by The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021
Every head swiveled to stare at him. “What?” I said.
He picked up the toy and pointed it at me and Antoine. “Yap, yap, yap, blah, blah, blah—Gawd! I should just shoot the two of you right now.”
It wasn’t a toy. It was a gun. Plug-ugly and made out of plastic, but a gun nonetheless.
I froze, my hands and feet turned to ice. Oh my God, oh my God! How had he gotten a gun past security? I thought he was playing with a toy, but was he actually putting plastic pieces together to assemble a weapon? Jesus.
The guy backed away from the table and, pivoting on his heel, swept the thing in an arc around the room. Someone gasped, and we all shrank back in our seats. “Keep quiet and stay still,” he said, “and I won’t have to kill you.” No one moved. “And you, motormouth”—he waggled the gun at me—“crack the door open and stick your head out. Tell that lardass to lock us in, or I’m gonna start shooting.”
I sat, paralyzed.
“Now!” he screamed, and leveled the gun.
I bolted up from my chair and held out my hands, as though my palms could repel bullets. I backed to the door, slivered it open, and poked my head out. The court officer was sitting behind a desk ten feet away, filling out forms.
“Excuse me?” I squeaked. My teeth were chattering.
She looked up. “Yes?”
“One of the jurors has a gun and is threatening to shoot us unless you lock us in the jury room.”
She stared at me. I knew how she felt. I couldn’t believe this was happening, either.
“Seriously,” I said. “You need to lock us in.” I withdrew my head and closed the door.
“Good,” the guy said. “Sit down.” I returned to my seat and folded my trembling hands on the table.
Still no one moved. It was like we were playing Statues—Nightmare Edition. Someone started breathing audibly and someone else sobbed. What would happen if the court officer burst in? Would this nutjob start shooting? I didn’t want to find out. Please, lady, I thought, please. Just do what he says.
The door shifted slightly in its frame like someone was leaning on it. A shadow flicked in the narrow space between the bottom of the door and the floor.
“Hey!” the guy yelled. “I know you’re listening. Lock the goddamn door, or one of these people dies.”
A beat. The court officer called back, “Is everyone okay? First tell me they’re okay.”
Crazy pants looked at me. “Tell her.”
“We’re fine,” I said loudly. “Please lock the door.”
I heard the thunk of a key turning a bolt. “It’s locked,” the court officer said. “Now what? What do you want?”
“What I want is for you to go away. Go back to your desk.” Nothing happened. “Do it! Do it now!”
I could feel her hesitation. The shadow at the bottom of the door disappeared, and although I knew she must have gone to summon help, it struck me like a fist to the gut that we were truly on our own. Tears threatened to spill. I blinked them back.
“So,” the guy said. “Here we are.” His green eyes glittered with malicious glee, or maybe he was just high. He bore an uncanny resemblance to the pre-swastika’d Charles Manson—small face with a high forehead, long shaggy hair parted in the middle, small goatee.
“Look,” said a Latino man sitting at the far end of the table. “You want money? We’ll give you money. Just don’t hurt us.” He looked around, and several heads nodded.
Charlie danced over to him and shoved the gun under the guy’s chin. Charlie was shorter and skinnier than I’d thought; he must’ve loved the power the gun gave him over men who were bigger than he was. Color drained from the man’s face and he stared up at Charlie, a muscle near his eye jumping.
“What’s your name, man?” Charlie said.
“Oscar.” It was a whisper.
Charlie lifted Oscar’s chin with the barrel of the gun. “Well, Oscar, if I wanted money, I’d’ve taken it already, right? Right?”
“Right,” Oscar said faintly. He closed his eyes and his Adam’s apple twitched as he swallowed.
“Damn right,” Charlie said, slapping Oscar’s cheek lightly with the gun and bounding back to his seat at the other end of the table. He was definitely high—which meant he was erratic, which meant he was even more dangerous than I’d thought. And here I’d been worried about junior high school bullying forty years in the past.
