The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  “Better. Those fucking kids. I’m still a little sore. I can’t take it like I used to. I swear to God, honey. I feel like I got old overnight.”

  “Hey, Dad? Do you think they have places like this in Japan? I mean with the costumes and the music and everything?”

  “I think they all eat McDonald’s over there,” he said.

  She got a kick out of that, and he felt better about everything for the moment. When the woman brought the sushi, he watched Karyn stir the wasabi into a tiny dish of soy sauce with her chopsticks, and he thought she looked like some kind of lesser samurai, diligently observing a time-honored ritual. She ate carefully, using her chopsticks. He used his hands. He scarfed tempura, crunching steamed asparagus, feeling the wasabi clear his sinuses.

  “So you’re in trouble again, huh, Dad?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle, sweetie. I’m just taking a little vacation. I’m gonna get out of the city for a while.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, nodding, and that was all they said about it.

  He walked her back to the car and kissed her on the cheek. He could feel the hardness through her jacket, and she pulled away from him even as she nestled in his arms. Sunlight slanted across the tops of the houses on Twin Peaks, bathing them in pastel light, etching doors and windows in sharp bas-relief. Through layers of cloud, the radio tower pricked glumly at the sky.

  “’Bye, sweetie.”

  “Yeah. Hey, see you, Dad. You take care of yourself, okay? And thanks for dinner.”

  As the sun slanted down and the sky turned from pink to cobalt blue, he sat behind the wheel of the Pontiac and dug the crumpled snapshot from his shorts pocket. He pressed it flat against the steering wheel. He didn’t even know the woman’s name. She stared up at him with panicked eyes, crow’s feet etched into their corners, her smile bright and hysterical, as if the expression of connubial bliss pained her somehow. She was wearing a mohair sweater, and her skin had an eerie luminescence, a metallic sheen acquired from too many deep pore cleansers, facial rinses, and mud masks. Her hair was pulled back in a way that made her forehead seem too wide, and her eyebrows arched sharply, identical and neatly plucked works of art. She wasn’t exactly catwalk material, Mickey thought. But she was still a hell of a good-looking woman.

  He’d lost control in the park. He knew that. It seemed to happen more often these days. What did it mean when you quit drinking and you were even meaner than before? Like when those kids had jumped him the other night. He didn’t remember half of that. They’d circled him up, and the next thing he knew, he was on the verge of beating one of them to death with his bare hands. In the park it was the same. He hadn’t wanted to kill anybody, but he’d seen the guy standing there in his expensive suit with his gold-plated Rolex, and it was like the ghost of every CO, every commissioner or DA who’d reprimanded him for the last twenty years had reared up on him suddenly, and before he’d even known what he was doing, the guy was flat on his back, out cold with one punch.

  He figured Reardon was probably going to be pissed. Whatever angle he was playing, Mickey had blown it for him. And if he had enough money in the briefcase he’d taken from Marsh to pay off his debts and put himself in the clear, his instincts still told him to take the money and run, hotfoot it for the airport before everything started to catch up with him.

  But another voice whispered at him through those luminous brown eyes in the photograph. They were crazy eyes, he realized; something was missing in them, something was fractured. It wasn’t lust they stirred in him. More like some deep and inexpressible desire to make good on his life after throwing forty-three years away. What was the point in running away from San Francisco? Here the battle lines had been drawn, and here he would make his stand. Only he didn’t know yet what he was fighting—or what he was fighting for. He’d lost Sue years ago, and he didn’t know if it was too late even to win Karyn back.

  He let it all tick over in his mind as he started the car, meandering out toward the Great Highway as the last of the day’s light burned out over Ocean Beach.

  She was much smaller in person than he’d expected. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. And Christ, the woman could shop. He tailed her to the malls, the department stores, the high-end places downtown. She took it seriously. Like some people take food or professional sports seriously. She stalked the aisles like a big-game hunter, shrewd eyes goggling out of her childish face. He watched her trying on a diamond tiara at Saks on Saturday, twisting from side to side in front of the mirror in her designer jeans, and he thought of Wonder Woman.

