The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

by C. J. Box

  I waited to see how Toola would take that, but she was smart and a big girl; she had to be to survive the way she had. She didn’t even blink.

  “Lionel’s back,” she said.

  “He’s back,” I said. “Look, there’s a lot going on and I’m not sure how it’s all going to play out. Why I’m telling you is, you ought to lay low for a while, until things die down. I don’t think you’re in any danger, but better safe than sorry.”

  “I got people expecting me. Customers. I don’t know if—”

  “They can wait a day or two. It won’t kill them any. This thing with Selby, it’s going to shake up a lot of people, there’s no telling how they’ll react. Or what Lionel will do.”

  Toola stood up and stuffed the pack of cigarettes in her jeans. It wasn’t in her nature to rely on anybody. “Shoot, if it’s that bad, maybe I ought to leave town,” she said.

  “It’s not so bad as that yet,” I said. “And if it ever is, then I’ll be there running right behind you. But for now, go stay at your mother’s old place. Nothing bad will happen there.”

  Toola paused and looked away. I stood up, sweating and nervous. How does a woman decide to trust a man? Why would they ever? The moment stretched. Then, finally, Toola nodded. That’s all, just nodded one time. I knew enough about her experience with men to know that even that much was harder than it seemed. I just hoped I wasn’t going to be the next man to let her down.

  * * *

  Toola packed quick and went on her way, and for a moment I felt about as alone as I ever had in my life. I wanted to stay at the house with all its reminders of her, but that made me feel weak and anyway it was too far from the action. So instead I drove back to that bankrupt lumberyard where me and Billy had met a few hours before.

  It was full dark now and my mouth was dry. My brain was working on overdrive but not in a good way. Things were in motion and there was nothing for me to do now but wait. That gave me too much time to think and worry, remembering all that I knew of my father.

  I kept thinking of a dealer named Donald Ray Wallace the most. One time, years ago, when I was little, Donald Ray got tired of working for my father. In fact, he got so tired that he went to the police station up in Harris County and offered to set my father up, wear a wire and get him on tape making a big heroin buy. The cop up there told Donald Ray that was a good idea, the cop told him to go about his business as usual and he’d call him when the warrants and such were in place. A few days later the cop told Donald Ray to meet him out at the Milk Creek mines, that he’d give him his instructions and wire him up there. Except when Donald Ray drove out to those old abandoned mines the cop wasn’t there. Only Lionel was. And nobody ever saw Donald Ray again.

  Lionel didn’t live on luck, is my point. He was smarter and meaner and willing to do more than anybody I’d ever met. He had to be, to stay on top as long as he had. Nothing I’d ever done in my life could compare.

  Was Billy Price leading me to the same fate as Donald Ray? Were there men like that cop in Harris County working in my department? Was there something I was missing? I couldn’t say. But there’s times in life that the world calls you to shoot your shot, and this was it for me.

  My radio cackled to life. Billy was calling me in.

  * * *

  I put my flashers on and floored the gas, running red lights and passing every car in my way. Before long town was far behind me. Heat lightning shot across the sky, but everything else was black. Miles rolled past just that quick, then I turned off Cross Creek Road and headed into the woods down a ragged dirt track that I hadn’t seen in more than twenty years.

  How many times in your life do you know that you’re approaching a moment that will change everything in your world, either for the good or for the bad? That old feeling, falling quickly through space and wondering how I put myself in that position, came over me again. My heart was pounding, thinking of Donald Ray Wallace, my mother, of all the times Lionel had come out on top. I crested that last big hill and saw cherry lights from patrol cars—​one, two, three, four in all. I prayed Billy Price had come through.

  I parked on the perimeter and got out of my cruiser, with my holster unbuckled and my hand by my gun. As if that would help me. Billy came running up, like he’d been waiting for me.

  “It was exactly how you said it’d be,” he told me. “Just exactly.”

