The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Read online

  She was trembling, as though she were extremely hungry. She knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to buy a present for Darlene. She wanted to do this simple action: go into a store, select a gift for her, and buy it. That was all. Ginger stood up, wearing the same dress she had the night before, faint with the scent of smoke and alcohol, and walked slowly to the gift shop.

  There she stood, surrounded by the store’s offerings: the butterfly-sequined blouses, the china statues of noble wildlife, the authentic replica Eskimo fur hats, the jars of glacier-blue rock candy.

  “May I help you?” the girl at the counter asked.

  Ginger selected a large opal brooch set in a gold snowflake. It was three hundred dollars.

  “Beautiful taste,” the salesgirl said.

  “Hey,” said a voice. It was Darlene. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  The girl stood before her. Ginger put down the brooch.

  “Are you all right?” asked Darlene. “Who’s that for?” she said, glancing at the brooch.

  Ginger looked at her. “You,” she said.

  “That will be three hundred and fifteen dollars and seventy-three cents,” said the salesgirl.

  Ginger put her hand into her red velvet purse. There was nothing in it but the silk lining. She shook out her purse. Now she had one dollar and thirty-seven cents.

  “I have no money,” she said, softly.

  “Is it in your room?” the salesgirl asked.

  “This is all I have,” Ginger said.

  She pushed her hand deep into the purse, feeling its emptiness. Her coins fell onto the floor. “You don’t have to buy me anything,” said Darlene.

  The lights were too bright, as though someone had turned them all on at once.

  “I want to buy it,” said Ginger. “Don’t you understand? I want to.”

  She stood, swaying a little, aggravated that Darlene did not recognize her goodness. Darlene squinted at her, as though Ginger had begun to disappear.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked Darlene. She lurched toward her. “What?”

  “Hold on,” said Darlene, looking at the salesgirl. “I’ll be right back.” She backed up and began to hurry down the hallway.

  “Where is she going?” asked Ginger. She stepped toward the door. Then Ginger went into the hallway and began to follow her.

  ~ * ~

  An elderly couple floated toward her. The woman wore a white brimmed sunhat and the man wore a camera around his neck. “Thief,” Ginger whispered. She passed the maid clutching armfuls of crumpled sheets. “Thief,” she said. The maid turned around. Ginger began to walk onto the deck, the sunlight brilliant and cold on her arms. She staggered through the crowd in their pale sweatsuits. “Thief!” she yelled. She believed one side of her was becoming heavy. Her heart banged in her throat. Her voice was flat and loud. She heard the jingle of ice cubes in people’s drinks. “My money!” she yelled. Her voice was guttural, unrecognizable to her. “Give me my money! “

  The girl was running up to her.

  “Thief,” she yelled.

  The girl blinked. “What?” she asked.

  “Thief,” said Ginger. She wanted to say the word over and over. Ginger’s face was warm; she was exhilarated by the act of accusation. She had forgotten the girl’s name. It had simply disappeared from her. “I know who you are.” Her knees buckled. The girl grabbed her arm.

  “Call a doctor!” the girl yelled. “Quick.”

  The ocean was moving by very quickly, and Ginger stared, unblinking, at the bright water until she was unsure whether she was on the deck looking at the water or in the water looking up at the light.

  The girl’s firm grip made her feel calmer. Ginger did not remember her name, did not know who this friend was, did not know who had loved her and whom she had loved. She leaned toward the glaring blue world, the water and ice and sky and she felt as though she were part of it.

  “You’re not what you say,” murmured the girl. “I don’t believe you. You’re not a swindler. You’re a nice old lady. It was all a joke, wasn’t it —”

  Ginger breathed more slowly and clutched the girl’s arm. She saw everything in that moment: saw the trees on the shore giving up their leaves to the aqua sky, the ocean shimmering into white cloud, and the passengers’ breath becoming rain. She felt the vibrations of the ship’s motor in her throat. She stood, with the other passengers, looking. Through the clear, chill water, the ship moved north.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  C. J. BOX

  Pirates of Yellowstone

  From Meeting Across the River

  It was cold in Yellowstone Park in early June, and dirty tongues of snow glowed light blue in the timber from the moonlight. The tires of the van hissed by on the road.

  “Look,” Vladdy said to Eddie, gesturing out the window at the ghostly forms emerging in the meadow, “elks.”

  “I see ‘em every night,” the driver said. “They like to eat the willows. And you don’t say ‘elks.’ You say ‘elk.’ Like in ‘a herd of elk.’”

  “My pardon,” Vladdy said, self-conscious.

  The driver of the van was going from Mammoth Hot Springs in the northern part of the park to Cody, Wyoming, out the east entrance. He had told them he had to pick up some people at the Cody airport early in the morning and deliver them to a dude ranch. The driver was one of those middle-aged Americans who dressed and acted like it was 1968, Vladdy thought.

