The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  The biker lay on a wide flat stone below the bridge. He was on his left side, and there was blood on his face. Kirwan walked toward him, watching where he put his feet, not wanting to slip and fall.

  The biker’s right boot was scraping uselessly against the stone. His left boot was missing, and the leg there was bent at a right angle away from his body. He’d dragged himself onto the rock, left a smear of dark blood and mud on the stone to mark his passage.

  Kirwan shone the light in his face. The biker raised his right hand, let it fall. His left arm was trapped beneath him.

  The gun. Watch for the gun.

  He came closer. The biker was hyperventilating like a wounded animal, chest rising and falling. His left eye was swollen shut. He raised his arm again, weakly.

  He doesn’t recognize me. Doesn’t know what happened.

  Kirwan came closer, shone the light up and down the biker’s body, then around it. No gun.

  “Help . . . help me.” The voice was a hoarse whisper. In the darkness, something splashed in the canal, swam away.

  Kirwan squatted. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  The biker tried to shift onto his back, gasped.

  “Remember me?” Kirwan said.

  He turned the flashlight toward himself, holding it low so the biker could see his face. The good eye narrowed into a squint. He shook his head.

  A big leather wallet was on the ground a few feet away, had come free from its chain. Kirwan tucked the flashlight in his armpit, picked up the wallet, unsnapped and opened it. In one pocket were three hundred-dollar bills and six twenties. In another was a laminated Georgia driver’s license with the biker’s picture. His name was Miles Hanson, and he was sixty-one years old.

  Hanson coughed, and Kirwan looked back at him. The biker raised his head, spit a blot of blood onto the stone. “Keep it, man . . . it’s all yours. Just help me.” The voice still weak.

  Kirwan closed the wallet, set it on a rock.

  “Hurry up, man. I think I got something broken inside.”

  “My cell phone’s in the car. I’ll call 911.”

  He started up the slope, then stopped, looked back down. Hanson was watching him. He saw the glimmer of the diamond stud, remembered the grin, the middle finger, the chip in the windshield.

  He went back down the slope, set the flashlight in the grass.

  “What are you doing?” Hanson said.

  Kirwan crouched, gripped the back of the man’s leather jacket with both hands. Hanson swatted at him with his good arm, but there was nothing behind it. Kirwan took a breath, straightened up so as not to pull a muscle, then jerked the jacket up, pushed, and tumbled Hanson face-first into the canal.

  Kirwan couldn’t tell how deep the water was. Hanson splashed once, went under. He floundered there, got his head above the surface for a moment, gulped air, then went under again.

  Kirwan found a stone the size of a basketball beside the canal, lifted it high, then dropped it into the water where he’d last seen Hanson’s head. Water spattered his pants.

  He dusted off his hands, picked up the flashlight, and shone it down into the water. Hanson was a shadow just below the surface, not moving. A dark red cloud bloomed in the stagnant water, then dissipated.

  He stood there for a while, watching to make sure there were no bubbles. Then he went back to where he’d dropped the wallet, took out the bills, and folded them into his shirt pocket. He kicked the wallet into the canal, then stepped out onto the flat rock, unzipped, and urinated into the water, a long stream that caught the light from the bridge, the pressure in his bladder finally easing.

  When he was done, he zipped up, walked back to where the bike lay. It ticked as it cooled in the night air. Strewn on the grass were a pair of jeans, dark T-shirts, a sleeveless denim jacket. An insignia on the back read WHISKEY JOKERS DAYTONA BEACH above an embroidered patch of a diving eagle, claws out.

  He reached into the open saddlebag, rooted deeper through more clothes. And there, at the bottom of the bag in a flat pancake holster, was the gun.

  He drew it out, looked at it. At some point, maybe at the diner, Hanson must have holstered it in the saddlebag. But this gun was a revolver, and the one he’d seen had been an automatic. Or had it? Was this a second gun?

