The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  Travis checks the traffic ahead of him—still not moving. Three lanes at a standstill, everyone with their blinkers on, trying to merge but getting nowhere. “Come on, come on,” he mutters, “move your asses.”

  The digital display on the dash of the Honda reads 9:07 p.m. They left Travis’s mother’s place in Columbus at about five-thirty. He wanted to avoid rush hour but hadn’t been quick enough. And now this. They should have been home nearly an hour ago.

  Cody continues to scream, a wet staccato that makes Travis feel as hopeless as ever.

  He finally pulls out the small tube of benzocaine he picked up at the CVS yesterday when the homeopathic teething tablets and clove oil that Emma packed in his overnight bag weren’t working. Emma’s big on organic food and natural medicine, especially when it comes to their child. Normally Travis is all for it, and he does his best to respect her wishes. But he refuses to let his son suffer.

  “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, right, pal?” He squeezes a dab of the benzocaine on the tip of his index finger, then checks the road again. Still no movement.

  Travis puts the car in park and turns to Cody. His son’s arms flail once more as he reaches toward him, but Travis gets the finger in his mouth, and the screams turn to garbles as Travis works the clear gel into Cody’s swollen gums.

  “Shhh, it’s all—” he begins as Cody’s razor-sharp incisors clamp down in the groove of Travis’s first knuckle. He yells, yanks his hand back. Cody’s pitch climbs several octaves, and Travis hears something crackle in his right ear. “No, no, shhh. It’s okay, shhh,” he says in vain.

  He doesn’t hear the phone in his coat pocket over the chaos both inside and outside the car, but Travis always keeps his cell set to vibrate when it rings, so he feels it going off. He looks at the caller ID. Emma wondering where they are.

  He answers, “Hey, babe.” His voice is louder than normal.

  “Where are you? Is everything okay? What’s wrong with Cody?”

  As much as he loves her, he wishes he hadn’t answered. She’s just one more noise right now. It makes him feel bad to think this way, but sometimes she can be a bit much. And he’s got enough on his mind right now.

  “There was an accident,” he says, but before he can finish she interrupts with a litany of frantic questions.

  He waits for a gap and jumps in. “Honey, it’s fine. We’re fine. A truck went off the road. We’re stuck in traffic and waiting to get around it.”

  She calms down. “But I can hear Cody.”

  “His gums are just sore,” he says.

  “Did you try the teething tablets, or the—”

  Though he feels a twinge of guilt, he cuts her off and says, “Way ahead of you. In fact, I think he’s starting to feel better, actually.” This much at least is true. The medicine is working and Cody’s fit has begun to subside. “I’ve got the last bottle of milk ready to go for him too.”

  She asks him how much longer he thinks they’ll be.

  “We’re about twenty minutes out,” he says. “We’ll be home as soon as these damn cars start moving again.”

  “I hope it’s soon. I made tofu for dinner.”

  “Yum.”

  “Ha-ha, funny man.”

  Cody’s breaths come out in short, quick bursts, but his crying has stopped. Travis opens the cooler compartment of the diaper bag and removes a bottle of milk while Emma continues to talk. When he offers the bottle, Cody takes it.

  “Uh-huh,” he tells her. “Love you too, babe. See you soon.”

  After he hangs up and returns the phone to his pocket, Travis tunes the radio to a classical station and examines the deep red indentation on the knuckle of his index finger where Cody bit him. Didn’t break the skin, but hurts like hell.

  The clock now reads 9:32 p.m. Cody has finished his bottle in record time and is fighting sleep, a battle he ultimately loses two minutes later when a small opening appears up ahead, just before the pileup. An exit ramp. Several cars maneuver along the rumble strip in the breakdown lane, and Travis falls in behind them. He follows the ramp’s sharp curve as it straightens out into a two-lane residential street. A block farther, he comes to an intersection and stops at a red light.

  Relieved to be moving again, but with a head still reeling from Cody’s meltdown, he isn’t initially aware of where he is. As he sits waiting for the light to change, however, bad memories gather around the car like stray dogs, and Travis suddenly knows all too well.

