The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021
Page 4
Instead, I gently eased open the door to the yard, and edged out, to face Harland Guthrie. And if I’d had any remaining doubts, they disappeared.
It was the old man from the funeral flatbed, the one I’d thought was staring at me when he’d looked up at Charlie’s office. Same black suit, same wild white hair and beard. Looked like he’d been sleeping in his clothes. His rifle was in much better shape. A Vietnam era Winchester Model 70, a bolt action rifle chambered in 30-06, deadly out to fifteen hundred yards. He was holding it at port arms across his chest, not aimed in my direction, but it didn’t have to be. He was leaning against a wrecked Chevy Blazer, maybe sixty meters across the yard from me. If I drew on him, I might get off a round or two, but it would take a miracle for me to score a hit at this distance. Guthrie wouldn’t need a miracle. With a scoped Winchester, he could cap me like swatting a fly.
“I know you,” he called. “Saw your picture in the paper when you signed on to the force. A war hero, it said.”
“We both know better, don’t we? The real heroes are buried in Arlington. I just did my job, same as you, back in the day. In Vietnam?”
“Two tours,” he nodded. “Sniper with the Airborne. More than sixty confirmed kills. You?”
“Afghanistan, the Sulaiman Mountains. Nowhere near sixty, but way too many, I think now.”
“You’d better figure on doing one more, if you’re here for me.”
“I’m here for Charlie, Mr. Guthrie. I owe him, big. And I’ve figured out what happened, I think. But not the why of it.”
“It ain’t complicated. Ten years ago, Charlie Marx got called to my daughter Janiva’s place, because her live-in, Leon Broussard, was roughing her up. Marx had been there before, but it was different this time, she was pregnant with Leon’s child. I guess Charlie figured Leon had a lesson coming, and roughed him up pretty good. I got no problem with that, I’d have beaten the bastard myself if I’d known. Leon was a drunk, mean as a snake when he had his load on. But Charlie crossed the line. Kicked Leon across his own yard, like a damn dog. But he misjudged how drunk and crazy Leon really was, and after he left . . . ?”
“Leon offed himself, like the psycho asshole he was. And you blame Charlie for that?”
“Not then, I didn’t. I figured my Janiva was better off without him. And when her boy was born, Todd? I almost forgot where he came from. Todd was Guthrie to the bone. His mother’s son. My blood. None of his dad’s. Or so I thought, until two years ago . . .” He looked away, swallowing hard. But the gun never wavered. And my heart sank like a stone, as his meaning, and maybe his intent, sank in.
“The cancer,” I said.
“The worst kind,” he agreed. “In his bones. Couldn’t cut it out, chemo hardly slowed it down, drugs couldn’t help much with the pain. Todd’s only hope was a bone marrow transplant, but he had a rare blood type, AB negative. Like his father. None of us were a match.”
“Even with matching blood types, there’s no guarantee Leon would have been a match.”
“I know, they told me that. But he could have been. That boy needed a miracle, and he deserved one, but he didn’t get it because Charlie Marx wanted to feel like a big man. And he put Todd’s last, best hope, his only hope, in an urn on his grandma’s mantel.”
“Charlie didn’t kill your son-in-law, sir.”
“He killed my whole damn family! That boy was the last of my blood, last one entitled to bear my name. I’m the last Guthrie now, and I’m going to lay it down a long damn ways from home.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way—”
“Don’t blow smoke at a smoker, son. I don’t plan to die in jail. I’ve killed plenty before, overseas, for my country, same as you. I’ve thought about that a lot since, same as you, I expect. We killed them on their home ground, in wars that didn’t mean spit, in the end. I didn’t hate them people, wouldn’t take their damned country as a gift, but we dropped ’em anyway, didn’t we? They sent us there, and we did what we did. But your Sergeant Marx? He crossed the line, shamed Leon so bad he took his own life, and took away my grandson’s last hope. And when I’m suiting up for Todd’s funeral, I see this article in the paper, how Charlie’s gonna retire on his anniversary, thirty years from the day he signed on.”
