The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  “Very good,” Kathy said. She explained it to him. “Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s the weather.”

  “But perfect,” she said. “Perfect weather.”

  “All this technology,” Rome said, “and all anybody wants to talk about is the weather.”

  “It’s the end of the world, Rome,” Kathy said. “Don’t you know that? Flash floods, heat waves, tornadoes.”

  “It’s the end of people,” he said. “Not the world. Once we’re gone, the world will be fine.”

  “Put it however you want,” she said. The man was infuriating. He knew what she’d meant. “Either way, it’s an opportunity.”

  Even as she considered the position she was in—and Kathy was begging him for money; they both knew that—she found it difficult to be fake with Rome. With anyone else, Ted even, she would have immediately agreed, sacrificed her own opinion, and done whatever was required of her to get what she wanted. But it was different with Rome. Her instinct was to attack. With him, her love had always come out wrong. She would want to be gentle, but would end up pushing him away instead. She would pick a fight, or find herself in one despite not wanting to be. Something about Rome, his closeness, the way he’d lived in her, and she in him, had been unsettling. It had felt claustrophobic. It had driven her mad.

  “Will you meet him?” Kathy asked. “Will you please do that for me? I’ve never asked you for anything.”

  She waited in silence. The tension between them—old and comfortable—was like a worn T-shirt that needed to be thrown out. Kathy felt herself disappear. She experienced the folding nature of space and time.

  “Fine,” Rome said. “Send him up. But later tonight. I’ve got work to do. Some of us do actual work.”

  He clicked END and noticed Monarch standing in the kitchen doorway. She wore a towel, but her hair was dry.

  “Who was that?” she asked, and yawned.

  She was beautiful, sexy, and kind, and Rome loved her, he thought, but for an instant he couldn’t remember who the hell she was or what she was doing there.

  “No one,” he said. And then, “An old friend.”

  Monarch was half Mexican, with dark eyes and even darker hair. A pleasant sleepiness clung to her in the mornings.

  “Kind of early,” she said. “Who?”

  Rome understood that if he lied to her, it would only end up being more of a thing.

  “Kathy,” he said.

  The sleep burned out of Monarch’s eyes. She’d heard too many stories around the farm. One time she did this. One time she did that. Over time, Rome had come to understand that Monarch’s obsession with Kathy had very little to do with him. Maybe nothing.

  “What did she want?”

  “Oh,” Rome said. “Business.”

  “Business?” Monarch asked. “Your business?”

  “Her husband and her. They’re having some . . . some money stuff.”

  “And she called you?”

  “Isn’t that what I—” He stopped himself. “Yes,” he said.

  “What do you say?”

  “I said I’d hear him out.”

  “Who?”

  “Her husband,” Rome said. “He’s got a pitch. Some company. A weather thing.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Monarch said. She readjusted her towel, made it tight, and then walked out of the kitchen. She went down the hall toward the bathroom.

  “Monarch!” Rome shouted. He tried to be gentle about it. “Mon!”

  He heard the bathroom door close. A moment later the shower came on. He did not hear the curtain, which meant she was either peeing or standing there in front of the mirror, being angry. Monarch was an emotional person. She cried a lot. Something would bother her, and then she would start. He had learned to let her cry, like that Hootie and the Blowfish song. What was that guy doing now? Rome wondered, his mind suddenly gone left. Singing country music? What was that about? How did that work? America did the strangest things to people.

  He filled his thermos with coffee and went out to the truck. On a morning like this, when he felt behind, having to drive slow on the gravel driveway was annoying. But it was a good thing, the gravel. The rocks were a cheap security measure—he’d never not heard an approaching car—but more than a few were sharp. Sometimes, if a guy came up from San Francisco or flew in from wherever, New York, Boston, there would be a puncture.