“So, friends, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let me tell you what happens next. I got a letter here”—Charlie fished in his back pocket and pulled out a folded rectangle—“that I need someone to push under the door for me. Volunteers?” He held the note up and looked around the room. “No? Then the winner is . . . Norma Jean! Come here, Norma Jean. Not too fast, though.”
Oh, God. I took a deep breath, stood on wobbly legs, and slowly walked toward him, my eyes locked on the gun. A rivulet of icy sweat trickled down my spine as I reached for the paper. Once I had it firmly gripped between thumb and forefinger, I just as slowly made my way to the door and squatted, sliding the note under it. Thank God for those Pilates classes. If I was going to die, I’d do it with a fine-looking pair of glutes.
Still trembling, I slunk back to my seat. Under the table, Antoine pressed his knee against mine, and I pressed back. Mentally, I shook myself—hard. I was not going to die. No one was. I had survived equally dangerous situations before, and I was going to figure a way out of this one too. But how?
Charlie sat back in his chair and threw one leg over the arm, foot jiggling, the hand holding the gun resting in his lap. “Good job, Norma Jean! I knew you could do it.” He smiled. “So now we’re gonna wait for the police. We’re gonna have plenty of time together, so let’s get to know each other! We all met Oscar here, and Norma Jean and her new buddy Antoine, but what about the rest of you? Around the table—you! What’s your name?”
He pointed the gun at the curvy young red-haired woman seated immediately to his left. She sank in her chair, the freckles on her face standing out in stark relief against the paleness of her skin. “Um, my name’s Darlene,” she said in a small voice.
“Darlene,” Charlie said. “Dar-lene. And what are your hobbies, Dar-lene?”
She stared. “My hobbies?”
“Yeah, your hobbies. Although I think everyone can see what you do for fun, right, all those nights alone, sitting in front of the TV?” He mimed shoving food in his mouth. “Do you ‘eat your feelings,’ Dar-lene? Huh? Do you?” He guffawed.
A fiery blush rose steadily from Darlene’s chest to her hairline. She ducked her head, but I could see she was biting her lip. A tear slid down her cheek.
Charlie faux yawned. “Ho hum. Too easy.” He shifted the gun to the woman sitting to Darlene’s left—Jodi. “Next!”
Jodi started and blanched under her tan, but there was defiance in the way she stuck out her chin. “Jodi Greenberg.”
“And what do you do for a living, Jodi Greenberg?”
“I’m a realtor.”
I almost laughed. Of course she was.
Charlie pursed his lips and squinched his eyebrows in a parody of deep thought. He stroked his goatee. “Hmmm, that’s really . . . boring. Right, everyone?” His stare was a searchlight scanning the room. “Right?”
The group murmured something that could have been assent. What a sick bastard. He was enjoying this.
Charlie turned his attention back to Jodi. “Everyone agrees that’s pretty boring, hon. Say something interesting.”
I had to hand it to her; she looked him straight in the eye. “Like what?”
The gun swiveled between me and Jodi and back again. “How about, like, how you know Norma Jean here? She says she knows you.” He rested his chin on the back of his hand and batted his lashes in a nasty imitation of Antoine. “I need all the deets.”
I felt Antoine tense up. Jodi gave me the side-eye, then turned her gaze back to Charlie. Backbone of steel. “I don’t know her.”
I looked at Charl
ie, sitting three people away from me—Antoine, then Jodi, then Darlene. I was getting an idea. It was a huge risk, but this guy was so unpredictable, I wasn’t sure the cops could get to us before he shot someone anyway. But could I do it? My heart jackhammered in my chest, my throat so dry I could barely swallow. I had no choice.
Teeth clenched, I responded before Charlie could. “Sure you do,” I said. “Jodi Auerbach, right? From IS 47?”
She whipped her head around to stare at me. She wasn’t ignoring me now. She snarled. “I don’t know you. How many times do I have to say it?”
Charlie leaned forward in his chair, grinning. “Ooh! Grab your popcorn, folks! We got us a catfight!”
I shook my head. “Wow, Jodi. That really hurts. We were friends! Don’t you remember the pranks we pulled on the girls we didn’t like?” I held her gaze, willing her to understand me.
Jodi narrowed her eyes and watched me warily.
