Harlan Coben

by The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

  So I told him the bit that I’d left out. The bit I didn’t want to say aloud. The bit that, once he’d heard it, he couldn’t dare ignore.

  “Look, Stuart, you want the truth? Fine, here it is. They need Evie. They need her alive, because they think that they can use her to get to me. Now that doesn’t mean they need her in good condition. And the guys they send on missions like this, these are not nice guys. In all likelihood, they’ll beat her. Rape her. Torture her, just to hear her scream. And you won’t be able to do a thing about it, because you’ll be dead. See, they need Evie, but you? You they don’t give a shit about. They don’t give a shit about you because they figure you’re not worth a thing to me—you’re just the guy who’s been fucking my wife.”

  Stuart made like he was going to object, but I raised a hand to silence him. “I know, I know, that’s not how it really is. Any claim I had on the title of husband died in the desert a long time ago. But you’ve got to understand just what we’re up against.”

  Evie’s face darkened in thought. “Say you kill these men,” she said. “Their employers will only send more, won’t they? And they’ll keep sending more until they finish the job. We’ll never be safe.”

  She was right. I knew she was. And suddenly I realized what I had to do.

  “There is one way,” I said. “One way to end this all for good.”

  Stuart looked confused. Evie didn’t, though; tears brimmed anew in her eyes, streaking down her cheeks, and the hand she raised to brush them away shook like a leaf in the wind. It was clear she understood.

  “Jake,” she said, “you can’t.”

  “I have to. It’s the only way.”

  Stuart looked to her, and then to me. “What? What’s the only way?”

  It was Evie who answered. “He means to let them kill him.”

  Stuart laughed. There was no humor to it, only incredulity. “Hey, good riddance, I say!” Then he saw my face—her face—caught on it was no joke. “Wait—you’re serious? You’re going to let them gun you down?”

  “It’s the only way I can be sure they never come back. Once I’m gone, they’ve got no use for you. You’ll be safe. All three of you,” I said, my gaze pulled toward Evie’s swollen belly.

  “But you only just…” she said. The sentiment died on her lips, though. It was for the best, I guess. She had a new life, a new love, a new path. All I had was the beginnings of a plan, and a pretty shitty one at that.

  “Look, if this is going to work, we have to get you out of here, and fast. You remember my family’s old camp?” Evie nodded. “Good. I want you to pack a bag and head up there, okay? Take only what you need, and leave your cell phones so you can’t be tracked. I’ve holed up there a time or two myself—there’s food enough in the cupboards for at least a week, and the generator’s all gassed up.”

  “How do we know when you’re … how do we know when it’s over?”

  “There’s a radio. Keep it on. If I’m going out, I’m taking as many of those fuckers with me as I can. When it’s over, you’re sure to hear it.”

  “And what do we tell the police?”

  I shrugged. “Tell them the truth. Tell them whatever you like.”

  “Jake, this is crazy.”

  “Maybe. But it’s the way it’s got to be.”

  She didn’t want to listen. Didn’t want to leave. But eventually she acquiesced; she and Stuart packed a bag, hopped in her truck, and together they disappeared into the hills.

  I watched until they vanished from sight, and then a couple minutes more.

  Then I went inside and made my call.

  Rigby answered on the seventh ring.

  “H-hello?”

  “Oh, good,” I said, “They haven’t come to kill you yet.”

  He swallowed hard, made a little keening noise in the back of his throat. “Dude, you don’t know for sure they’re gonna.”

  “Sure I don’t. Listen, I want you to do me a favor, on account of I let you live.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “When your Mob friends come to kill you, I want you to tell them if they go after Evie I’ll be waiting. That if they plan to take me, they’d best send every guy they’ve got. And that if I were them, I’d bring a fucking armory.”

  A long pause. “Uh, you sure you really wanna tell ‘em that?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Now say it back.”

  He said it back. “But really, dude, they might not come for me—”

  I hung up. I had nothing more to say to him. And I had no interest in anything he could say to me. What was the point in wasting either of our time? Soon enough, we’d both be dead.

