The Best American Mystery Stories 2005
- Автор: Хиггинс Джордж, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51744-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
2200 Block, Felicity Court. Domestic disturbance. Officers pull up, kill engine. They dawdle in Patrol Unit, fiddling with the mirrors and the radio, double-checking the parking brake. Officers sigh heavily, climb out, and assess scene. Garage door closed. Curtains in windows of home drawn. Officers walk up driveway, pick their way through the detritus of television set ancl washing machine. They knock on door, ring bell. No answer. Neighborhood quiet. Dogs next door quiet. Birds quiet. Everything, in fact, is quiet. The quiet of earplugs, of morgue duty, and of corridors at 3 am. The quiet before an alarm clock goes off. Officers backtrack down driveway, approach west side of house, move toward a gate in the fence that leads to backyard. They move gingerly across a saturated lawn, squishy beneath their feet. Soapy water oozes into the tracks they leave. Up ahead, against an exterior wall of house, a pile of freshly cut wood comes into view — one-by-four posts and whitewashed flatboards painted with black block letters, life one of them reads, murder reads another. Chain-sawed picket signs. Officers’ napes prickle, butts clench in autonomic response. They thumb the release tabs on their holsters, move toward gate. They lift latch, ease gate open. Above them, the sky clears and the sun breaks. The shadow of a distant airplane skims over them, glides across the lawn, disappears. Officers enter backyard. The back fence sags forward. Trellises and plant stakes list at crazy angles. A brick barbecue sits crumpled atop its sunken hearthslab. The deck along the west side of the house is a corrugation of collapsed planking. It is as if the earth here simply gave up, shrugged, and dropped six feet. Officers move along periphery of sinkhole, toward the sliding patio doors that open onto deck. Their panes are shattered. The ground glitters with pebbles of safety glass. From within, cool air drifts out. And then they are hit, bowled over by a surge of vapors foul and thick — the redolence of mimosa, clawing at their eyes and throats, like some monstrous blossoming from somewhere inside the house. And then the noises. First, a loud muffled report — the only way to describe it. Then, rising from the basement — or from someplace deeper still — the robust glissandi of a chain saw, its motor throttling up and down, laboring mightily. And within this an indeterminate overtone — the cadence of voices, urgent and shrill. Shouting, or laughing. Or screaming. Officers unholster service revolvers, position themselves at either side of patio entry. They slip off their sunglasses, take this moment to let their eyes adjust to the dark inside. They look at each other. His eyes are dark brown, like coffee, or good soil. Hers are gray, flat as lead except for the glint of a pearly chip in one iris. They do not speak. They love that they don’t have to say anything. Instead they reach down, check ammo pouches for extra clips, wipe palms on duty trousers. Eyes adjusted, they draw and shoulder their weapons. They brace their wrists, release their safeties, silently count three, and take a breath. Whereupon officers cross threshold, enter home.
David Rachel
The Last Man I Killed
From Eureka Literary Magazine
The dream is always the same. Of the last man I killed. I had the dream again the night after Dr. Schofield told us he was leaving the department. This was back in 1965. The dream always wakes me. I keep a copy of von Clausewitz’s On War beside my bed to read until I fall asleep again.
Dr. Schofield was not only leaving the Department of German Studies; he was leaving O’Connell State University and the Midwest and returning to Georgia, where he would take up a position as dean of arts at his alma mater. He made the announcement at the end of the monthly department meeting. Warm applause followed his statement. He was well liked, and the department had run smoothly under his direction. He might have preferred the news of his departure to be greeted by cries of anguish, but he accepted our congratulations with a good grace.
I left the meeting with John Duncan. “Let’s have a beer,” he suggested. “Mulroney’s in half an hour?”
“Going to try for it, Tomas? I’ll nominate you,” Duncan offered as soon as we sat down. He was born in the U.S., like half the department. The other half, including myself, were German-born. Duncan was overweight, and hadn’t published for ten years. He saw himself as a fixer.
“Hell, no,” I said. “Thanks for asking, John. I don’t want to compete against Anna. She’s earned it.”
Anna Scheinberg and her late husband had befriended me when I first arrived at O’Connell State, and I had gotten to know her quite well. But it was not loyalty that prevented me from competing with her for the headship. I’d already figured out the voting, and I knew she would beat me easily.
“You’re the only alternative. Everyone else is either too near retirement or too young or just plain incompetent.” Duncan himself was approaching retirement.
“She’s the obvious choice,” I said. “Assuming we go internal.”
“The president will insist on internal. It will save one salary. Sure you don’t want to run? If you’re going to move up, now’s the time. You’re what, Tomas, forty?”
“Thirty-seven,” I corrected him. We were sitting at a table in one of the booths. The bar was quiet, furnished in dark wood with a lot of black leather. “Right now, my work on Clausewitz demands all my time. It’ll be a good way for Anna to end her career. She’s a people person first and foremost.”
“She is,” Duncan agreed, lighting his second cigarette. “But I wonder whether she’s sufficiently formidable? Can she ride herd on the young lions?”
He always called them the young lions, because they gave him a hard time. He was referring to Nick Jonas and the two Neomarxist clones Nick supervised, nominally under my direction. Naturally, in a Midwest university in the 1960s, they didn’t call themselves Neomarxists. They preferred the terms critical theorist or postmodernist.
“I had a word with Wisnesky right after the meeting,” Duncan was saying. “As you know, he’s just started his sabbatical. He’s going to spend the year in Heidelberg. If he thought you were going to run, he’d delay his departure in order to block you.” Doug Wisnesky had never forgiven me for discovering, a few years previously, that one of his favorite students had plagiarized several pages of her master’s thesis.
“I wouldn’t want Wisnesky to stick around any longer than necessary. Why don’t you nominate me for the Search Committee? Then he’ll know I’m not running.”
I wouldn’t have called Duncan a friend, but he had allied himself to me ever since early in my time at the university, when a fortunate event had allowed me to establish in everyone’s mind the fact that, unlike him, and unlike Anna Scheinberg, I was formidable. A small body of women had gone public with the allegation that certain professors were engaging in sexual relations with their students. Without waiting for anyone else to react, I had issued a statement requiring that they declare unequivocally that I was not one of this unnamed group of professors. If they did not do so within twenty-four hours, I would initiate proceedings for libel. Other faculty soon followed my lead, and the women had to withdraw their accusation unreservedly. This earned me the respect of my colleagues across the university, and the gratitude of those professors who actually were bedding their students.