  His eyes shone wide and his smile too, like some kind of game-show winner. My heart tripped a little, in a good way. But I kept my hand near my gun all the same.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “I sat up on that hill like you told me and on about midnight here comes your father with the other two, and they start unloading product off their truck into that bunker.” Billy motioned to the other deputies working somewhere behind him. “I got dispatch to call up a couple of the guys real quiet, and we ambushed them as they came out of the bunker for the last time. We got all of them, the girl, C.T., and your father. It was just as simple as you said it’d be.”

  Billy couldn’t keep the smile off his face. I let out a shaky breath and buckled my holster. I don’t think Billy saw me. He was in his own world now.

  “You know what to tell everybody from here on out?” Any screwups could still kill me.

  “Oh, sure, that’s the easiest part,” Billy said. “I’m gonna write it up how you told me to. On my way home, I see some jerk swerving all over and I go after him. I lose him in these hills but then I see some lights off in the distance and decide to investigate. That’s when I see your father and that girl and C.T. unloading a bunch of dope into that old bomb shelter.”

  Billy laid it out like a hard-won war story, and in time, with enough retellings, I knew he’d come to believe it too. Seeing Billy so confident and sure, seeing the flashing lights and the deputies securing the scene, I tingled, beginning to wonder for the first time if maybe everything really would work out. The bomb shelter was Lionel’s oldest, most secret warehouse. I had come here once, as a child, when Lionel had to unload product in some kind of emergency. I kept that secret in my mind for years, protecting it like a precious inheritance. I didn’t know where his other stash spots were, not anymore, but I had a hunch that he’d move it all here if he was worried about a raid. It looked like I was right.

  “Listen,” Billy said. “I appreciate you bringing this to me. I know it wasn’t easy on you, it being your father and all.”

  I shrugged, kept my face blank, and retreated to the safety of cliché. If nothing else, I know my role. “What’s right is right. People can’t sell dope in this county. I just don’t want anybody knowing I was behind my own daddy getting locked up.”

  Billy nodded, looking sympathetic, then he pointed to a patrol car underneath an ancient blue spruce tree. “He’s sitting right there, if you want to talk to him.”

  I thought about that for a second, then decided I did.

  Lionel sat in the back of the patrol car, looking angry but in control. The deputy standing watch nodded and wandered off a respectable distance. I leaned over Lionel’s window, took in the scene surrounding us for a moment, then looked inside and locked eyes with him. Seeing my father handcuffed in the back of a patrol car and knowing I put him there, it felt like the enormous weight that had been crushing my chest and my heart for most of my life had started to lift just a little.

  “Thought you were leaving town,” I said.

  “I don’t expect that’s exactly true.”

  “No,” I told him, “it isn’t.”

  Lionel leaned back, looking comfortable, but that didn’t bother me as much as I’d have thought it would. It was all out there in the open between us now.

  “I got two sons, and each one is dumber than the next,” Lionel said.

  “Is that a fact?”

  Lionel shook his head. “You must think this will make you sheriff. You’re so dumb you can’t see that Keely and C.T. will tell everyone those are their drugs.” He shrugged. “This is nothing, this will be ju
st a parole violation for me. I’ll do six months at most.”

  “Is that a fact?” I said again.

  Lionel nodded. “None of this will stick to me. It never does.”

  I looked at him and smiled. And my smile got wider and wider, so wide that it felt like my face would crack. And my father looked at me, really looked at me, for maybe the first time in his life. And when he did, I leaned in close and whispered in a voice as clear and cleansing as a mountain creek: “Old man, it’s not the drugs you should be worried about.”

  * * *

  I left Billy to his paperwork and the slaps on the back. He didn’t know it yet, but he’d be getting a lot more of both soon. Who knew, maybe before I was done Billy would be the next sheriff, him the deputy nobody much trusted with a gun.

  As for me, there wasn’t much else to do. Just the last two dangerous parts.

  First I went back to the Cadillac and Selby Cluxton’s body one more time. Nobody saw me. I mean, Lord, I hope not. Then, when I was done there, I went looking for Toola.