  Sitting in his living room, Rome would hear the tire blow. After the first few, he learned to keep spares around. The buyers he sold to spent a lot of money to get out his way. Plane tickets. Rental cars. Once they reached him, they spent a whole lot more. He tried to be accommodating. The tires. Plenty to eat and drink. It was in his nature, but it was also good business practice. Everything was reputation. It wasn’t like he sold coke or heroin. He wasn’t cooking meth. Those trips were for maniacs, paranoiacs. The people he transacted with were decent. The idea was to make a nice living. In ten years, Rome had harmed very few. On occasion he would have to scare someone. He would have to put the fear of God in them. But that was the nature of any business.

  After the gravel came the dirt road. The kids who trimmed camped in the pines. On his right he saw last night’s campfire. It still smoked. A thin gray line like something drawn with a pencil rose up into the branches near the sun. The kids’ pup tents were scattered here and there, and one of their pit bulls lapped up water from a tin pan on the ground.

  Rome saw Brian standing on the side of the road. He pulled the car over and rolled the passenger-side window down.

  “Mornin’,” Rome said.

  “Mornin’.”

  Brian had to hunch over to get his head in the cab. Rome hardly noticed the tattoos anymore. SELF MADE, my ass, he thought. ROME’S GUY was more like it.

  “How’s it goin’ with them?” He nodded at the campsite.

  “Pretty good,” Brian said. “Should be done with the first grow house end of the week.”

  “Good, good.”

  “Little problem last night, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The new kid. Botherin’ one of the girls. Well, not girl.”

  “Right,” Rome said. “Which one?”

  “Okie.”

  Rome liked Okie.

  “Real problem?” he asked.

  “That’s what she—that’s what Okie said.”

  “Okay, okay,” Rome said. “I’ll stop in.”

  Brian didn’t emote. Not really. He stared. He stood there. New Hampshire or California—Rome knew it didn’t matter. The country was the country.

  “What?”

  “The fence. We got a serious issue up there,” Brian said. “Near the southeast corner.”

  “Show me,” Rome said. “Get in.”

  They drove up toward the hidden fields. On the left side of the rise, staked tight across the ground, was half an acre of black plastic sheeting. Kathy had mentioned flash floods, and Rome knew about those. After six months of drought, a monsoon off the coast. The loss of that plot had cost him $60,000. He didn’t need Kathy to tell him about anything, let alone the end of the world. The apocalypse wasn’t sexy anymore, someone should have told her. It was boring. It was here, and it was going to cost a lot of money. Lots and lots. More than the world could ever know.

  One of the things Rome paid Brian for was to check the perimeter fence a few times a week, but during the harvest this proved more difficult than usual. In the grow room for most of the day, Brian inspected for quality and made sure the kids weren’t pinching more than they should. The gutter punks, like Okie, took only small amounts—a fat bud here, another there—but the hippies were greedy. You had to watch them all day and for part of the night. It was annoying, but necessary. Pounds were known to disappear between their fingers.

  Rome parked the truck outside the south gate, and he and Brian walked east beside the scrub brush and vines that grew across th
e fence; it was chain link, and rusted in places. They stopped at the corner where the path took a sudden left. Brian squatted and pushed aside a pile of branches and Rome saw the bolt cutters. They were brand-new, two feet long, with red rubber grips.

  “And over here,” Brian said. He slid over on his haunches like an ape to where the fence met the ground and pulled apart the cut links. “Half a foot, maybe. You think it’s—”

  “I don’t think,” Rome said. “I know. They hit Bill. They hit Julie. We’re up from Julie. We’re next.” He went down on his knees and examined the cut. “Those assholes worked for me for three years.”

  “Could be the other thing.”

  “It’s not the other thing,” Rome said. “The other thing is they come here with machine guns, offer me money, and I say, ‘Muchas gracias, señors. No problemo.’ Then I retire. This isn’t that. It’s them.”

  “I saw the one yesterday,” Brian said. “The young one.”

  “I thought we were straight?” Rome asked. “I bought the land. I paid a fair price.”

  “They’ve been here a long time,” Brian said. “They’re an old family.”

  OLD FAMILY, Rome thought. That would have made a better face tat. OLD FAMILY or WHISKEY BOTTLE or PILL HEAD. TRUST FUND would have been hysterical, but Brian didn’t do irony.