  The driver thought he was cool, giving a ride to Vladdy and Eddie, who obviously looked cold and out of place and carried a thick metal briefcase and nothing else. The driver had long curly hair on the side of his head with a huge mustache that was turning gray. He had agreed to give them a ride after they waved him down on the side of the road. The driver lit up a marijuana cigarette and offered it to them as he drove. Eddie accepted. Vladdy declined. He wanted to keep his head clear for what was going to happen when they crossed the huge park and came out through the tunnels and crossed the river. Vladdy had not done business in America yet, and he knew that Americans could be tough and ruthless in business. It was one of the qualities that had attracted Vladdy in the first place.

  “Don’t get too high,” Vladdy told Eddie in Czech.

  “I won’t,” Eddie said back. “I’m just a little scared, if that’s all right with you. This helps.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t wear that hat,” Vladdy said. “You don’t look professional.”

  “I look like Marshall Mathers, I think. Slim Shady,” Eddie said, touching the stocking cap that was pulled over his eyebrows. He sounded a little hurt.

  “Hey, dudes,” the driver said over his shoulder to his passengers in the back seat, “speak American or I’m dropping you off on the side of the road. Deal?”

  “Of course,” Vladdy said, “we have deal.”

  “You going to tell me what’s in the briefcase?” The driver asked, smiling to show that he wasn’t making a threat.

  “No, I think not,” Vladdy said.

  ~ * ~

  Vladimir and Eduard were branded “Vladdy” and “Eddie” by the man in the human resources office for Yellowstone in Gardiner, Montana, when they showed up to apply for work three weeks before and were told that there were no job openings. Vladdy had explained that there must have been some kind of mix-up, some kind of misunderstanding, because they had been assured by the agent in Prague that both of them had been accepted to work for the official park concessionaire for the whole summer and into the fall. Vladdy showed the paperwork that allowed them to work on a visa for six months.

  Yellowstone, like a microcosm of America, was a place of wonders, and it sought Eastern Europeans to work making beds, washing dishes, and cleaning out the muck from the trail horses, jobs that American workers didn’t want or need. Many Czechs Vladdy and Eddie knew had come here, and some had stayed. It was good work in a fantastic place, “a setting from a dream of nature,” as Vladdy put it. But the man at human resourc
es said he was sorry, that they were overstaffed, and that there was nothing he could do until somebody quit and a slot opened up. Even if that happened, the nonhiring man said, there were people on the list in front of them.

  Vladdy had explained in his almost-perfect English, he thought, that he and Eddie didn’t have the money to go back. In fact, he told the man, they didn’t even have the money for a room to wait in. What they had was on their backs — cracked black leather jackets, ill-fitting clothes, street shoes. Eddie wore the stocking cap because he liked Eminem, but Vladdy preferred his slicked-back hair look. They looked nothing like the other young people their age they saw in the office and on the streets.

  “Keep in touch,” the hiring man had told Vladdy. “Check back every few days.”

  “I can’t even buy cigarettes,” Vladdy had pleaded.

  The man felt sorry for them and gave them a twenty-dollar bill out of his own wallet.

  “I told you we should have gone to Detroit,” Eddie said to Vladdy in Czech.

  ~ * ~

  Vladdy pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the van window as they drove. The metal briefcase was on the floor, between his legs.

  He had not yet seen the whole park since he had been here, and it was something he very much wanted to do. He had read about the place since he was young and watched documentaries on it on television. He knew there were three kinds of thermal activity: geysers, mud pots, and fumaroles. He knew there were over ten thousand places where the molten core of the earth broke through the thin crust. He knew that the park was the home of bison, elk, mountain sheep, and many fishes. People from all over the world came here to see it, smell it, feel it. Vladdy was still outside of it, though, looking in, like Yellowstone Park was still on a television show and not right in front of him. He wouldn’t allow himself to become a part of this place yet. That would come later.

  Eddie was talking to the driver, talking too much, Vladdy thought. Eddie’s English was very poor. It was embarrassing. Eddie was telling the driver about Prague, about the beautiful women there. The driver said he always wanted to go to Prague. Eddie tried to describe the buildings but was doing a bad job of it.

  “I don’t care about buildings,” the driver said. “Tell me about the women.”

  ~ * ~

  The girl, Cherry, would be angry with him at first, Vladdy knew that. While she was at work at the motel that day, Vladdy had sold her good stereo and DVD unit to a man in a pawn shop full of rifles for $115, less $90 for a .22 pistol with a broken handgrip. But when she found out why he had done it, he was sure she would come around. The whole thing was kind of her idea in the first place, after all.

  Vladdy and Eddie had spent that first unhappy day after meeting the nonhiring man in a place called K-Bar Pizza in Gardiner, Montana. They sat at a round table and were so close to the human resources building that when the door to the K-Bar opened they could see it out there. Vladdy had placed the twenty-dollar bill on the table and ordered two tap beers, which they both agreed were awful. Then they ordered a Budweiser, which was nothing like the Czechoslovakian Budweiser, and they laughed about that. Cherry was their waitress. She told Vladdy she was from Kansas, some place like that. He could tell she was uncomfortable with herself, with her appearance, because she was a little fat and had a crooked face. She told Vladdy she was divorced, with a kid, and she worked at the K-Bar to supplement her income. She also had a job at a motel, servicing rooms. He could tell she was flattered by his attention, by his leather jacket, his hair, his smile, his accent. Sometimes women reacted this way to him, and he appreciated it. He didn’t know if his looks would work in America, and he still didn’t know. But they worked in Gardiner, Montana. Vladdy knew he had found a friend when she let them keep ordering even though the twenty dollars was spent, and she didn’t discourage them from staying until her shift was over.