  He staked out the house. He kept vigil. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed being a cop. However cynical you became, however arbitrary the designations seemed, by virtue of the uniform, you became one of the good guys. And you believed in it because it was all you had, because if you weren’t one of the good guys, the only thing left for you was to be one of the bad.

  Those days seemed simple to him now. It seemed to him they’d all been playing dress-up, like playing cops and robbers when they were kids. How many of his friends from the neighborhood had he put away over the years? And why them, when he was no different?

  He had the feeling he was broaching new territory, entering uncharted waters. If he no longer wore the uniform, if he no longer had the force of the law at his back, how could he know what was right any longer?

  He wasn’t going to kill her. He knew that now. He’d known it from the first, from the moment he’d set foot in the bar and seen Marsh slouched there in his custom-tailored suit. And before, when Reardon had called. He’d known he wasn’t going to be able to go through with it, even then.

  The house might have gone for a hundred grand five or six years ago, but if he had to hazard a guess, Mickey would have said half a million by now. It looked just like every other house on the block, and they were all butted right up against one another, one house stacked on top of the other like Dixie cups in a line all the way to the top of the street and the dun-colored hills beyond.

  If you wanted to know what kind of parents they were, all you had to do was look at the kids. The girl was your typical tortured adolescent—combat boots that reached her knees, hair dyed black with a flaming red stripe down one side. She carried a lunchbox to school, and Mickey wondered if he hadn’t done all right by Karyn after all. As for the boy, Mickey just felt sorry for him. He was a chip off the old block, that was for sure. He already looked like his father—of whom, Mickey remarked, there had been no sign.

  He ate fast food and slept in the car. After three days he could smell himself. He’d blown his tail on Sunday, he was sure of that, running a red light on Geary, and good sense told him to clear out before he got himself arrested. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. For the clouds to part and reveal the firmament—he didn’t know. He thought he’d figure it out when the time was right.

  4

  Henry Marsh checked into the Airport Hilton with a change of socks, a toothbrush, and a pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He needed some time to think.

  First thing Saturday, he called in sick for the week. He had AIDS, the Ebola virus. He’d come down with the bubonic plague. There was a family emergency, his grandmother was flooded out of her house in Mississippi, there was a war starting up in Bosnia again—whatever. He wasn’t going back to work, not for as long as he lived. His last official act as assistant general manager of the Radisson Hotel in downtown San Francisco was canning Tommy Reardon.

  “He’s been late every day for a month. I think something’s going on. I caught him drinking during his shift twice last week, and I think he’s sniffing cocaine at work, too. He looks all bug-eyed and paranoid.”

  The open line hummed. He could hear Robert “Call-Me-Bob” Zimmer, the bar manager, making little clicking noises with his tongue.

  “I tried to give him a chance,” Marsh said. “I’ve been telling him to clean up his act. But I think it’s time something was done about it.”

  “Where
are you, Henry?” Zimm said finally. He was a big, poker-faced man with a dry sense of humor and an easy way with people. Everybody he worked with liked him. Marsh had been trying to get him fired for years. “People have been talking,” he said. “They’re worried about you. There’s been some concern. They say you’re showing all the signs of a real crack-up.”

  “San Diego,” Marsh said. “We’re waiting for a flight. It’s Gina’s mother. She’s in the hospital again. Leukemia or something. Look, our flight’s boarding. I’ve got to go.”

  “If anyone asks, Henry, you didn’t hear it from me, all right? But people are talking.”

  “Thanks, Zimm. Just take care of Tommy for me, will ya?”

  “Call me Bob,” Zimm said, and he hung up.

  Time folded in on itself after that. He finished one pint, went across the street for another. When he finished that one, he went back out and bought a fifth. He passed out sometime around noon, and when he woke up, it was dark again.

