The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Read online

  “Easy to pulverize.”

  “Easy to dissolve.”

  “Lots of legitimate uses for synthetic curare drugs,” Jessica said.

  “Provided you’re careful with the dosage.”

  “We weren’t particularly careful with the dosage, Will.”

  “Did your champagne taste a little bitter?”

  He wanted to shake his head no. His champagne had tasted just fine. Or had he been too drunk to know just how it had tasted? But he couldn’t shake his head, and he couldn’t talk.

  “Let’s watch him,” Susan said. “Study his reactions.”

  “Why?” Jessica asked.

  “Well, it could be helpful.”

  “Not for the scene we’re doing.”

  “Killing someone.”

  “Killing someone, yes. Duh, Susan.”

  Killing me, Will thought.

  They are actually killing me here.

  But, no…

  Girls, he thought, you’re making a mistake here. This is not the way to go about this. Let’s go back to the original plan, girls. The original plan was to pop a bottle of bubbly and hop into the sack together. The original plan was to share this lovely night three days before… actually only two days now, it was already well past midnight… two days before Christ­mas, share this sweet uncomplicated night together, a sister act with a willing third partner is all this was supposed to be here. So how’d it get so serious all of a sudden? There was no reason for you girls to get all serious about acting lessons and private moments, really, this was just supposed to be fun and games here tonight. So why’d you have to go drop poison in my champagne? I mean, Jesus, girls, why’d you have to go do that when we were getting along so fine here?

  “Are you feeling anything?” Susan asked.

  “No,” Jessica said. “Are you?”

  “I thought I’d feel…”

  “Me, too.”

  “I don’t know… sinister or something.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I mean, killing somebody! I thought it would be something special. Instead…”

  “I know what you mean. It’s just like watching somebody, I don’t know, getting a haircut or something.”

  “Maybe we should have tried something else.”

  “Not poison, you mean?”

  “Something more dramatic.”

  “Something scarier, I know what you mean.”

  “Get some kind of reaction out of him.”

  “Instead of him just sitting there.”

  “Sitting there like a dope and dying.”

  The girls leaned over Will and peered into his face. Their faces looked distorted, so close to his face and all. Their blue eyes looked as if they were popping out of their heads.

  “Do something,” Jessica told him.

  “Do something, asshole,” Susan said.

  They kept watching him.

  “It’s not too late to stab him, I suppose,” Jessica said.

  “You think?” Susan said.

  Please don’t stab me, Will thought. I’m afraid of knives. Please don’t stab me.

  “Let’s see what’s in the kitchen,” Jessica said.

  He was suddenly alone.

  The girls were suddenly gone.

  Behind him…

  If he could not turn his head to see them.

  … behind him he could hear them rummaging through what he guessed was one of the kitchen drawers, could hear the rattle of utensils…

  Please don’t stab me, he thought.

  “How about this one?” Jessica asked.

  “Looks awfully big for the job,” Susan said.

  “Slit his fuckin’ throat good,” Jessica said, and laughed.

  “See if he sits there like a dope then,” Susan said.

  “Get some kind of reaction out of him.”

  “Help us to feel something.”

  “Now you’ve got it, Sue. That’s the whole point.”

  Will’s chest was beginning to feel tight. He was beginning to have difficulty breathing.

  In the kitchen, the girls laughed again.

  Why were they laughing?

  Had they just said something he couldn’t hear? Were they going to do something else with that knife, other than slit his throat? He wished he could take a deep breath. He knew he would feel so much better if he could just take a deep breath. But he… he… he didn’t seem to be… to be able to…

  “Hey!” Jessica said. “You! Don’t poop out on us!”

  Susan looked at her.

  “I think he’s gone,” she said.

  “Shit!” Jessica said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking his pulse.”

  Susan waited.

  “Nothing,” Jessica said, and dropped his wrist.

  The sisters kept looking at Will where he sat slumped in the easy chair, his mouth still hanging open, his eyes wide.

  “He sure as hell looks dead,” Jessica said.

  “We’d better get him out of here.”

  “Be a good exercise,” Jessica said. “Getting rid of the body.”

  “I’ll say. I’ll bet he weighs at least a hun’ ninety.”

  “I didn’t say good exercise, Sue. I said a good exercise. A good acting exercise.”

  “Oh. Right. What it feels like to get rid of a dead body. Right.”

  “So let’s do it,” Jessica said.

  They started lifting him out of the chair. He was, in fact, very heavy. They half-carried him, half-dragged him to the front door.

  “Tell me something,” Susan said. “Do you… you know… feel anything yet?”