  It’s been years since he’s been on the South Side, much less on Glenwood. He considers turning right and getting back on the freeway, sitting in traffic as long as it takes. But his temples are still throbbing, and when he imagines Cody waking up, freaking out again, he thinks better of it.

  The light turns green. Travis hangs a left.

  He’s at the bottom end of the avenue, and it’s a slow climb on the icy asphalt. He looks out at deserted lots and ruined buildings, nail salon neons and barred windows.

  The neighborhood is how he remembers it. A few more vacancies. A few more boarded-up homes. But otherwise the same. Still the type of area many people won’t wander around during the day, never mind when the sun goes down. Drive-throughs perch on corners every couple blocks or so, nuclei around which the populace darts and dashes at all hours, buying beer and loose cigarettes. The Foster Theater continues to defy time, dirty yellow bulbs illuminating its wedge-shaped marquee—ADULT FILMS XXX—in a stubborn revolt against the World Wide Web.

  He spent many days and nights here. Up and down the hill. In and out of condemned houses on shady side streets. Breaden. Delason. Overlook and Evergreen. All the time running.

  At another red light, Travis watches bangers in spoke-rimmed Caddies fuel up at the Gas Mart near Princeton, feels the bass from their sound systems in his bones. A deep vibration. Cody stirs, then settles. A faint whistle escapes his nose as he breathes.

  Not a day has gone by over the last four and a half years that he hasn’t been reminded of just how lucky he is. To have Emma and Cody. To have placed one unsure foot in front of the other until, at last, he was no longer a part of that world. This world.

  Emma never knew the other Travis, and never will if he can help it. He was a year out of treatment when he met her at the health-food store where she works. He came in looking for something to help him sleep. She was out of his league but helpful, and she laughed at one of his unfunny jokes. He’d researched various supplements online—milk thistle, 5-hydroxytryptophan, melatonin, GABA, passionflower tea—things shown to promote detoxification, relaxation, and elevated mood. After a few weeks of visiting the store, he asked her out and she said yes. He took it for a fluke, but she went out with him a second time, a third. By the time it occurred to him that he hadn’t thought about his old life in a long while, they’d been together for going on a year and had a kid on the way. It seemed impossible, and he began to wonder when he’d wake up from it all. He still wonders.

  “Things sure turned out for the better, huh, buddy?” he says, and glances in the rearview to check on the boy, whose head is lolled to the side like a fragile flower. He passes beneath one of the sodium streetlamps, and Travis notices a glimmer of spittle running from the corner of Cody’s mouth. Travis smiles.

  The weather is frigid, just above freezing, so besides the gas station, there are few people on the streets. Two dark shapes lurk to Travis’s right in the doorway of the old Park Hotel, smoking cigarettes and giving him the stink eye. One steps out from the shadowy alcove and moves toward the passenger window, hinging at the waist to look inside. Travis feels that feeling again, the one that always preceded a terrible decision. Tightening throughout his body. Sweaty palms and rising pulse.

  The light changes, and Travis thinks, Not tonight, fellas.

  The tires of his Honda spin on the slick blacktop before they bite. As he passes a Family Dollar with its metal security doors rolled down and a fenced-in car lot, he looks back and sees the guy raise his arms, as if to say, W
hat the fuck? A moment later the man drops his hands and turns back to his dark shelter as Travis crests a hump in the road.

  Since first turning onto the avenue, his gut has been a tight knot of nerves. The closer he gets to being out of the neighborhood, however, the better he feels. His heart rate returns to its normal cadence, and the knot begins to loosen.

  He’s about to pat himself on the back, tell himself Good job, but as the street curves past a block of dilapidated brick duplexes and a Baptist church, that old voice returns. The one that used to bark at him from the depths whenever he was attempting to act in his own best interest. The one that visited him every night as he sweated it out in County, during the late hours in the halfway house, and as he white-knuckled it through meetings that first year. One negative affirmation after another.

