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:
“Christ,” I said.
“He’s in the car,” Fatman said. “He ain’t gonna hurt you.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“What’s his name?” Fatman said. “What are you, five years old? Want to name your doggy? His name is bite the living shit out of anything that moves. He’s a fighting dog, what the fuck does he need a name for? He’ll be dead in a month.” He coughed. “Call him Barracuda.”
“I found him walking through the woods,” my escort said, pointing the rifle at me.
Fatman shook his head. “What the fuck do you need a name for?” he asked, pissed, looking around. “Do you know anybody here, can you help yourself out of this? This is a serious fucking hole you’re in.”
I looked around. A guy with a ball cap on, near the foundation, I swore I had gone fishing with his brother years and years ago. I think the guy had just got out of prison. I pointed at the guy. “I used to go fishing with Russell Work and I think that’s his brother Jimmy over there, the big quiet guy with the baseball hat on straight.” Men were handing him money, so his dog must have just won the fight. They were starting to load the dog from the Barracuda into a crate, two big guys with the full-length leather gloves and another guy with a neck harness made from a belt wrench. The dog looked to be around a hundred pounds of pure black and white muscle. Once they had him in the crate, they lowered him into the pit.
Fatman yelled, “Hey Jimmy come here.”
The guy I thought was Jimmy Work walked over to us.
“Know him?” asked Fatman.
His brother Russell and I had driven through a snowstorm once to visit Jimmy up in Dannemora. I think after he got out, he’d done more time somewhere. He was at least ten years older than me and I hadn’t seen Russell in over five years. He looked at me hard. The scars on my face and the way I held myself after the accident and the beating. I must have looked totally different. His mind tried to place me.
“John,” he said. “You’re John, but I can’t get your last name.” He turned to Fatman. “He’s OK. Friend of my brother’s.”
I started to breathe again. “How is Russell?” I asked.
Jimmy Work was already walking back to the dog pit. “Passed on,” he said over his shoulder. My guard walked into the woods as sweat rolled down my ribs under my T-shirt. I sat on a plastic milk crate for a minute to cool down. It happened then.
The DEP cop shoved Jimmy Work over the edge of the concrete pit. I heard Jimmy hit the floor and the dog was on him. I got to the edge of the pit and the dog already had hold of his leg, clamped on, and had bit Jimmy in two spots on the arm. He was bleeding and the floor of the pit was covered in shit and blood and it smelled. Somebody shot the dog, and we all hit the deck, the ricochet buzzed out of the pit through the woods, sizzling through the leaves. Two guys jumped into the pit and cut the dog off Jimmy, they had to practically skin the thing to get at the jaw and get that loose. Blood was everywhere. The fucking DEP cop was next to me.
“Saw man,” he said. “He just got hurt in logging accident and you and I are taking him to the hospital.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “And the next time we see a cherry picker with a single load going around the reservoir, we’ll stop it. And the next time. And the next time. Until your eighteen-wheeled friend loses his license. You must think we’re stupid, running single loads up here before the big crew shows up.”
At the hospital, a different one from the one I’d gone to, closer to Syracuse, the doctor pulled me to one side, behind a curtain. He was obviously from India, very serious-looking. Concerned. His English was a little tight but good.
“These wounds, sir,” he said to me. “They are from an animal, probably a dog. Not a chain saw, as you told me. As the officer told me.”
In his world, you called people sir and expected them to act accordingly. With truth and honesty and human concern. I wanted to act like someone who deserved to be called sir, but I couldn’t.
“It was a saw,” I said. “He was climbing, way up, with the small limb saw and he fell, with the chain going, and really did a number on himself.” I nodded to myself and him.
“Yes,” the doctor said. “That is what happened in the lie the officer told you to speak. This man could die from his punctured arteries. Be honest with me now.”
I wondered if in India they had trees and chain saws and men who fought dogs in the afternoon. “Chain saw,” I said.
“Yes,” the doctor said again. “Never.” He shook his head and walked past the curtain back to the emergency room. The DEP cop hung around, to make sure Jimmy Work lived, then took off. It took Jimmy almost two months to recover. The cop had bet a hundred to one against Jimmy’s dog and lost. I missed my rendezvous with Dave, I never turned in the appraisal. I knew Molly at Hayes wouldn’t work with me again. If any Hayes crew ever came down to the site, they saw the marking tape. They’re not stupid. I visited Jimmy Work twice and he stayed at my new apartment for a month. I had to move out of my old cabin because I couldn’t make rent.
The first time I saw the DEP cop after that was in a bar, Cody’s, a one-pool-table joint a mile off the reservoir. It was night and snowing. The DEP cop was parked behind my truck when I came out.
“Hey,” he called out his window. “Where’s your friend Jimmy?”
Jimmy had moved in with this woman he knew, not far down the road. “I have no idea,” I said.
“Tell him I’m trying to get some money together,” he said. “In fact, why don’t you give me what you’ve got in your wallet?”
Nobody else was in the parking lot. “Piss on you,” I said.
He took his foot off the brake of his patrol car and tapped the back of my truck. “I could total it,” he said. “You’re drunk, and this car isn’t going to hurt me.”
I couldn’t afford a new truck. I took fifty dollars out of my pocket and handed it to him.
“You’re a good boy,” he said. The cruiser spit gravel at me as he pulled into the night.
I was off, headed to this girl’s house, when through the park, behind me, came a DEP cop. He followed me for over a mile and then the flashers went on. I pulled over.
When he got next to the truck I recognized him and he had his gun in his hand. “Hey,” he said. “You were speeding and weaving and out of control and then we had a high-speed chase.” He was grinning from ear to ear as he said it. Behind him it was pitch black.
“Here’s my license,” I said.
“I don’t want your license,” he said. I could smell booze on him. “I want two hundred bucks.” I reached into my wallet and pulled out some twenties and handed them to him.
“I bet you didn’t know this was a toll road,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
He took out a knife and stuck it in the sidewall of the front driver’s-side tire. I listened to the hiss as he yanked it out of the split rubber.
“Front tire’s flat,” he said. “Flat flat flat. That’s too bad.” He had his gun in one hand and a knife in the other.
“Come on, man,” I said. “Give me a break.”
“Sure,” he said. He started to walk back to the patrol car, stopped at the end of my truck and kicked out a rear light. The whole truck rocked. “Got a back light out too,” he said. “That’s a violation. Better get that fixed.” He slammed his door and swung around me. I watched his taillights get smaller in the dark as he drove off.
A couple months later they found his patrol car empty on a logging road near the reservoir. The door was open, the cop radio was turned on. There was money and blood all over the place, like green and red leaves blowing in the wind, and as the investigation went on, the BCI determined it was his money. He came to that spot to pay someone for something. But they didn’t take his money. They took him.