by The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021
The gunshots were so deafening that I didn’t hear the forklift engine until it was almost on us. Donny was screaming at me. I jumped onto the forks and clung to the mast as the lift made a tight circle and trundled to the loading bays.
One of the doors was open, waiting. We jumped from the machine and ran. Roccamena stood in the doorway shooting at us.
10
“They should never have fired Gregory,” Donny said.
“So you decided to destroy Roccamena’s inventory in revenge?” I said.
“Of course not.” That was Sonia. “Donny was with me that night. I needed help filling out my tax return.”
“And Donny, tax whiz that he is, was just the man for the job,” I agreed politely. “Reggie would have been a better choice, but he was with Donny at the warehouse, using his snazzy app to undo the keypads at Roccamena’s.”
“I most certainly was not,” Reggie huffed. “I was right here at home with Cassie, wasn’t I, darling? Our home security photos prove it.”
He showed me the date-and-time-stamped pictures on his monitor, Cassie working on a quilt in the family room, him at his desk, doing something on his computer. Their two sons were playing a video game.
“You do remember that I grew up with you, I hope. I remember when you and Stanley worked a racket with the numbers runners outside US Steel. That guy, what was his name? Lime Pit or something—he ratted you to the cops, and each of you claimed it was the other until Sonia stepped in and said you’d both been with her.”
“So?” Reggie said. He sounded blasé, but his shoulders were tense.
“So I learned the only way to tell you apart was Stanley’s birthmark on his left temple.” It was tiny, barely the size of a sunflower seed, but visible in the security photo.
“Stanley drove straight through from Sedona, stayed here with Cassie, and drove home.”
“You can’t prove that,” Sonia cried.
“I can’t prove the driving part,” I agreed, “but the birthmark is there. Anyway, the SA had to release Gregory. The documents I pulled from Roccamena’s desk were Harvey’s printout showing how Horvath had been defrauding the pension fund.
“Horvath created phantom employees. He was sending their benefits to a bank in Saint Kitts. Roccamena finally figured that out—he had a forensic accountant audit the books. He confronted Horvath, killed him, and left him on the warehouse floor. When Donny came in an hour later and started knocking over the inventory, it was gravy. No way to prove how Horvath died or who killed him, but Roccamena and Harvey must have fought—blood from both was on the report. It was good enough for the cops. They figured Roccamena did the damage to the warehouse himself to cover the crime.”
“So Sonia and Donny saved me again.” That was Gregory. He looked better in jeans and a T-shirt than he had in the jail, but he was still slouched in his chair, looking at the floor. “I’m such a fuckup.”
Sonia went over to him and put an arm around his neck. “You’re not a fuckup, Gregory. You just need a little extra support. That’s what we’re here for.”
“What I’d really like to know, Sonia, is why the hell you put me through that song and dance of hiring me, when you Litvaks already had the whole story covered.”
No one spoke for a long moment until Donny said, “She didn’t know. It was all I could do to talk the clean virtuous twins into helping out. Reggie made me promise not to tell Sonia—he didn’t want word getting back to his investors.”
“I have a life,” Reggie snapped. “You can’t grow up, Donny. I gave up all that crap when I left South Chicago. It was only when you told me you were going ahead regardless that I got Stanley involved, and he hated it as much as I did. But we needed him here for the time stamp, and so he came, but he sure as hell won’t do it again, and neither will I.”
“Oh, Reggie,” Sonia said reproachfully. “Your own brother? If he was in danger again I can’t believe you’d let him suffer.”
“Then keep him out of danger.” Reggie scowled.
After another pause, Donny said, “I hear the whole company has shut down. I thought Roccamena’s kids could keep it going.”
“They could if they had the capital,” I said. “Ajax canceled the bridge loan they’d provided while they waited for their adjusters to figure out the bottom line on the claim. Roccamena’s is gone, which is sad. They had a wonderful whisky supply.”
