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:
“What happened to your girls?”
Larry hit the marina three weeks ago with a pair of girls in their twenties he’d introduced to Emmett as his galley slaves.
“Bugged out on me.”
“The both of them?”
“They came as a team. I saw the skinny one, Kim, in town yesterday. Hanging all over one of those boogie-board guys with the blond dreads. Bitch just waves, ‘Hi, Captain Larry!’ like she and her dumpy little pal haven’t totally screwed me.”
Larry is in his early fifties, salt-and-pepper beard, a regular at the Y-Ki-Ki since his Catalina sloop limped down from the Bahamas. He was gradually heading for Tahiti, he said, once he got the right crew onboard.
“You know there’s a couple young fellas on the island know their way around on a boat,” says Emmett cheerfully. “Skip Andersen’s boy there, Nicky, and that one that works at the bait shop — Jay? Jordan?—”
Larry shakes his head. “Only room for one hardtail on this bucket.”
Emmett shrugs. “You’re the skipper.”
“They do that passive-aggressive thing. My wife was the queen of that. She could say ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s fine,’ so it came out ‘You blew it again, you insensitive piece of shit.’”
He seems more agitated than usual. At first, from the bile invoked when he spoke of his ex-wife and her evil lawyer, Emmett thought Larry’s divorce must be recent, the wound still raw. But he’d been single a full eight years, cruising for five, a computer-dating Ahab chasing a wet dream.
“Even if they don’t learn jack about sailing,” he says, “these young ones get to practice their routine on me.”
Emmett keeps smiling. “So is there some kind of computer shape-up where all the able-bodied sea ladies advertise?”
“Something like that. But you hire one, they bring their whole damn sorority along. If this wasn’t too much boat to single-hand I’d be off this rock by now.” He looks up to Emmett. “You hear the scuttle on the old couple?”
“Roderick won’t talk.”
“What does Roderick know? He didn’t go inside the boat.”
“You did?”
Larry logs off, closes the laptop, and sets it beside him. Emmett sees now that his eyes are red, his hands trembling slightly.
“I saw the old guy, Whitey, there at Ricky’s place just yesterday afternoon. Then last night I couldn’t sleep, so I get up, take a walk around the jetty—”
“This is late—”
“After three, at least. I get down at their end of D Pier and I hear the radio. Just weather reports and shit, somebody calling in the update on this Cedric.”
“Edna was a real weather junkie,” says Emmett. “We’d be sitting here, she’d tell you it was raining over in the Sea of Cortez.”
“Fairly useless information.”
“She explained the whole hurricane thing to me once. Most people think it’s like straight wind pushing you over? But really you’re being pulled, sucked in to fill a vacuum. Like going down a drain.” Suddenly Emmett doesn’t want to know the details, dreads the responsibility of passing the news to others. “All that noise and activity,” he says, “but inside there’s this big nothing.”
Larry frowns at his hands. “The thing is, it was loud. The radio. I passed by, but on the way back I figure at that hour, not a light shining on the boat, they must have spent the night in town and left it running. So I’m gonna do the Good Samaritan thing.”
Emmett suddenly feels a little dizzy. He looks across the channel. Something, not clouds exactly but a different kind of sky, is coming together in the north.
“You hesitate to step on somebody’s boat without an invitation. Especially the liveaboards.”
“You just don’t do it,” says Emmett, upset. “It’s an invasion of privacy.”
“I’m feeling pretty fucking invaded right now,” says Larry, “if you want to know the truth.”
“We haven’t actually seen Edna for a while,” says Emmett, stalling.
“No. I don’t suppose you have.” Larry wiggles the power cord with his toes, thinking. “You know that shark gun he kept by his chair when they went out for big stuff?”
“Short-barrel forty-four—”
“About as much wallop as you can get from a rifle. You can imagine, point-blank range, not shooting through water — he was just down on the saloon couch, the rifle was still between his knees. And the wife — the blood on the pillow and sheets was all dried. He must’ve caught her sleeping.”
Emmett sees a trio of jellyfish working their way along the pontoon, no color, no edges, just a slight lack of focus in one part of the water. “Was she on her back? Looking up?”
“Yeah—”
“So she could have been awake. Knew it was coming, even.”
“Like some kind of mercy-killing deal?”
“Why not?”
Larry considers this. He is shivering a bit, the shadow of the Lifestyles complex covering them both. He shrugs. “Who knows what the fuck goes on in people’s heads? I figure she was already gone three, four days when I sat with him at Ricky’s. I asked what was new and he said they were thinking about tarpon.”
“That’s all?”
“‘We’ve been thinking about tarpon.’”
They are quiet for a long moment, a breeze picking up and tinkling the wind chimes on the back of the converted tug two slips down. A succession of hippie-looking people come down to use it on some sort of time-sharing deal. Muriel calls it the Love Boat.
“I hauled my ass back here and got my cell phone, tracked down the cops. I didn’t go back in a second time, just gave them my statement. I’d forgot about the damn radio. Took the locals an hour before they turned it off.” Larry looks out past the breakwater. “The fella calling in the weather said he thought this Cedric might turn into the real thing.”
Emmett nods. The channel water has a little chop to it now. The frigate birds have disappeared.
“The way I feel, just let it blow,” he says. “Be good to clear the air.”
Sam Shaw
Reconstruction
From Story Quarterly
on A brisk, beautiful autumn day, Guinevere accidentally killed my neighbor, Len Haynes. We were sniping chipmunks from a blind I’d constructed out of scrap tin when his head appeared over the crest of a hill. As if compelled by an innate marksman’s instinct, she squeezed the trigger, and he vanished with a little spray of blood and what must have been brain matter. A cry escaped Guinevere’s mouth.
“What,” I said. “What did you do?”
“Oof,” she said.
We were out of the blind and running across the field.
Haynes lay on the blond grass in the strangest position, arms and legs splayed like he had been interrupted in the performance of a dance. A cardboard box rested nearby, and objects that might have been hailstones had spilled from its mouth. Gwen licked one and said, wonderingly, “Mothballs.”
I’d never seen a dead man before, not even Sid, whose ashes my brother and I had strewn in the fourth-hole water hazard at his beloved Pasquaney Club. Haynes looked almost serene, but blood of a startling red color streamed out of an opening an inch above his right eye. I dabbed his brow with the cuff of my shirt.
“Hey,” I said to Haynes. “Hey, pal.”
Haynes was not a good neighbor — often he left trash bags outside his door, and animals littered my yard with their contents — but I saw at that moment with perfect clarity that our fates were linked.
“It’s OK,” Guinevere said. “His eyes are moving.”
But they weren’t. Wide and glassy, they gaped at the cold expanse of the sky. I bent down, took his wrist in my hands and shook it.
At that moment, we heard what we took for a second shot, a screen door banging shut, and Guinevere and I both bucked upright. Haynes lived with his very large wife and a menagerie of desperate-looking cats and dogs in a green house some hundred feet from my own. Mrs. Haynes stood on the porch, holding a silver colander in her hands. It glinted terribly in the sun.