  Don’t fool yourself, kid. It’s just the same resolution all these miserable fuckers make when they hear the gavel fall. When they run out of cash and run out of credit. Next it’s vow to walk the righteous path, find Jesus. All that happy shit. Give it up, kid. You can pretend, but people don’t change.

  He doesn’t get into the usual dialogue with it, doesn’t argue and doesn’t deny, just turns up the radio a few clicks and drives a little faster.

  A hard bend in the road and he’s no longer on the avenue but on Midlothian Boulevard. The dividing line between where people want to be and where they don’t. Ahead, the luminous sign of Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits springs into view.

  He’s more or less succeeded in embracing healthy living, but now that his gut has untangled, he’s hungry, and the rationalization comes easy: he’s been a good boy—a little fried food won’t kill him.

  See, you’re still the same.

  The sign grows larger as he gets closer, closer to being farther from that world again.

  The same as you always were.

  He turns into the Popeyes parking lot.

  The same as you’ll always be.

  “The truck stop is a far cry from the farmers’ market,” Emma said the first time she and Travis went away for the weekend.

  They’d stopped to get gas and stretch their legs. She had packed a cooler with healthy snacks—fruits, vegetables, hummus, bottles of spring water. When Travis came out of the store with a bag of Doritos and a Monster energy drink, Emma started in with that tone she adopts when “educating” people about the horrors of the food industry. “That stuff is packed with preservatives and artificial colors,” she told him. “If you can’t pronounce the ingredients, it’s pretty much poison.”

  He’s since memorized her rhetoric, parroted from Netflix documentaries and the Huffington Post.

  Trans fats and processed sugar are the real terrorists in this country.

  Margarine is only one molecule away from plastic.

  Wheat has us hooked like heroin.

  Travis often wants to laugh when she goes on a rant. He wants to tell her that we also share roughly 80 percent of our genetic makeup with cows, that everything is only one molecule away from something else, and that when it comes to comparing wheat to heroin, she hasn’t got a damn clue. But he doesn’t. He’s afraid a certain door will open, that certain truths might step through. So he chants his mantra instead: What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.

  So far, it’s been enough.

  The tinny voice coming through the speaker reads back his order, and Travis pulls up to the window. A pretty black girl wearing a visor and headset takes his money, tells him they just dropped a fresh batch of chicken and it’s going to be a few minutes. He can see that she’s pregnant, and when she spots Cody sleeping in the car seat, she makes small talk.

  “Aw, he’s cute,” she says. “How old?”

  “Just about a year and a half,” he says, then nods toward her bump. “How far along?”

  “I could pop before your order’s up.” She laughs as another car pulls up to the speaker behind him, then closes the pickup window and begins talking into the mouthpiece of her headset.

  A few minutes turn into a few more, and the girl pokes her head back out the window, says it’s going to be a bit longer. She apologizes and tells him he can pull up, that someone will bring it out to him when it’s ready.

  “I’ll try to toss in a little something extra,” she says, and smiles toward Cody again. “Take care of that little cutie-pie.”

  He smiles, then pulls out of line and into a parking spot.

  It soon becomes apparent to Travis that the discrepancy between the concept of “fast” food and the actual speed with which it’s delivered is yet another reason he doesn’t miss eating the stuff. He looks at the car’s digital clock. Thirteen minutes. He’s been waiting for thirteen minutes. It’s been just over half an hour since he got off the phone with Emma. They should have been home by now. She’ll be calling again soon.

  Part of him thinks, Screw it, just go. But he’s paid for it, so now he’s committed, invested in the situation. All in.

  The dilemma now is whether to go in and get his food or go in and get his money back. He figures he’ll decide by the time he gets to the counter.

  But then there’s the issue of Cody. He reaches back and brushes the boy’s shaggy bangs out of his face. Should he wake him up after the ordeal of getting him calmed down? He looks at the restaurant. The register is within view. He thinks, Don’t even. Then, It won’t take but a minute.