“Thirty and out,” I nodded.
“He’s gonna go fishing, maybe sit and rock on his front porch of an afternoon, while the worms are chewin’ into my grandson. He done what he done. It was time to pay up for it. Now it’s that time again.”
“It’s not what I want,” I said.
“In case you ain’t noticed, son, this world don’t give a rip what you want—”
And I was off, sprinting straight at him, full tilt, pulling my weapon as I came, trying to close the distance between us, my only hope. Guthrie froze, staring, startled, but only for a moment. Then he shouldered his weapon, snugging it in—to his right shoulder. Right handed. Harder to swing to his right. I dove to my left, landing hard, then rolling back to my right.
He fired! The slug whistled past, so close it cut a notch in my ear, burning a groove where my head had been a split second before. He racked his Winchester—but I was already returning fire, shooting blindly, not aiming, just trying to throw him off stride. But I grew up hunting in the back country. I have gunman’s instincts, and serving in the ’Stan made me better. And I was fresh out of a war, much sharper than the old man. On pure reflex, I’d zeroed in on center mass, ripping off a dozen rounds as fast as I could pull the trigger—
And got lucky. Or maybe my desperate run had gotten me just close enough to score two solid hits out of a dozen shots. In center mass.
Dead center.
Guthrie’s legs buckled, and he dropped to his knees, staring at me the whole time, as he toppled and fell. Surprised, I think.
So was I, but I didn’t waste time on it. I was up and running again in a heartbeat. I knew damned well he was dead, but I kicked him hard in the chest anyway, furious at what he’d done, and what he’d made me do. As he rolled off the rifle, I grabbed it up, racking open the action to make it safe—
But it was already safe. The magazine was empty. He’d fired the only round he had. And missed me. At forty yards. A guy with sixty confirmed kills. Who’d dropped Charlie Marx with a head shot at seven hundred.
Goddamn it! I eased down slowly, kneeling beside his body, trying to read an answer in his glassy, empty eyes.
Had he missed me on purpose? How the hell could I know? All I know is, he put me in a situation, and I did what I had to. It was his play, he called it, and if I was just a puppet in the old man’s swan song, well, so be it.
Fuck him.
He’s the one taking the dirt nap.
And in the end, I squared things for Charlie the best I could. He’d gotten his thirty and out, though not the way he’d planned. Or hoped.
Not like this.
Not like this.
They buried old man Guthrie the following Saturday. No flatbed truck or “Sweet Home Alabama” this time. A private ceremony, family only. I was definitely not invited, but I was there anyway, watching, from the far side of the cemetery, still brooding about what happened.
I know damn well it could have me been in that box, dropping down into the deep, dark tunnel to forever. I had a bandage on my ear, covering the notch his bullet put in me, as a reminder.
But that notch wasn’t my only cause for thought. That Saturday was an anniversary. They buried Harland Guthrie thirty years to the day that Charlie Marx signed onto the Valhalla force. Thirty and out. He came close, but didn’t quite make it.
Nor will I, I think.
My hometown on the north shore isn’t the same country I grew up in. It was a quaint little vacation village then. People came to get away for a few weeks in summer, or for hunting season in autumn, or skiing over Christmas break.
The Web has changed all that. Why live in a cramped, dirty city when you can do business from a laptop on your patio? Why not vacation year-round,
sell shares from a beachfront cottage or a cozy condo looking out over a glittering lake? Valhalla’s population is exploding, and crime’s keeping pace with it, and everything is moving so much faster than before.
I have Charlie’s job now, boss of Major Crime. But I won’t see my thirty and out.
I’ll be lucky to make twenty.
Or ten.
*The question comes up at every seminar and signing. Where do you get your ideas? We trot out the usual suspects: research, serendipity, even dreams. But this story, “30 And Out”? Came differently.
I was headed home from Flint, one of the most violent cities in America, when up ahead a cop flicked on his flashers, blocking off the intersection to let a funeral motorcade pass.