  He watched Saturday Night Live, flipping channels with the bottle balanced precariously on his stomach. He watched Jenny Jones and thought about his wife. The thing was, he hadn’t expected the guy to show. Never in a million years did he think there were people who did this kind of thing for money. He hadn’t been prepared. The Cub Scout motto came back to him, and he remembered his father, a remote, congenitally disturbed man plagued by a host of neuroses who had deferred in all matters to his wife, Henry’s mother, a woman whose overweening influence had driven him, Henry, to the far ends of the earth—to California—to escape, to make a life for himself, to raise his children where the woman could not smother them as she had smothered him. But curse of curses, fate of fates, he had married his mother, or a woman just like her, a woman who seemed in every way different from her but who had, in fact, turned out to be so much the same he could no longer separate the two in his mind, and the bitches at his back had become one.

  Had she cheated? She’d lost interest in him sexually years ago, but then she’d never been much interested in sex. Still, he remembered times when it was free and easy between them. Certainly they’d fornicated once—twice, if they’d conceived the two brats, the bloodsuckers, and he wondered if that was when it had ended, when the first or the second of the kids had popped out, if that was the precise moment when the gates had swung closed, when the dream of better things and better times had died, stillborn. They—she and the children—had made his life a prison.

  Sunday morning he washed his socks and his underwear in the sink. He found a Chinese takeout menu in the drawer by the bed, tucked into the obligatory Gideon’s, and he ordered spareribs and egg rolls for breakfast. He drew the curtains and paced the room naked. He stood under the shower until it ran cold. He passed out again in the afternoon, and when he woke, it was a quarter of two and he had fifteen minutes to haul himself out of bed and across the street to the store for another bottle.

  5

  The girl crept downstairs after dark. The television was blaring in her parents’ room, an apocryphal white noise, a bluish blush of light showing under the door. It gave the impression of something trying to get out, something she’d seen in a hundred horror movies, but it was only her mother in there, hiding away.

  The lights in the hall burned like sentries and made her think of Bedouin fires in the desert, something she’d seen in National Geographic, though it was the words that came to her and not the image. Like Bedouin fires, she thought. The house was dark, as still as a mausoleum.

  She’d just reached the front door when the noise from the television upstairs died and her mother’s voice carried shrilly down the hall.

  “Where are you going at this time of night, Jaime?”

  The woman had some kind of sixth sense; she had sonar like a bat’s.

  “I’m just going for a walk, Mom. I’ll be back in a while.”

  Her mother didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

  “Well, okay, sweetie. But you be careful, will you? I hate to think about you walking around out there all by yourself after dark. I know it’s a good neighborhood, but don’t be long. I can’t stand to think about it.”

  The girl rolled her eyes.

  “Then don’t think about it, Mom.”

  She didn’t wait for her mother to answer.

  Outside was the roiling sky, the moon like a hole punched in the clouds, and the faint taste of the ocean on the air. She took it for granted they were near the water, although she couldn’t see it from the house. When they’d gone to Sacramento to see her grandparents, she’d missed it. She’d felt some nameless dread, an anxiety she couldn’t place until they’d come back across the San Mateo bridge, and she’d realized it was the ocean she missed all along.

  She felt reflexively in her pocket for her keys before she pulled the door shut and stood on the front step for a minute, looking up and down the quiet street, the starlit confines of her world. A couple walked slowly past, dappled in shadow. They were climbing the hill, leaning into the grade, and they were maybe a few years older than she was. Moonlight glinted off the boy’s glasses, and the girl’s face shone, her lips parted in an expression that was at once abject and leery and was somehow frightening on both accounts. The boy was neat, clean-cut, and maybe a little embarrassed. He held her hand awkwardly, as if unsure what to do with it.

  Boys were puzzling, Jaime thought, only in the depths of their stupidity.

  A man went quickly past on the other side of the street, ducking under the trees, his face hung in shadow. His jacket flashed like a warning signal, bumblebee yellow, and the girl hesitated, letting him dart past before she came down the steps and crossed the lawn, turning up the hill toward the bus stop. Her mother’s paranoia was rubbing off on her. But if she’d married her father, Jaime thought, she’d probably be stark raving mad by now, too.

