The Best American Mystery Stories Part 25

"I'm feeling pretty f.u.c.king invaded right now," says Larry, "if you want to know the truth."

"We haven't actually seen Edna for a while," says Emmett, stalling.

"No. I don't suppose you have." Larry wiggles the power cord with his toes, thinking. "You know that shark gun he kept by his chair when they went out for big stuff?"

"Short-barrel forty-four -"

"About as much wallop as you can get from a rifle. You can imagine, point-blank range, not shooting through water - he was just down on the saloon couch, the rifle was still between his knees. And the wife - the blood on the pillow and sheets was all dried. He must've caught her sleeping."

Emmett sees a trio of jellyfish working their way along the pontoon, no color, no edges, just a slight lack of focus in one part of the water. "Was she on her back? Looking up?"

"Yeah -"

"So she could have been awake. Knew it was coming, even."

"Like some kind of mercy-killing deal?"

"Why not?"

Larry considers this. He is shivering a bit, the shadow of the Lifestyles complex covering them both. He shrugs. "Who knows what the f.u.c.k goes on in people's heads? I figure she was already gone three, four days when I sat with him at Ricky's. I asked what was new and he said they were thinking about tarpon."

"That's all?"

"'We've been thinking about tarpon.'"

They are quiet for a long moment, a breeze picking up and tinkling the wind chimes on the back of the converted tug two slips down. A succession of hippie-looking people come down to use it on some sort of time-sharing deal. Muriel calls it the Love Boat.

"I hauled my a.s.s back here and got my cell phone, tracked down the cops. I didn't go back in a second time, just gave them my statement. I'd forgot about the d.a.m.n radio. Took the locals an hour before they turned it off." Larry looks out past the breakwater. "The fella calling in the weather said he thought this Cedric might turn into the real thing."

Emmett nods. The channel water has a little chop to it now. The frigate birds have disappeared.

"The way I feel, just let it blow," he says. "Be good to clear the air."

SAM SHAW.

Reconstruction.

From Story Quarterly.

ON A BRISK, beautiful autumn day, Guinevere accidentally killed my neighbor, Len Haynes. We were sniping chipmunks from a blind I'd constructed out of sc.r.a.p tin when his head appeared over the crest of a hill. As if compelled by an innate marksman's instinct, she squeezed the trigger, and he vanished with a little spray of blood and what must have been brain matter. A cry escaped Guinevere's mouth.

"What," I said. "What did you do?"

"Oof," she said.

We were out of the blind and running across the field.

Haynes lay on the blond gra.s.s in the strangest position, arms and legs splayed like he had been interrupted in the performance of a dance. A cardboard box rested nearby, and objects that might have been hailstones had spilled from its mouth. Gwen licked one and said, wonderingly, "Mothb.a.l.l.s."

I'd never seen a dead man before, not even Sid, whose ashes my brother and I had strewn in the fourth-hole water hazard at his beloved Pasquaney Club. Haynes looked almost serene, but blood of a startling red color streamed out of an opening an inch above his right eye. I dabbed his brow with the cuff of my shirt.

"Hey," I said to Haynes. "Hey, pal."

Haynes was not a good neighbor - often he left trash bags outside his door, and animals littered my yard with their contents - but I saw at that moment with perfect clarity that our fates were linked.

"It's OK," Guinevere said. "His eyes are moving."

But they weren't. Wide and gla.s.sy, they gaped at the cold expanse of the sky. I bent down, took his wrist in my hands and shook it.

At that moment, we heard what we took for a second shot, a screen door banging shut, and Guinevere and I both bucked upright. Haynes lived with his very large wife and a menagerie of desperate-looking cats and dogs in a green house some hundred feet from my own. Mrs. Haynes stood on the porch, holding a silver colander in her hands. It glinted terribly in the sun.

"You sonofab.i.t.c.h," she cried, in her grim baritone. To which, for reasons I still can't fathom, Guinevere lifted the rifle she had somehow neglected to drop, drew a bead on the woman, thought better of this, and fired a shot in the air. Mrs. Haynes loosed the colander and darted into her house.

We drove first to Guinevere's trailer, to collect some personal items and to think. As soon as we pa.s.sed into its beery gloom, she thrust a stack of hardcover library books into my arms. The volume on top was called Parrots of the World. It must have weighed five pounds.

"I'm keeping these," she said. "It's wrong, I know, but I am."

I set the books by the door, then sat in the kitchen on the scuffed Formica counter while she filled a suitcase with clothes. Her faucet was busted, and a weak stream of water murmured in the sink. It was the bleakest sound I'd ever heard.

