The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  He felt tired and his skin itched. Just nerves, Pine thought. His stomach roiled with acid. He knew he would be on the six o’clock news and he wanted to wait for the update. He needed to see how close they were.

  Maybe I can still turn it around, he thought. Maybe I don’t have to stay a criminal.

  I never wanted to be this way.

  I never chose it.

  This whole life . . . it just . . . happened to me.

  They say the devil knows his own.

  The man whose real name was Christopher but who had recently called himself Steve Pine lay on his bed and meditated, his mind doing its own riff through his past—those early failures followed by the successful robberies where the money was good but never lasted. Those bodies on the floor back in Minnesota intruded. It would have been unthinkable when he started down this path—to take a life so easily. Bob was an easy one, a pragmatic decision. That wasn’t even Pine’s doing because Bob wrote that part for himself. He felt nothing inside for him or any of them. Suicide, they told him, was the only irredeemable sin. He took off his St. Christopher medal and laid it gently on the pillow beside him. He took the Glock out of his ankle holster, brought the barrel to his mouth, and applied a pound of pressure just to see what it felt like to pull the trigger. Except for the taste of bluing in the metal, he had no other sensation, no fear of ending his life in an abject squalor of brain and blood on a headboard in a highway motel. The money in the trunk of his car had all the meaning that mattered now.

  He trusted his instincts. Key West was too risky—too many snowbirds from up North came down and he’d stand out to local cops and bar owners. He’d save it for later like a good middle-class citizen deferring pleasure until circumstances were more in hand. First things first: a place to stay, nothing flashy like those deluxe resorts at the tip of Little Torch Key. A small trailer park on the leeward side of Dolphin Marina fit the bill; a decrepit sign stuck between a couple of palm trees declared lots, trailers, and rentals available, inquire with the manager. He introduced himself as “Keith Reynolds,” financial-services consultant, out of Chicago.

  The park manager was a Vietnam vet with tobacco-stained teeth and shoulder-length gray hair. He said a retiree named Jefferson had just brought his double-wide down from South Dakota and “then, by God, dropped deader than Julius Caesar from a massive coronary” after only a week down here. He looked inside, nodded, asked the manager about the price and was told it could be his at a huge discount because “the old boy’s family, they don’t want to pay a big-ass fee to have it hauled back home.”

  He agreed to the price, asked to pay cash—he planned to open up an account at a bank in the Lower Keys tomorrow.

  “I’m sure the family will let you have all his stuff at a good price,” he said.

  “No thanks,” he replied.

  The manager said, “No problem, man,” and then said he’d arrange with some moving people to have the furniture carted away to a storage facility.

  He thought of his St. Christopher medal back in Valdosta, now most likely the property of a motel maid. He wasn’t free of all superstition, but he didn’t want anything a dead man had touched hanging over his new life.

  He thought he felt his luck changing. He began to breathe more easily and stopped looking over his shoulder so often. The sunshine, the ocean breezes, the postcard sunsets were everything he dreamed of back when he was languishing in his prison bunk. He drove his car close to the back of his trailer and threw a blue plastic tarp over it in case somebody glimpsed the out-of-state plate and got curious. One night was spent counting and sorting his money. He decided it was safe inside the trunk for a couple more days until he could dispose of the car. Just to be sure, he let the air out of the tires.

  His first goal was to find a bank to begin depositing small amounts of money. Banks were required to report deposits of $10,000 or more; he suspected they reported amounts much lower, so he planned to stagger his deposits in odd amounts. The park manager suggested the bank on Islamorada Key, and he made plans to go there the following day. He’d box up $50,000 for his sister in Iowa and ask her to mail Tom a few bucks, have her get the message to him he’d catch up on old times with him soon.

  He wore the suit and new shoes he’d picked up at a mall in Homestead on his way down to the Keys. He practiced the story he intended to roll out of an eccentric aunt who died suddenly and left him cash. He practiced it in the rearview mirror until it sounded natural.

