The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

by C. J. Box

  “I think I can get you some work,” he said.

  “Yeah? What kind?”

  “Insurance fraud,” he said. “Let’s order another round and talk about it.”

  So every month or so I get a call from Dallas to check on a claim. I once accidentally rear-ended a guy in San Angelo. It was nothing. A couple of crinkled bumpers at a stoplight. I couldn’t have been going more than three miles per hour. I hopped out of the car and checked on the other driver, who said he was perfectly fine. No problem. By the time the uniform cop arrived to take a report for the insurance companies, the other driver was holding his neck and declaring that he had shooting pains going all down his arm. I shrugged and handed my information over to the cop.

  Two days later I caught the guy on my dashcam, doing backflips on a trampoline in his backyard. Needless to say, his personal injury claim died on the spot.

  That was the kind of work I got from Dallas. Lots of folks trying to put one over on the insurance company. Some of them were legit. Most were bullshit. I saved the insurance company in Dallas a lot of money.

  Then there was the process serving. An old friend at the courthouse called me one day. Said he’d heard I’d opened an office. Wondered whether I’d like to pick up a hundred or so a week to serve warrants and subpoenas. Probably wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.

  I bit. The pay is pocket change, but like I said, I’m not in this for the money. Not entirely.

  I drop by his office each Monday morning, and he has three or four orders to be served waiting for me. It’s usually local stuff. I served a guy just down the street from me a couple of months ago. Walked over after dinner, found him in his front yard mowing his dirt. Slapped him with a subpoena and was back in my house, all in ten minutes. They’re not all that easy. In most cases, though, it’s a piece of cake.

  People don’t walk around expecting legal papers to drop out of the sky. It’s a cinch to get close to them. The easiest are the ones you catch at home. Ring the bell, ask for Mr. About-to-Be-Served, tell him you’re a courier, and hand him the envelope. Bingo bango, dinner for two at Golden Corral in your back pocket, with a few bucks left over for ice cream.

  I’m partial to ice cream.

  Sometimes you catch a guy who’s been given a heads-up. This is especially true in divorce cases, where the wife has already screamed something like “I will steal your fucking dreams, you cheating son of a bitch!” Those guys are on the lookout. Getting to them sometimes takes a little finesse.

  I know a woman in town who’s in the process-serving game. Her name’s Amy. She’s middle-aged, but time has been kind to her, and she still gets lots of looks from guys half her age. She snags a lot of divorce paper services. Her game is to catch the subject in a bar, start up a conversation. Somewhere along the line, she gives him a fake name, and he—​naturally—​gives his real one. She repeats the name, as if she’s heard it before. The guy says, “Yep, that’s me!” and she lays it on him. He goes home with a subpoena in one hand and his dick in the other. Works every time. Nobody expects a hot southern lady to come bearing a summons. She has perfect camouflage.

  Won’t work in my case, unless I’m serving divorce papers to little old ladies in rest homes. I work the codger angle. There’s always a guy out there willing to talk about the good old days. Sometimes they buy me a beer before I serve them. It’s not really ethical, but I hate to be antisocial.

  The boss at the courthouse knows what kind of guys are likely to respond to Amy and which will respond to me. He’s kind of psychic that way. He gives Amy the young guys, and I get the old-timers.

  I received the call on a Wednesday morning.

  “Got a job for you, Huck,” my guy said.

  I’m Huck. Huck Spence. It’s short for Huckleberry, my middle name.

  “What’s the job?” I asked.

  “Guy named Ralph Oakley. Should be a milk run, no big deal. He skipped out on jury duty. Chose exactly the week the district judge’s diverticulitis was flaring up. Judge was in the mood to knock broomsticks up some asses. He issued orders to bring in every scofflaw who failed to show for the jury pool, so they could account for their lack of civic engagement, but mostly so he could rake them over the coals and vent his spleen. There’s a fine for dumping out on the call, also.”

  “I’m familiar with it,” I told him. “Word in the halls is the money goes into a fund that’s split evenly among the judges at the end of the year.”

