The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (2 page)

O. P.

T
HE TIME
: edging past midnight.

The place: a suburban neighborhood where a quarter moon casts pale light across sleepy trees, tailored lawns, and darkened houses; the camera that is our mind's eye floats past these houses until it comes to rest on a window lit from within . . . which happens to be
your
window.

We now drift closer, where we find . . . me (aka Robert Crais, the coeditor of this book, along with the esteemed Otto Penzler) and author of this introduction), giggling like a goblin in the midnight shadows beneath the eaves of your roof, hanging in the darkness as I peer with cat-slit eyes into your bedroom. (Creepy, yeah, but
not
for deviant criminal purposes!)

I am watching you read this book.

I am giggling because you have plunked down hard cash for this book (
maybe
because my name is attached!), and I am having a blast and a half watching you enjoy this wonderful collection of short stories.

Because, good readers, this book is all about you enjoying yourselves and finding new authors to love, else my name would not be on it.

Short stories were my first love. Though I have published eighteen novels at this point in time, I began as a writer of short fiction and dearly love the form. For one, short stories are short. Poe famously defined a short story as a story one could read in a single sitting. I'm not sure that that is necessarily the case, but most of us can suck up a three-thousand-word short story in a sitting, and do, and that is part of the fun. You get the beginning, the middle, and the payoff all in a single gulp, and because of this, short stories are like peanuts—you probably won't eat just one.

A good reader might be able to plow through a novel in three or four nights, relishing the immersion in the novel's reality for a sustained period, but short stories allow the reader to sample many realities in that same period of time. I love checking out a contents page for the familiar names of writers I know I'll enjoy, and also the exploratory adventure of discovering new writers whose names are unknown to me, which is the joy of an anthology such as this. Here you'll get quick hits of superstars such as Peter Beagle and Thomas McGuane and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, as well as of writers whose work you might not yet have discovered.

With a collection like this, you get it all, and if you are like me, friends, you
want
it all!

Now that I've said this, make no mistake: short fiction should not be dismissed as a literary quickie, having no more importance than, say, stopping by McD's for a burger to go. The best short stories can linger. Salinger's “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Hemingway's “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and Chandler's “Red Wind” all haunt me years after I first read them. In fact, the brevity of a short story often lends to its power.

Mr. Penzler and I have tried to provide something for everyone, from surprising amusements to complex character studies to noir pieces as desperate as a death row inmate's heart. The key to a great short story collection is diversity. These stories do not all feature private investigators or college professors or retired FBI agents or criminals doing crime. They are not all grim noir etchings, not all laugh-out-loud giggles, and do not all have snappy twist endings. This is by design, but regardless of your personal preferences and tastes, these stories all have one thing in common—they are the best of their American kind yer 'umble editors could find, and personally, I am most excited for you to sample the type of story you ordinarily
don't
read.

So explore. Taste new flavors, smell new aromas, and run your fingers across the textures of authors you haven't known before. Let Mr. Penzler and me be your guides.

The place: this book.

The time: now.

The mission: lose yourself in these dark dreams, and enjoy.

I am outside your window. Watching.

R
OBERT
C
RAIS

FROM
Xavier Review

 

T
HE GUY LOOKED
like an off-duty cop. Even Marsh could see that. For a terrible moment, when the door swung open as if torn from its hinges, when the lumbering shape waddled in, blotting out the sunlight from Irving, Marsh thought he'd been set up. He pictured himself hauled off in cuffs, his name splashed across the
Examiner
's afternoon edition; he pictured Gina's tears and the confused faces of their children, and something reared up inside him, an impulse toward self-destruction he didn't know he possessed.

“You were supposed to be here by eleven o'clock,” he squawked, in the same petulant tone he reserved for his children, for the parolees they hired to scour pots at the hotel.

He didn't know what he'd been expecting—someone more like Pacino in
Scarface,
with a little 007 thrown in for good measure; someone with at least a good head of hair. Mickey's distended gut spilled out from under a dirty sweatshirt that said
Property of the San Jose Sharks,
and he was wearing shorts.

