. I said a good exercise. A good acting exercise.”
“Oh. Right. What it feels like to get rid of a dead body. Right.”
“So let’s do it,” Jessica said.
They started lifting him out of the chair. He was, in fact, very heavy. They half-carried him, half-dragged him to the front door.
“Tell me something,” Susan said. “Do you... you know... feel anything yet?”
“Nothing,” Jessica said.
Mike MacLean
McHenry’s Gift
From Thuglit
There was a knock at the door. Dillon Leary grabbed the .45 from underneath his mattress and pressed himself flat against the wall. He thumbed the safety off then racked the pistol’s slide, jacking a round into the chamber. It was a big sound in the little apartment.
“Who is it?” Dillon called out.
“UPS. Got a package out here.”
“Leave it.”
“I need a signature, sir.”
Dillon glanced through the peephole. The man outside was dressed from head to toe in brown. Brown shorts. Brown shirt. Brown cap. Standard issue UPS uniform. He even had one of those electronic clipboards to sign. The kind that looked like an Etch A Sketch toy but that recorded names into a vast computer database. From all appearances, the guy seemed like the real thing. But appearances could be deceiving.
Taking a deep breath, Dillon caught a whiff of the mildew and grime that permeated his little apartment. On Saturday nights the elevators smelled like vomit, the halls like piss. Dillon snuck another look out the peephole. The UPS guy stood motionless, head down, cap low over his eyes.
Screw it, thought Dillon. He held the .45 low behind his back and opened the door an inch. “Pass me the board.”
The guy did as he was told, slipping the Etch A Sketch toy through the crack of the door. Dillon scrawled his name on the monitor screen and handed it back. “Take off,” he said.
Shaking his head, the UPS guy disappeared down the hall. Dillon waited two and a half minutes. Then he quickly swung the door open and swept the package up from the floor. It was lighter than he thought it would be. He shook it gently. It made no noise.
Who could’ve sent such a thing?
Great lengths had been gone to conceal Dillon’s whereabouts. His dingy little hideaway sat surrounded by government housing projects, pawnshops, and liquor stores. It was a place where people minded their business and kept their mouths shut. Dillon had grown up in a neighborhood like this. He knew how to blend in, how to disappear, becoming another face in the crowd. No one had a clue Dillon was here.
So how did the UPS find him?
As he turned the dead bolts behind him, Dillon scanned the box’s surface, reading the return address. Printed clearly in the upper left-hand corner was the name Wilson McHenry.
Dillon’s blood went cold, chilling his veins. The box nearly slipped from his grasp.
He had just received a package from a dead man.
Wilson McHenry didn’t look like a drug runner. He was tall and thin with stooped shoulders and a salt-and-pepper beard, a little more salt these days than pepper. Sometime in his late thirties he’d gone bald. Now at sixty, he was rarely seen without his trademark black fedora. It wasn’t a look many men could pull off, but it seemed to suit McHenry fine.
It was the hat that Dillon first recognized as he trudged over a hill at Cedarbrook park. He spotted McHenry on a bench facing the lake, feeding ducks from a brown paper bag. Along with the fedora, the old guy wore a pair of khakis and a tattered tweed jacket. More like a college professor than a career criminal. Dillon took a seat next to him and stretched out his legs. The lake smelled like wet grass.
“You ever eat one of those things?” asked Dillon, nodding toward the ducks.
“Every Christmas when I was a boy,” said McHenry. He pulled a handful of bread crumbs from his bag and threw them into the pond. A pair of silky green mallards plucked them from the water and quacked for more.
“What’d they taste like?”
“Like a greasy turkey. But greasy in a good way. Maybe I’ll make one next holiday. You can come over and try it for yourself.”
“I’d like that.”
McHenry finished with the bread crumbs, crumpled the bag, and sky-hooked it into a trash can a few feet away. There was a simple grace to his movements. McHenry was no athlete, not anymore. But he was comfortable in his skin, comfortable in his aging bones. He propped the fedora high on his head and squinted in the sun. “So why am I here?”
“Estaban sent me. He wanted us to talk.”
“Estaban, huh? You on his clock now?”
Dillon went silent.
“I have to admit,” said McHenry, “never saw that one coming.”
“Writing’s on the wall,” said Dillon. “You’ve had a good run, Mac. Longer than anyone I know. But Estaban is a Colombian. And this is a Colombian’s game.”
McHenry smiled sadly. “And it’s a young man’s game too, is that it?”
Dillon peered out at the water. Gray clouds reflected off its glimmering surface, a bit of sunlight fighting through. “He wants thirty percent. And you have to chip in to pay off the federales. Maybe an extra five a month.”
“That sound like a fair deal to you?”
Dillon shrugged. “It’s what he’s offering.”
“And if I say no?”
“This is Estaban Gomez we’re talking about. A Mexican judge said no to him once. They still haven’t found the body.”
The old man leaned back against the bench, letting out a long sigh. “You know, I was only nineteen when I started in this business. I’d fly a little Piper cub back and forth to Mexico a few times a month. It was pot back then, a little cocaine here and there. God, I was a cocky little shit. Did it more for the thrills than anything else. Now it’s all about the money. Been that way for some time.”