  “I know that, Brian,” Rome said. “I know they’re an old family.”

  “They used to be all right.”

  “Not anymore,” Rome said. “Now they’re trash. They’re gonna rob me here.”

  Rome stood up, then Brian. On the other side of the high fence were five hundred plants. Afghani indica. It was early in the season—they were still in the stretch—but Rome could smell them: their oils, their resilience, their profit. He could do three fifty.

  He could make that happen for her, if he wanted to.

  “Whaddya think?” Brian asked.

  “Put everything back exactly where you found it,” Rome said. “I’m gonna get the Bobcat up. I’m gonna dig a hole.”

  He went at it all day and the better part of the evening. The vibrating interior of the Bobcat cleared his mind, and it was that, the work, the repetitive nature of it—even more than the money—that he was addicted to. He dug the hole eight feet wide and eight feet deep. He put beams in the corners to keep the walls from collapsing. He made twenty or thirty trips in the Bobcat so as to hide the dirt a quarter mile away. All of this he did in a kind of trance. When he was finished, after he covered the hole with tree limbs and branches and looked up to see the last of the shadows on the mountain, he began to think in a more regular fashion, his past forming, becoming, like the dark. It was an experience Rome found he didn’t care for. Instead of dealing with it, he went down to see about Okie.

  It had taken Rome years to think of Okie as only Okie, and never as “she” or “her.” Kathy had always said “they” was fine, “they” was preferred, and Rome used it, sure, but the plural threw him off, not least of which because Okie was one person. He knew it was unfair, but the word “they” brought to mind multiple personalities. Also, after a lifetime of gendered pronoun usage, it was hard to break the habit. Rome was sympathetic to the cause, but the language flummoxed him. Still, he tried. He made the effort. He hadn’t left New Hampshire for nothing. The last thing he wanted to do was to become the kind of asshole he’d hoped to get away from.

  The Coleman lanterns were on at the camp. The kids hung them from the lowest tree branches and left them on inside their tents. Red and yellow, green and blue: bubbles of color were scattered around. The kids moved from the fire to the woods, from the woods to the fire. They cooked their pinto beans, and the half-rotten meat they’d scavenged from town.

  Rome saw Okie. They were sitting on the ground outside their tent. They were cleaning their knife. He went over.

  “Mind?” He nodded at the ground beside them.

  “It’s your land,” they said.

  Rome sat. He watched them as they cleaned their knife with a green rag. It was a Bowie, with a brass-knuckle handle. The blade caught the firelight. Okie’s neck and arms were covered in a dense mosaic of black ink. Their hair was cut short, and their septum was pierced with a silver ring. They were self-conscious about their lips—the full, pink beauty of them—and they tried to keep them chapped by biting them all the time. In eight years, Rome had never seen Okie in anything other than fatigues and a black T-shirt. Rome could smell their body odor, their not-unpleasant sweat. They kept their breasts bound tight against their chest. They said it was their last season, but they’d said that every season. Who didn’t need forty grand? It didn’t matter who you were. A lot of the kids had run away from lives of privilege even, away from the inbred dysfunction of too much old money. Okie was one of those, Rome thought, but he couldn’t remember for sure. They’d mentioned a father once, a sailboat accident. He knew they hopped trains.

  “Where were you this winter?” he asked.

  “Tennessee for a while, in Nashville, and then down to this jamboree thing,” they said. “It’s on an island. It’s crazy. Everybody’s queer or trans. Then I was in New Mexico for a few months.”

  “Doin’ what?”

  “Hangin’ out. I went on a spirit quest.”

  “In the desert?” Rome asked.

