The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

by C. J. Box

  Bax’s boss nodded with his whole body. He pulled a long wallet from inside his jacket, opened it, and fingered through the bills. He tugged out a fifty. “That Miss Venetta is quite a catch, Bax.” Folded it under his saucer. “You take good care of her.”

  * * *

  Bax hustled his brother out of the diner as soon as Mr. Kline’s Lexus turned at the end of the block.

  “Russell, how you find this much trouble to get into?”

  Russell threw a dismissive hand toward the sky. “Man, get off my shit. I just—”

  “Your shit?” Bax dope-slapped Russell. “I’m carrying that Wells deal you oughta got dead for, and you talk at me about your shit? You tell Mr. Kline the woman I’m seein’, and you talk at me about your shit? How many times I got to tell you ’bout impulse control?” Bax didn’t flinch as Russell reared back to retaliate for the dope slap. “You need to think before you swing on a man.”

  Russell sprawled himself on the smoker’s bench, his ridiculous shoes pointed at Bax. “The Cossacks—”

  “Shut up.” Bax swiveled his head. “You stupider than I gave you credit for, you start name-checking the guys gonna peel your skin off.”

  “They reached out to me.” Russell admired the rings on his left hand. “They. Reached out. To me.”

  “Why you think they did that, Russell? ’Cause you the brains of this operation?”

  Russell puffed out his chest.

  “Or ’cause you the likeliest to fuck up the deal the Bandidos already done for what both of ’em want?”

  Russell’s face blanked. His head tilted.

  “Jesus, Russell.” Bax rubbed his palms across his face. “Go back to the shop. I got to think. You just—​just—”

  “Gimme your keys, then.”

  Bax shook his head. “Call you a Lyft. Or hoof it. Just sit in my office. Don’t touch nothin’. Or do nothin’. Watch some SportsCenter or some shit like that.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t you do nothin’ or say nothin’ till I get there.”

  * * *

  Venetta’s one arched eyebrow told Bax about all he needed to know. He showed her his palms as he straddled his regular counter stool.

  “You told me you was going straight after your bit.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, I know who that was you was talking to.” Venetta raised her other brow. “And people going straight don’t spend a lot of time with Mr. Reamer Kline.”

  “I’m—​that was my kid brother. With us.”

  “The one you did the bit for.”

  Bax had told Venetta most of the truth about his stretch downstate. He hadn’t done what he pleaded to, but he’d pleaded to it to keep his brother out of the system. “Russell fell in with a crew belonged to one of Mr. Kline’s lieutenants while I was doing his time. And he—​he ended up owing Mr. Kline some.”

  Venetta turned her back to him. She started wiping the little spring-loaded pitchers of syrup. “I’m still listening.”

  “Mr. Kline, he got to me the day I landed at the halfway house. Told me I could pay Russell’s debt if I fix—​if I fixed up one of his businesses.”

  “Why you work so hard for Russell?”

  Bax hadn’t told her any of the truth about that. Not really. Just that doing Russell’s bit had been the right thing for both of them because he’d done some stuff he hadn’t been caught for, that he should’ve gone away for. “Russell, you know, he came up without a dad. He ain’t had nobody to show him how to be a man. And he’s my only family now.”

  Venetta let him keep looking at her back.

  “Since our mom passed.”

  “I don’t want no Mr. Reamer Kline in my diner.”

  “I don’t want that neither.” Bax thought carefully about his next move. Moves. Thought that what he really needed was time to think about motorcycle gangs and what they wanted with the shipping container that filled a not-too-noticeable hole in the salvage yard he ran for Mr. Kline. “Can I finish my breakfast here?”

  “I saved it for you.” Venetta turned and slid his plate across the counter. “But it gone cold.”

  * * *

  In the diner’s parking lot, the cold half of his eggs riding heavy and low in his belly, Bax opened the Kia’s tailgate and lifted the floor panel covering the spare tire. He pushed the sidewall of the tire until it gapped away from the wheel, reached inside the tire, and fished around until he grasped his most recent burner. Flipped it open and tapped at the tiny keypad: Hudson. U got any friends in DC.