  He tucks Cody’s baby blanket around him and considers leaving the car running with the heat on.

  What if someone jumps in and drives off?

  Won’t happen.

  But it could.

  Come on.

  Inside, the smells of fryer grease and spices make him both queasy and ravenous. But ravenous wins, and he decides that he still wants the food. He walks to the counter. When the guy in the batter-stained polo shirt hands him his bag of chicken and fries, Travis’s stomach begins to grumble and flip, similar to the way it would before he used to shoot up or hit the pipe. The thought unsettles him, but only for a moment before someone says his name.

  “Yo, Travis.”

  He’s halfway out the door and freezes. It’s finally happened. He’s always known he might eventually cross paths with someone he used to run with, or, worse yet, someone he burned. Eventually all things come around. As he turns toward the voice, puts a face to it, he discovers it’s the latter.

  “Where you been?” The guy stands up from a table where three other guys remain seated and eating. His words come out slightly muddled as he speaks through the sparkle of his platinum grill. “I been lookin’ for you for a long time.”

  His name is Q. One among many of Travis’s dealers before everything changed. As with most of the guys from whom Travis scored, Q let him open up a line of credit because Travis always made good and was a steady customer. But when Travis was ordered to six months in rehab in lieu of jail time for a botched robbery, he got it in his head to go out in style. His initial plan was to rip off every dealer that would front him. Cut ties. A little insurance policy for when he got out, something to guarantee he wouldn’t come back around. But Q was the only one he could track down that would let him owe. Travis took him for a bundle of dope and then some.

  He plays it cool. “Q, what’s up, man? I’ve been plannin’ on hittin’ you up.”

  “Uh-huh.” He steps closer to Travis, his hands in the pockets of his puffy coat.

  “Things have just been crazy lately. You hear I got locked up?”

  Q cocks an incredulous eye. “Yeah?”

  “Right after I saw you last. I just got out a few months back. They got me checking in and pissing in a cup every week.”

  “You bit down in Belmont?”

  Travis has never done time in the joint. His minor offenses have never landed him past County. But he’s known enough guys who have gone down for long stretches in places like Lucasville and Mansfield and Belmont to talk the talk. Still, he hopes this conversation ends sooner than later.

  “Yeah, it’s anothe
r world down there, man,” Travis says.

  Q smiles and his teeth glint like foil. “Fuckin’ gladiator school,” he says. “You got your stripes now.”

  Travis thinks for a moment that this might be as far as it goes, but he knows better. There is no statute of limitations on the street. He just wonders how long Q wants to catch up beforehand.

  As it happens, not long.

  Q’s grin levels out. “So you got me?”

  Travis is coiled inside like a rusty spring. He glances out at the car and sees the top of Cody’s head, thinks of running. Bad idea. Even if he could make it to the car before Q or one of the other three guys caught him in the parking lot, what then? Q has put holes in people, at least three bodies from what Travis has heard.

  You fucked up, kid.

  He’s got no choice but to make good. He does a quick mental calculation. Two grand and change in the bank. About ninety bucks in his wallet. Emma will want to know where the money went, but he’ll worry about that later.

  “We can head over there real quick.” Travis points with his clutched bag of food toward the ATM at the Home Savings and Loan across the street.

  “All right,” Q says, and nods. He leans in to whisper something to his boys. They wipe their greasy mouths and stand up.

  When they get outside, Travis starts walking toward his car.

  “Nope,” Q says as his boys walk up on Travis and grab his arms. “You ridin’ over with us.”

  The coil inside him continues to tighten. “Come on, Q, my kid’s in the car, man. I can’t just leave him in there.”

  “Since when you got a kid?”

  “Since just before I went downstate.”

  “How old?”

  “About eighteen months.” He’s already said it before he realizes his mistake.

  It’s been over four years since they’ve seen each other, and right now Q’s face appears to be working out the math. After a moment, he seems to settle on a number, realizes things don’t add up.

  “That means you was still on the street for a long time before you went to the joint.”