“All right, take it easy, will you?” the guy said finally, and Marsh knew what he was going to say before he said it—the parking, the traffic, stuck on the Bay Bridge for an hour and a half. “I've been driving circles around the block for half an hour looking for a place to park.”

His voice was soft, and it rose to a lilting crescendo that might have been funny, under different circumstances. He stood six feet, and Marsh would have said six across, too. He moved slowly, as if conserving his strength or impaired by his hulking physique, or as if he were in a great deal of pain. With the few pale wisps of blond hair standing up on the pink dome of his head, he looked like a toddler with a thyroid problem, but the threat of physical harm seemed to lurk just behind his every gesture, and Marsh recoiled in spite of himself, bumping into the empty barstool behind him.

“Come on,” Mickey said in a stage whisper, glancing around the bar. “I don't think we should talk about this here.”

Outside, the sun was like a spear driven through an iron patchwork of cloud, refracted into needles of light in the low-lying haze. The two and a half drinks Marsh had managed to choke down while he was waiting worked in his system, a fire that seemed to sap his extremities of warmth, numbing the tips of his fingers even as it raged in his belly, as if the heat were being drawn inward, sucked violently to his middle, by a bellows. When the wind gusted, it brought tears to his eyes, and at his side the briefcase hung a dead, leaden weight, as if he'd managed to stuff their history, the long and tortured declining curve of their failed marriage, twenty-two years, the bitterness, the venom, rows cataclysmic and inconsequential, in there, along with the banded piles of unmarked, nonconsecutive $20 bills.

He thought the guy was limping, and he was—drawing up short every time he stepped on his left foot. But he was moving quickly, and Marsh had to hurry to keep up.

He trailed at a few dozen paces as the guy walked down Lincoln, waited for a break in traffic, and lumbered across, and they dodged joggers on JFK, now crossing the rolling, windswept green of the park. Down on the grass, a gaggle of children ran screaming after a tennis ball, and a few sunbathers were sprawled on blankets at the edges of the fields, stretched out as if on display. They turned finally onto one of the innumerable hiking trails that webbed the park like capillaries, Marsh straggling now, his face flushed, his sides slick with cold sweat. An enclave of kids were lounging in the bushes alongside the crooked path, passing a bottle, and Marsh caught a whiff of what might have been marijuana smoke, but the wind took it away. Cresting a hill, they clambered through a copse of jack pines, the tops of the trees roiling above them, tossing crazily in the wind. Marsh caught his foot on one of the roots that elbowed up through the topsoil and nearly went sprawling, saving himself at the last minute by catching one of the low branches.

When they finally emerged onto another bright swath of grass, the sounds of the city had receded, a distant hum punctuated now and again by the faraway bleat of a car horn. Variegated bunches of green showed all around, clusters and copses of trees, heather gray and a deep, piney green. All angled spastically in the wind, curling like strange, drunken dancers.

Several trails converged on a duck pond bordered by an asphalt lane. The ducks bobbed uncertainly on the surface of the gray water, as if anticipating some massive upswell. They pitched from side to side as the wind razed through the trees and muted the sound of their chatter. They beat their wings on the water, striking up silvery flares.

A lone bench stood by the water's edge. The light was an opaque gray wash, as if the whole thing were being shot from some remote vantage and the atmosphere were disturbed between the camera and the action taking place.

Marsh licked his lips. With a trembling hand, he extracted the creased snapshot from his coat pocket and held it, fluttering on the wind. He knew he should be drunk, but he couldn't feel it anymore at all. Adrenaline, he supposed; he was buzzing with it.

“Your wife,” the guy said, in a way that irritated Marsh, as if he'd seen it a million times, as if the whole thing were something squalid, some oft-repeated tragedy. Mickey sighed. “All right,” he said, looking off at the slight milky haze lowering across the western sky. He looked at Marsh. “What did she do? Is she cheating on you? She's running around on you and you just can't take it anymore? What is it?”