Donny grinned. “Someone told me you were a whisky drinker. I just happened to have a case of Oban delivered to me. I kept a bottle for you. Along with whatever Sonia’s paying you, of course.”
11
I set the bottle of Oban on my dining-room table, in between two of the red wineglasses my mother had brought with her from Italy all those years ago. Next to them I set my framed photo of my parents, not the formal one—Tony in his dress blues, Gabriella in her burnt velvet concert gown—but a snapshot I’d taken with the Brownie camera they’d given me for my tenth birthday. They were sitting in plastic garden chairs in our minute garden on South Houston, fingers loosely linked. Tony was watching her, his beloved wife, while Gabriella smiled at some private thought.
I wondered what my dad would have done with Donny, if he’d have let him off the hook or made the arrest. Would he have seen him as someone protecting his vulnerable brother, or just the punk who never even committed grand enough crimes to qualify for a federal prosecutor?
“It was the dress, Mama,” I explained to Gabriella. “Why couldn’t Mr. Litvak let Sonia have that one beautiful thing? Maybe her life would have moved onto a different track if she’d seen herself as someone special, someone who got to wear that dress.”
*Although I grew up in rural Kansas and V. I. Warshawski comes from the South Side of Chicago, I always feel freest in writing about her when I can mine her memories of the people in her old neighborhood. “Love & Other Crimes” grew out of my own revenge fantasy: a person I’m close to was fired from a job where new management was getting rid of long-standing employees to cut payroll costs. I thought if I was half as good a friend as I wanted to be, I would have wreaked havoc on the offending business. Instead, it all came out on the page, and in the Litvak family, who turn dysfunction into an art form.
Joseph S. Walker is a college instructor living in Bloomington, Indiana. He has a PhD in American literature from Purdue University. He is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, Sisters in Crime, and the Private Eye Writers of America. His stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, Hoosier Noir, Tough, and a number of other magazines and anthologies. In 2019 he won the Al Blanchard Award and the Bill Crider Prize for Short Fiction. Recent and upcoming anthologies from small presses (which are helping to keep short crime fiction alive out of love and dedication, and are richly deserving of support) containing his stories include Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir (Down & Out Books), Peace, Love, and Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Sixties (Untreed Reads), Cozy Villages of Death (Camden Park Press), and Heartbreaks and Half-Truths: 22 Stories of Mystery and Suspense (Superior Shores Press).
ETTA AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Joseph S. Walker
After she left the truck stop south of Jacksonville, Etta kept passing signs with names she’d heard all her life from TV and people with the time and money for vacations. Orlando. Tampa. Daytona Beach. It all felt imaginary, but then Florida felt imaginary, like a giant billboard for itself. She passed a lot of palm trees before she accepted that they were real. She couldn’t always see the ocean off to her left, but she knew it was there, knew it by the wind and a smell that would never touch Iowa. The sky was big and blue and untouched until the late afternoon, when mountainous clouds started to rise up out of the east. It was like driving into a 3D antidepressant commercial, but she felt an itch at the back of her neck all day. She was cutting herself off. There was only one direction to go now, and if they found her, no place else to run.
> Of course, running wasn’t really the idea.
She pulled off in Boca Raton. It was still light out, but she had no chance of making Key West before sunset, and her back wouldn’t take another night in the car. She found a run-down motel, not one of the big chains, a few blocks away from the beach. The Sandcastle Lodge. It was a long L, two stories high, sheltered from the main drag by a mini-mall and backed by a big, abandoned lot full of scrub pine trees. She’d put up with the roaches for the sake of a desk clerk who wouldn’t find cash strange.
