The Best American Mystery Stories 2006
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Хантер Эван
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51746-6
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
I made myself a coffee, and the cops saw what I wanted them to see. It’s what I do.
Scott Wolven
Vigilance
From Controlled Burn
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED, the same story I gave to the investigators:
I never met Carl Larson before I rented a one-bedroom house from him in Potlatch, Idaho. I’d seen a handwritten ad tacked to a bulletin board at the University of Idaho and I called the local number from a pay phone. An old woman answered and said she and her husband were Carl’s neighbors, just handled the keys for him. She’d be glad to show me the place, but I’d have to talk to Carl about renting it. Her name was Rose. She gave me a long-distance number to reach Carl. I dialed.
A woman answered and I asked for Carl Larson and she asked what it was about. The rental, I said. A man got on the line and introduced himself as Carl Larson. He didn’t mention a lease or paperwork. Nothing for me to sign. He asked me my name. Ed Snider, I lied. The utilities — phone and electric — stayed in his name. The phone was restricted from long-distance access to prevent renters from running it up, and the bill went directly to him. Same with the electric bill. All I had to do was mail him the first month’s rent, a five-hundred-dollar money order made out to cash. There was a garage I could use however I wanted and Rose and her husband, Dan, would explain that to me. The house heated with a woodstove in the living room and a pellet stove in the basement. The garage woodstove worked and the neighbors would show me about turning the water on, which valve was the pressure tank, and how to empty the tank, in case I went away during a temperature drop. Keep a close eye on the pipes in winter, Carl said.
The number I’d called was in the nine-oh-seven area code, Alaska, and the mailing address he gave me was Fairbanks. Everything was to be sent care of L. Matthews, and he told me on the phone the address was the house of a woman he knew, a shirttail relation of his. He spent as little time in town as possible. He’d built a cabin way out in the woods, far away, where he hunted and fished a good part of the year. His friends on the peninsula were all big fishermen, some commercial. His voice was deep and old, a little slow in coming. We drifted into a brief conversation about states with a single area code being the best for hunting and fishing. Montana, Idaho, and Alaska we ranked as the top three. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine in the East. Neither of us had traveled east in years. Carl said he liked the people out west better and I agreed. One time, he said, years and years ago, he shot a twelve-point whitetail in eastern New Hampshire, on the Maine border. He hadn’t expected to see a buck that size, ever, and his rifle was under caliber, the shot a hair too long. The hit was a solid lung shot, but the deer took off. Managed to get over the state line, marked in the woods. Carl came to a clearing and a logging road. Three Maine game wardens had the buck halfway dressed in the back of a pickup truck. Too bad about your New Hampshire deer, the one game cop said, he decided to die in Maine. That’s people from the East, Carl finished.
Like he’d said, his neighbors Dan and Rose held the keys and they’d explain the trash to me, answer any questions at all. He asked me not to move stuff around in the house and to be careful with the taxidermy and I said I wouldn’t and I said I would. How long did I think I’d stay in Potlatch, he asked, and I said I didn’t know. I understand, he said, don’t worry about it. Go look the place over and let the neighbors look you over. In the meantime, I’d mail the money order, and once it got to Fairbanks, I could move in, unless Dan and Rose didn’t like the way I dressed out. He told me if I had trouble with money to ask Dan, there was always extra work around. He wished me good luck and I said the same to him. We hung up and I walked across downtown Moscow to the post office a block off Main Street to mail the money order. I wrote “Cash” on the To line, “Snider” on the From line.
My brother and I had given up a scrap business in Nevada, so I carried a little money, but not much. Thirty-five hundred dollars and a truck that ran most of the time. My brother headed to Seattle after a girl, and in Seattle there were lots of girls in case he broke up with this one, so after a while you didn’t even ask last names, because that wasn’t important, you knew they would not be around long enough to worry about last names. Living in Potlatch put me close enough to two big colleges, Washington State and University of Idaho, both twenty minutes south. Plenty of dates if I wanted them. But I wasn’t looking for that right now. I wanted to earn honest money and get on the right track. I wanted that a lot.
The one-bedroom house in Potlatch was fine. It sat fifty yards off the main road. Dan and Rose were an older couple who lived next door in a trailer with a redwood porch, and he showed me around the place. He wore a bright flannel shirt and a wide-brimmed Australian cowboy hat. He must have thought I was okay, because he let me keep the keys.
“You send the rent to Carl?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “An hour after I talked to him.”
We stood on the porch of the house. The one-bay garage was a concrete-block building next to the road. I had told Dan I hoped to fix some chain saws out of it, sharpen and sell chains to loggers.
“Do you need extra work?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Always.”
“I can give you some work, but it’s a little out of season, know what I mean? Still good work, though. Easy.” He watched me.
“I shoot ‘em when I see ‘em,” I said. “I worry about the regulations after. I’ve been known to keep one or two I shouldn’t have. They taste the same.”
Dan smiled. “You bet they do.” He pointed at the garage. “See the pump behind the garage?”
I nodded. “It looks like an old gas pump.”
“I’ll give you the key for it. There’s about ten or fifteen guys who come around and get gas from us, a dollar a gallon cash, we only sell one grade, unleaded regular, and we don’t advertise.”
“Where do you get the gas from?” I asked.
“A couple years ago, some big wheel from one of the universities’ administration saw all the maintenance trucks pulling in and out of the gas station where both schools had their accounts. Apparently some of the boys were buying a lot of beer too, on the school card that was issued with each truck, and they were looking at the girls — the point is they weren’t working. Washington State is the biggest school west of the Mississippi, so that’s a lot of gas and beer.”
“That must have caused a problem.”
“Oh, it did,” Dan said. “The two schools got together and solved it by buying a mini-tanker, just five hundred gallons. And the schools bought their own big stationary tank and pump service, just to fill the mini-tanker.”
“I can see where you’re headed,” I said.
“There are over a hundred trucks and vehicles that take gas in that fleet, not to mention lawn equipment, straight gas for the cans of mixed fuel, every single thing comes out of that mini-tank and they don’t track it. They just pay the bill on the big tank and since it’s less than the card system they were using, they’re saving money.”
“So the mini-tanker comes here once in awhile?”
“Old friend of Carl’s ended up with the job and as long as he’s behind the wheel, we’re golden. That’s tax-free retirement, right there.”
“How does the money work?”
“Never raise the price on the boys, it’s always a dollar a gallon. Never take on any new customers, I don’t care if it’s your aunt Mabel. Let her get gas in town. Push the gas a little, if you’ve had a slow week, sell a couple cans to some loggers, just say somebody dropped it off or something. But every Friday, there should be an envelope on my porch with three hundred seventy-five dollars in it. Nothing bigger than a twenty, never take anything over a twenty and the boys know that.”