  Cherry led them down the steep, cracked sidewalks and down an alley to an old building backed up to the edge of a canyon. Vladdy looked around as he followed. He didn’t understand Gardiner. In every direction he looked, he could see only space. Mountains, bare hillsides, an empty valley going north, under the biggest sky he had ever seen. Yet Gardiner was packed together. Houses almost touched houses, windows opened up to other windows. It was like a tiny island in an ocean of . . . nothing. Vladdy decided he would find out about this.

  She made them stand in the hallway while she went in to check to make sure her little boy was in bed, then she let them sleep in the front room of her two-bedroom apartment. That first night, Vladdy waited until Eddie was snoring and then he padded across the linoleum floor in his bare feet and opened Cherry’s bedroom door. She was pretending she was asleep, and he said nothing, just stood there in his underwear.

  “What do you want?” Cherry asked him sleepily.

  “I want to pleasure you,” he whispered.

  “Don’t turn on the light,” she said. “I don’t want you to look at me.”

  Afterward, in the dark, Vladdy could hear the furious river below them in the canyon. It sounded so raw, like an angry young river trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up.

  ~ * ~

  While Eddie and Vladdy checked back with the nonhiring man every morning, Vladdy tried to help out around the house since he had no money for rent. He tried to fix the dripping faucet but couldn’t find any tools in the apartment besides an old pair of pliers and something cheap designed to slice potatoes. He mopped the floors, though, and washed her windows. He fixed her leaking toilet with the pliers. While he did this, Eddie sat on the couch and watched television, MTV mostly. Cherry’s kid, Tony, sat with Eddie and watched and wouldn’t even change out of his pajamas and get dressed unless Vladdy told him to do so.

  ~ * ~

  Vladdy was taking the garbage out to the Dumpster when he first saw Cherry’s neighbor, a man whose name he later learned was Bob. Vladdy thought it was funny, and very American, to have a one-syllable name like “Bob.” It made him laugh inside.

  Bob pulled up to the building in a dark, massive four-wheel-drive car. The car was mud-splashed, scratched, and dented, even though it didn’t look very old. It was a huge car, and Vladdy recognized it as a Suburban. Vladdy watched as Bob came out of the car.

  Bob had a hard, impatient look on his face. He wore dirty blue jeans, a sweatshirt, a fleece vest, and a baseball cap, like everyone else did in Gardiner.

  Bob stepped away from the back of the Suburban, slammed both doors, and locked it with a remote. That’s when Vladdy first saw the metal briefcase. It was the briefcase Bob was retrieving from the back of the Suburban.

  And with that, Bob went into the building.

  ~ * ~

  That night, after Eddie and Tony had gone out to bring back fried chicken from the deli at the grocery store for dinner, Vladdy asked Cherry about her neighbor, Bob. He described the metal briefcase.

  “I’d stay away from him, if I was you,” Cherry said. “I’ve got my suspicions about that Bob.”

  Vladdy was confused.

  “I hear things at the K-Bar,” Cherry said. “I seen him in there a couple of times by himself. He’s not the friendliest guy I’ve ever met.”

  “He’s not like me,” Vladdy said, reaching across the table and brushing a strand of her hair out of her eyes.

  Cherry sat back in the chair and studied Vladdy. “No, he’s not like you,” she said.

  ~ * ~

  After pleasuring Cherry, Vladdy waited until she was asleep before he crept through the dark front room where Eddie was sleeping. Vladdy found a flashlight in a drawer in the kitchen and slipped outside into the hallway. He went down the stairs in his underwear, went outside, and approached the back of the Suburban.

  Turning on the flashlight, he saw rumpled clothing, rolls of maps, hiking boots, and electrical equipment with dials and gauges. He noticed a square of open carpet where the metal briefcase sat when Bob wasn’t carrying it around. He wondered if Bob wasn’t some kind of
engineer, or a scientist of some kind. He wondered where it was that Bob went every day to do his work, and what he kept in the metal briefcase that couldn’t be left with the rest of his things.

  Vladdy had taken classes in geology and geography and chemistry. He had done well in them, and he wondered if maybe Bob needed some help, needed an assistant. At least until a job opened up in the park.

  ~ * ~

  Cherry surprised them by bringing two bottles of Jack Daniel’s home after her shift at the K-Bar, and they had whiskey on ice while they ate Lean Cuisine dinners. They kept drinking afterward at the table. Vladdy suspected that Cherry had stolen the bottles from behind the bar but said nothing because he was enjoying himself and he wanted to ask her about Bob. Eddie was getting pretty drunk and was telling funny stories in Czech that Cherry and Tony didn’t understand. But the way he told them made everyone laugh. Tony said he wanted a drink, too, and Eddie started to pour him one until Vladdy told Eddie not to do it. Eddie took his own drink to the couch, sulking, the evening ruined for him, he said.