  “Yeah. I took peyote. I saw an angel with a black face. I thought it was a sign.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  “No,” Okie said. “I asked it.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It said, ‘Fuck you. I’m just a black angel. There’s black angels too, you know.’ ”

  Okie went into their tent. Rome could hear them moving around. In their absence, he looked at the campsite, at the kids. At one time he’d known them all. He’d known their names, and stories, and where they were from, and how it was they’d come to him. But that was years ago, with Kathy, who took the time to get to know people. She was cool like that, or had used to be. Now when Rome looked at the kids, he saw compensated strangers. Except for Okie and a few others, he didn’t know their names. He kept them straight in other ways. There was the kid with the one-eyed dog; the boy who never wore shoes; the girl with earlobes that hung down to her shoulders like loops of taffy. The new kid sat Indian-style near the fire. He wore a fedora with the feather of a hawk in the band. He gnawed an ear of corn. He was either choosing to sit alone or was being shunned. Aside from the kid’s hat—which was stupid, plain stupid—Rome didn’t see the problem.

  Okie crawled out of the tent with papers and a small bud in their hand. They sat down next to Rome. They broke the bud apart and rolled.

  “Is that the Silverlight?” he asked. It was his design. The strain was mellow, for the body. Monarch said it hit her in the third eye.

  “Yep,” Okie said. “Brian said it was cool. He put it down in the book.”

  Okie lit the joint. They took a small hit to check the draw. They waited a second, then took another, bigger hit. Okie passed the joint to Rome. As he exhaled, they asked him how his day was.

  “Kinda fucked up,” Rome said. “Kathy called.”

  “That explains it,” Okie said.

  “Explains what?”

  “Why you look so sad,” Okie said. “A ghost called. The ghost called.”

  “I did feel sick,” Rome said. “Like in my stomach.”

  “Yeah, man,” Okie said. “That’s exes. They’re like the dead, except they can call you on the phone. My mom can’t do that. My dad can’t. You know why? Because they’re dead. They can’t call me up just to see how I am.”

  Hitting the joint again, Rome remembered: it had been the both of them; Nantucket; a freak storm; the maid and the harbormaster crouched in the playroom, consoling; the fortune had been left to a blue-blooded grandmother who wouldn’t acknowledge them.

  “What did she want? Can I ask you?”

  “Money.”

  “Ouch,” Okie said. “You still love her?”

  Rome shrugged his should
ers.

  “Jesus, man. Really?” Okie said. “That woman is a force of nature.”

  “She really is,” Rome said.

  “But I always liked her.”

  Rome passed the joint to Okie.

  “Me too,” he said. “When we were together, Kathy never asked me for money. I’d give it to her, but she never asked me. She said it made her feel kept. She had a chip on her shoulder. It was the size of a planet.”

  “I get that,” Okie said. “That makes all sorts of sense to me.”

  “Now she calls.”

  “She must be desperate,” Okie said. They passed the joint back to him and picked up their knife again. “You remember desperate? It’s a terrible place.”

  “I remember.”

  “But not really,” Okie said. “No offense, but not really. That’s not how money works. It doesn’t help you remember. Not the desperation. Not the fear. Not in this world.”

  “I’ve been desperate,” Rome said.

  “I’m sure you have been,” Okie said. “But you don’t remember.”

  “Sure I do,” he said.

  “No you don’t,” Okie said. “Once you’ve got the money, you know? It’s not your fault. Once you have it, certain receptors, they get clicked off. It’s just the way it goes. It’s just how it is.”

  Rome hadn’t come by to argue, and he didn’t need a lesson in sympathy, or whatever it was Okie thought they were talking about. If he wanted to, he could tell them his own little sob story. A description of his own father would make them happy theirs was dead. He could say, “I remember desperation, you little asshole. I remember crackers for dinner, and hiding in a closet whenever he came home.” But Rome wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t. The gentleness people required so much of depended entirely on his not being cruel. He tried to live this way, but would forget from time to time. It was a battle.

  “What’s the issue over here?” He nodded at the kid with the feather in his hat.

  “He gets drunk and weird,” Okie said.

  Rome got that. That made all sorts of sense to him. “Does he need to go?”

  Okie looked up from their knife. They eyed the kid.

  “No,” they said. “I don’t think so. I told him if he looks at me again I’m gonna cut his balls off.”