But this was no ordinary funeral. No hearse, no long, black limousines. The cortege was led by a rusty flatbed truck flying twin rebel battle flags and carrying an undersized casket on a low bier. “Sweet Home Alabama” was thundering out of the truck’s massive sound system, loud enough to wake the dead. Behind it, a long train of Harleys and muscle cars stretched out for a mile or more. Outlaw bikers in club colors, rednecks in faded denims and coveralls. Nary a suit in sight. Some of the mourners were armed. NRA to the bone and proud of it.
But the thing that struck me most deeply was the unconcealed rage in their faces, anger at the unfairness of life. A coffin should never be so small. It should be full-sized, large enough to hold a soul grown old, one who’s enjoyed a rich, full time on this planet, lived a life that family and friends can celebrate at the end.
Not a lonely little box, just big enough to hold a life ended early. Funerals are never happy, but this one was so clearly unfair that . . . Well.
Where do stories come from? Sometimes they run you right off the road.
Jim Allyn is a graduate of Alpena Community College and the University of Michigan, where he earned a master’s degree in journalism. While at Michigan he won a Hopwood Creative Writing Award, Major Novel Division, and also won the Detroit Press Club Foundation Student Grand Award for the best writing in a college newspaper or periodical.
Upon graduation, he pursued a career in health care marketing and communications, working first as a science writer with the University of Michigan and subsequently holding management positions at major hospitals in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. In 2009 he retired as Vice President of Marketing and Community Relations at Elkhart General Healthcare System in Elkhart, Indiana.
His first short story, “The Tree Hugger,” appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in 1993 and was selected by Marvin Lachman as one of the “Best Mystery Short stories of 1993.” Seven other stories have been published by EQMM since then, including “Princess Anne,” which was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, and “The Master of Negwegon,” which was published in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. Allyn is a US Naval Air Force veteran, having served in a helicopter squadron aboard the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid. He gets valuable insights on law enforcement and things Jarhead from his son Brodie, a Michigan graduate who served in the Marine Corps and is now a federal agent with Homeland Security Investigations in Florida where, among many other responsibilities, he leads a highly active SWAT team.
THINGS THAT FOLLOW
Jim Allyn
Four men were clustered around the form on the stainless-steel autopsy table: two in dark blue uniforms, a homicide detective in a plain dark suit, and the medical examiner in a knee-length white lab coat. The room was cool, sterile, gleaming metal and white plastic. Latex gloves and various instruments of invasion were carefully laid out. A Mr. Coffee was perking happily in the corner.
It was early and quiet, even for the morgue. Sometimes when four or five tables were in use it was almost a locker-room atmosphere, with dark humor the order of the day. But not this morning.
She was a cold, dead, naked teenager, and nobody felt like cracking wise. They didn’t know who she was. Her skin was shockingly white. It had the perfection of youth. Her face was that of a child, although she hadn’t been a child maybe ever. The tracks on her arms said that. Her face was unremarkable, but not without strength. Her hair was dyed an unnatural deep jet black, black as night, and was streaked with orange and green and yellow like some mysterious tropical bird from a vanishing rain forest. Was she pretty? Hank Sawyer, one of the uniforms, wondered. Often you couldn’t tell looking at them dead, the prettiness fading with the pulse. A dark red channel had been carved down her middle. It looked like someone had poured red raspberry preserves from her crotch to her breastbone and now it had dried to a reddish black crust. Hank had seen smaller openings in gutted deer.
“Another lost soul with a nice ass,” Carmen Bastio, the homicide detective, said. “Popcorn for perverts and heartbreak for Mom and Dad.” Carmen kept up a good front, but Hank knew these kinds of killings affected him. He had three daughters, the oldest seventeen. Carmen’s face was ruddy. He drank too much late in the evening.
“No tats, huh?” Hank said. “That’s rare these days.”
“She’s got a little one on her butt,” Carmen said. “A little blue butterfly. Light blue and ragged. Looks homemade.”
“Why do you think he opened her up like that?” the other uniform, Joey Sheridan, asked. Joey had the round, smooth, freckled face of a man who would still be called “boyish” at sixty-five. He had recently transferred from public relations to street duty, and the jury was still out. Despite several years on the force, he was still considered green. An unknown quantity. A desk in PR wasn’t the street.