  “Nothing,” Jessica said.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  MIKE MacLEAN

  McHenry’s Gift

  from Thuglit

  There was a knock at the door. Dillon Leary grabbed the .45 from underneath his mattress and pressed himself flat against the wall. He thumbed the safety off then racked the pistol’s slide, jacking a round into the chamber. It was a big sound in the little apartment.

  “Who is it?” Dillon called out.

  “UPS. Got a package out here.”

  “Leave it.”

  “I need a signature, sir.”

  Dillon glanced through the peephole. The man outside was dressed from head to toe in brown. Brown shorts. Brown shirt. Brown cap. Standard issue UPS uniform. He even had one of those electronic clipboards to sign. The kind that looked like an Etch A Sketch toy but that recorded names into a vast computer database. From all appearances, the guy seemed like the real thing. But appearances could be deceiving.

  Taking a deep breath, Dillon caught a whiff of the mildew and grime that permeated his little apartment. On Saturday nights the elevators smelled like vomit, the halls like piss. Dillon snuck another look out the peephole. The UPS guy stood motionless, head down, cap low over his eyes.

  Screw it, thought Dillon. He held the .45 low behind his back and opened the door an inch. “Pass me the board.”

  The guy did as he was told, slipping the Etch A Sketch toy through the crack of the door. Dillon scrawled his name on the monitor screen and handed it back. “Take off,” he said.

  Shaking his head, the UPS guy disappeared down the hall. Dillon waited two and a half minutes. Then he quickly swung the door open and swept the package up from the floor. It was lighter than he thought it would be. He shook it gently. It made no noise.

  Who could’ve sent such a thing?

  Great lengths had been gone to conceal Dillon’s whereabouts. His dingy little hideaway sat surrounded by government housing projects, pawnshops, and liquor stores. It was a place where people minded their business and kept their mouths shut. Dillon had grown up in a neighborhood like this. He knew how to blend in, how to disappear, becoming another face in the crowd. No one had a clue Dillon was here.

  So how did the UPS find him?

  As he turned the dead bolts behind him, Dillon scanned the box’s surface, reading
the return address. Printed clearly in the upper left-hand corner was the name Wilson McHenry.

  Dillon’s blood went cold, chilling his veins. The box nearly slipped from his grasp.

  He had just received a package from a dead man.

  ~ * ~

  Wilson McHenry didn’t look like a drug runner. He was tall and thin with stooped shoulders and a salt-and-pepper beard, a little more salt these days than pepper. Sometime in his late thirties he’d gone bald. Now at sixty, he was rarely seen without his trademark black fedora. It wasn’t a look many men could pull off, but it seemed to suit McHenry fine.

  It was the hat that Dillon first recognized as he trudged over a hill at Cedarbrook park. He spotted McHenry on a bench facing the lake, feeding ducks from a brown paper bag. Along with the fedora, the old guy wore a pair of khakis and a tattered tweed jacket. More like a college professor than a career criminal. Dillon took a seat next to him and stretched out his legs. The lake smelled like wet grass.

  “You ever eat one of those things?” asked Dillon, nodding toward the ducks.

  “Every Christmas when I was a boy,” said McHenry. He pulled a handful of bread crumbs from his bag and threw them into the pond. A pair of silky green mallards plucked them from the water and quacked for more.

  “What’d they taste like?”

  “Like a greasy turkey. But greasy in a good way. Maybe I’ll make one next holiday. You can come over and try it for yourself.”

  “I’d like that.”

  McHenry finished with the bread crumbs, crumpled the bag, and sky-hooked it into a trash can a few feet away. There was a simple grace to his movements. McHenry was no athlete, not anymore. But he was comfortable in his skin, comfortable in his aging bones. He propped the fedora high on his head and squinted in the sun. “So why am I here?”

  “Estaban sent me. He wanted us to talk.”

  “Estaban, huh? You on his clock now?”

  Dillon went silent.

  “I have to admit,” said McHenry, “never saw that one coming.”

  “Writing’s on the wall,” said Dillon. “You’ve had a good run, Mac. Longer than anyone I know. But Estaban is a Colombian. And this is a Colombian’s game.”

  McHenry smiled sadly. “And it’s a young man’s game too, is that it?”

  Dillon peered out at the water. Gray clouds reflected off its glimmering surface, a bit of sunlight fighting through. “He wants thirty percent. And you have to chip in to pay off the federales. Maybe an extra five a month.”

  “That sound like a fair deal to you?”

  Dillon shrugged. “It’s what he’s offering.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “This is Estaban Gomez we’re talking about. A Mexican judge said no to him once. They still haven’t found the body.”

  The old man leaned back against the bench, letting out a long sigh. “You know, I was only nineteen when I started in this business. I’d fly a little Piper cub back and forth to Mexico a few times a month. It was pot back then, a little cocaine here and there. God, I was a cocky little shit. Did it more for the thrills than anything else. Now it’s all about the money. Been that way for some time.”