  “Beats me,” he said. “I have no idea whether it’s true, but I’ve heard the same rumor.”

  Ralph Oakley lived in Humble, about fifteen miles north of the center of Houston. Humble is the ghost of an oil boomtown, which lent its name to an oil brand at some time in the murky past. A hundred years ago it was the richest-producing field in the entire state. The oil dried up, and the petro circus pulled up stakes and moved on, leaving Humble very humble indeed. At its height, Humble burst at the seams with roughnecks and wildcatters and mud loggers and doodlebuggers making small fortunes by pulling dead stuff out of the ground. These days population tops out around twelve thousand, mostly truck farmers and day laborers and field workers and timbermen, the kind of people who sweat out their paychecks and try to raise families on the precipice of poverty. It’s your typical small suburban Texas town, a simple satellite of the metropolis to the south. It’s a hundred square miles of desperation and hope and churches and resignation, with a few bars thrown in to keep the sidewalks flat on Saturday night. The best thing Humble has going for it is a high school football stadium that would make most college fields weep with envy. They take high school football extra serious in Humble.

  It also has twice the average crime rate for towns its size. It’s that kind of place.

  I had an address for Ralph Oakley. It was close to the city limits with an unincorporated community called Borderville, close enough to the freeway to hear the cars zooming by. To get there I had to drive through the center of Old Humble, a section that might have inspired Anarene in The Last Picture Show.

  I pulled up in front of the house where Oakley lived. A woman wearing a flowered house robe answered the door. She looked like someone had wrapped a refrigerator. Her voice sounded like someone grooming a cat with a belt sander.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m looking for Ralph Oakley,” I said.

  “Ralph? Ralph ain’t lived here for a year and a half. Can’t say I’m sad about it, either. Guy was a fuckin’ cheapskate, pardon my French. Practically had to beat the rent out of him every month. Why you want him? What’s he done?”

  “Just wanted to catch up. Do you know where he moved?”

  “You’re a friend of his, you should know.”

  “I haven’t seen him in years. I’m just passing through. This was the last address I had for him.”

  “Well, you might catch him at work, if he ain’t been fired yet. Check out Borum’s Butcher Shop. Five blocks thataway. Cain’t miss it. Got a big plywood bull hanging out over the sidewalk. Last I saw him, he was working in the back.”

  She was right. There was no missing Borum’s Butcher Shop. I walked through the front door. Texans pride themselves on their beef, and Borum was no exception. The floor was spotless. The cases were polished to a sheen, the glass crystal-clear. Cuts of rib eye, thick as a man’s wrist, were stacked inside. I walked down the case, building an appetite. Porterhouses, New York strips, fillets. I started thinking about grilling that night.

  “Help you?” a man said as he walked in from the back room. He was shorter than me, but massively built, in the way you get cutting up two-hundred-pound steer carcasses for a couple of decades. His face was open and smiling, that fake sort of grin people slap on their faces when they want to sell something.

  “Ralph Oakley?” I said.

  “Bob Borum. You a cop?”

  “Nope. Are you?”

  He grinned for real this time. “Was, once. Long time ago. Thought I smelled it on you.”

  “Le
ft over from my days in the Rangers, but that was a long time ago too. Ralph wouldn’t be around, would he?”

  “Off today. Mind if I ask your business with him?”

  “Some legal stuff. Nothing big.”

  “None of my business anyway, right? It’s cool. Way Ralph’s been moping around and skipping out on work lately, he probably won’t be working here much longer. What happens to him is on him, right?”

  “Couldn’t agree more. I dropped by the address I had for him, but they said he moved away.”

  “He’s in a motel, three streets over. Been living there for quite a while now. Not a bad deal, I suppose. Fresh towels every day, fresh sheets every week, and you don’t have to lift a finger. Not a lot of square footage, but how much room does a man need, anyway?”

  “I reckon we all wind up with more or less the same space,” I said.

  “Ain’t it the truth?”

