The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

by C. J. Box

  When Lionel was released from prison a few months back and then disappeared himself, people figured he didn’t come back because they thought he couldn’t. See, Lionel never had a true second in command, unless you count C.T. It wasn’t my father’s way to share one bit of power. And when he was sent away to serve that two-year stretch, C.T. was in no position to hold on to what Lionel had built. It just wasn’t in him.

  So in Lionel’s absence, a foulmouthed and filthy-minded creep nobody much liked named Selby Cluxton rose up and took everything over. Selby had always been a fat and greedy low-level dealer held down by my father, most likely because Lionel knew the threat he could become. But once Lionel was gone, there was nobody stopping him. Toola worked for Selby. Most everybody that sold pills, weed, or powder around here did.

  Creep though he was, it said something about Selby that people would think he could keep Lionel from coming back. But it said more about how quick people are to forget. Because I knew Lionel wasn’t scared of Selby or scared of coming back. Lionel wasn’t afraid of anything, because nothing in his life had shown him he ever had reason to be. I knew Lionel wasn’t avoiding Selby, he was only out of state for a little bit, repairing the relationships he needed to keep him with a steady supply of drugs to sell. He’d be back sooner or later to take over again.

  And if people had a little more information, if they knew what I knew, then they’d start to believe that time was now. After all, it was Selby Cluxton that was laying dead in that Cadillac.

  * * *

  The sheriff’s station might have been impressive when they built it fifty years ago, but I doubt it. All I knew for sure was that now it was a squat, faded red-brick building that was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, and looked like something God had squished with his thumb. I stayed away as much as I could, but I didn’t have that option now.

  Inside the station Billy Price was reading the newspaper, his long legs kicked up on his desk, looking as thin and limp as a string hanging from a balloon. Billy had a deputy’s star and the title that came with it, but he was seldom allowed to carry a gun or go out in the field. Only the sheriff knew why that was, but everyone acquainted with Billy agreed that it was probably a good idea anyway.

  Now Billy looked me over lazily and yawned. “Where you been at all day?”

  “Keeping the world safe from outlaws and Methodists,” I said.

  Billy laughed, a little too hard. He always did, as if he wanted to prove he could recognize a joke. You’d be surprised who gets hired for jobs that nobody particularly wants.

  “The sheriff in?” I asked. I was feeling anxious. If I was going to do anything on Selby Cluxton’s murder, I had to hustle. There was only so much time before the Cadillac would get discovered. Somebody skipping work to go fishing or poach deer would find it sooner or later. And then they’d box me out and there’d be nothing I could do. Before that happened, I wanted to grease the skids that pointed to Lionel. Give them a head start, so to speak. And I needed to do all this without telling anybody about that dead body.

  “Sheriff’s in his office,” Billy said, nodding toward the back. “Same as always.”

  Sheriff Gutherie was in fact in his office, hidden behind three tall stacks of paperwork on his desk. The sheriff was a good man, as far as that went, but he seemed constantly vexed, like a man who had to spend each day trying to shovel another hundred pounds of garbage into a ten-pound bag. There was a rumor every year that he was going to retire, and those rumors were getting stronger now.

  “Okay,” he said, after hearing what C.T. told me, “your father’s back.” He shrugged. “Probably was going to happen sooner or later.”

  I glanced at the door like I didn’t want to be overheard. “What worries me is, he’s not exactly the type to take to rehabilitation.”

  “You’re probably right on that. But we can’t arrest a man for what he might do.”

  It was a weird feeling, not reporting the murder. But there was no other way.

  “We can follow him,” I said. “That’d help keep him on the straight and narrow.”

  “How am I going to do that? And who am I supposed to do it with?”

  “What about Billy?”

  “Deputy Price is good right where he is, sitting at his desk reading the paper cover to cover every day. We shouldn’t strain that brain of his with anything more difficult.”

  The way the sheriff folded his hands across his gut and leaned back in his chair, I knew he had made his decision and I had lost. But I had to play my role anyway.

  “I’m just worried it’s only a matter of time,” I said. “Before he’s back to doing his dirt.”

  “And then we’ll investigate it when he does. Look, I appreciate you telling me this, I know it’s hard for you and you only want to keep him out of trouble. But we can hardly deal with the crimes that have happened, let alone the ones that haven’t yet.”

  The sheriff set a chaw in his lip and scooted the tallest pile of paperwork closer to him. His way of saying goodbye. There wouldn’t be any tail on Lionel, and that would make my job that much tougher. For a second my nerves got to me and I wondered if the sheriff could be in Lionel’s pocket. But the sheriff was cautious and responsible to a fault, the kind of man who gets more pleasure from reserving his cemetery plot than buying a new pickup. The sheriff wouldn’t take a dirty dollar, I didn’t think.

  He looked up from his work, as if surprised to still find me there. I stepped out, like a scolded child, and shut his door. I stood for a moment in the empty hallway, thinking.