  “It was always about the money, Mac. You just never noticed.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “So why not get out?” said Dillon. “You’ve got enough put away. And Estaban won’t bother you as long as you’re not competition.”

  “Sorry, kid,” said McHenry. “Not ready to give up the reins yet.”

  Dillon closed his eyes, listened to the ducks as they drifted away on the water. “Is that your answer then?”

  “I’ll talk to the boys. Let them decide for themselves. But I’m still in it. “

  Dillon stood, brushed off the seat of his jeans, and rolled the kinks out of his shoulders. He looked down at the old man, seeing his steel-blue eyes, dark in the shade of the fedora’s brim. “I wish you’d change your mind.”

  McHenry shook his head. “You know me better than that.”

  Dillon nodded and headed back up the hill. Just as he was about to disappear over its edge, McHenry called out to him.

  “Hey,” said the old man, “you still flying?”

  “No. Too busy on the ground.”

  “That’s a shame. You always were pretty good at the controls. Had some real talent up there.”

  “It wasn’t talent,” said Dillon. “I had a good teacher.”

  ~ * ~

  Night fell and the apartment filled with gray shadows. Dillon barely noticed. He sat in a dark corner, silent and unmoving, staring at the package on his kitchen counter. He’d been sitting that way for over an hour.

  When the package first arrived, Dillon almost opened it. Then he noticed the overnight sticker. The parcel had been sent within the last twenty-four hours, sometime after McHenry’s death. Which meant someone had sent it on the old man’s behalf, possibly someone looking for revenge. If that was the case, maybe opening the package wasn’t such a good idea. It wasn’t ticking, but that didn’t mean anything. Digital timers didn’t make noise, Dillon told himself. And neither did trip wires.

  Now, sitting in the dark corner, Dillon finally willed himself to move. He went to the kitchen and pulled a Budweiser from the fridge. Taking a drink, he circled the package a few times, trying to guess what could be inside.

  A small block of C-4 would do the trick, he thought. Or maybe a stick of good old-fashioned dynamite.

  No, the old man wasn’t like that. McHenry saw killing as a necessary evil, but one to be avoided at all cost. Pure and simple, he didn’t like to hurt people. And he certainly didn’t have the heart to order Dillon’s death. Did he?

  Dillon thought back to their last moment together. He had seen a father’s love in the old man’s eyes. Even in the end.

  Setting his bottle down, Dillon found a box cutter in a cabinet over the range top. He just had to know. Carefully, he steadied the package and gripped the box cutter tightly. He was sweating and the plastic handle felt slick in his hand. Once he made his first cut, there was no going back.

  He placed the blade lightly against the box top, about to slice into the tape. Then the phone rang. Dillon let out a heavy breath and went to answer it.

  “Yeah?”

  The voice on the other end was frantic, speaking rapid-fire English with a thick Colombian accent. “Leary, is that you? I have bad news. Very bad. Dios mio, you not going to believe it.”

  Dillon recognized the voice instantly. It belonged to Miguel Ortiz, one of Estaban’s L.A. lieutenants.

  “Miguel, slow down,” said Dillon. “What’re you talking about?”

  “It’s Señor Gomez. He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Estaban is dead,” said Miguel, this time louder. “Someone blew up his Mercedes. Right in front of that house he bought in Brentwood. You hear me, Leary? You there?”

  Dillon didn’t answer. In a daze, he set the phone back on the receiver and looked once again at the package.

  Maybe he was wrong about Wilson McHenry. Maybe the old man was as cutthroat as Dillon himself had been.

  ~ * ~

  Dillon had put McHenry’s prize Dobermans to sleep with a pair of drugged T-bones, then scaled the south wall of the old man’s estate. The wall’s razor wire cut into Dillon’s work gloves, but left his skin unmarked. He would leave no blood at the scene, no DNA, no fingerprints.

  Once inside the walls, Dillon carefully made his way across the grounds, sticking to the shadows and avoiding security cameras. He moved very slowly, very patiently. When he finally reached the main house, he saw McHenry sitting alone outside on the deck, drinking a margarita. The old man looked strange there for some reason. Dillon couldn’t put a finger on what it was. Then it occurred to him that McHenry wasn’t wearing his fedora. He looked unnatural without it, like he was missing a limb.

  “You didn’t kill my dogs, did you?” asked the old man.

  Dillon stepped into the glare of a flood lamp,
his shadow stretching across the lawn. “They’re just napping.”

  “I appreciate that.” McHenry took a sip of his margarita and eyed Dillon from head to toe, pausing briefly at the .45 automatic in Dillon’s hand. “I’ve let the boys go for the evening,” he said, “so you won’t have any trouble.”