  “Let me take care of this business with Ralph, and I’ll drop back by. That rib eye there looks like it’s got designs on my stomach. Think you can wrap it and have it ready for me? I don’t want to leave it in the car.”

  “You got it.”

  The place was what we used to call a “drive-up motel.” It wasn’t a chain place. It had likely been around for half a century. The entire motel was on a single level, all the room doors opening directly onto the parking lot. The outside walls were painted cinder block. An ice machine with a wheezing, rattling compressor stood against the outer wall alongside a Pepsi machine. All the “sold out” lights on the machine were lit.

  Bob Borum had given me Oakley’s room number, so I didn’t have to shine on the desk clerk. I backed my car into a space across the lot, facing his door.

  A couple of years back, a process jockey in Houston was beaten to death with a baseball bat when he tried to serve divorce papers on a guy who’d stoked back too many PBRs. Since then I carry a GoPro camera on my dashboard. It’s motion-activated and connected to a drive that can record up to a week of images at a time. If I ever catch the off-world shuttle on the job, I figure someone might find evidence on the camera to catch the guy who did it. It also protects me from claims that I dump paper in the trash and still claim the pay for serving it. It’s happened.

  The whole deal took less than a minute. I slipped an oil change receipt from my glove compartment onto a clipboard, added the subpoena, turned on the dashcam, and crossed the lot to his door. A Latina cleaning woman stepped out of the room two doors up just as I rapped on Oakley’s door and said, “Maintenance!” The cleaning woman looked at me strangely. Guess she never saw a maintenance guy in a corduroy jacket and a Stetson before. I held a finger to my mouth and pointed at the door. She nodded and retreated into the room she had been cleaning. That door closed, and I heard the lock trip. Guess it was that sort of neighborhood.

  Oakley opened the door. He was about an inch shorter than me, maybe six feet in his socks. He was blond, his hair shaggy and maybe a little stringy, and otherwise an attractive sort, as best as men can determine that about other men. He looked sweaty and nervous. His eyes were red, and I caught a whiff of weed from the room. None of my business.

  “Got a call about your AC,” I said.

  “I didn’t call nobody,” he said.

  I checked the oil change receipt on my clipboard, which looked official enough if you didn’t examine it too closely.

  “Ralph Oakley?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  I took the envelope with the subpoena and held it out. “This is for you.”

  He took it, reflexively. My job was done.

  “The original notice of jury duty was sent to your old address. They didn’t know where to forward it. Tell the judge that story, and you might talk your way out of a fine.”

  “What?” he asked, but by then I’d turned and walked away. His rose-colored eyes told me he wouldn’t remember the advice anyway.

  He closed the door. I sat in the front seat of my car and filled out the service log detailing when I’d completed the job. As I did, a Honda Accord pulled into the parking slot in front of Ralphie’s room. A woman stepped out. From behind, she had a decent figure. Nice legs. She wore a scarf over her hair, which I thought strange, but then she knocked on Ralph’s door. He opened it and she looked over the parking lot furtively, but she was in shadow and I couldn’t make out her face. I thought she stared at me for a long time, then stepped inside, and it all made sense. I’d spent time sitting outside motels spying on philanderers for longer than was healthy. I recognized a clandestine rendezvous when I saw one.

  I drove back to Borum’s, where Bob had my steak wrapped and rung up.

  “How’d it go?” he asked as he made change.

  “Smooth. No biggie. A misunderstanding. He seems a nervous sort.”

  “Ralph? Never noticed.”

  “Maybe it’s because his girlfriend was on the way over.”

  “Didn’t know he had one. Hey, you enjoy that steak, y’hear?”

  * * *

  Sunday morning I was lounging on the screened porch at the back of my house, reading the newspaper. I’d dispensed with the sports and the funnies and was perusing the local section. I keep an eye on the obituaries these days, mostly because it’s become sort of a game for me to outlive people. I had just taken a sip of coffee, and I nearly sprayed it all over the newsprint when I saw the notice.

