The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  Amos kept quiet.

  “So . . . really. Why all the fuss? Like I said . . . we can reach an agreement, right here and now. What do you say?”

  Amos glanced down at the speedometer, was pleased to see he was traveling at exactly the posted speed limit—forty miles an hour—without losing control and speeding. That would be unwise, giving a state trooper an excuse to pull him over.

  “I say this,” Amos said. “For all her faults . . . Jennifer was my wife. Under God and under the law. So no matter how she treated me or how many friends she had, she was still my wife. And . . . I can’t let what you did go unpunished. It ain’t right. I was her husband. Taking care of her and getting justice for her, that’s my responsibility. And I ain’t a man to walk away from my responsibilities.”

  “You really believe that?” the man asked, his voice quiet.

  “I do.” A quick glance to him. “And if you did too, well, you wouldn’t be in my truck right now, trussed up like a turkey.”

  As they got closer to Leah, traveling the back roads, Tony tried again. “Mister . . . please. All right. I have to pay for what I did. I get that. So pull over to a police station, or make a phone call, and I’ll let myself get arrested. Hell, I’ll even confess. So what do you say, mister? Okay? You do that and we’ll let the cops and the courts get justice for your wife.”

  “Her name was Jennifer.”

  “All right, justice for Jennifer.”

  Amos waited for about thirty seconds or so. “Well, that’s tempting. The problem is, though, that’s what you say now. But suppose the cops, you tell them something else? That I roughed you up and kidnapped you? Then I’d be the one in trouble, not you. And even if you did let yourself get arrested, well, I’m sure all it would take would be a smart lawyer fella working on your behalf, telling the jury that you panicked, it was an accident, not to mention, hey, there’s no proof you were riding the Jet Ski. Maybe you let a friend borrow it, you forgot his name, that sort of thing, gives the jurors that thing . . . yeah, reasonable doubt.”

  “It was an accident!”

  Amos turned again to his frightened passenger. “The channel ’tween the two lakes, it’s got a half-dozen orange-and-white buoys, all sayin’ the same thing. NO WAKE ZONE. If you had been following those signs, you would have missed my wife. She’d still be alive. No, it was no accident, and no, I’m not gonna turn you over to the police. It’s my job, my responsibility.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Maybe so, but it is right,” Amos said.

  When they got into Leah, he skirted the downtown and drove up the country road that led to Paul Sytek’s place, and then he took the old logging road that headed to where he had been doing the logging and other work. The way was bumpy and rough, and soon enough he came to a clearing that he’d made with all the weeks of cutting and chopping. He parked his Ford next to a cleared area that had a nice rectangular hole dug.

  Amos got out, opened the door to the other side, undid the belt, and hauled out Tony. He pushed him into the dirt hole and he fell on his face. He squirmed around like a worm and then got up, dirt smeared over his face. His lower lip was trembling. He was crying.

  “Please . . . God, please . . . don’t do it . . .”

  Amos took out his Sig Sauer. “It’s gotta be done.”

  “Wait! Damn it, please wait!”

  Amos waited.

  The man sobbed. “Back in Chelsea . . . I gotta girlfriend . . . Monica . . . she’s pregnant . . . I’m gonna be a dad . . . please . . . I know what I deserve . . . but please . . . you’re a guy without a wife now . . . and I’m sorry, Jesus, I’m sorry . . . but will you do the same to Monica? Will you? And make my boy or my girl . . . grow up without a dad?”

  Amos waited.

  Another round of sobs, the man’s taped arms before him, his legs shaking, dirt smeared all over him from where he had fallen. “Please . . . I’m begging you . . . if there’s any mercy in you, mister . . . please . . . let me live . . . I don’t know how . . . but I swear to God I’ll make it right to you . . . I swear on my unborn kid’s life . . . Honest to Christ . . .”

  Amos sighed.

  Waited. Remembered what that cute divorcée had said, back during his search. You’re such a good man, Amos.

  Lowered the Sig Sauer.

  “You sorry for what you did?”

  “Oh, Christ, yes, so goddamn sorry.”