"What are we doing?" I asked her.

Through a half-opened door, I could see her standing over the suitcase. She held a sheer yellow blouse at arm's length as though contemplating a purchase. I took this opportunity to finish a roach I'd stowed in my wallet.

"Gwen? What are we doing, really?"

"I'm packing," she said, breathless, "and you're - I don't know what. Panicking."

"I'm not," I said. "Listen, you and I both know what happens next. We drive into town and straighten this thing out. Think for a second and you'll see I'm right."

"Getty, don't," she said.

"We've done nothing wrong, when you get down to it," I said, exhaling blue smoke.

She gave me a long, incredulous look. "See what you can find in the fridge," she said. "We're driving to Mexico."

Or rather I was driving - Gwen was unlicensed. What can be said about this plan? It sounded reasonable at the time. We piled into my Volvo, the two of us plus the bird.

Guinevere had acquired Cheyenne the prior Christmas from a war veteran in Sausalito. She was a c.o.c.katoo, an enormous creature with glistening feathers and imperious black eyes and an unsettling habit of turning her head 180 degrees to regard you over her shoulder - if a bird can be said to have shoulders. It was bad judgment, I thought. Exotic pets attract attention, and a getaway car ought properly to blend in. And there was the border crossing to consider: certainly the bird would not be welcome in Mexico.

"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it," Guinevere said. "I'll let her go if I have to. Who knows - could be she'll find us on the other side."

"She'll die," I said, and immediately I regretted this.

We didn't speak until we'd reached the highway. Everywhere, billboards. She put her hand on my leg, kneaded my thigh, and suddenly, exuberantly, I was erect.

"Look who's awake," she said.

Gwen had a special animal confidence, like she'd invented the concept of s.e.x. We kissed there in the car, at eighty miles an hour, under a hemorrhaging sky.

I'd been stuck in a kind of emotional holding pattern for going on seven years. Not that things were desperate. I wasn't about to do myself in, for example, though I'd threatened it once in a letter to Sid. But I was looking down the barrel of turning thirty and there were days when I never put on pants, and nearly everything I ate emerged futile and gray from the maw of a George Foreman Grill. I'd moved to Port Wescott in '97, with the project of ruining my life. The place fairly reeked of disappointment. Everyone you met wore the same dazed look, as if the shovel of life had caught them square in the face. They were all former somethings: grounded pilots and injured farm-league phenoms, failed actors and businessmen, the disbarred, displaced, and dispossessed. As for me, I was a former son, doing everything I could think of to avoid becoming Sid. He'd built a pharmaceutical empire by the age of thirty-five; I look potshots at rodents from a half-collapsed porch. I was ready for a change.

One thing about flight: the s.e.x is incredible. I've done breakup s.e.x and makeup s.e.x, s.e.x with strangers, s.e.x with old friends, s.e.x in public, s.e.x in closets, s.e.x with several partners, s.e.x with none; believe me when I tell you that there is nothing in the world like fugitive-from-justice s.e.x.

We stopped for the night at a motel designed to resemble an African village: stucco office, empty kidney-shaped pool, and a corridor of suites with artificial thatching on the roof. I gave a false name and plate number to the desk attendant, a squirrelly Asian guy who might himself have been a wanted man. I was tense and depleted, and Guinevere fell on me as soon as we'd reached the room.

We screwed intermittently throughout the night. She pulled at my hair, bit my ear, cried and cursed, came like thunder. At dawn, swaddled in bedclothes, I told her that I loved her. She held me in a kind of wrestling lock with her legs and kissed my neck. I had said the words before. To Astrud Faison, dressed in her whites and smelling of tennis; to that French lifeguard, 1989; to Colleen, the night I left Antioch, not to return. Things have a way of ending.

"Have you been to Central America?" Gwen asked.

"No," I lied.

I lit a joint. The rotors of the ceiling fan did interesting things with the smoke.

"There are mangoes you eat right off the tree," she said. "And birds that you wouldn't believe. Serious birds. Everybody freaks over raptors, like the bald eagle is the greatest thing since bread. Try the resplendent quetzal. Emerald green with a three-foot tail."

As it happened, I had seen one in the wild. Guatemala, with Sid and Phyllis - or Syphilis, as I called my parents even then. As usual, they had spent the week indoors, sh.e.l.lacked on rum and c.o.kes. I'd spotted the bird on an afternoon hike. The half-dozen tourists in our group, whose T-shirts attested to other vacations they'd enjoyed ("Pura Vida Costa Rica," "Oahu Nights") all clutched at their chests and swooned. Perched on a high branch, the resplendent quetzal looked to me like something you'd use to dust a chandelier.

