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:
“That’s all right,” Viceroy said. “We don’t need to see no damn mule.”
“He’s a good’n,” James said when the mule was completely out of the trailer. “A little touchy about the ears.”
He turned the mule slightly then, reached up, and grabbed the mule’s ears, and it kicked.
The kick was a good one. Both legs shot out and the mule seemed to stand on its front legs like a gymnast that couldn’t quite flip over. The shod hooves caught Viceroy in the face, and there was a sound like a pound of wet cow shit dropping on a flat rock, and Viceroy’s neck turned at a too-far angle and he flew up and fell down.
James bolted, and so did Elliot, slamming into Tim as he went, knocking him down. James hit the ground, rolled under the trailer, scuttled to the other side, Elliot went after him. Butch aimed at the back of Elliot’s head and the chicken man said, “Hey, what the hell.”
Butch turned and shot the chicken man through the center of the forehead. Chicken man fell and the rooster leaped and squawked, and just for the hell of it, Butch shot the rooster too.
Tim got up cussing. “I’m all muddy.”
“Fuck that,” Butch said. “They’re gettin’ away.”
Even the mule had bolted, darting across the yard, weaving through the car crusher and a pile of mangled cars. Their last view of it was the tips of its ears over the top of the metallic heap.
Tim ran around the trailer and saw James and Elliot making for a patch of woods in the distance. It was just a little patch that ran along both sides of the creek down there. The land sloped just enough and the rain and wind were hard enough that the shot Tim got off didn’t hit James or Elliot. It went past them and smacked a tree.
Tim came back around the trailer and looked at Butch bending over Viceroy, taking his gun, sticking it in his belt.
“He bad?” Tim asked.
“He’s dead. Fuckin’ neck’s broke. If that’s bad, he’s bad.”
“We gonna get them hillbillies?”
“There ain’t no hills around here for a billy to live in. They’re just the same ole white trash they got everywhere, you idiot.”
“Well, this ain’t Dallas... We gonna chase ’em?”
“What for? Let’s get the TV set and go.”
“Got a stereo too. I seen it in there. It’s a good’n.”
“Get that too. I don’t think there is no money. I think he was gonna try and sweet-talk Viceroy out of some of that blow. A pay-later deal.”
“He damn sure didn’t know Viceroy, did he?”
“No, he didn’t. But you know what, I ain’t gonna miss him.”
A moment later the TV and the stereo were loaded in the Cadillac. Then, just for fun, they put the chicken man and Viceroy in the chicken man’s truck and used the car crusher on it. As the truck began to crush, chickens squawked momentarily and the tires blew with a sound like mortar fire.
With Viceroy, the chicken man, and the chickens flattened, they slid the truck onto a pile of rusted metal, got in the Cadillac, and drove out of there, Butch at the wheel.
On the way over the cattle guard, Tim said, “You know, we could have sold them chickens.”
“My old man always said don’t steal or deal in anything you got to feed. I’ve stuck by that. Fuck them chickens. Fuck that mule.”
Tim considered that, decided it was sage advice, the part about not dealing in livestock. He said, “All right.”
Along the creek James and Elliot crept. The creek was rising and the sound of the rain through the trees was like someone beating tin with a chain.
The land was low and it was holding water. They kept going and pretty soon they heard a rushing sound. Looking back, they saw a wall of water surging toward them. The lake a mile up had overflowed and the creek and all that rain were causing it to flood.
“Shit,” said James.
The water hit them hard and knocked them down, took their hats. When they managed to stand, the water was knee-deep and powerful. It kept bowling them over. Soon they were just flowing with it and logs and limbs were clobbering them at every turn.
They finally got hold of a small tree that had been uprooted and hung on to that. The water carried them away from the trees around the creek and out into what had once been a lowland pasture.
They had gone a fair distance like this when they saw the mule swimming. Its neck and back were well out of the water and it held its head as if it were regal and merely about some sort of entertainment.
Their tree homed in on the mule, and as they passed, James grabbed the mule’s neck and pulled himself onto it. Elliot got hold of the mule’s tail, pulled himself up on its back where James had settled.
The mule was more frantic now, swimming violently. The flood slopped suddenly, and James realized this was in fact where the highway had been cut through what had once been a fairly large hill. The highway was covered and not visible, but this was it, and there was a drop-off as the water flowed over it.
Down they went, and the churning deluge went over them, and they spun that way for a long time, like they were in a washing machine cycle. When they came up, the mule was upside down, feet pointing in the air. Its painted nose sometimes bobbed up and out of the water, but it didn’t breathe and it didn’t roll over.
James and Elliot clung to its legs and fat belly and washed along like that for about a mile. James said, “I’m through with livestock.”
“I hear that,” Elliot said.
Then a bolt of lightning, attracted by the mule’s upturned, iron-shod hooves, struck them a sizzling, barbecuing strike, so that there was nothing left now but three piles of cooked meat, one with a still visible brown nose and smoking, wilting legs, the other two wearing clothes, hissing smoke from the water, blasting along with the charge of the flood.
Michael Malone
Maniac Loose
From A Confederacy of Crime
Holding a yellow smiley-face coffee mug, Lucy Rhoads sat in her dead husband’s bathrobe and looked at two photographs. She had just made a discovery about her recently deceased spouse that surprised her. Prewitt Rhoads — a booster of domestic sanguinity, whose mind was a map of cheerful clichés out of which his thoughts never wandered, whose monogamy she had no more doubted than his optimism — her spouse Prewitt Rhoads (dead three weeks ago of a sudden heart attack) had for years lived a secret life of sexual deceit with a widow two blocks away in the pretty subdivision of Painton, Alabama, where he had insisted on their living for reasons Lucy only now understood. This was the same man who had brought her home Mylar balloons proclaiming, “I Love You,” and white cuddly Valentine bears making the same claims, and an endless series of these smiley-face coffee mugs — all from the gifts, cards, and party supplies shop he owned in Annie Sullivan Mall and called The Fun House. This was the same man who had disparaged her slightest criticism of the human condition, who had continually urged her, “Lucy, can’t you stop turning over rocks just to look at all the bugs crawling underneath them?”
Well, now Lucy had tripped over a boulder of a rock to see in the exposed mud below her own Prewitt Rhoads scurrying around in lustful circles with their widowed neighbor Amorette Strumlander, Lucy’s mediocre Gardenia Club bridge partner for more than fifteen years; Amorette Strumlander, who had dated Prewitt long ago at Painton High School, who had never lived anywhere in her life but Painton, Alabama, where perhaps for years she had sat patiently waiting, like the black widow she’d proved herself to be, until Prewitt came back to her. Of course, on his timid travels into the world beyond Painton, Alabama, Amorette’s old boyfriend had picked up a wife in Charlotte (Lucy) and two children in Atlanta before returning to his hometown to open The Fun House. But what did Amorette Strumlander care about those encumbrances? Apparently nothing at all.