  My call made, I wandered Evie’s empty house, drinking in the scent of her that lingered in the air. I closed blinds. I shut off lights. I busted stemware up in a paper bag and spread the broken shards across the windowsills. I nailed shut the front and back door both, and barricaded the French doors I’d watched Evie through with the kitchen table and Evie’s grandma’s china hutch.

  I stuck a can of cooking spray and a couple tins of Sterno in the microwave. Then I tossed in the contents of the silverware drawer for good measure, and set the timer for ten seconds. I figured maybe when the shit went down, I’d have a chance to trigger it.

  I hoped so. Dying didn’t seem so scary, but I’d be damned if I was going to do it alone.

  In the living room, I spied Evie’s dad’s old hi-fi and smiled to find it working after all these years. She’d lost him to cancer our sophomore year of high school; we’d sit and listen to his records for hours, tears streaming down her smiling face as, for a little while at least, he lived among the vinyl’s hiss and scratch.

  I fired it up and dropped the needle. The opening strains of Ex-ile filled the house. For one beautiful, painful moment, it felt like Evie was standing right beside me—she always had a soft spot for the Stones.

  Took me clean through “Sweet Virginia” to make Molotov cocktails of Evie and Stuart’s liquor cabinet. When I finished, I made a quick trip to the kitchen to fetch a chef’s knife and one of Stuart’s longneck PBRs. I tested the heft and balance of the knife in my hand and decided it’d do. Then I cracked the beer and retired to the couch, to sit and listen in the darkness.

  As I sat there—eyes closed, listening—I wondered if Rigby’d pass along my message, or if they’d pop him from afar before he got the chance. I wondered if they’d think that I was bluffing. I wondered if they’d come in full-jorce or sideways—some way I hadn’t thought of.

  But in the end, I knew, it didn’t matter.

  Eventually, message or no, they’d come.

  Could be it took them hours. Could be it took them days. But soon enough, I knew, they’d be here; all I had to do was wait.

  West of Nowhere

  Harry Hunsicker

  FROM Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

  DANNY THE DUMB-ASS fires once into the ceiling of the bar.

  Plaster and slivers from a ruined fan shower the room, a slurry of dust and wood fragments.

  I cringe, grip my pistol tighter, face hidden by a Ronald Reagan Halloween mask.

  Rule One: The guns are for show only; don’t shoot unless absolutely necessary.

  “N-n-n-nobody move.” Danny’s voice, muffled by his own rubber mask, sounds shrill, scared. “Ha-ha-hands where I can see them.”

  Rule Two: Let me do the talking. Especially if you’re a stutterer.

  In the middle of the room, a half-dozen men in overalls and work clothes sit around a felt-covered gaming surface. The table is between a bar on one wall and a shuffleboard game on the other. Nobody else in the place except for a scared-looking bartender by the beer taps.

  In the middle of the table: a pile of chips and cash, and a spray of playing cards, trapped by a circular fence of longneck bottles and ashtrays.

  Danny the Dumb-ass moves to one side of the front door and unplugs the jukebox.

  Toby Keith and Willie Nelson stop singing in midverse. “Whiskey
for my men—”

  Silence. The bartender is shaking. A mug in one hand, beer slops over onto his fingers. Danny looks at me and nods, apparently now remembering to be quiet.

  I resist the urge to slap him. Instead, I flip the deadbolt on the door, stride to the table.

  Outside, it’s early afternoon and the sign on the bank around the corner reads ninety-three degrees. Inside it’s balmy, the narrow room thick with air conditioning and smoke, lit only by a handful of neon beer signs.

  “Put the cash in here.” I drop a canvas bag in the middle of the card pile. “All of it.”

  The guy at the head of the table is about seventy. He has work-gnarled hands and a leathery face, evidence of a lifetime in the sun, most likely working the rocky soil of Central Texas.

  “Boy, you are making a big mistake.” He exhales a plume of smoke from his nostrils.

  “Less talk, more money.” I fire a round into a framed picture of John Wayne. The photo hangs next to a deer’s head with a dusty bra dangling from the antlers.