  * * *

  I found her at her mother’s old house, like she said she would be, sitting on the front porch steps, as if she had been waiting for me all night. She wasn’t wearing makeup or any colored contacts now, and her eyes were a soft blue-gray. She looked more beautiful than I could ever remember.

  “They caught Lionel moving a mess of drugs,” I said. “He’s on ice now. He will be for at least a couple months. It’s awful hard to buy judges or intimidate witnesses from prison, even for Lionel. And that’s all the time we’ll need.”

  “Need for what?”

  Toola looked at me for a second, waiting for an answer, and I felt that tingle again, that belief that it was all going to work out. Then I put her necklace in her hand, the necklace I found ripped and broken beneath the driver’s seat of Selby Cluxton’s Cadillac yesterday morning. I didn’t know for certain why she shot that disgusting creep or why her necklace would be ripped and lost right there. There’s a danger in letting your mind run wild. And there’s a danger too in asking for explanations.

  “Tomorrow morning you need to go to the sheriff’s station and ask for Deputy Price,” I said. “Tell him that Selby Cluxton is missing and you haven’t seen him for a couple days. And that the last thing he said was, he was going to meet with Lionel to settle a disagreement.”

  I took a deep breath and kept going.

  “If they don’t find Selby in a couple days, I’ll make an anonymous call. I’ll tell them about seeing Selby’s Cadillac off of Paint Creek Road. They won’t find anything of yours there, I made sure of that. But they’ll find Lionel’s pack of Chesterfields on the dash. I made sure of that too.”

  Toola looked at me and she didn’t nod or say anything. There wasn’t a need to, not anymore. But after a moment she smiled.

  Because to answer Toola’s question, I still didn’t know if I was the type of person who could kill a man. But I knew for certain now that I could send a man to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. I could do that if it meant getting revenge for the woman I had always loved. And if it meant protecting the woman, I believed I was starting to. Lionel would learn that about me soon enough, but he wouldn’t be able to complain. That’s the way the world works, after all. Like he taught me years ago, what the truth is and what you can prove, they’re only second cousins.

  BRIAN COX

  The Surrogate Initiative

  FROM Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

  Cassandra Howard walked around the small band of protesters gathered across the street from the courthouse. The handwritten signs they raised read JURIES ARE HUMAN! and MY PEER IS NOT A DROID!

  The Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in downtown Detroit was a rectangular cement monolith, its brutal bulk squatting over nearly an entire city block on St. Antoine Street. Every time she visited the Third Judicial Circuit Court, Cassandra was reminded of an enormous mausoleum built to endure centuries.

  She climbed the steps and entered the courthouse. She swiped her hand under the yellow UR? reader that registered the I-AM chip implanted at the base of her right thumb before passing through the softly humming maze of body scanners. Security drones hovered in the lobby, running facial identification checks on the crowd as Cassandra crossed to the elevators.

  The chief judge’s chambers were on the sixth floor.

  As the elevator doors whisked shut, Cassandra recognized a colleague crossing the lobby. Forrest Latham walked with his hands in his pockets and his head tilted to the side as if he were considering an entertaining thought. His stride was slow and leisurely. He carried the air of a bemused man who had nowhere to be anytime soon and for whom everything came easy. Cassandra found his charm and confidence to be as annoying as it was attractive. In graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, he once asked her to dinner, but she had lied out of nervousness and told him she didn’t date white men. He hadn’t approached her again, but she’d felt self-conscious around him ever since. She knew he had been recruited to work on the Surrogate program—​there were, after all, only so many AI psychologists—​but what was he doing in Detroit?

  Cassandra closed her eyes briefly as she realized Forrest was likely the consultant for the prosecution.

  “Terrific,” she muttered.

  Then she inhaled deeply and exhaled. It would be fine. She hadn’t had time for a relationship in school and she certainly didn’t have time for one now. She would put it out of her mind. Focus, she thought. She had more important concerns. The newly formed Federal Association of Court Management wanted to start implementing the Jury Surrogate system nationally within eighteen months, but everything hinged on this and the other pilot programs in St. Louis, San Diego, Charlotte, Boston, and Seattle succeeding.