  Ralph Mark Oakley. Age forty-three. Butcher. Died on Friday, May sixteenth. A smattering of survivors. Services to be held, so forth and so on. Two paragraphs. Forty-three years of breathing, and his entire life had been digested into two paragraphs. Short paragraphs at that. No cause of death listed. The picture looked like the guy I’d served at the motel, except the hair was shorter.

  I had Saturday’s newspaper still in the rack in the den. I’d been working Saturday and had only glanced at it. I yanked out the local section and searched it. Found the story on page three. A cleaning woman—​probably the one I’d scared—​found Ralph’s body in his hotel room late on Friday afternoon, after seeing the door slightly open. The reporter tried to pretty things up, but it was easy to read between the lines. It had been gory. Ralph had been bludgeoned and stabbed multiple times. He had to be identified by his prints. Police were investigating, but there were no suspects.

  I sat on the porch, scratching my aging cat Boudreaux’s lumpy head as she basked in the sunlight, and I thought. Bob Borum had told me he didn’t know Oakley had a girlfriend. I wondered if anyone else knew. I had seen the woman visit him surreptitiously in his motel room. People who sneak around have things to hide. What if the woman thought she had been discovered? She had looked right at me. Maybe she thought I was spying on her, and she decided to eliminate her cheating problem. It didn’t gel completely in my head, but it was something to work on.

  And, I had a way to find her.

  * * *

  I retrieved the dash camera from my car. It took a couple of minutes to hook it up to my laptop computer.

  I was in luck. Since I’d parked directly across the lot from Oakley’s door, I had a full-on view of his visitor’s car when she parked in front of me. I jotted down the license number and saved the file on my computer.

  Here’s the thing about being a retired Texas Ranger. It’s like being in the mob. You might cash out, but you never really leave. Looking back, I probably should have gone directly to the Humble Police Department. I’m a cop, though—​or at least I used to be—​and the tendency to do it yourself is kind of strong in cops. I called my old office. It was Sunday, but there was always someone on duty. I was lucky. I got Wade Stanfield. We used to call him Wade the Blade because in his day he was definitely the sharpest knife in the drawer. That was a long time ago. We’ve all dropped a half step toward second since then, which was probably why they had him working the slowest day of the week.

  “Blade, need you to run a license for me.”

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Don’t know.
Could be something. Might be nothing.”

  “Like always. Gimme the number.”

  What we were doing was technically illegal. Like I said, though, once a Ranger, always a Ranger. You never completely punch out. It would have been a lot worse if Wade had checked a license for some guy on the street who had never worn a badge or body armor. I read the number off the paper and heard him muttering a little.

  “No can do, podjo,” he said. “System’s down for maintenance. Ain’t that the way? They always do these things on Sundays. Should be up tomorrow morning. Maybe later tonight. Tell you what. I’ll run it as soon as I can, and I’ll call you. Gonna cost you two beers and a burger.”

  “Cheap at half the price,” I said. “You’re on.”

  * * *

  Sunday turned into Monday, and no word from Wade the Blade. I wasn’t surprised. Like most government agencies, the Rangers were stuck with a computer system that should have been junked years ago. Sometimes shutting it down made it lazy about booting up again.

  I had nothing to do, and the Rangers didn’t have the only computer system in the state, so I drove over to Humble and introduced myself to the detective who’d caught Oakley’s murder.

  His name was Ken Sheeran. My bona fides as an ex-Ranger got me into his office pronto. He was in his middle forties, a lifer. He was thick around the middle. His shirt gapped between the buttons when he sat down, probably because he saw extra-large shirts as an assault on his vanity. He had thick pewter hair and a gaze that could cut glass. The first time I saw him, I had a feeling he was a good cop. You get a sense for these things.

  “How can I help you?” he asked.

  “Maybe I can help you. I served papers on Ralph Oakley last week, a couple of days before he died.”

  “Did you now?” Sheeran asked. “So you’re the one. Yeah. I see it now. You match the description.”