“Pranks!” Charlie said. “What kinds of pranks?”
I shrugged, hoping it looked casual. “They were pretty fun. We wrote notes to these losers telling them nobody liked them and they should kill themselves.”
Charlie inclined his head. “Not bad. What else did you do?”
I spoke only to Jodi. “We put, uh, used feminine products in their lockers.”
Charlie laughed. “Ew. That’s a good one.”
“We also used to send them on trips.” I raised my eyebrow at Jodi and awareness flooded her face. She nodded slightly and turned back to look at Charlie.
“Trips?” Charlie said. “What does that mean?”
This was it. My body electric with fear, I stood up, flinging my chair back. “Figure it out, asshole. Or are you too stupid to understand one-syllable words?”
He froze. Rage darkening his face, he jumped out of his seat and charged at me, arm extended, gun lifted at shoulder height.
“Now!” I yelled.
Jodi stuck out her foot.
As it turned out, the gun wasn’t even loaded. According to the newspaper, Charlie—ironically enough, his real name—had mastered 3D printing and assembling most of the weapon’s components before learning that even plastic guns require metal bullets and, crucially, a metal firing pin to help discharge them. He knew he’d never be able to sneak those parts past the courthouse’s metal detectors, but he decided to go ahead anyway, counting on the presence of the gun itself to intimidate the cops into giving him what he wanted.
It was a good thing, too, that there were no bullets. After Jodi tripped him, Charlie flew a couple of feet, hit the floor, and landed on the gun. If it had been loaded, he might have shot himself in the belly, or it might have exploded, injuring him and the five jurors who sat on his back to restrain him. Antoine was first to pile on; I heard a crack, and Charlie screamed. “Oops,” Antoine said. “My bad.”
The newspapers also reported that in the note I had shoved under the door, Charlie said he was going to hold us hostage until New York State released his incarcerated brother from Sing Sing. It was a ridiculous plan, destined to fail, but it seemed to me Charlie’s special skill was cruelty, not intelligence.
As was Jodi’s. I had mixed feelings about her. Despite the horrible things she did to me in junior high school, I thought what she did in the jury room that day was pretty brave. And when it was all over and we jurors were sitting on the long benches in the courthouse hallway, waiting to be interviewed by the cops, I told her so.
“You too,” she said, tapping her foot and glancing at her watch.
I cocked my head. “What’s amazing, though, is that you understood I wanted you to trip that guy. I mean, considering you’ve never seen me before.”
Jodi stopped fidgeting and looked me straight in the eye, then shrugged. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I stared at her. “Seriously? After everything that happened today?” I shook my head in disgust. “Although, if you wouldn’t admit it even at gunpoint, you never will. Jesus.” I started to rise.
She glared at me. Then she tapped my hand. “Wait.”
I sat back down and folded my arms across my chest. “Yes?”
She blinked rapidly and sighed. “Those popular girls?” Jodi said. “I think they were wrong to do what they did. I think they were probably just really, really immature. In fact, if they were here now, I think they’d probably apologize.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” I examined her face, searching for a hint that she was messing with me, but she seemed sincere—embarrassed, even.
“If they were here.” She shrugged. “Hypothetically.”
Any further nonapology she might have made was interrupted by the appearance of a uniformed cop, who said he was ready to take her statement. Without another word, she stood up and followed him down the corridor.
I shook my head. What a piece of work. But as I watched Jodi disappear down the hall, a funny thing happened. I felt some of my anger go with her. I felt lighter. I felt good.
And when I hit Waikiki Beach with a mai tai in each hand, I’d feel even better.
*A few years ago, I discovered that open-source blueprints for printing 3D guns could be downloaded from the Internet. After my initial shock about the implications for our society, I started toying with the implications for, of course, a short story. If untraceable, unregistered firearms could be smuggled through metal detectors, then many of our relatively “safe” public spaces are vulnerable—including our courts.
Setting a story in a courtroom was intriguing to me because during one of my stints of jury duty service in New York City, I discovered how irrational and, frankly, terrifying my fellow jurors could be, even without firearms. How likely was the jury-selection process of voir dire—“to speak that which is true”—to ferret out different kinds of threat? Like most crime writers, I’m interested in capital-J Justice. But I wanted to explore other kinds of justice too.