  Judge Cameron O’Connor was outside his chambers with Jessica Blick, one of the assistant prosecuting attorneys assigned to the initiative. Blick was a short white woman with closely clipped red hair gelled to sharp peaks so that at the right angle it looked as if small flames flickered atop her head. The distinctive hairstyle along with her explosive temper tagged her with the nickname “Firecracker,” though no one used the name in her presence.

  “Ms. Howard,” welcomed O’Connor, whose deep, resonant voice reflected his ego but belied his stature; he resembled a cherub in black robes. Broken capillaries marked his full nose and flushed cheeks.

  “Judge O’Connor,” said Cassandra, shaking hands. “Ms. Blick.”

  “We’re just waiting for—”

  “I thought that was you,” called a voice from down the hall. Cassandra turned. Forrest came toward them, dressed in khakis and a blue suit coat, carrying a coffee in one hand and a leather laptop satchel in the other. He grinned widely. His blond hair was strewn across his forehead and his beard needed a trim. “How are you?” he asked as he leaned in to kiss Cassandra on the cheek. She smelled chicory coffee and cinnamon on his breath.

  “I’m good,” she said. “How’re you?”

  “Great,” said Forrest, still smiling. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “I’m surprised,” said Cassandra. “I thought you’d be working out of D.C.”

  “Nah, headquarters is boring,” said Forrest. “I wanted to be in the field. This is great that we’ll be working together.”

  “Not exactly working together, Mr. Latham,” interjected Judge O’Connor. “Ms. Howard is advising the defense. You’re advising the prosecution.” He introduced Blick and then said, “Mr. Cervantez is waiting for us in my chambers. Shall we?”

  Forrest bowed and waved the women ahead of him with a grin. He directed a wink at Cassandra.

  The walnut-paneled walls of the chief judge’s chambers were decorated with pictures of him posing with politicians and celebrities dating back twenty years. One shelf held awards from dozens of organizations, both local and national; another shelf held editions of the two books he had written, on the Sixth Amendment and juries (he was inclined to present guests with autographed copies). A third she
lf held biographies of Winston Churchill (whom O’Connor was fond of quoting) and framed pictures of his family.

  A slender man with thinning dark hair, a silvering goatee, and black-framed glasses turned from the bookshelf as O’Connor and the others entered. Cassandra noticed his ears were disproportionately long and his brown suit was ill-fitted, perhaps a size too large. She put him in his late fifties.

  “Mr. Cervantez, this is Cassandra Howard from Real Thought Analytics,” said O’Connor. “She’ll be your jury consultant for the trial.”

  “I’m looking forward to working with you,” said Cassandra as she crossed the room to shake Cervantez’s hand.

  “So you’re to blame for this miscarriage of justice,” he said, his hands remaining in his pockets.

  “In small part,” said Cassandra with a slight smile. “In very small part.” She had become practiced in absorbing outrage and blowback over the Surrogate technology. People were resistant to change, and she had learned to put off any attempts at reasonable persuasion until emotional temperatures cooled. Cervantez was clearly still hot.

  “Never mind him, Ms. Howard,” said O’Connor. “He’ll come around. Lawrence, behave yourself.”

  “But Judge, this is preposterous.” Cervantez brushed past Cassandra. “A robot jury? How have we come to this?”

  “They’re not robots,” said Forrest.

  “Artificial intelligence then, whatever,” said Cervantez.

  “We call it replicate consciousness, actually,” said Cassandra gently. “There’s a marked difference.”

  “Artificial intelligence implies independent sentience,” said Forrest. “The Surrogate program employs technology designed to replicate a specific consciousness.” He grinned broadly.

  Cervantez stared at Forrest a moment before turning back to O’Connor. “I have real problems with this whole idea, Judge.”