  He went around to the other side of the bike, stepping over torn foliage. Using a pair of T-shirts to protect his hands, he took hold of the frame. It was still warm. He grunted, lifted, vines pulling at the ruined front end. The bike rose and then fell on its other side. The gasoline smell grew stronger.

  He got the flashlight, opened the other saddlebag. More clothes, a full carton of cigarettes—Marlboro Reds—and a lidded cardboard box about half the size of a hardback book. No gun.

  He opened the box, saw tissue paper. He peeled it back and in the middle was a cheap cloth doll—a cartoonish Mexican with a sombrero and poncho playing guitar, his floppy hands sewn to the cloth instrument.

  Was this what he’d been checking in the saddlebag? A gift for a child? Then Kirwan squeezed the doll, felt the unyielding lump inside.

  He turned it over, lifted the cloth flap of the poncho. Stitches ran up the back of the doll, thick ones, a darker color than the material. He tucked the flashlight under his arm again, pulled at the stitches until they were loose. The back of the doll came apart at the seam, revealing more tissue paper packed around a metal cigar tube. He unscrewed the top of the tube and pulled out a tightly rolled plastic bag. He poked a finger in, teased out part of the clear bag. Inside was a thick off-white powder, caked and compressed.

  He pushed it back into the tube, screwed on the top. He put the tube in his pants pocket and tossed the doll out into the water.

  He picked up the holstered gun, walked back up the slope to the Volvo, the road still empty in both directions. The yellow light blinked in the distance. The Volvo’s hazards clicked, insects flittering in the headlights. A breeze came through, moved the sugarcane on the other side of the road.

  He opened the Volvo’s tailgate, pushed aside the sample boxes to get at the spare-tire compartment. He lifted the panel, pried up the spare, and put the tube and gun under it, then let the tire drop back into place. He closed the panel, shut the tailgate.

  Back behind the wheel, he put away the flashlight, shut the glove box, gave a last look at the cell phone.

  He reversed onto the road, swung a U-turn, headed back the way he’d come. He was calm inside, centered, for the first time that night. At the intersection, he turned the radio back on.

  After a while he began to feel sleepy again, a pleasant drifting. He looked at his watch. If he kept going, he could push through to New Smyrna by three-thirty or so, find a motel, get five or six hours’ sleep before the meeting. It would be enough. Maybe he’d ask Lois out to dinner that night, divorce or no.

  He had two free days after that. He could stay down there, figure out what exactly was in that tube, what it might be worth. There didn’t seem to be much of it, whatever it was. Maybe it was just a sample for some larger deal to be made later.

  Rain began to spot the windshield, thick heavy drops. He turned on the wipers. They thumped slowly, and on their second arc, he saw that the chip in the windshield was gone. He touched a thumb to where it had been. Nothing there now, the glass unblemished. One less thing to take care of, at least.

  He was humming along to the music by the time he reached the on-ramp for 95. What had happened had happened. There was no going back. Not now, not ever. The road and the night were his.

  Contributors’ Notes

  The author of 11 novels and more than 120 short stories, Doug Allyn has been published internationally in English, German, French, and Japanese. More than two dozen of his tales have been optioned for development as feature films and television. Allyn studied creative writing and criminal psychology at the University of Michigan while moonlighting as a guitarist in the rock group Devil’s Triangle and reviewing books for the Flint Journal. His background i
ncludes Chinese language studies at Indiana University and extended duty with USAF Intelligence in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Career highlights? Sipping champagne with Mickey Spillane, waltzing with Mary Higgins Clark, and cowriting a novel with James Patterson.

  • A few years ago, on a flight from New York, my seatmate was a former heavyweight contender from a famous Flint, Michigan, boxing family. For a lifelong fight fan, it was like sitting next to Elvis. We chatted the whole trip away. He’d suffered an injury similar to the one depicted in “Puncher’s Chance” and continued to fight for several years afterward. Consider that a moment. This man stepped into the ring with skilled fighters, two hundred pounds and up, who were trying to knock him into next week, knowing that his chances to win, or even to defend himself effectively, were limited by his injury. Why would anyone do this? “I was trying to salvage my career,” he said. “And hell, I always had a puncher’s chance.” And he was dead serious. Awed by his courage and commitment, I couldn’t wait to get to my desk to start weaving it into a story. Sometimes writing is work. Not this time.