  Bax bundled the phone among his newspaper and other trash from his car and stuffed all of that in the stinking, oozing can at the bus stop.

  * * *

  The lady cop had pulled him over between the diner and the salvage yard. Berberian had never responded to a text so fast. The DC ask must have lit a fire under someone important. Bax thought about how he might leverage that as he triple-checked that he’d deactivated all the sounds and shakers on the burner the lady cop had dropped in his pocket.

  He found Russell in his office BSing with the guy who knew how to take apart Audis. Bax told the Audi guy to get gone with a chin twitch, then kicked Russell’s feet off his coffee table. “Thought I told you not to say nothin’.”

  “I weren’t saying nothin’.”

  “Russell, you want to get out of this alive, you need to understand that don’t say nothin’ mean don’t say nothin’. To nobody.”

  Russell turned this over in his mind for a few moments. “Even you, that means.”

  Bax felt the growl in his throat. “You know what, Russell? That’s the best idea you’ve had in a long time.” He played out the strategy a few moves, imagined all the ways Russell could fuck it up. “Here’s your rule: unless you’re answering a question I ask you, you don’t say nothin’ to nobody.”

  “Even Reamer?”

  Bax shook his head. “That man’s always Mr. Kline to you. And if he say something to you, the only options you got to reply are yes, sir and no, sir.”

  “What if—”

  “Yes, sir or no, sir. Or answering my questions.” Bax paused at the door to the bathroom. “You keep your mouth shut, maybe I can keep you breathing.”

  * * *

  In the bathroom, Bax checked his burner.

  Brooklyn. 1415 the park.

  The park was Berberian’s code for the commercial laundry where Bax took the salvage yard’s floor mats.

  Brooklyn, he tapped back to Berberian. OK.

  * * *

  Bax ordered Russell to collect anything going to the laundry and load it in the salvage yard’s F-150. He went out to get chop suey for his crew and get rid of his most recent burner.

  After lunch Bax stuck Russell’s phone and his desk phone in a metal locker behind a padlock, then locked Russell in his office and told the Audi guy to make sure no one went in or out.

  * * *

  “This is Parker,” Berberian said. “FBI.”

  Parker was a tiny thing, wiry and coiled. She looked like a kid sitting at the Ikea table in the laundry’s back room. She wore a wedding ring with a diamond that looked the size of a bottle-cap.

  “I’m Bax.” Her handshake told him she punched above her weight. “Randall Baxter.”

  “Berberian tells me that you’re his meal ticket,” she said.

  Bax didn’t tell her that he couldn’t care less whether it was Berberian’s ticket he punched or hers. He knew only that if ratting on someone guaranteed that he’d never go back inside, he’d rat on anyone with a pulse. “I try to take very good care of Detective Berberian,” Bax said.

  “And why is that?” Parker said.

  Bax felt her grip again, but more like it was around his neck. He glanced at Berberian.

  “Bax is a man with a—” Berberian said.

  “My brother—​his name’s Russell, and Russell’s my only family—​my brother made some mistakes when I was in prison,” Bax said. “He screwed up a fentanyl deal for one of Reamer Kli
ne’s lieutenants. Cost Mr. Kline a lot of money. When I got out, Mr. Kline told me I could make up that money for him or watch his man Owsley kill my brother.”

  “So you’re out to get Reamer Kline,” Parker said.

  “No, ma’am. I got no particular interest in Mr. Kline. But he’s got a very particular interest in me. And I got no interest in going back to prison for whatever he’s up to. But a lot of interest in keeping my brother alive.”

  Parker checked Berberian. “What’s Reamer Kline’s interest in you, Mr. Baxter?”

  “Bax did a—”

  “I did a bit for my brother. I stood up. Kept my own counsel. Mr. Kline, he likes people who know how to stay loyal. And I ain’t had much school, but I’m pretty good at making sure things run smooth.”

