Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017
- Автор: Фузилли Джим, Харрис Шарлин
- Год: 2017
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017». Краткое содержание книги:
“Over me?”
“No! Because what they’re doing to you is wrong—”
“So you did quit over me?”
“I... okay, maybe to some extent it was about you. But mostly, I left to pursue a promising business opportunity.”
“What opportunity?”
She drew a deep breath, then turned to face me. “I’m looking at it.”
I just stared back. “What are you talking about?”
“You, Mr. Gates. Big Mack and the studio think they’ve buried you, that you’re all washed up. I think they’ve got things exactly backwards. As tragic as it was, that shootout has made you a very hot property.”
I stared at her as if she’d grown a second head. On the TV, a newscaster had broken in, and Clete and I were facing each other again—
“Turn that off!” we yelled at the bartender together. He did.
“Listen to me, Toby,” Leah said, leaning in. “In the original Ben-Hur, with Charlton Heston, during the great chariot race, there was a terrible accident. A driver was thrown out of his chariot and almost killed. That driver was the action director’s son. And yet they used the footage in the movie. It’s considered one of the greatest action sequences ever filmed.”
“Pain is temporary, movies are forever. I get that. What’s your point?”
“You’re that driver, Toby. You’ve been thrown, but you survived. And that footage is pure gold.”
“Maybe for Big Mack. It’s his movie.”
“But he can’t use the scene. Standards and Practices won’t allow a death to be shown. The studio’s already shutting down this production, putting it on hiatus. But they can’t keep the video off the Web. It’s viral. You’re viral! So when they resume filming the next Mack McCray movie, or any other Western, all the buzz will be about you and Clete, and what happened in that scene. Unless—”
She hesitated, leaning back, reading my face. “Unless the buzz is about the new Toby Gates movie.”
“What?” I blinked, then shook my head, as though I’d taken a punch. “Sorry, but I don’t follow.”
“Like it or not, that viral video has made you the most famous gun-fighter on the planet. I’ve already pitched you to a friend in production. They’re ready to sign you to a two-picture deal. Big-budget westerns. The kind they used to make.”
“You — wrangled a movie deal out of this — godawful cock-up?” I managed. “Don’t you realize how ghoulish that is?”
“Every important story, from The Iliad to Titanic, is about somebody’s tragedy,” Leah said flatly. “It’s a sad, hard truth, but there it is. The only question left is, cui bono? Who wins, Toby? Big Mack and the studio? Or us?”
I met her stare dead-on. I’ve spent my life around hard men, wranglers, roughnecks, soldiers. And this five-foot package of smarts and ambition was as tough as any of them.
“Look, I’m sorry to push you on this, but here’s another hard truth, Toby. Celebrity has an expiration date. Next week, or the one after, someone else’s tragedy will be viral on the Web. To make this happen, we need to strike quickly. So I need to know. Right now, this minute. Are you in? Or not?”
I had caught a flash of my father, who died in a ditch.
And Clete Peterzak, dead for bedding the wrong wife.
And me? My only options were to run home or to gamble everything with this fierce, dark-eyed woman.
It wasn’t a tough choice.
“I’m your huckleberry,” I said.
© 2017 by Doug Allyn
Wendell and Joni and Dianne and Me
by Tim L. Williams
In the decade or so since Tim L. Williams first started contributing to EQMM, he's earned two Thriller Awards, an Edgar nomination, and two Shamus nominations, all for work that appeared in our pages. Two of his stories have also been included in Best American Mystery Stories (2004 and 2012). The Kentucky author’s latest collection is Skull Fragments; he's a professor by day.
On the morning my wife’s ex-husband is supposed to plead guilty to misdemeanor assault and begin serving his plea-bargained one hundred and twenty days, he shows up at our house with two quarts of beer and a stuffed giraffe for his little girl. The plan was for me to swing by his place a couple of hours before his scheduled court appearance, but Wendell has always had a knack for fouling the best of plans. When I open the back door, bleary-eyed and shivering in the hazy light of dawn, I’m not happy to see him, but I’m not particularly surprised either.
“Did I wake you up?” he asks. “I did, didn’t I?”
“It’s all right,” I say. “Come in.”
He nods and grins, but instead of stepping across the threshold, he stands there as if his brain and legs have been disconnected. “It’s colder than a witch’s teat,” he says after a second. “We’re supposed to get a big snow. You remember when we were little and we used to take those inner tubes off of Five Spot Hill?” He runs his hands through his greasy, sand-colored hair. “We were always the first out there, weren’t we?” His breath is steaming, his face ruddy from the cold. I glance past him at a fresh dusting of snow. It’s been a hard winter so far, but I know it’s likely to get a lot harder before it’s over.
“Come on in, Wendell. I don’t really want to turn my kitchen into an ice rink.”
“Oh,” he says. “Right. Sorry.”
He stomps snow from his boots, steps inside, and closes the door. He stares around our kitchen as if it’s a place he’s never seen before and then sets the quarts of beer on the table and smiles. “The lawyers didn’t say anything in the plea deal about me showing up sober,” he says.
For a second, he looks as if he’s about to burst into a bout of wild laughter, but he just shrugs and stands by the table with the oversized giraffe tucked under his arm. “I brought it for Joni,” he says.
“Let me put on some coffee.”
While it’s making, he paces through the kitchen. Every few seconds, he stops at the table and touches the cap on one of the quarts of Falls City but doesn’t bother to open it. He’s jittery, on edge, and I figure he’s had more than a couple of hits of speed to go along with the booze that’s wafting from his skin.
“You get any sleep last night?” I ask.
He shakes his head, stands at the refrigerator, tracing the souvenir magnets Dianne picked up at the Smoky Mountains, Daytona Beach, the Magic Kingdom, places we visited before Peabody packed up its operation and I lost my job at the River Queen mines. We were living a good life back then — Dianne, Joni, and me. We had a three-bedroom ranch house on the north side of Greenview, a new car for Dianne in our drive, a savings account at First Kentucky Bank, money to take vacations a couple of times a year. The savings account was the first to go, then Dianne’s car, finally the house. Now we barely have enough money to keep our checking account open; Dianne drives a ’63 VW with a slipping transmission and rust-cancer on the doors, and we live in this cramped and shoddy rental house at the end of a gravel road that dead-ends at a strip mine. When the leaves are off the trees like they are now, I can stand on my rotting front porch and see the coal shovel I once operated rising over the skeletal branches of the hickories and poplars on the horizon. No matter what he thinks, Wendell isn’t the only one who has come to know hard times.
“Dianne was always on me to take her places,” he says now. “But I never had the money.”
Instead of pointing out that he never had the money because he threw it away on booze and pills and women, I say, “That was a long time ago, Wendell. That was another lifetime.”