Her room was on the first floor, near the swimming pool tucked into the elbow of the building. A man in the pool was drinking a can of beer and roughhousing with a couple of kids, while a plump woman perched on one of the deck chairs made dismayed noises every time one of them went under the water. The only other person near the pool was a teenage girl, sleeping on her stomach on a lounger, wearing sunglasses and a red swimsuit that said she thought her body was a little slimmer than it actually was. Etta only glanced at her as she walked by, but the clearly defined bruises on the girl’s upper arm jumped at her like they were lit up in neon. She’d seen their match often enough in her own mirror. Four angry purple blemishes perfectly staking out the shape of a man’s hand. The girl’s arm was the most real thing she’d seen all day.
The room was as bad as she’d expected, but the sheets were clean and the water in the shower hot enough to satisfy. She let it pound onto her aching shoulders for more than half an hour. There’d been a time when she could have driven for four straight days and then partied all night, but fifty was creeping up on her a lot faster than she’d like. She dried herself with the surprisingly adequate towel and fell across the bed, intending to get up in a few minutes and go in search of some kind of dinner.
The next thing Etta was aware of was a heavy thud that shook the whole bed. She jerked upright, with no idea for a moment of where she was or what was happening. She was nude, sprawled across the bedspread, shivering with cold. She could see the outline of the window behind the drapes, but the room was pitch dark. Heart pounding, she tried to figure out what had woken her.
There was a yell from behind the headboard, a deep man’s voice. She couldn’t make out the words, but the anger was clear. It was cut into by another voice, a female voice, this one pleading and tearful. The second voice got out only a few words before the initial thud happened again: Something heavy being thrown up against the wall. She remembered now—the imprint of those fingers on that arm.
She sat still for the next ten minutes, listening to what could have been the soundtrack of most of her life. At some point she noticed the faintly glowing dial of the clock beside the bed. If it was remotely accurate, it was just past three in the morning.
When the noises ended she still did not move, unable to decide if she could still hear crying from the room next door or if her mind was filling that in. Eventually she stood, moving as quietly as possible to the chair where her backpack rested. A T-shirt and shorts were the closest thing she had to sleeping wear and she pulled them on. Then she stuck her hand back in the bag and felt the grip of the gun. She held it for a long minute, biting her lip, then went back to the bed and crawled under the blankets. She brought the backpack and put it next to her pillow and stared into the darkness, willing the room next door to stay silent.
Shooting Tyler had been like a power outage. That instant when everything falls dark and all the hums of a house, the ones you don’t hear until they’re not there to hear, end. She’d put the barrel against the base of his skull and pulled the trigger and he’d simply dropped, first face forward onto the table and then rolling to the floor. He didn’t flop or gasp for breath or spit out bitter final words. He didn’t even bleed that much. He just . . . stopped. Twenty minutes later Etta was on the interstate outside Davenport, deciding where she would stop to steal a different car. Tyler had taught her how to steal cars. He’d taught her about guns too. He was a good teacher. That didn’t come close to making up for all the things he was bad at.
The knock at the door the next morning was so light that Etta wasn’t sure she’d heard it. Just dressed after another shower, she was looking out the bathroom window at the wild tangle of trees and vines that ended about ten feet from the motel, picking out all the plants she’d never seen before.
Surely the cops wouldn’t knock?
She looked through the peephole and wasn’t really surprised to see the girl. For a moment she just stood with her hand on the knob, trying again to project silence, but the girl must have heard something because she knocked again.
Etta opened the door a few inches. “Can I help you?”
“Um, yeah,” the girl said. She was wearing the sunglasses again, but with jeans and a T-shirt with sleeves long enough to obscure the bruises Etta had seen. “I lost my ID? And I was wondering if I could give you some money to go to the liquor store for me.” She pointed at the mini-mall. “There’s one right at the road there.”
“Lost your ID,” Etta said. “Clerk didn’t believe that either, right?”
The girl just stared blankly at the door.
“It’s a little early in the day for a beer buzz,” Etta said. She was about to add “dear” but bit it off, horrified to be talking like an old woman.