  “And you’ll make it up to me, no matter how long it takes? Or what it takes?”

  Tony nodded his head up and down, up and down. “Yes, yes, yes, I promise. Honest to God. I’ll even go to the cops and confess, I promise . . . just don’t leave my unborn kid without a dad.”

  Amos put his pistol in his coat pocket.

  “You figure you can climb up out of there on your own?”

  It took a bit of work but Tony managed to do that, climb out of the hole, panting and breathing, and he kept on whispering, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” as Amos tore off the duct tape from his ankles and wrists.

  And then Tony punched Amos hard in the gut.

  Amos fell back, and Tony was on him, and in seconds Tony was standing, breathing hard, grinning, Amos’s Sig Sauer in his hand.

  “Man oh man, am I going to have a story to tell when I get back home. Jesus!”

  Amos slowly stood up, hands empty. Tony laughed. “Man, you’re one stupid piece of work, you really are. And to think I’d let some dimwit slut like Monica bear me a child . . . well, Christ, that was never going to happen. Man, but you fell for that story, didn’t you?”

  Amos didn’t say a word. Tony’s eyes flashed in anger. “Your turn to beg, mister. Your turn to cry, to have snot running down your face. C’mon! Beg!”

  Amos slowly shook his head. “Sorry to say, but I don’t think that’s gonna make much of a difference, now, will it?”

  Tony took a step forward. “First smart thing you’ve said all day, asshole.” He raised the Sig Sauer. “You’re so damn gullible.”

  He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Eyes widening, he worked the slide, pulled the trigger. Again, nothing happened. Amos reached into his coat pocket, held up a full magazine of rounds, and then put it away. Then he took out his deer knife, approached Tony.

  “Yeah, well, you’re not the first person to say that,” Amos said.

  LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  GI Jack

  FROM The Big Book of Jack the Ripper

  Burke said, “What’s with Mac? I offered to set him up with a redhead that rooms with a blonde I got my eye on and he said it was no go.”

  The detective first grade was addressing his superior, Lieutenant Max Zagreb. They were at 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters, in the fourth year of the Second World War. Detective Third Grade McReary was dimly visible in a far corner reading by the light of a gooseneck lamp.

  Just like Lincoln, Zagreb thought. He said, “He’s got ambition. He’s studying for the sergeant’s exam.”

  “What for? The higher you go, the less people you got to blame stuff on.”

  “Do yourself a favor. Cancel the date and spend the evening with your wife for a change.”

  “She’d just think I was up to something.”

  Zagreb found McReary immersed to his eyebrows in books piled on the desk of an officer currently ducking sniper fire on Iwo Jima. The lieutenant slid the volume off the top of a stack, a fifty-year-old chronicle of murders in both hemispheres. A puff of desiccated paper came out when he cracked it open, making him sneeze. He snapped it shut.

  “You know they’re not going to ask you this shit on the test. Burke and Hare? Them dumb Doras in the brass’ll think it’s an insurance firm.”

  McReary, the bottom face on the totem pole of Detroit’s fabled Four Horsemen (the Detroit Racket Squad, to the uninitiated), slid his fedora back from his prematurely bald head. “Once you get started, it’s hard to stop. I know the Michigan Penal Code back to front; I can ace that, but they’re always looking for mor
e. Most of these old criminal cases were cracked. If I can get a handle on how it was done, I stand to nail the orals.”

  “Just so long as it don’t get in the way of the job. We got a line on a truckload of Australian kangaroo meat that Frankie Orr’s looking to pass off as South American beef docking down in Wyandotte, tonight or tomorrow night. My money says it jumps on the side of a rationing violation.” He smiled. “Jumps, get it?”

  Under ordinary circumstances the junior member of the squad would chuckle at his superior’s joke. He grunted only, absorbed deeply in the Crippen poisoning case.

  The telephone jangled on yet another vacant desk. It was Lieutenant Osprey with Homicide.

  “Yeah, Ox,” Zagreb said.

  “The name’s Oswald. I got a streetwalker carved up like a side of beef I ain’t seen since before rationing.”

  “Since when is a hooker murder a Racket Squad deal?”