  That Lionel killed Selby Cluxton would make sense to everybody; they wouldn’t need a calculator to add it all up. The problem was, guesswork would be all they had, and that wasn’t near enough to convict anybody, let alone someone as slick as Lionel. Five decades of committing every crime you could imagine and the only time the jury got to say guilty was when he beat that college boy, and that was only because an off-duty highway patrolman drinking in the corner of the bar happened to see it all. Unless you got that kind of luck, you need confessions, physical evidence, eyewitnesses.

  For now I had none of that. And with no tail on him, Lionel would be free to go and do as he pleased. But that didn’t mean I was quitting.

  On my way out of the station, I rapped my knuckles on Billy’s desk to wake him up.

  “Come with me, deputy,” I said. “You just got a new assignment.”

  * * *

  Billy was nervous, and that’s without me even mentioning the murder. I explained it to him again.

  “All I’m asking is, back my play,” I told him. We were sitting in Billy’s borrowed cruiser in the empty parking lot of a bankrupt lumberyard, while my patrol car idled a few feet away. “There’s no risk in it for you. It works, you get all the credit. If it doesn’t, nobody will ever hear about it.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “You want to get out in the field more than once a month? You want to carry a gun without asking permission? Then you got to give the sheriff a reason to believe in you.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Besides, Joe might not be sheriff much longer. Who knows who the next sheriff might be. Doing this would go a long way in impressing whoever that is. And look, this won’t sweat you any. You see something, you call for backup. You don’t, you go on home. It’s gonna be easy as shelling peas. You used to do that for your mama, right?”

  Billy laughed, too hard again. It didn’t give me a good feeling, but there was nothing that could be done now. All I could do was hope that the next time I saw Billy he’d be accepting handshakes and backslaps from the rest of the department, not tightening the noose around my neck.

  I got out and tapped the hood and Billy drove off. It was time for me to go find Lionel.

  * * *

  The new girl that lived with my father was glassy-eyed and talked real slow, like her mouth had a limp. I call her a girl, but she must have been twenty, standing in the doorway looking thin as a pro
mise and wearing only an old white T-shirt. She saw my badge and set her mouth and you could almost see her trying to remember her line.

  “Lionel?” she said. “Lionel’s not here.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “He trained me to say the same thing five years before you were ever born.” Then I edged past her into the house.

  I figured if Lionel was back in town and wanting to lay low, he’d head to this hunting cabin north of town that he’d bought a decade before. My guess was right.

  Lionel was sitting at the kitchen table working over a pen and paper, next to a pile of safety-deposit keys. When I came in he looked up for only a moment, then he went back to work as if I’d arrived a few minutes early for an appointment instead of this being the first time we’d seen each other since the morning the judge handed him a two-year stretch.

  The funny thing about that day was, everybody in the courtroom expected him to get at least five years. But then, for reasons nobody knew but I could guess at, the judge dismissed the most serious charges and gave him the minimum. The prosecutor looked like he’d just learned that his wife had run away with the local preacher and took the dog too, but I could have told him it wasn’t personal, he was just another in a long line of men to get rolled by my father.

  Now I set my hat on the kitchen table, sat down, and wiped my face. “Boy, it’s hot out,” I said. “If we don’t get any rain soon, the trees will start bribing the dogs.”

  Lionel kept working. “You come to talk about the weather?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  Lionel looked the same as ever. Broad shoulders sticking out from underneath a cut-off black Harley T-shirt, long white hair in a ragged ponytail, and pale blue eyes that always seemed to look right through you. He had a few more tattoos than before, but that was all. He was still bigger than me, and showed no sign of slowing down.

  A small fan pointing at Lionel was the only sound in the room. He continued to ignore me. I realized I was chewing my nails and I wiped my hand across my leg, disgusted with myself. How long could you live with a man that you knew killed your mother? A day? A week? I did twelve years. And leaving home doesn’t fix anything.

  I nodded toward the front room. “What’s this one’s name?”

  “Who, Keely?”

  “Yeah, Keely. You tell her she’s only the latest in a series?”

  “I don’t know that that would surprise her.”

  “She be surprised to know how the other ones fared?”

  Lionel kept working. “That’s a better question for her than me,” he said. “If you’re really wanting to know, then you ought to hustle on in there and ask, because if I meet my guess there’ll be no talking to her in another twenty minutes.”

  “Guess that’s what it takes to keep them when you’re more than twice their age.”

  “No, but it does save a lot of time and hassle.” Lionel got up, stuck the keys in his pockets, and shoved the papers in a drawer. “Speaking of hassle, looks like you’re still as much of one as ever. I see you haven’t lost your taste for judging people.”

  “I come by my self-righteousness honestly, through prayer and hard work.”

  Lionel leaned back against the kitchen counter and looked at me, his eyes running over me cold and flat, completely at ease, like a rattlesnake sunning itself on a rock.

  “That’s why you never accomplished anything,” he said. “Too busy making jokes. What you never learned about women is, they’re as disposable as socks—​when they get too old or worn out, or hell, you just get sick of them, there’s no use keeping them around. Now, tell me what you’re here for or get the hell out.”

  I wanted to slug him then, but that would have ruined everything. I get a smart mouth sometimes, but Lionel always held the trump card. I took a breath, tapped my hat against the table, and tried to appear relaxed. I had to be careful. Lionel was slick, too slick for me to see every move. I had to keep things simple, not try to prove the whole case right here.