'"What I meant is, I love this," I said.

"I know," said Gwen.

She stood up and walked to the bathroom, perfectly naked and unashamed, urinated with the door open, then climbed back into bed.

"What's that?" I said.

"What?"

"On your back. ESP." I traced the letters with my finger.

"Extrasensory perception," she said. "I've got it like crazy. Think of a number between one and fifty."

"The E is darker," I said.

She put my hand on her breast.

"Because it's new."

I thought about this.

"Who's SP?"

"Just someone," she said.

She was undoubtedly the most beautiful person I ever knew.

"Guess where I'm heading once we get down south," she said. "Veracruz. Guess why."

"Have a swim?"

"I'm going to get my degree and become an ornithologist. They've got a very good program. Maybe the best."

"Hey. Hey." My finger was in her mouth. "We really killed that guy."

She laid my hand on the bed and sat upright.

We were back on the highway, then, traveling south. The car was a wreck, bird s.h.i.t on the seats, snags and holes pecked in the dash-board upholstery. It was exhilarating in a way: we rode with the windows down, air howling in our ears so that we had to shout to make ourselves heard; Gwen held Cheyenne in her lap, smoothed her leathered head; I played the radio like an instrument, tuning gospel and swing and roiling Spanish talk.

It was a mistake, I knew, but I couldn't help worrying over Haynes. Probably laid out on a gurney somewhere on a paper sheet, and cruisers parked outside the house, hounds pursuing odors through the gra.s.s. I hadn't packed. So many objects I would never see again: my brother Antietam's trophy from the state geography bee, my journals, a Fender telecaster that had once belonged to Jeff Beck. And the eye, prized from the stony head of a bobcat at Pasquaney, when I was fourteen. Sid had shot the thing himself and presented it to the club as a monument. It was worthless, as far as I could tell. But of all his many treasures - all the asinine curios he'd found to throw his fortune at - the bobcat stood closest to his heart. Whenever he saw it he stopped and raised his gla.s.s as if toasting the honor of some great storied rival he had smote on the fields of war. I'd replaced the milky ball with a backgammon chip. Five minutes with a penknife while my parents drank cordials in the trophy room.

In spite of all that, it was good to be driving. From time to time, I would look over at Gwen and see the way she tended to her bird, and I'd want to pull over and stretch out in the back seat - not to make love, even, but to hold her and to feel the shockwave of pa.s.sing trucks. It was as if I'd been granted a second chance. Now that Haynes was dead, I felt duty-bound to love and be loved, to build something real and true from the pieces of our three wrecked lives.

We lunched at a truck stop, in a fast-food place flanked by gray, skeletal hedges. I waited in a line of bedraggled kids and parents while Gwen made calls in the lot. Behind the counter, women in striped shirts dispensed hamburgers and vapid, lipsticked smiles. Unplugged pinball and arcade machines lined the wall like monuments in an antebellum graveyard. I was contemplating the plate gla.s.s windows when a hand touched my leg. It was attached to a boy in flannel pajamas.

"You're in the water," he said.

The floor was a vastness of blue tiles breached at intervals by islands of white. He leaped from one to the next, arms extended comically.

"I like a swim," I told him.

"There are sharks," he said soberly, and a woman seized his arm and dragged him off.

Gwen returned, dug her hand into my back pocket, and kissed my cheek.

"Everything all right?" I asked. She frowned in a way that suggested my question had endangered us both. All at once, I felt very anxious and not at all hungry. We ate without pleasure in a narrow booth.

Outside, she said, 'We stop tonight in Arizona. Truck is going to meet us with money and a fresh car."

'Wait," I said. "What happened to Mexico?"

"Nothing happened," she said. "Except they'll be looking for your plates. And as far as money, Truck's got two thousand dollars, maybe more. We need every dollar we can get."

"I have money. I can get us - I don't know - five or six hundred, plus another thousand on the first of the month." Those were the provisions of my trust fund - a slow intravenous drip, interest from a princ.i.p.al I couldn't touch.

"Not enough," she said, and shook her head disgustedly.

"Enough for what, sunscreen? The whole point of Mexico is it's cheap."

"It's called tuition," she said. "Ornithology, remember?"

"The thing about grad school, you don't just drive up at orientation with a suitcase full of cash. There are tests. You need transcripts and letters."