“Why does a dentist from Minnesota fly to Zimbabwe to shoot Cecil the Lion?” Daniel Linsky, the ME, asked. “Because it makes him feel good, that’s why. There, I just saved the department ten grand in psychological consultation. Be sure to tell them.”
“At least Cecil the Lion had a name,” Hank said.
“Oh, this girl has a name,” Carmen said. “That’s the big challenge. Not finding her killer. Finding out her name.”
“One thing about a little town like where I’m from,” Joey said. “If a young girl ever goes missing, everybody knows her name, everybody knows her family, and everybody goes looking for her. Everybody helps, everybody pitches in.” Joey had wavy blond hair, was tall and lanky, and had a kind of yokel look about him. A country boy. “ ’Course, this would never happen in my hometown in the first place.”
Almost in unison Hank and Carmen and the ME raised their heads from the butchered girl to look at Joey. There was an innocent undercurrent to what he had said, the kind of innocence that if any of them had ever had it had long since been ground away. It conjured up a magical apple-pie American small town where everyone’s a friend and beautiful teenage girls are never disemboweled by vicious freaks. They knew no such town existed, but they weren’t sure Joey did.
An awkward silence. Carmen broke it. “Hank, I asked you to stop by because she was found near that area in Campbell where you’ve been working. You seen her before?”
“If I did, it probably would have been in front of a club,” Hank said. He stepped in closer and studied her face. Hank was accustomed to seeing the dead. He’d seen more in Iraq in an afternoon than he’d seen during his entire time on the force. He was beyond shocking, but not beyond anything else.
She looked surprised. Young and surprised for the last time.
It was not a flashback. Not a disorienting, disabling episode. Those were pretty much behind him now. It was a remnant of Iraq, nonetheless. Something in the shape of the girl’s sad lips that reminded him of the slain matriarch. A powerful memory that took him back . . .
He was inside the home. The bodies of the Sunni family were lying awkwardly on the floor, twisted and splayed by the bullets that had killed them. Hank was standing alone, black rifle over his shoulder, surveying the silent scene, when a tall, crusty major, a fellow Marine, entered, the oldest-looking soldier he had ever seen.
The major stood next to Hank for what seemed a great while. Toge
ther they stared at the bodies. In the middle of the carnage two children were embracing at this, their last moment. Whoever had paid this fratricidal visit, whatever faction or militia or perhaps even the Mahdi Army, they had gunned them down at their evening meal, creating this contorted fatal ring. Blood everywhere, food and shards of bowls and glasses everywhere. Colors and textures splashed across clothing and faces.
The faces were those of individuals, young and old. Their expressions, all different, burned into Hank’s memory. His eyes rested and became fixed on the face of the matriarch he had spoken to and warned the day before. She was the wife and mother and grandmother and even in death was the force in the room. The one who was close to them all, had helped them all, had been there for each of them in many different ways. The one who bore their weight.
Suddenly the dead woman’s head jerked slightly and a faint sound escaped her lips. Hank took a clumsy half-step forward. The major blocked him with an arm. “Some kind of death rattle,” he said. “The weight of the body pushes out gas. There’s nothing we can do.
“We’ve been telling them to clear out for two weeks,” the major went on gruffly. “We warned them. We told them to leave. We told them it was dangerous.”
“Yes sir,” Hank said. If he had learned one thing in the Corps, it was that corporals don’t question majors. But he felt compelled to speak anyway: “What if we’d never have liberated this family, Major? Think they’d be any worse off?”
The major glanced sharply at Hank. His face tightened, then instantly relaxed, and he shrugged. “Well, Corporal, there’s that, isn’t there? There’s always that.” A long moment went by. “Where you from, soldier?” the major asked softly.
“Michigan,” Hank said. “Black River.”
The major wore a blank look.
“Northeastern Michigan. About two hundred and fifty miles north of Detroit,” Hank said. “Little town right on the coast.”