The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Although at the very moment that her honey-voiced neighbor had phoned, Lucy Rhoads was squeezing in her fist the key to her husband’s secret box of adulterous love letters from the deceptive Amorette, she had replied only, “All right, come on over, Amorette, because I’m having a real dark day here today.”

Still Lucy wasn’t getting ready. She was drinking black coffee in her dead husband’s robe and looking at the photos she’d found in the box. She was listening to the radio tell her to stay off the streets of Painton today because there was a chance that the streets weren’t safe. In general, the town of Painton didn’t like to admit to problems; the motto on the billboard at the town limits proclaimed in red, white, and blue letters, THERE’S NO PAIN IN PAINTON, THE CHEERFULEST TOWN IN ALABAMA. There was always a patrol car hidden behind this billboard with a radar gun to catch innocent strangers going thirty-six miles an hour and slap huge fines on them. If Deputy Sheriff Hews Puddleston had heard one hapless driver joke, “I thought you said there was no pain in Painton,” he’d heard a thousand of them.

The local billboard annoyed Lucy, as did the phrasing of this radio warning; she thought that a town so near the home of Helen Keller had no business suggesting life was “cheerful” or that the streets were ever safe. The reporter on the radio went on to explain rather melodramatically that there was a maniac loose. A young man had gone crazy at Annie Sullivan Mall on the outskirts of Painton and tried to kill his wife. Right now, live on the radio, this man was shooting out the windows of a florist shop in the mall, and the reporter was outside in the atrium hiding behind a cart selling crystals and pewter dwarves. No one was stopping the man because he had a nine-millimeter automatic assault weapon with him, and he had yelled out the window that he had no problem using it. The reporter had shouted at him, “No problem,” and urged the police to hurry up. The reporter happened to be there broadcasting live at the mall because it was the Painton Merchants Super Savers Summertime Sale for the benefit of the Painton Panthers High School football team, 1992 state semifinalists, and he’d been sent to cover it. But a maniac trying to kill his wife was naturally a bigger story, and the reporter was naturally very excited.

Lucy turned on her police scanner as she searched around for an old pack of the cigarettes Prewitt had always been hiding so she wouldn’t realize he’d gone back to smoking again despite his high cholesterol. He’d never hidden them very well, not nearly as well as his sexual escapades, and she’d constantly come across crumpled packs that he’d lost track of. Lucy had never smoked herself, and had little patience with the Gardenia Club members’ endless conversations about when they’d quit, how they’d quit, or why they’d quit. But today Lucy decided to start. Why not? Why play by the rules when what did it get you? Lighting the match, she sucked in the smoke deeply; it set her whole body into an unpleasant spasm of coughing and tingling nerves. She liked the sensation; it matched her mood.

On the police scanner she heard the dispatcher rushing patrol cars to the mall. This maniac fascinated her, and she went back to the radio, where the reporter was explaining the situation. Apparently the young man had gone to the mall to shoot his wife because she’d left him for another man. According to the maniac’s grievance to the reporter, his wife was still using his credit cards and had been in the midst of a shopping spree at the mall before he caught up with her in the Hank Williams Concourse, where they’d fought over her plan to run off with this other man and stick the maniac with the bills. She’d fled down the concourse to the other man, who owned a florist shop at the east end of the concourse. It was here that the maniac caught up with her again, this time with the gun he’d run back to his sports van to collect. He’d shot them both, but in trying to avoid other customers had managed only to hit the florist in the leg and to pulverize one of his wife’s shopping bags. Plaster flying from a black swan with a dracaena plant in its back gouged a hole out of his wife’s chin. He’d allowed the other customers to run out of the shop but held the lovers hostage.

Lucy could hear the sirens of the approaching patrol cars even on the radio. But by the time the police ran into the atrium with all their new equipment, the florist was hopping out of his shop on one foot, holding on to his bleeding leg and shouting that the husband had run out the back door. The police ran after him while the reporter gave a running commentary as if it were a radio play. As the florist was wheeled into the ambulance, he told the reporter that the maniac had “totally trashed” his shop, “terminator time.” He sounded amazingly high-spirited about it. The reporter also interviewed the wife as she was brought out in angry hysterics with a bandage on her chin. She said that her husband had lost his mind and had nobody but himself to blame if the police killed him. She was then driven off to the hospital with the florist.