  “You’re just a good citizen.”

  “No, ma’am.” Bax forced the gentle smile he’d perfected to soothe the warden’s mind when it was troubled by uppity Negroes. “But I didn’t much enjoy my time in prison, and I planned to go straight after I got out. Mr. Kline, he gave me no chance to go straight. What I do for Detective Berberian, it’s about the only thing I can do to bend the curve back.”

  “And you obviously know how this game is played.”

  “I’m always trying to learn.” Bax maintained his smile. “Ma’am.”

  That seemed to chill her out a bit, and she was silent.

  Berberian couldn’t abide silence. He said to Bax, “Why’d you ask me to call in the feds?”

  Bax locked eyes with Parker. “You’re aware of a shipping container from FN Herstal that the police in Los Angeles didn’t get?”

  The silence flattened and got heavy. Parker rapped her knuckles on the table twice. “Excuse me.” A third time. Then she left.

  Berberian took her chair. “Bax, what the—​I mean, chop shops and drugs, right, but—​shit. How did Reamer Kline get hold of—​I don’t even know what FN Herstal is.”

  “It’s Belgian. I can’t pronounce it—​it’s French, like, Fabric National. They make guns for the army, but also for cops.”

  “LAPD?”

  “Crazy full-auto shit. Looks like the goddamn Terminator. One a those half-sized containers packed high and tight—”

  Parker returned. She leaned against the door she’d just closed, tapping her phone against her chin. “Can you describe the contents of this shipping container you claim to know something about?”

  “That, and more.” Bax had grown used to people taking his word since he started fixing for Mr. Kline, and he forced himself to swallow his frustration. “I can give you the numbers off the side of the container, plus who wants to buy it.”

  Parker’s phone made a Charlie Brown teacher noise. She held the phone to her ear, then said, “Hang on.” She tapped the screen and put the phone in the middle of the table. “Mr. Baxter, could you—”

  “Bax, please, ma’am.”

  “Sure. Bax, could you tell us the numbers on the container?”

  Bax recited the digits he’d memorized, and then described the shipping seal his Jaguar guy had cracked. “It’s a twenty-foot container. I ain’t taken everything out of it to know the complete inventory, and Mr. Kline, he ain’t showed me the manifest. But the one crate I did take out had four rifles, and there’s a hella lotta crates in that container.”

  “How did Reamer Kline come into possession of this container?”

  “The driver traded it. To buy his daughter out of Mr. Kline’s stable in Memphis.”

  A voice came out of the phone: “You know where it is?”

  “And who’s bidding on it.”

  Parker said, “Bidding?” at the same time her phone flashed a text message.

  Bax pretended he hadn’t seen the message—MAKE THE DEAL—​and said, “But I need something.”

  * * *

  Bax returned with the three dozen Krispy Kremes that Berberian brought to the meeting to cover for why he’d been gone so long. His crew tore through the doughnuts so fast that only one was left by the time he unlocked Russell from his office.

  When Russell started to whine, Bax said, “I ain’t ask you no question.”

  Russell stuffed the entire doughnut into his sneer.

  Bax pushed him into his office. “I got to go back out again tonight.”

  “You ain’t locking me up—”

  “The hell I ain’t. The only question is, you want it to be here, or you want me to put a man on you at your room.”

  “Man, what you got to—”

  “To save your life, brother.” Bax grabbed Russell’s shoulder. “You and me, Russell, we all each other got since Mom passed.”

  “Since my dad got killed.”

  Bax chewed his lower lip. “He weren’t no kind of man for you to follow.”

  Russell threw off Bax’s hand and started building up to something furious.

  “No.” Bax pointed at the couch. “I’m full up to here listening to your bullshit about how great your daddy was. I’m sorry you only had our granny to show you how to be a man, because she didn’t have it left in her to tan your hide the way she did mine.” Bax continued pointing until Russell finally sat. “Once was all it took.”

  “And look where you ended up.”