Marsh began sputtering, unable to answer.

“No,” he said finally. “Nothing like that.” What was the man doing, trying to talk him out of it? “The car,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Do you think you could spare the car?”

“What?” Mickey loomed over him.

“She drives a Mercury Sable. Last year's model. I was hoping you could avoid—you know. Damaging the car.”

What happened next happened quickly, and while it was happening the one thing that occurred to Marsh, crowding out all other thoughts or considerations, was that he was being mugged. Mickey told him to drop the briefcase, and when he failed to do this, struck him a resounding blow with a large, pinkish fist that seemed to materialize out of thin air, the row of swollen and meaty knuckles making contact with the bridge of his nose. He heard a sharp crack, a ringing in his ears, and when he came to, he was flat on his back in the mud at the foot of the park bench, and several ducks were honking in his ear and padding about on their webbed feet in the mud not far from his head.

The briefcase, the snapshot, the money—all gone. Even his wallet, and yes, his Rolex. He'd been cleaned out, and his suit, $450 before alterations, was ruined. He felt frantically in his pockets for his keys and found them, thinking at least something had gone right. But forty-five minutes later, when he finally found his way out of the park, he could see the bright orange ticket fluttering under his windshield wiper as he approached the Jag. He screamed, not caring who gawked or shook his head. On 19th Avenue, passersby turned their faces away, as if his particular insanity could be transmitted by no more than eye contact, and he stumbled along in the thickening, dusky light.

 

2

 

They had a place in South San Francisco, a two-story walkup that sat in a row of identical walkups in what passed for a quiet neighborhood among the sprawl and the clutter of city life. They were still paying for the house, but they'd bought before the latest boom, and when she heard what the other houses on the block were going for these days, she gasped. Sometimes she thought they should sell, treble their money and get out, but she didn't want to uproot the kids halfway through their schooling. Her father—the Colonel—had dragged her from Illinois to Taiwan to Corpus Christi, Texas, before she was twelve, and she had sworn above all else that she would not do the same thing to Todd and Jaime.

They had a lawn, a twelve-foot-by-four-foot patch of grass she watered and fertilized and guarded jealously against the neighborhood dogs, who were always doing their business there.

They had a two-and-a-half-car garage, a thing that struck her as funny in a vague way, in the sense that two point five children might have been funny.

She watched him come tramping across the lawn, the shit, in what must have been a state of extreme drunkenness if he thought he was going to get away with it—trampling the hyacinths, tripping over the rhododendron along the brick walk, all but tearing the philodendron bush out by the roots as he stumbled coming up the steps. She'd had the feeling this was coming, though she couldn't have said just what
this
was yet. She'd sensed impending calamity, sniffing it on the breeze the way you would a coming storm, bracing herself for impact even as she dug in her heels and refused to let the smallest thing go. A tiny exhilaration blossomed inside her at the foretaste. She would have felt entirely justified stabbing him with the garden shears.

Drunk as a sailor. She pitied the creature she'd married.

“If you think,” she said, bits of hamburger clinging to her fingers, on him before he'd set foot in the door, her voice carrying shrilly across the hall, “if you think you can come in here any goddamn way you please, mister, you'd better think again, because you've got another thing coming. I spent three and a half hours out there today, and look, would you just look at what you've done to my garden? Henry, goddammit, what the hell do you have to say for yourself?”

Then she saw his face.

His nose seemed to be screwed on sideways, as if it had tried to escape but had become confused and tried to go in two different directions at once. Purple bruises bloomed under his eyes, and wads of spittle clung to the corners of his mouth. He stunk like a barroom, the cheap, lowlife smell of booze and cigarette smoke clinging to his suit and wafting into their home. A sense of shock mitigated her horror, and then the whole thing suddenly became funny, and she collapsed against the wall, covering her mouth with the back of her wrist and giggling, aware even as she did of the cruel edge to her laughter, of the pleasure she took in seeing him disgraced.