“I don’t need beer,” the girl blurted. She shifted from foot to foot. “Ma’am, it’s not for me. Honest. Tone . . . the man I’m with . . . he wants me to get him a bottle of Jack. I tried yesterday and . . . look, he’s gonna be real mad if I don’t get it again today.”
“The man you’re with,” Etta said. “Not your husband.”
“I ain’t married,” the girl said forcefully.
Etta sighed. She wanted to close the door. She wanted to crawl back on the bed and just wait until somebody found her. Instead she said, “Is there a place to eat around here?”
The girl cocked her head. “There’s a restaurant next to the liquor store.”
Etta nodded. “I’ll make you a deal. Come have breakfast with me and I’ll buy the liquor.”
The restaurant was a diner where everything was coated with a thin layer of grease. All the employees were slender young dark-skinned men who shouted Spanish at each other and seemed perpetually annoyed by the customers wanting attention. The girl left her sunglasses on and kept touching the bottle of booze in its plain brown bag as if to assure herself it was real. She’d insisted on going to buy it before eating, though she had waited outside.
Etta ordered eggs and toast and watched the girl work on a stack of pancakes. “So, Tone,” Etta said carefully. “Is he underage too?”
“No, ma’am,” the girl said. “He’s old. In his thirties.”
This definition of old made Etta decide she’d been ma’amed enough. “Call me Etta,” she said. “So why doesn’t he buy his own whiskey?”
The girl shrugged. “He’s real busy.”
“Too busy to go into a liquor store right outside his door?”
“He’s supposed to be meeting a guy.” The girl pushed her food around a little. “He’s gone all day waiting for him.”
Etta nodded as though that made sense. “But what does he expect you to do if they’re carding?”
The girl didn’t say anything. She stared down at her plate.
“Let’s try this again,” Etta said. “My name is Etta, and you are—”
“Grace,” the girl said quietly.
“It’s nice to meet you, Grace.” Etta took a sip from her coffee and waited.
Grace finished the pancakes. She put the fork down and took off the sunglasses and looked Etta in the face for the first time. Etta carefully didn’t react to the black eye she had known she would see.
“He gets off on making me do stuff. He told me to shoplift,” Grace said. “Only I tried that yesterday and they caught me. That’s why I waited outside. So then he told me.” She looked out the window. “He told me to offer to blow the clerk.”
A waiter came up and slapped the check down on the tabl
e, where part of it immediately turned translucent with grease. Grace put her sunglasses back on. Etta dropped a twenty on top of the check. “Do you have to stay at the hotel all day?” she asked.
Grace shook her head. “Tone won’t be back until late.”
“I thought I’d walk down to the beach,” Etta said. She stood up. “Join me?”
They went back to the hotel first, so Grace could drop off the bottle and Etta could pay for another night. She got directions to the beach from the clerk, who warned her not to go into the lot behind the hotel. “Snakes back in there,” the man said in an accent Etta didn’t even try to identify. “Gators.”
“I think he was putting me on,” she told Grace as they walked.
The girl shrugged. “He told us the same when we checked in,” she said. “Then a couple of days ago a gator ate some lady’s dog a few blocks from here.”
Unreal Florida again. Etta tried to imagine scaly monsters strolling around in Davenport and people just accepting it.
The beach seemed unreal too. They sat a few yards above the waterline, Grace propped up against her backpack, watching the waves come in and dead-eyed gulls scurrying down onto the wet sand as the water receded. It was still early in the day on Monday and there were only a few other people around, mostly just watching the water themselves.
Etta thought she could watch it all day. “I’ve never seen the ocean before,” she told Grace. “I’ve spent my whole life in Iowa.”
Etta dug her hand into the sand, looking for shells. Souvenirs, she thought, then wondered when she expected to ever enjoy such a thing. She’d always thought of sand as light, but this was heavy, shifting, hard to walk through. The breeze from offshore kept the sun from being too hot and she was mesmerized by the perpetual motion of the water.