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:
Gene didn’t know what to do. Put the money in his pocket. Kearns took the revolver from Gene. Broke open the cylinder and clucked at the empty slots for bullets. “You’re too honest for your own good.”
He took a flat .25 automatic from his back pocket and disappeared it in Gene’s hand. “An honest guy needs iron that works. This one’s ready to go, though it won’t damage anybody who’s not kissing close.”
Kearns walked toward the door. The crowd outside roared when Gibbons connected with a combo that stung the champion and then danced around the ring to escape a furious Dempsey.
“Mr. Kearns!” said Gene. “Who got all the money from the fight?”
“Gee kid, beats me.”
Then he was gone. Outside, the crowd roared. Gene fled the counting room. Saw the door to his dressing room shake. Out of the door crack fell a knife blade.
Gene ran. Made it out of the roaring arena. A naked yellow eye baked the oiled air. He muscled his way through a dirt street jammed with crazed strangers. Two Martin boys set off a string of Chinese firecrackers. A man and two women sat on an overturned sausage peddler’s cart, stuffing themselves with meat tubes they plucked from the ground. A tuxedoed redhead bounced off Gene and staggered away, his eyes whirling in his head. A cowboy shot his Peacemaker into the air and no one flinched.
Where are you, Billie? Got to be here! She’s got to be here!
Firecrackers. A horse screamed and a fat woman laughed. The cowboy fired his pistol.
Car horn, was that a—
“Gene! Over here!”
Billie waved from the Ford’s running board. Gene shoved his way to their getaway car that was pinned against the curb by a deserted truck. Parked vehicles jammed every road.
She grabbed Gene to be sure he was alive and real. “Where’s Doyle? Where’s...?”
“All gone wrong. No heist. Doyle killed Harry. He—”
Glass exploded in the car window.
Doyle: near the arena. He stood on a wobbly overturned pushcart, his gun hand shaking as he lined up for another shot over the sea of heads who didn’t give a damn.
Gene grabbed her hand, held on to his life, and plunged into the mad, milling crowd.
“One chance!” he yelled as he dragged her behind him. Every bone in his body wept. His legs shook. Lemonade he grabbed from a kid didn’t cool the fire in his throat. “We got one chance! Get to Texas John! Not crooks! We’re targets ’n’ only he can save us!”
“His house is two miles across town!” But she ran with him.
By the time they’d fought their way to Main Street, Billie was more carrying Gene than running with him. They looked back and saw only the sea of people in their wake.
“Still there,” gasped Gene. “He’s still there somewhere. Won’t stop. We can’t stop.”
The crowd became a solid wall of flesh at the east end of Main Street, an audience to the volunteers battling a ball of fire that had once been a tailor shop.
“Railroad tracks!” gasped Billie. “Nobody’s there! We can go quicker along them!”
“But not straight to John’s! That’s maybe three football fields north of his house—”
“Only hope,” she told him as they staggered to the steel rails. Hundreds of parked freight cars squatted on the tracks, diverted there for the passenger charters that hadn’t come. A metal clang! shuddered the wall of boxcars beside them as the locomotive a thousand yards away got a clear track signal. Steel wheels creaked a slow revolution.
Gene pressed Kearns’s close-in gun into Billie’s hands. Shoved Kearns’s money into her dress pocket. “Get on train! Can’t make it farther. Can’t run no more.”
“Yes, you can!” Billie grabbed his shirt. “Look! You can see Texas John’s house from here! Just up that hill!”
“Can’t get up that hill ’fore Doyle catches us. You know he’s out there, hell-hound smelling us. He won’t stop until he gets his blood. Till he gets me. But you: hop on this freight, open boxcar comin’ up. Hide. Taking care of me will slow him down. He’ll see me, stop for me. Enough so you can go. Get free.”
“You can get away!” cried Billie.
“No. I can only do what makes me special. You said it. I save you. Only special you can do is make me love you. Let me be special and love you and get you on the train. You be special and do it. Don’t let us both die as nothing.”
“Too late,” she said, looking past him, wrapping her grip around the pistol.
Doyle stood a hundred yards down the tracks.
Billie raised her gun—
Gene covered her hand with his: “That won’t work until he’s close enough to kiss.”
The barrel of her automatic swung down along Gene’s ribs. Billie hid the gun behind her.
“You have to let him get real close,” said Gene. “He’ll like that. Do that. For you. Not for me. He’ll never let me get close to him again. But I won’t just stand here and take it.”
He stepped away from her grabbing hand. Took two steps forward as Doyle strolled toward him. Doyle stopped when he was about the same distance away as a sucker shot to a bank door. But instead of night, he had a broad daylight aim, though the sky had suddenly gone gray with rain clouds as Dempsey threw everything he had at Gibbons, yet had to settle for a clinch finish at the final bell, a decision victory instead of a knockout.
The freight train groaned and inched forward.
Gene Mallette brought both hands up in fists and dropped into the stance of a boxer.
Heard Doyle laugh and saw that man’s solo hand clear his suit coat and snap straight out.
A crimson rose blew out Doyle’s left ear and sprayed red on a passing boxcar. Doyle fell to the chipped rock track bed as the crack! of a German sniper’s Mauser from a front porch on a hill a thousand yards away whispered to Gene above the rumble of the train.
No second shot came from the man who used to have a badge and who knew what his eyes saw. Gene stared at the house on the hilclass="underline" whatever had happened up there was over. He and Billie went to the dead man. A million angels dropped tears on them as she helped Gene throw Doyle and the guns through open doors of crawling boxcars. Gene almost fell under the steel wheels, but she grabbed him and held on. The train rumbled toward the mountains and the ocean beyond. Gene ripped the medal off his neck and threw it onto the last boxcar out of nowhere.
Clark Howard
The Cobalt Blues
From Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
Lewis got off the Harrison Street bus, turned up the collar of his old surplus Navy watch coat, and walked, head down against the cold March wind, to the Cook County Medical Center down the street. Chicago, he thought, was a lousy place for a guy to have to spend the last weeks and months of his life. He should have moved out to Arizona or down to Florida a long time ago, like most of the rest of the old gang he had grown up with did. At least he could be lying out in the sun while he died.
At the big, sprawling medical complex, he made his way to the Radiology Building and entered the foyer. He paused a moment to turn down his collar, catch his breath, and pull a tissue from his pocket to dry his watery eyes. On his way to the elevators, he looked up at the lobby clock and saw that it was 8:52. As usual, he began making the mental bet he made every Thursday morning. Would he be the first to arrive and sign in? The second? Or the third? There were three of them that had the nine o’clock appointment: himself, a skinny white guy named Potts, and a sullen black man named Hoxie. The radiology technician had three come in at once because there were three phases to the treatment, and he could have a patient in each phase as the morning progressed.