  Jim Allyn is a graduate of Alpena Community College and the University of Michigan, where he earned a master’s degree in journalism. While at Michigan he won a Hopwood Creative Writing Award, Major Novel Division, and also won the Detroit Press Club Foundation Student Grand Award for the best writing in a college newspaper or periodical. Upon graduation he pursued a career in health-care marketing and communications, working at major hospitals in three states. He recently retired as vice president of marketing and community relations at Elkhart General Healthcare System in Elkhart, Indiana. His first short story, “The Tree Hugger,” appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and was selected by Marvin Lachman as one of the Best Mystery Short Stories of 1993. Six other stories have been published by EQMM since then, including “Princess Anne,” which was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014. Allyn is a U.S. Naval Air Force veteran, having served in a helicopter squadron aboard the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid.

  • I found “The Master of Negwegon” very difficult to write. It began as a novel about five years ago and kept morphing and morphing so that I wound up with a couple of banker’s boxes full of rough copy and nothing that resembled a coherent plot or story. I realize now that I made the classic mistake of “If you warm up too long, you miss the race.” In an attempt to stay timely and relevant, I was continuously adding fodder about the war in Iraq, ecological problems such as the emerald ash borer, the utterly amazing lack of accountability among politicians, and developments in our understanding of TBI/PTSD. I got distracted and buried. So after walking away for a while, I decided to try it as a short story. Reduce it to bare essentials. That worked, but it was tough to extract and refine a short story from the morass that was to be a novel. The novel remains a target. Negwegon, at least, is stationary. Dynamic, but stationary. This beautiful wilderness park is located just a mile or so from my home in Black River and allows me to step back in time at will. When you emerge from the forest path to the broad, dune-swept horseshoe beach that fronts the bounding waters of Lake Huron, however far you’ve had to travel to get there will be worth it.

  Dan Bevacqua’s stories have appeared in Electric Literature’s “Recommended Reading,” the New Orleans Review Online, Tweed’s Magazine of Literature & Art, and The Literary Review, among others. A chapbook, “Security and Exchange,” was published in 2015. Bevacqua is the fiction editor at Jerry Magazine. A visiting assistant professor in English and creative writing at Western New England University, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

  • For lots of reasons I won’t get into, “The Human Variable” started in my mind with the image of a man driving through the night toward a marijuana farm. For weeks I didn’t know why, until my friend and neighbor Krzysiek, a Polish engineer and climate scientist, told me about an app he was developing that would more accurately predict horrible weather events, like tornados and hurricanes. Somehow these two ideas, marijuana farming and climate change, got all mixed together, and then everything in the story started to click and work toward its violent end.

  C. J. Box is the number-one New York Times best-selling author of twenty-one novels, including the Joe Pickett series. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel (Blue Heaven, 2009) as well as the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 (France), Macavity Award, Gumshoe Award, two Barry Awards, and the 2010 Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Award for fiction. He was recently awarded the 2016 Western Heritage Award for Western Novel by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. The novels have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Open Season, Blue Heaven, Nowhere to Run, and The Highway have been optioned for film and television. Millions of copies of his novels have been sold in the United States and around the world. In 2016, Off the Grid debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list in March. Box is a Wyoming native and has worked as a ranch hand, surveyor, fishing guide, and small‑town newspaper reporter and editor, and he owned an international tourism marketing firm with his wife, Laurie. In 2008, Box was awarded the “BIG WYO” Award from the state tourism industry. An avid outdoorsman, he has hunted, fished, hiked, ridden, and skied throughout Wyoming and the mountain West. He served on the board of directors for the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo and currently serves on the Wyoming Office of Tourism board. He and his wife have three daughters and one (so far) grandchild. They split their time between their home and their ranch in Wyoming.

