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:
James wanted to call bullshit on that, but right now he wanted Elliot on his side.
“Unless you’re doin’ so good here you don’t need money, I got us a little job.”
“You case some spots?” Elliot asked.
“I didn’t find nothin’ worth doin’. Besides, there’s lots of old folks where I was lookin’.”
“I don’t want no part of them. Always home. Always got dogs and guns.”
“Yeah, and lawn gnomes and sprinklers made of wooden animals.”
“With the tails that spin and throw water?”
“Yep.”
“Kinda like them myself. You know, you picked up some of them things, you could sell them right smart.”
“Yeah, well. I got somethin’ better.”
“Name it.”
“Rustlin’.”
Elliot worked his mouth a bit. James could see the idea appealed to him. Elliot liked to think of himself as a modern cowboy. “How many head?”
“One.”
“One? Hell, that ain’t much rustlin’.”
“It’s a mule. You can get maybe a thousand dollars for one. They’re getting rarer, and they’re kind of popular now. We rustle it. We could split the money.”
Elliot studied on this momentarily. He also liked to think of himself as a respected and experienced thief.
“You know, I know a fella would buy a mule. Let me go up to the house and give him a call.”
“It’s the same fella I know, ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” Elliot said.
Elliot made the call and came out of the bedroom into the living room with good news.
“George wants it right away. He’s offerin’ us eight hundred.”
“I wanted a thousand.”
“He’s offering eight hundred, he’ll sell it for a thousand or better himself. He said he can’t go a thousand. Already got a couple other buys goin’ today. It’s a deal and its now.”
James considered that.
“I guess that’ll do. We’ll need your truck and trailer.”
“I figured as much.”
“You got any brown shoe polish?”
“Brown shoe polish?”
“That’s right,” James said.
The truck was a big four-seater Dodge with a bed big enough to fill, attach a diving board, and call a pool. The Dodge hummed like a sewing machine as it whizzed along on its huge tires. The trailer clattered behind and wove precariously left and right, as if it might pass the truck at any moment. James and Elliot had their windows down, and the cool April wind snapped at the brims of their hats and made the creases in their crowns deeper.
By the time they drove over to the place where the mule was, the smashed spider clouds had begun to twist their legs together and blend into one messy critter that peed sprinkles of rain all over the truck windshield.
They slowed as they passed the gate, then turned right. No cars or people were visible, so Elliot pulled over to the side of the road and got out quick, with James carrying a rope. They went through the woods, stepped over the barbed-wire fence, and found the mule grazing. They walked right up to it, and Elliot bribed it with an ear of corn from his garden. The mule sniffed at the corn and bit it. As he did, James slipped the rope over its neck, twisted it so that he put a loop over the mule’s nose. Doing this, he brushed the mule’s ears, and it kicked at the air, spun and kicked again. It took James several minutes to calm it down.
“It’s one of them that’s touchy about the ears,” Elliot said. “Don’t touch the ears again.”
“I hear that,” James said.
They led the mule to the fence. Elliot pushed it almost to the ground with his boot, and James and the mule stepped over. After that, nothing more was required than to lead the mule to the trailer and load it. It did what was expected without a moment’s hesitation.
There was some consternation when it came to turning truck and trailer around, but Elliot managed it and they were soon on the road to a rendezvous with eight hundred dollars.
The place they had to go to meet their buyer, George Taylor, was almost to Tyler, and about sixty miles from where they had nabbed the mule. They often sold stolen material there, and George specialized in livestock and just about anything he could buy quick and sell quicker.
The trailer was not enclosed, and it occurred to James that the mule’s owner might pass them, but he doubted the mule would be recognized. They were really hauling ass, and the trailer, with the weight of the old mule to aid it, had slowed in its wobbling but still sounded like a train wreck.
When they were about twenty-five miles away from Taylor’s place, James had Elliot pull over. He took the brown shoe polish back to the trailer and, reaching between the bars while Elliot fed the mule corn on the cob, painted the white around the mule’s nose brown. It was raining lightly, but he managed the touch-up without having it washed away.
He figured this way Taylor might not notice how old the critter was and not try to talk them down. He had given them a price, but they had dealt with Taylor before, and what he offered wasn’t always what he wanted to give, and it was rare you talked it up. The trick was to keep him from going down. George knew once they had the mule stolen they’d want to get rid of it, and it would be his plan to start finding problems with the animal and to start lowering his price.
When the mule was painted, they got back in the truck and headed out.
Elliot said. “You are one thinker, James.”
“Yes sir,” James agreed, “you got to get up pretty goddamned early in the morning to get one over on me. It starts raining hard, it won’t wash off. That stuff’ll hold.”
When they arrived at Taylor’s place, James looked back through the rear truck window and saw the mule with its head lowered, looking at him through sheets of rain. James felt less smart immediately. The brown he had painted on the mule had dried and was darker than the rest of its hide and made it look as if it had dipped its muzzle in a bucket of paint, searching for a carrot on the bottom.
James decided to say nothing to Elliot about this, lest Elliot decide it really wasn’t all that necessary to get up early to outsmart him.
Taylor’s place was a kind of ranch and junkyard. There were all manner of cars damaged or made thin by the car smasher that Taylor rode with great enthusiasm, wearing a gimme cap with the brim pushed up and his mouth hanging open as if to receive something spoon-fed by a caretaker.
Today, however, the car smasher remained silent near the double-wide, where Taylor lived with his bulldog, Bullet, and his wife, Kay, who was about one ton of woman in a muumuu that might have been made from a circus tent and decorated by children with finger paints. If she owned more than one of these outfits, James was unaware of it. It was possible she had a chest full of them, all the same, folded and ready, with a hole in the center to pull over her head at a moment’s notice.
At the back of the place a few cows that looked as if they were ready to be sold for hide and hooves stumbled about. Taylor’s station wagon, used to haul a variety of stolen goods, was parked next to the trailer, and next to it was a large red Cadillac with someone at the back of it closing the trunk.
As they drove over the cattle guard and onto the property, the man at the trunk of the Cadillac looked up. He was wearing a blue baseball cap and a blue T-shirt that showed belly at the bottom. He and his belly bounced away from the Caddy, up the steps of the trailer, and inside.
Elliot said. “Who’s that?”
“Can’t say,” James said. “Don’t recognize him.”
They parked beside the Cadillac, got out, went to the trailer door, and knocked. There was a long pause, then the man with the baseball cap answered the door.