  What the heck; the don’t-shoot rule has already been broken and my other wingman is a no-show. Time to crank this cash-and-dash up to eleven and get out.

  Five of the six people at the table flinch and duck. The old man with the gnarled hands doesn’t move, not even a blink. He smiles instead.

  Danny hobbles to the table, dragging his foot in the special shoe, the one he told me would allow him to walk normally but clearly doesn’t. He grabs a wad of currency and a manila envelope that sits in front of the old man. He stuffs both into the sack.

  The old guy tenses, the tiniest movement in an otherwise still room. Losing that much cash hurts. Danny doesn’t notice. I do, and the old man knows it.

  “The rest of it,” I say. “Get a move on.”

  The other players shove money toward Danny.

  “You know whose game this is?” the old man says.

  “W-w-w-wouldja just shut the hell up.” Danny’s voice is louder than necessary. He jams the muzzle against the man’s temple. “It’s our ga-ga-game now.”

  “You nervous or something?” The old guy raises one eyebrow. “People stutter when they get nervous.”

  Danny’s gloved hands shake. He doesn’t handle stress well, not the best attribute for the sidecar on an armed robbery, even one as easy as this. Sometimes, however, you’ve got to run with whoever’s on the playground, even if he comes to school on the short bus and has one leg longer than the other.

  The old man shrugs. He stares at me. His eyes seem to pierce my mask.

  Danny scoops up the rest of the money with his free hand, shoves it in the bag.

  Lots of high-denomination bills, a big game. The stopwatch in my head says we’ve been inside for about fifteen seconds. Another fifteen to wrap things up, and we’ll be in the stolen pickup just outside the front entrance.

  Danny limps toward the door, sack in hand.

  “Don’t anybody be stupid.” I back away, weapon pointing at the men. “It’s just money.”

  Danny is at the entrance when the back door we’d locked earlier opens.

  A woman in her mid-thirties wearing a denim miniskirt and a halter top bounces in, cigarette dangling between her lips.

  Everybody turns her way.

  She stares at me and screams, a keening sound like the gates of hell just opened up for an instant or maybe American Idol has been canceled. The cigarette falls to the floor.

  Danny startles. Fires his pistol again for no apparent reason. The bullet hits the floor.

  Several of the men at the table jump up. The bartender reaches under the bar.

  The old guy moves faster than everybody. A gun appears in his hand. An orange spit of flame. BOOM. The bullet hits the wall about a foot from my head.

  In the same movement, I fire twice and turn to the door. I’m not really aiming, only pointing in the general direction of the table, hoping not to hit anybody, especially the girl, just trying to make the old man quit shooting.

  Another round hits the wall near my face. Shouts from behind me. A grunt of pain too, maybe.

  I grab Danny, push him outside. Slam the door behind us.

  The joint is on a side street in a little town in the Texas hill country, between an antique shop that’s always closed for lunch and an abandoned feed store. No traffic or people visible. Yet.

  I rip off the mask and blink at the sun. From the cardboard box we’ve left sitting by the front of the bar, I grab a battery-powered nail gun.

  Thwack-thwack-thwack. Three nails in the door and frame, almost as good as a deadbolt.

  Danny takes off his mask too. Sweat drips down his nose. “S-s-sorry about that.”

  “Get in the truck.” I walk as fast as possible to the driver’s side of the Chevy parked by the curb.

  Inside, we buckle up, all legal. I head to Main Street, driving well under the speed limit.

  “Don’t forget Chris.” Danny’s tone has returned to default, a whine somewhere between petulant and pathetic. “We g-g-gotta go to the rendezvous to get Chris.”

  The urge to rip out a clump of Danny the Dumb-ass’s red hair rises in my gorge like week-old anchovy pizza eaten too quickly. I reach over. Danny backs away. I mutter, lean back, keep driving.

  We’re in the clear so far. There looks to be enough money in the canvas bag to pay off a few debts with some left over to send to the kid and hopefully make the she-beast that is my ex-wife go away.

  A sheriff’s car idles by in the other direction. The driver’s window is down and a uniformed guy who looks like Jabba the Hutt but bigger sits behind the wheel. He pays us no mind.