  Bax enclosed his fury in the safe he’d learned to build in prison, the lockbox that earned him a little grudging respect from the guards and privileges in the library, the commissary. He slowly, quietly closed his office door and turned on his brother. “I did your bit so you could stay in school. I ended up finishing my diploma in prison. You couldn’t even finish your diploma in my old school. And when you started running with Ducornet’s crew instead, you fucked that up so bad that I ended up in a whole ’nother prison when I got outta the first one I went to for you.”

  “Hey, Bax, I—”

  “You shut the fuck up, boy, and you listen to me. Where I ended up is putting my life on the line to make sure you ain’t skinned alive by the most bloodthirsty savages since you pissed yourself when we watched that chainsaw movie.”

  Russell looked out the window.

  “So if I tell you I got to go back out and you got to choose where Ima lock you up, the only thing you say to me is here, alone, or in your room, with a babysitter.”

  Russell dug at the carpet with his toe. “I got Xbox in my room.”

  * * *

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Kline.” Another burner. “Since Russell introduced competing interests, I think we should keep you as far away from this transaction as possible.” Another boss. “Russell handed his party off to me, and if you’ll hand your party off to me, I’ve got a solution that will satisfy both.” Another deal. “But I’m moving the product to a third-party location to limit your exposure.”

  * * *

  Bax’s crew was used to overnight hours, and the chop suey followed by Krispy Kremes had left them feeling like they’d finished a Thanksgiving meal, maybe Friday leftovers, so the grumbling about breaking the container into two truckloads for staging across town was good-natured, and no one asked him why they had to rustle up the lumber to build as many empty crates as they had crates full of guns and then pack them with recycling scrap picked from the yard to match weight.

  The warehouse wasn’t exactly abandoned, but the ownership had transitioned into the nether regions of not quite Southland Beverage’s and not quite Bank of America’s. The liquor distributor had built its warehouse across the state line. A single building that could ship into either state and comply with each state’s different regulations and taxes and laws about selling on Sundays. A single building with a concrete wall that sat atop the legal and geographic boundary between the big, mirrored loading bays facing northeast and southwest and overseen by a dispatch room that could look at both sides simultaneously even though neither side could see the other.

  And later, at the pizza joint where he bought pitcher after pitcher of Captain Jack to cloud his crew’s faculties and memories, when a thick-necked, tatted-up crewcut set a burner on the co
unter between the bathroom sinks in which they were washing and said, “Your code is Queens,” Bax said, “Tell Parker I owe this to my brother.”

  * * *

  Bax hadn’t known how Reamer Kline would keep his finger on the deal’s pulse.

  He’d known Mr. Kline would take his advice to stay away from any potential dispute between the Bandidos and the Cossacks, because they were as likely to set one another on fire as they were to rape the other’s women or blow up their clubhouses. He’d also known that Mr. Kline’s distance came with conditions, with remote sensors, that could get complicated.

  So it was a relief, and some luck, when Kline sent only Owsley. Owsley alone probably was the best he could’ve hoped for. Just one extra guy would make everything easier to manage, but Bax knew Owsley only as a type—​powerful, mean, not too smart, but singularly focused and therefore clever about what he applied his singular focus to.

  As he had when he put Russell out of commission for five weeks to persuade Bax to fix for Mr. Kline.

  Since then, Bax made a point of having as little to do with Owsley as possible. Bax figured that probably ended up as a wash: as much as he didn’t know Owsley, Owsley didn’t know him.

  “We gonna be up here,” Bax told Owsley, pointing at the dispatch room on the diagram he’d drawn. “The glass ain’t bulletproof, but we laid a bunch of sheet steel on the floor and against the walls, so if anyone starts shooting, just get down. There’s a door to the outside, down a flight of stairs, and we already hid a car there. There’ll be plenty of concrete between us and the warehouse, and I’ve got a couple of guys watching it tonight to make sure no one scouts us before the deal goes down.”

  “Clean getaway.” Owsley nodded. “Your guys strapped?”