  The assistant manager told him he himself had been called by an elderly woman just the other day who wanted to know if she could cash “a gold bar” at the bank. He laughed along with the man, playing an amiable nitwit, joking like a squarejohn with a man he’d have snarled at and put a gun in his face not so long ago.

  “She was a dear soul but very much belonged to a different time,” he told him, assuming the role of an amiable nephew.

  When he returned that afternoon, his bone-white shirt was damp behind the collar and his silk was folded up in his pocket, its job completed.

  The manager was raking lava rocks around the palm trees out front.

  He stopped raking when he saw him exit the Uber car.

  “The two moving men was here while you was gone. They got your place cleaned out,” he said. “Refrigerator and everything.”

  “That’s fine.”

  He had no further interest in the man or the topic and headed down to his trailer.

  Inside, he found a carton of lukewarm beer that had been removed from the fridge before the moving men took it. The place was empty, all blond wood, polished. No dead man smell anywhere. He popped the tab on one can and took a long swallow. He thought of engaging a charter for some deep-sea fishing off Islamorada the next morning. He’d take his time filling up the trailer with his own furniture. No rush, no rush at all . . .

  He was raising the can to his lips for another sip of beer when a thought struck him like ice in the belly. No, not that. He rushed to the back window and flipped the curtain aside. The blue tarp was gone, as well as the car beneath it.

  He unscrewed the vent in the bedroom and removed his gun. He slipped it into his belt and raced to the park manager’s trailer. He banged on the door.

  A smell of marijuana drifted out when it opened. The manager’s pale chest and pot belly clashed with the skinny, sunburned arms; his nipples peeked from behind an unbuttoned shirt like a pair of mismatched rosettes.

  He drew an imaginary line bisecting them and imagined the bullet going in there punching everything to mush before it exited his spine.

  “My car . . .” he choked out, “my car is . . . gone.”

  “Them boys asked me if they should take everything, like you told me, and I said, yeah, it’s all got to go. I let’em use the phone to call for a tow truck.”

  He bent low, sick to his stomach, and punched himself in the forehead with his fist. No act of self-abasement; he had to dispel the tsunami of rage and panic. Killing this idiot standing in front of him was not going to get his money back.

  Calmer now, his hands shaking, he asked him where the stuff had been taken.

  The manager handed him a card.

  “I forgot to give you this when we was talking out front just now.”

  It had the name of a storage facility: Bonefish Self-Storage. Marathon, FL. Someone had written in block letters the word UNITS and two numbers: 149, 150.

  “Nothing closer?” he asked, some of his spit flecking the manager’s bony chest.

  “All’s I know is they say they got a contract from the owner.”

  His hand swung around to his belt and stopped.

  No, not him. It might not be too late. Think, think—

  “Give me your car keys,” he said.

  “Hunh?”

  “Give me your fucking car keys, asshole, and a bolt cutter. Right now!”

  He drove and wept, big sobs erupting unbidden from his throat. Mile markers on the Overseas Highway were a blur, the sunlight dazzled hi
m, but he stared dully through the windshield. The glint off the windshields of opposing traffic heading north created a mirage of dazzling light and flashing chrome, a snake unwinding beside him, its belly full of happy tourists whose faces appeared in his peripheral vision. He blanked out all thought as if he were on a caper. No thought but one now: find the car, get the money, ignore the world.

  He took in at a glance that the facility in Marathon was surrounded by a cyclone fence and closed-circuit cameras mounted on poles.

  The lock snapped. The metal folding door rattled on its castors. The car was backed into unit 149. The first thing he noticed was that both doors were left wide open and the trunk lid was up, like a giant metallic insect unable to take flight. He forced himself to look inside.

  He snapped the lock of the next unit and saw the dead man’s items neatly arranged. They’d done the unloading first; the trunk was popped merely to see if there was anything of value that could be taken and not be missed, such as a tire lever, maybe the whole jack set, asserting the scavenging rights of the unskilled laboring class.

  He had only the money in his wallet he’d taken with him that morning. Not enough to track the thieves, certainly, and more pressing, not enough to sustain him for more than a few days in his empty trailer.