  She waited until the end of the block to light a cigarette, although she couldn’t figure out how her parents hadn’t caught on by now, seeing as she’d come in reeking like a cigarette every day for almost a year. If they knew, they weren’t saying anything—maybe hoping she’d give it up if they just acted like they didn’t notice—and she didn’t see any reason to rub their noses in it.

  The first few drags made her woozy, an ephemeral wooziness she wanted to hold on to for as long as it lasted and that was gone too quickly. The bus stop sat crookedly like a chess piece at the top of the hill, webbed in a skein of gauzy light from the street lamp, the opaque siding pitted and scarred. A dark-skinned woman in a rain jacket who was as wide as she was tall was waiting under the shelter, and she turned her eyes on Jaime as if some vague animal instinct had registered an incursion.

  But there was no threat, no reason whatsoever to be alarmed, and she seemed smug then, sitting primly on the tiny seat, glancing quickly at Jaime out of the corner of her eye and looking away as she folded her arms across her chest.

  She didn’t wear black for the sins of the teeming world, and not because she was obsessed with sex or with death or because she wanted to die, although she thought about it—with sex, it was the other great mystery—and not even because she came from what she considered the archetype of the dysfunctional family. Even Reynaldo, the Spanish exchange student who’d been trying to get in her pants for the last six months, seemed to think it meant there was something wrong with her. “It says to me you have great sadness,” he said, in that ridiculous accent that made everything he spoke seem a come-on. But then Reynaldo thought Americans were all head cases anyway, and there were things she couldn’t explain to him. There were things she couldn’t explain to anyone, not to her friends or her boyfriends, not to her parents or the endless procession of guidance counselors and psychologists they were always sending her to at school. Not to Principal Dryer, who’d taken an almost fawning interest in her, whose wife was cheating on him with Jaime’s math teacher. But she’d never questioned her own capacity to survive, and she knew something inside her would persevere. She’d made that decision a long
time ago, without ever knowing she was making it, and she would not become crazy like her mother, she would not die inside like her father, who she half expected to find waiting at the breakfast table with a loaded gun one of these mornings. She didn’t know if Todd was going to make it, but she’d take him with her if she could, and she knew that one way or another, come what might, she’d survive them all with her soul intact.

  One cigarette led to another. She had a relationship with the things that had power over her; there was a give and a take. Things like Reynaldo, who was always pushing the envelope, always asking—begging—for a little bit more. She said, “Don’t, goddammit,” and he only laughed. But if she ever let him have what he wanted, he’d disappear. She intuited this the same way she intuited he was lying when he said he wasn’t a virgin. He talked about the girls he’d had in Spain, and she wondered if they were real or not, or if he was only making them up. He was terrified of the world waiting between her legs, and the power that gave her over him gave her an almost sexual thrill that was far more exciting than his anxious, inept fumbling. And that thrill in turn, that feeling that he didn’t even know he was giving her and wouldn’t understand if he did, it held sway over her.

  She took all responsibility. She had to handle him with kid gloves. And if she ever let him have his way, she’d ruin it. He’d never look at her again.

  The world was a matrix of power relationships. Love and pity, tolerance and kindness—sometimes she wondered if those entered into the equation at all. In her estimation, God was a bleak thing, a cold, clear eye watching with dispassion.

  The bus rolled to a stop with a hissing of air brakes, the door opened, and the woman got on, giving Jaime a look over her shoulder. She sat a while longer before she started back down the hill, and it occurred to her as she passed the Parsons’ place that she’d seen the beige Pontiac across the street the night before. She thought it had been sitting there the night before that, too. And that might not have struck her as out of the ordinary, if not for the fact someone was sitting in the car, a shape massed behind the wheel, under the galaxy of reflected light. She walked quickly, not wanting to sprint for the front door but having to fight to keep from doing just that, all her cool thrown off for the moment, fumbling with her keys for what seemed an eternity, hands trembling, the hackles rising on the back of her neck. She could feel him watching her.