  “Look, I’m shorthanded since D-day. If you like I can tell the papers she slept with Göring. We can recant on page eight.”

  “Something tells me I’m not getting the full story. Oh, right: I’m talking to Ox Osprey, the cop who pled the Fifth seventeen times during the McHenry grand trial.”

  “So I sprang a small-time bootlegger in return for a case of good Canadian for my tenth anniversary. The head of the review board shot golf with Frankie Orr the day he suspended me. It was Orr’s liquor.” The homicide lieutenant dropped his voice to a whisper. Zagreb had to press the receiver tightly to his ear to catch the words.

  “Listen, we got the button tight on this one. She’s number three. All killed the same way: throat slit, stomach cut open, and her guts dumped alongside the body. I need the manpower before the press jumps in and takes page one away from Patton’s Third Army.”

  “Enlighten me on how three dead hookers outscore a thousand of our boys in Europe.”

  “The press is sick of troop movements and how MacArthur takes his shrimp tempura. You know how they like to get their hands into a sex murder up to their elbows.”

  Zagreb took down the particulars, depressed the plunger, and called Sergeant Canal’s home number. That month the most intimidating member of the squad was living in an apartment on Michigan Avenue directly above a barbershop whose phones never seemed to stop ringing. He owed his cheap rent to a landlord who made the very good case that a little bookmaking on the side compensated for most of his clientele taking their haircuts free courtesy of the U.S. military.

  “We got a name to go with the latest stiff?” he shouted above the jangling.

  The lieutenant looked at his notes. “Bette Kowalski.” He spelled it. “Ox’s witnesses say she pronounced it ‘Betty,’ like Bette Davis.”

  “Yeah, she was clear about that.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Not in the biblical sense, if that’s any of your goddamn business, Lieutenant, sir. Since she’s dead, I can tell you she was a firehose of information, depending on what we had in the kitty. We dumped over three warehouses of tires, gasoline, and fresh eggs on her word alone.”

  “Firehoses have to be connected somewhere.”

  “It ain’t exactly a trade secret. We could’ve turned him over a couple of dozen times, only we’d have spent the rest of the war finding out who took his place and how he operates. Plenty of time to crank him up to the Milan pen once we run Old Glory up Schicklgruber’s ass.”

  “You’re saying Frankie Orr’s added pimping to his repertoire?”

  “I don’t know what that is, but if it’s buying tail on the street, Frankie’s the man to see.” Canal cleared his throat, an operation similar to coal sliding down a chute. “I ain’t saying this because I need the sleep. We need to corral these bats in broad daylight.”

  Zagreb had something intelligent in reply, but just then a horse came in at thirty to one and the noise level on Canal’s end made conversation impossible.

  For formality’s sake, the entire squad convened in the Wayne County Morgue to get a look at the only real evidence in any case of homicide: the victim’s body naked in a pull-out tray, clay-pale except for the blue-black smile the last person she’d known had carved under her jawbone and the black cotton cross-stitches the medical examiner had used to close the incisions he’d made to examine her entrails. She’d been basted together like a made-to-order outfit for a first fitting, and from the extent of the repair work the damage had been more than substantial. She looked very young. As many stiffs as Zagreb had seen, he never got over how the brutal act of murder returned even the most jaded victims to innocence.

  “You okay?” he asked McReary. “You look a little green.”

  “It’s the iodoform, L.T. Ma bought it by the gallon during the influenza scare in ’19 and doused us all by the day.”

  “Garlic, me,” Canal said. “I ain’t just sure if the old lady meant it for the ague or vampires.”

  Lieutenant Osprey tipped back a flask, exposing the tender flesh under a jaw cut with a miter. He didn’t offer to share it with the others. “What I think? He paid his girls on the installment plan, she preferred cash-and-carry. She beefed, he cut.”

  “I saw a seal blow ‘Anchors Aweigh’ on horns in the circus. I guess he thought that was thinking too.” Burke, who had a phobia against promotion, never missed a chance to take a shot at rank, with the single exception of Lieutenant Max Zagreb.