  He expected to find the police waiting for him back at the trailer park. Instead, the manager—shirt undone as before, but high on weed from the odor wafting toward him—snatched his keys back, grumbled something derisive and obscene, and then slammed the door in his face.

  He couldn’t bear walking back to the trailer. He headed mindlessly in the direction of the marina and soon found himself on a sandy path that cut through saw grass down to the shoreline. Sand fleas hovered around his shoes with every step; dust took away the mirror polish as he trudged along.

  He waded into the water up to his knees, uncertain. He should make the Grand Gesture: curse God and die.

  He took out the Glock, thinking This is as good a place as any—

  He placed the barrel at his temple. He looked down at the refracted image of his legs, his dress shoes submerged in muck. The warm air and salt-scented tang of the open sea was a balm, a belated gift after the torment of those last several hours. The gun seemed to lower itself of its own weight. He stuck it back inside his belt and stared again over the flat sheen of the gray-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Sandwiched between two oceans—the Atlantic just on the other side of the key—he felt small and insignificant. God wouldn’t care. His suicide might make the paper in Key West, but not in Miami. That is, if his body didn’t go out with the tide and get nibbled to a skeleton by fish.

  He heard a noise behind him and turned around. A small white-tailed deer stood there calmly staring back at him.

  He laughed. Bob, sending me a fuck-you message . . .

  “If you came to see me off, you’re in for a disappointment,” he told the deer.

  The tiny creature bolted as soon as he began plowing back to shore and disappeared into the thicket. His heart was a lump of ice despite the heat. He could survive. The country had other disgruntled employees, plenty of inside men. Meanwhile, he was going to have a long talk with the park manager. He may know more about that tow truck operation than he had volunteered.

  The island wasn’t all that big, and they had to expect someone would come looking before too long. He wondered if they’d expect it would be someone like him.

  TED WHITE

  Burning Down the House

  from Welcome to Dystopia

  They burned down my block today.

  I saw them. They had flamethrowers, big tanks on their backs like backpacks, and black nozzles that spurted flame. I was across the street, just coming home, when I saw them.

  They were big men, more than a dozen of them, dressed in black. They’d kick in a door and then torch the place. They were efficient, systematic. In less than ten minutes, that whole side of the street was burning.

  I ducked into an alleyway on my side of the street. No sense letting them see me. I saw what they did to the people who ran out of the burning buildings or dropped from windows to the street. They shot them. They do that every time they burn a block.

  It was all going up in flames—my little hideaway, with my cache of paper books, so very flammable, tucked away in the center of the block. My home.

  Suddenly a grimy arm locked around my neck from behind and I felt myself being yanked backwards and nearly off my feet.

  I thought I recognized the arm—and the smell that enveloped me. It was the smell of primroses.

  He pulled me into a narrow doorway and whirled around to close the door with his butt, flinging me loose to stumble toward a dilapidated armchair. I almost sat in it before deciding it probably had bugs.

  “Well, missy, there it all goes!” he said, gesturing in the direction of the street. “How long till they do this block, huh?”

  Rudolph was a deceptively stringy-looking man, shambling in appearance, but very strong. He could probably pick me up with one arm. He dowsed himself with cheap fragrances because he never bathed.

  His little hole was no bigger than mine had been, a roofed-in and closed-off space between two older buildings. It’s illegal to do that, but pretty common. I hadn’t built mine; I found it. Someone had died there and it had been abandoned and mostly forgotten. I’m not sentimental and I’m not squeamish, so I moved in. Now I’d have to find a new place. But not Rudolph’s. Among other reasons, it was too close. Odds were it would be burned next.

  Rudolph was giving me the eye.

  “Yer a scrawny kid,” he told me, “but yer female, and I could use me one.”

  “In your poppy dreams,” I said. A knife appeared in my hand. It had a long blade and I kept it sharp.

  “Hey, now,” he said, backing away from me. There wasn’t much room. “A simple no would do it.”

