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:
“You know, I got the same feeling,” Hoxie admitted. “I’d like to have a way to get the hell out of my daughter’s house. I don’t want to die in no basement room. That little beach village sounds mighty good to me.”
Lewis and Hoxie looked at Potts. The Southerner nodded slowly. “I guess I got a reason, too. I’d like to have my wife and kids with me when I go. Somebody to say goodbye to besides strangers.” He blushed slightly. “No offense.”
“Looks like we all understand each other,” Lewis said.
They sat back and raised their beer glasses in a silent toast.
They met in Lewis’s shabby little apartment the following evening and, over pizza and beer, began to make plans.
“First thing in the morning,” Lewis said, “we go downtown to the federal building and get passports. Then we gotta figure some way to get a gun—”
“I can cover that,” Hoxie said. “My son-in-law gots a thirty-two-caliber Saturday-night special he keeps in a drawer nex’ to his bed. It’s a little gun, but he had it chromed and it looks bigger.”
“Just one gun all we need?” Potts asked.
“Yeah, the other two guys can keep their hands in their pockets like they got guns, too,” Lewis said. “Anyway, we’ll take guns off the guys carrying the money. They’re bound to be strapped.”
“Okay. What else?” Hoxie asked.
“Plane tickets,” said Lewis. “I checked out the airlines this morning. There’s an Argentine Air flight from here to Buenos Aires at nine o’clock every night. One-way fare is eleven hundred and eighty bucks, first class.”
“First class!” said Potts.
“Certainly,” Lewis confirmed. “We’ll be in the money; you don’t think we’re gonna fly coach, do you?”
“Where we gonna get the money to buy first-class tickets?”
“We don’t need no money. The airline will hold the tickets at the airport until two hours before flight time; we pay for them when we check in. But we do need a little front money for a few other things.”
“Like what?” Hoxie wanted to know.
“We need to rent a car. We need to rent a motel room out near the airport. And we need to buy some clothes for the kid; we can’t have him running around in that orange jumpsuit. Either of you guys got a credit card?”
“Not me,” Hoxie said glumly. “My daughter canceled mine. She gives me an allowance now, like I was some kid.”
“I got a Visa card,” said Potts. “I don’t use it much; just for groceries and stuff when I run short of cash.”
“What’s the credit limit on it?”
“Five hundred.”
“That ought to be enough. You got a driver’s license?”
“Yeah. Tennessee license.”
“That’ll do. We’ll rent the car at the airport the night before, and drop it off when we go to catch the flight.”
“We taking the kid with us?” Potts asked. Lewis shook his head.
“Can’t. He won’t have no passport. We’ll give him a fourth of the money and then he’s on his own.” Hoxie and Potts exchanged cheerless looks. Lewis shrugged. “It’s the best we can do for him.”
For a long moment then, the three men were silent: looking at each other, looking down at the remains of the pizza, sipping beer that was turning warm, drumming silent fingers. It was a brief time of limbo, a heavy interval in which any one of them could have hesitated just a hint, looked even a trace tentative, and maybe the whole unlikely scheme would have broken to pieces in their minds and evaporated like some juvenile plan to steal a math test the night before the exam. But none of them faltered.
“Well then,” Potts drawled, “when do we do it?”
“A week from Thursday,” Lewis said. “We should have everything set up by a week from Thursday. We’ll do it then.”
When a week from Thursday came and Lewis’s friend Ralph opened the parlor door to let Lewis in to make his early bets, the parlor manager was surprised to find Lewis accompanied by two men he had never seen before. “What the hell?” he said, holding the door only partly open.
“These are a couple of guys I go to the hospital with,” Lewis explained. “Just let ’em stand inside out of the cold while they wait for me, okay?”
“Damn it, Lew, I shouldn’t even be letting you in before the place opens,” Ralph complained. “Now you’re taking advantage by showing up with two guys I don’t even know—”
“They’re okay,” Lewis assured him, gently shouldering his way in and gesturing for Potts and Hoxie to follow. “They’ll wait by the door, you won’t even know they’re here, Ralph. Come on, let me get my bets down...”
Reluctantly, Ralph closed and locked the door behind them. Walking around the betting counter, he studied Lewis curiously. There was something different about him. Suddenly it dawned on Ralph what it was.
“Where’s your racing form?” he asked. It was the first time in twenty years that he could remember seeing Lewis without a racing form either in his hand or sticking out of a pocket.
“I, uh — guess I forgot it,” Lewis said. He tried to sound casual, but he knew at once that he had blown the ploy; the nervousness that he heard in his own usually sanguine voice betrayed him.
Ralph glanced at Potts and Hoxie, who were just inside the door, watching intently. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “All right, Lewis, what’s going on?” he demanded.
Lewis locked eyes with him but did not answer. Ralph wet his lips. Swallowing, he moved one hand to reach under the counter. There was a red telephone under there that was Cicero Charley Waxman’s hotline. Just taking it off the hook without saying anything was enough to send a quartet of thugs from the neighborhood to check out the problem.
Before Ralph could get to the receiver, however, Lewis reached over and grabbed his arm. “Keep both hands up on the counter, Ralph,” he said quietly.
Hoxie walked over and drew his son-in-law’s chromed revolver. “Do what the man say,” he ordered.
Ralph looked at Lewis in utter disbelief. “Are you out of your mind, Lewis?”
Before anyone could say anything else, another knock sounded at the door. Lewis quickly pulled Ralph around the counter. He jerked his head at Hoxie and the black man hurried to stand behind where the door swung open. Potts stood with him.
“Open the door, Ralph,” Lewis instructed, nudging him toward it.
“You’re crazy,” Ralph muttered.
“Open it.”
Ralph did as he was told, and immediately through the door came a pair of burly men, each carrying two suitcases. Before it could register with them what was happening, Potts slammed the door behind them and locked it, and Hoxie stepped out to face them with the revolver leveled.
“Put the bags down and stay real still!” Lewis snapped, all nervousness dissolved from his voice by adrenaline.
“Do what he says,” Ralph told the men. “He’s crazy. Don’t make trouble.”
The couriers remained still while Potts relieved each of them of an automatic pistol and fished around in their coat pockets until he found the keys to the suitcases.
“All right, get in that closet,” Lewis then ordered. “You too, Ralph.”
It was a small closet behind the counter, the door usually open, with shelves on which the parlor kept pads of betting slips, boxes of ballpoint pens, rolls of calculator tape, cartons of disposable coffee cups, and other supplies. There was hardly room for all three men to squeeze in together. As Ralph followed the two couriers in, he shook his head in pity at Lewis.
“You’ve bought yourself a lot of trouble, Lewis, for a few thousand bucks.”