  That party fired another question at Osprey just as his neck began to redden. “What about the others?”

  A dilapidated notebook came out. “One colored, semipro, the other first-generation Albanian with a solicitation record as long as Errol Flynn’s dick. Three nights apart, a little over six weeks ago.”

  “Why the dry spell, you figure?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s a break. The press might not make the connection after all this time, but we got to sew this one up before he puts another notch on his belt.”

  “He’s on a cycle.”

  They looked at McReary, whose face had begun to show some normal color. “Some of these mass murderers go by phases of the moon or the zodiac or the anniversary of their mother’s death. If we can nail it down and study the behavior of known killers, we might narrow the field of suspects.”

  “What the hell’s Dick Tracy Junior flapping his gums about?” Osprey demanded.

  Zagreb smiled patiently. “He’s cramming for the sergeant’s exam, picking over the lush and fascinating history of crime—got it on the brain.”

  “No kidding. I got my first promotion by doing my damn job.”

  “And got busted drinking Frankie Orr’s booze,” Burke said.

  Osprey swung his way, fists bunched at his sides. Zagreb, standing in for the League of Nations, distracted him by pressing for more details.

  The other scowled, but uncrumpled his notebook and paged back, seesawing his arm as he tried to make out his own weeks-old scrawl. The first victim, Charlotte Adams, had been discovered flayed open in an alley off Grand River in the wee hours by a beat cop. A derelict found her colleague, Maria Zogu, in a trash bin behind the Albanian restaurant where she scooped up most of her clientele. Eyewitness descriptions of companions they were with when last seen were scattered and useless.

  “Canal says Kowalski pounded the pavement for Frankie Orr. What about the others?”

  “Indies, by all accounts. Say, maybe there’s something in that. He’s nailed down the steelhaulers’, garbage collectors’, and launderers’ unions across three counties. Maybe he’s moving in on the sex trade, making an example of the holdouts.”

  “Then why Kowalski? She worked for him.”

  “She wanted out.”

  “Listen to the quiz kid,” Burke said. “Got an answer for everything except how to close a case on his own.”

  Osprey wheeled on him. “You want to mix it up, Detective, there’s an empty tray right next door.”

  Zagreb said, “Let’s leave the fighting to the boys in uniform and see where it happened.”

  Bette K
owalski had shared a third-floor walkup on Erskine with a girl who said she worked a drill press at the Chrysler tank plant. Zagreb was inclined to believe her: she was a pudding-faced brunette who bore no resemblance at all to Rosie the Riveter. None of the swing-shift queens he’d known did.

  “I worked days,” she said. “That way we only had to have the one bed. That’s where I found her.” She pointed at a gaunt iron-framed veteran with bare springs. “I got rid of the mattress, but I’m sleeping on the couch anyway. I told the landlady I’m moving out first chance I get.” She hugged herself, although the room was stuffy.

  “Both doors locked, hall and street,” Osprey added. “Let him in, probably. All part of the job.”

  Zagreb flicked his gaze at Canal, who nodded and touched the girl’s arm, steering her into a corner to ask innocuous questions out of earshot of the rest of the conversation.

  “She must’ve been a mess,” Zagreb told the man from Homicide.

  “If we found her on the riverfront I’d’ve thought she got washed up after getting chopped up by the propeller of the mail boat. Working behind closed doors, without interruption, the son of a bitch had all the time in the world.”

  McReary said, “Ah!”

  Osprey turned his head. “You said what?”

  “Just ‘Ah!’ ”

  “We’ll pay Frankie a visit,” Zagreb said, glancing sideways at the detective third grade.

  “You need me for that?” Osprey asked.

  He knew the prospect of spending time in the same room with Orr wouldn’t appeal to the man who’d accepted a case of his liquor. “We’re used to him, Ox. We’ll take it from here.”

  The other was so relieved he forgot to take issue with the nickname.

  “Spill it,” Zagreb said. They were sitting in the 1940 Chrysler the department had issued the squad before the auto industry turned its attention from Airflow transmissions to airplanes, Burke at his station behind the wheel, the lieutenant beside him.