Alison Gaylin has written eleven books, including the Edgar Award–winning If I Die Tonight, and the Shamus Award–winning And She Was. A USA Today and international bestselling author, her work has been published in numerous countries, including Japan, Germany, the UK, and France. Her twelfth book, The Collective, was published in the spring of 2021 by William Morrow.
THE GIFT
Alison Gaylin
DAY ONE
When the first call comes in, Lyla McCord is at the London premiere of her new film, Desire of Annabeth. She is posing on the red carpet, done up in freshly highlighted beach waves and heavy false lashes that make her eyes sting, about five inches of high-def makeup, and a skintight Elie Saab dress that would have been a lot more comfortable had she opted to remove a few ribs before putting it on. She resents this. All of it. It was bad enough caking on the foundation and squeezing into getups like this one when she was just another girl on a teen TV show. But she’s a serious actress now, an Oscar winner. Will there ever be a point in her life when she doesn’t feel as though she’s being examined under a microscope?
Lyla is smiling, though, because that’s what’s expected of her. She sticks a spray-bronzed leg through the slit of her torturous dress and strikes a pose for the bank of British photographers and reporters and smiles until her lips start to spasm.
She does notice the vibration of her phone in the borrowed $500,000 diamond-encrusted Chanel clutch—but only as a nuisance that momentarily throws her off her game. She wishes she’d given her phone to someone else—her UK publicist, Claude; her assistant, Gigi; one of the bodyguard detail. Anyone.
Who could be calling? Actually, she never asks herself that question because she doesn’t care. Her daughter, Fidelity, never calls; she texts or FaceTimes, and Fidelity is the only one who matters to Lyla. So when the Chanel clutch begins vibrating yet again, Lyla is irritated, nothing more.
A Cockney-accented reporter shouts, “Where’s Nolan?” and Lyla recovers. She aims her emerald eyes at him and gives him that smoldering gaze she’s practiced in the mirror hundreds of times si
nce she was a teenager, the Lyla Look, as it’s been dubbed in the press. “He’s home with our baby,” she says.
For a moment, she envisions the three of them, back when Fidelity truly was a baby. Lyla, Nolan, and Fidelity, all in their pajamas. A lazy Sunday morning watching Elmo on TV, as close to real as she’s ever felt. “I miss them.” She says it unprompted. The reporter eats it up. “I miss my family.”
Her phone vibrates again. Lyla feels like throwing the clutch to the ground and stomping on it till it shatters.
After she thanks the British press and before she goes into the theater, Lyla slips the phone out of the purse and turns it off. And so she doesn’t see the dozen consecutive calls, one minute apart, all from the same number: Fidelity’s nanny.
As she makes her way to her seat, Lyla receives a standing ovation from the audience. This is far from a normal occurrence, but advance buzz has been that good for Desire of Annabeth, the story of a young woman on death row for killing both her parents. Thanks to the truly gifted Lyla McCord, the Variety critic had written, what could have been a downer of a film turns out to be a revelation.
Lyla is basking in the glow of the ovation, the word revelation, the very beauty of it, lighting up her mind, when a man in a dark suit approaches, tapping her politely on the arm. Behind him stand Claude and Gigi, wearing identical grave expressions. She holds a finger up at this trio, takes a bow for the cheering audience, and lets the lights go down before following them up the aisle and into the theater’s lobby.
“Ms. McCord.” The man’s voice is as dark and somber as his suit. “I’m Inspector Harrison. Scotland Yard.”
“Is there a problem?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Lyla takes a deep breath—the last one she’ll be able to take for a long time. “What does this problem concern?” she says.
“Your daughter, Fidelity,” he says. “It appears she’s gone missing.”
The inspector keeps speaking, about the New York State Police and being contacted by the FBI and providing an escort to the airport. But soon his words turn to fog, and all Lyla can hear is the thump of her own heart. She drops her bag. Her legs give out from under her. Claude and Gigi catch her before she hits the floor.