  I don’t look at him either. I keep my hands at ten and two on the wheel. At the next stop sign, I turn toward the rendezvous point, the parking lot of the Baptist church. A few moments later, we stop by a Dumpster behind the sanctuary, windows down. The air stinks of grease from the trash and a charcoal fire nearby.

  Thirty nervous seconds stretch to a panic-filled minute before Chris appears, running around the corner of the church.

  She’s wearing a denim skirt and a halter top, the girl from the bar, our lookout who was supposed to be inside before we got there, sending a text or three on the situation.

  “Sorry I was late.” She hops in, scoots Danny between us. “But I dropped the key to the back door and then my parole officer called. Figured I’d scream to distract everybody.”

  “That’s okay, Chrissie.” Danny smiles, a goofy look on his face. “It’s all good.”

  Danny would give another inch from his bad leg if she’d ac knowledge him as something more than a lopsided stump with eyes. He’d give his entire leg if she’d sleep with him. Chrissie, who’s made a career out of going to bed with authority figures and dope-addled musicians, would rather French-kiss an armadillo than let Danny touch her.

  I pull away from the Dumpster, marveling at the stupidity of my cohorts.

  “The old guy’s hurt.” Chrissie lights a cigarette. “One of your shots hit him in the gut.”

  “All good” just morphed into something less, more like “all screwed.”

  “W-w-w-what are we gonna do?” Danny looks at me. “That guy said the operation was connected.”

  “Somebody owned that game?” Chrissie leans forward, stares at me. “I thought this was an indie?”

  I don’t reply, trying to process it all. Only so many people who could control a poker table like that, none of them folks you want to mess with. One in particular is especially vigilant when it comes to keeping a watch on his investments: Sinclair, a psychopathic Pole whose problem-solving techniques start with a blowtorch and then get nasty.

  “Jesus H.” Chrissie flicks her cigarette out the window. “I thought that guy was familiar. I’ve seen him before. In Waco.”

  I keep driving, vision tunneling at the news. We pass the city-limit sign on a narrow two-lane farm-to-market road that heads west.

  “Waco?” Danny starts to shake.

  Waco is Sinclair�
�s base. Which means the game we just robbed was his.

  And so was the guy I had shot.

  Houston belongs to what’s left of the Italian mob, mostly the aging wise guys based in Louisiana. Dallas has gone from an independent region controlled by local mom-and-pop thugs to being run by the Russians advancing across the country from the East Coast. The border region, everything from the Rio Grande to San Antonio, is controlled by the cartels.

  That leaves Central Texas, the swath of foothills and blackland prairie between Dallas and the Alamo.

  The heartland of the Lone Star State belongs to the Bohunk Mafia, the descendants of the Central European immigrants who arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Krauts and Slovaks, Czechs and Poles. In addition to a taste for beer and sausage, they brought the vices of the motherland: whores and gambling, numbers rackets that appealed to their Teutonic sense of order. And a wicked style of loan sharking picked up over the years from the Jews as they herded them into the ghettos.

  The three of us are Czechs from the same town, a little place near the Brazos River famed for its oompah band, sausage house, and second-generation meth labs, the latter of which are run by Chrissie’s family. We grew up together and—if we’d stayed in school—would have graduated in the same class, coming up on twenty years ago.

  We used to work for the Nemeceks, a local crew recently dispersed by prison and a nasty strain of syphilis too long untreated. I was muscle and transport, moving the weekly take to a friendly bank in Austin. Chrissie ran a strip club and hotsheet joint by the interstate. Danny, dumb as cut hair, worked as the point guy at a Nemecek dope operation, essentially directing customers to the right aisle of the store, sort of like a greeter at Wal-Mart.

  But that was then. Now we are scared and a long way from home, cruising down a farm-to-market road in the western fringes of Central Texas, open territory, or so we thought. The terrain itself is sparse, rocky outcroppings topped with cedars, craggy hills that jut from barren pastures. Wood and stone farmhouses bleached by the elements.