  “You got it,” I said. “No.” I looked around the dimly lit room. Boxes had been piled, on their sides, against all the walls, creating uneven shelves, filled with objects that looked like and probably were scraps, stolen from dumpsters in the affluent areas—broken appliances, plastic tubs filled with mismatched nuts and bolts, and stuff I couldn’t identify. A battered sofa took up one end of the room. I could see it wasn’t the kind that opened up. I couldn’t imagine sharing it with Rudolph. “You’d have to sleep in the chair,” I said.

  “Why don’t you just get the hell on out, then,” he said. “Take your chances with the fire troopers, huh?”

  “I think I will,” I said, moving to the door. I could see it was made of planks bolted to crosspieces. I recognized the carriage-bolt heads when I opened the door and saw its outer side.

  “It’s yer mistake, missy,” he said as I pulled the door shut.

  The alley doglegged just beyond Rudolph’s door, and I moved around the corner quickly. The air was full of smoke, which was a bad sign. The wind could blow embers across the street. This block might be next, and sooner than Rudolph thought. So many old, wooden buildings with tar roofs, crammed together, a tinderbox just waiting for a match. I had to keep going, cross another street, hope for the best.

  Dusk was coming. That was both good and bad for me. Good, because I’m stealthy and I can get around without being noticed. Bad, because there’s a whole different crew out on the streets after dark, and my chances wouldn’t be great if I encountered the wrong people. Normally I’m home, holed up, after dark. Now where would I go?

  I decided to head for Hooker Street. That’s its real name—I think there was once a General Hooker—but it’s now also a good description. I cut through the alleys that snaked through the blocks. I grew up here. I know them all.

  I found Jonny. Or maybe he found me. That prosthetic eye of his has some kind of built-in radar, I think.

  “Hey, Shivvy,” he said from somewhere close behind me. That’s his nickname for me, because I’m good with a knife. I didn’t jump. I recognized his voice. “Change ya mind?”


  I turned to face him. He’s a kid, like me—but not very much. Jonny got put through the mill when he was twelve and had to be rebuilt. I used to wonder who paid for it. But I figured the reason he started running girls was to pay it off. He looks almost normal, until you realize that all his uninked skin is fake—and that’s his right arm and the right side of his face. Fake skin won’t take tats.

  “I been looking for you,” I said. “They burned my block down. I need a new place.”

  He grinned at me. “I can fix ya up,” he said. “But wha’choo gonna do fer me?”

  “I won’t cut you,” I told him. “How’s that?” I smiled back. Two big guys pushed between us as if neither of us were there, heading for the door of a juice house. Jonny in turn ignored them.

  “Choo’know,” he said, “when ya get ridda that scowl, ya don’t look so bad.”

  “I’m not gonna work for you, Jonny. You know that.”

  “It won’t be work. It’ll be fun.” He laughed, saw my reaction, and held up his hand. “I’m not asking’choo ta work for me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nah. I wan’choo to live with me. Now, hear me out.” His face got serious. “I got respect for ya, li’l Shiv. Ya someone I trust wit’ my back, you know what I’m saying?” He grasped my arm with his left hand, the real one, and pulled me into a barred doorway. I think we both felt exposed on the street.

  “I been thinking about’choo. This fire thing just pushed it together. Ya need a place to stay, and I need ya. Win-win, right?”

  “Uh-uh,” I said, shaking my head. “Not if you want to sex me.”

  “Aw, come on now,” he said, his voice getting all soft and husky, his pimp-voice.

  “Not ever,” I said. “No. I’m not one of your girls.”

  “Choo breakin’ my heart, girl.”

  “You got a crib you’re not using?” I asked. “Some place I can use for a few days?”

  “Then what?”

  “Then whatever. I’ll move on, quick as I can.”

  “Choo don’t wanna crib,” Jonny said, shaking his head. “They trade ’em off, hot beds. One after another. Never empty long.” He squeezed his eyes shut to show me he was thinking. “An’choo not willing to get in my bed, so . . .” He brightened. “How about a rich man?”