  “How long you been in town for?”

  Lionel shrugged, like the question bored him. “Maybe a week.”

  That didn’t square with what C.T. told me, but I expected the lie. I didn’t know when Selby Cluxton was murdered, but by the looks of him, it had been within the last few days. Before I went too far, before I got more people involved, I had to know for sure that Lionel didn’t have a card hidden up his sleeve, some airtight lie that put him out of town.

  “What have you been doing since you been back?” I said.

  “Fixing this cabin up, what do you think? C.T. was supposed to take care of things, but turns out he’s not as reliable as I’d expected.”

  “That’s all you been doing, just playing handyman?”

  “C.T. and Keely and me, we been here all day every day working.”

  So C.T. and Keely would be Lionel’s alibi. Everybody knew they’d repeat whatever lie he taught them.

  “Nobody’s seen you for six months,” I said. “People thought you were gone for good.”

  Lionel grinned. “Damn, son, almost sounds like you wished I stayed away.”

  “Wouldn’t have cried any. Especially since I know what you’re planning.”

  “That right?” Lionel shrugged. “Plenty of people thought they had me all figured out. But I’m still around and they’re not.”

  That was true. And it worried me.

  “I know what you’re planning,” I said. “It’s not hard to figure. But I’m giving you a chance. Clear out, tonight, leave town and don’t come back. This county is closed to you.”

  “Closed to me. This county I’ve run longer than you’ve been alive.” Lionel shook his head. “What is it about you that’s always made you so eager to spit into the wind?”

  “There’s going to be a raid on all your stash spots tomorrow. Starting with the loft in C.T.’s barn. You’re done here. I’m giving you a chance to run instead of going back to prison for a longer stretch than two years. Don’t screw it up.”

  “And why would you be telling me this for?”

  “Because you’re my father.”

  Lionel laughed. “You develop a lot of love for your daddy while he was gone?”

  “No. But I aim to be sheriff of this county. And I can’t do that with a jailbird father in prison for dope.”

  “You think they’d elect you anyway? All them voters know your blood.”

  “I’d like to take my chances. And they’re a damn sight better if you’re a million miles from here.”

  Lionel thought that over for a moment, then sat back down. His hands looked like something you’d see in a zoo, and he cracked his knuckles one by one. Those hands could hit you hard enough to shake your life loose. I knew it, because I’d seen it.

  Suddenly his hand shot out and I jerked back. But Lionel was only reaching for my hat.

  His lips smiled but his eyes stayed lethal. I hated myself for flinching like that. He set my hat on his head, then took it off and tossed it back on the table.

  “When, exactly?”

  “They plan to hit you in the morning, at dawn,” I said, trying to act more relaxed than I felt. “When they figure you’ll be asleep. That means you got to leave tonight.”

  Lionel sighed and waved his hand, dismissing me. “All right, then,” he told me. “You’ve said your piece. For all the good it will do.”

  I didn’t know if I’d accomplished anything, but I’d given it a shot. I stood to go as Keely walked in. She tried to slip past the table to the sink, but Lionel grabbed her by the hip and made her sit on his lap. In the soft kitchen light, I could see a dim yellow bruise shining under her left eye like an ignored caution signal.

  “Look at her,” Lionel said. He grabbed her face and turned it toward me. “Bet you can’t remember, but she’s just the spitting image of your mother.”

  * * *

  Lionel wouldn’t run. But he wouldn’t sit still and lose all his dope either, and working to save his product would tie him
up for a bit. If I was lucky, that was enough time to put me a half step ahead of him. But something told me that was as likely as finding a box of day-old sunshine.

  I rolled my window down and lit a cigarette, cruising empty backcountry roads as the sun began to set. Growing up, on hot summer days we’d jump off the highest cliffs we could find into cold spring quarries. And every time I did it, there was a feeling halfway down that everything was moving too fast and I couldn’t quite believe how I’d put myself in that position. That’s how I felt now. I needed to talk to Toola.

  I caught her just as she was locking up the house, on her way out for the night. We sat on the porch swing together, listening to the crickets and watching the chickens hunt them in the stiff yellow grass.

  “You been out playing hero?” she said.

  “Do I look like any kind of hero to you?”

  She grinned. “Sometimes salt looks like sugar.”

  Could I trust Toola? was the question. Sometimes I think your feelings mostly lead you into bad places, especially when you’ve spent your whole life alone and searching. But then, you never know if those feelings are worth anything unless you try.

  “Selby Cluxton is dead,” I said.

  Toola’s eyes went wide and she quit trying to light her cigarette and just looked at me.

  “I found him, this afternoon. Off of Paint Creek Road. You’re the only one I’ve told, but the sheriff will find out soon enough.”

  Toola looked confused. “How come you didn’t tell the sheriff ?”

  “People will be smart enough to guess my father did it,” I said. “But they won’t be smart enough to prove it. Not without some help. I want to make sure they can, but I need time to do it. I don’t want him to wiggle out of this one.”