  • With each short story and novel I write I draw from the landscape and terrain around me, and “Power Wagon” was written while elk hunting in northwestern Wyoming near Big Piney, with the Wind River Mountains to the east and the Wyoming Range to the west.

  There’s a rhythm to each day while hunting that involves leaving well before dawn in subzero temperatures, returning to the camp for the middle of the day, and going back out into the mountains to hunt in the evening. Most days result in seeing no elk, but every foray is an adventure that may involve wading across ice-covered swamps and fording freezing rivers. There is also the opportunity to encounter local ranch families and to hear their stories and witness the history and culture of the area from the ground up.

  I wrote the story in the hours between the morning hunt and the evening hunt, when everything I’d seen or encountered was still fresh in my mind.

  Big Piney is in rough country. It’s located in Sublette County, and family histories and feuds spread out along Lower Piney Creek, Middle Piney Creek, and Upper Piney Creek. There are four-generation homesteads scattered through the pine trees, and the memories of the locals are long. There are splits and divisions even among those with the same family name, and keeping track of who likes whom and who hates whom becomes a full-time job that was almost beyond my capacity.

  The isolation of the area and the independence of the locals breed long memories and colorful stories. There’s the one about the dead trapper found in a cabin in the middle of the winter, who was hauled by sleigh down to a ranch, where his body remained in the barn for three months until the ground thawed out. There’s the one about a water-rights feud between two old-time ranchers on the same drainage that ended with a tractor battle and high explosives.

  And there are stories about the tangled relationships of families who grew up and either stuck or dispersed.

  That’s where “Power Wagon” came from. It’s about the four adult children of a malevolent Big Piney patriarch and how they deal with their father’s death as well as a high-profile unsolved crime. Brandon, the youngest son, returns with his pregnant wife, Marissa, to sort out the financials of the inheritance. But it isn’t just the surviving children of the old man who have come back to the ranch for a reckoning.

  On a bitterly cold night, when Marissa sees a single headlight strobing through the willows on the way to the house, she senses that trouble is on the way. When four disturbing people climb out of the car and approach the front door, she’s sure of
it.

  And so are we.

  Soon Brandon will learn that the key to everything is the ancient 1948 Dodge Power Wagon that’s been parked for years inside an outbuilding. It’s described by one of the strangers as follows: “The greatest ranch vehicle ever made. Three-quarter-ton four-by-four perfected in WW Two. After the war, all the rural ex-GIs wanted one here like they’d used over there. That original ninety-four-horse, two-hundred-and-thirty-cubic-inch flathead six wouldn’t win no races, but it could grind through the snow and mud, over logs, through the brush and willows. It was tough as a damn rock. Big tires, high clearance, a winch on the front. We could load a ton of cargo on that son of a bitch and still drive around other pickups stuck in a bog.”

  “Power Wagon” was written for an anthology called The Highway Kind, which was edited by Patrick Millikan. The subtitle describes it thus: “Tales of Fast Cars, Desperate Drivers, and Dark Roads”—even though the vehicle in question in this tale may not ever run again. But it does hold secrets.

  The story was constructed over a week filled with blood, sweat, mud, ice, and some of the most awe-inspiring Rocky Mountain terrain in the country. I hope that atmosphere seeps through to the story itself.

  Gerri Brightwell is originally from southwest Britain. She is the author of three novels: Dead of Winter (2016), The Dark Lantern (2008), and Cold Country (2002). Her short stories have appeared in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Redivider, and Copper Nickel, as well as on BBC Radio 4’s Opening Lines. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, with her husband, fantasy writer Ian C. Esslemont, and their three sons.

  • One year I went through a phase of being obsessed with westerns—something about their grittiness and bravado fascinated me. There are some wonderful western novels out there (Portis’s True Grit, Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing, McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers) and spectacular films (The Revenant, the Coen brothers’ True Grit), but so many of the movies were disappointing: they relied on the same stock characters in the same stock situations. You could pretty much guess how the story was going to play out from the first few scenes.