The Best American Mystery Stories Part 32

"f.u.c.k you," I said.

"Yeah," he said. "And the next time we see a cherry picker with a single load going around the reservoir, we'll stop it. And the next time. And the next time. Until your eighteen-wheeled friend loses his license. You must think we're stupid, running single loads up here before the big crew shows up."

At the hospital, a different one from the one I'd gone to, closer to Syracuse, the doctor pulled me to one side, behind a curtain. He was obviously from India, very serious-looking. Concerned. His English was a little tight but good.

"These wounds, sir," he said to me. "They are from an animal, probably a dog. Not a chain saw, as you told me. As the officer told me."

In his world, you called people sir and expected them to act accordingly. With truth and honesty and human concern. I wanted to act like someone who deserved to be called sir, but I couldn't.

"It was a saw," I said. "He was climbing, way up, with the small limb saw and he fell, with the chain going, and really did a number on himself." I nodded to myself and him.

"Yes," the doctor said. "That is what happened in the lie the officer told you to speak. This man could die from his punctured arteries. Be honest with me now."

I wondered if in India they had trees and chain saws and men who fought dogs in the afternoon. "Chain saw," I said.

"Yes," the doctor said again. "Never." He shook his head and walked past the curtain back to the emergency room. The DEP cop hung around, to make sure Jimmy Work lived, then took off. It took Jimmy almost two months to recover. The cop had bet a hundred to one against Jimmy's dog and lost. I missed my rendezvous with Dave, I never turned in the appraisal. I knew Molly at Hayes wouldn't work with me again. If any Hayes crew ever came down to the site, they saw the marking tape. They're not stupid. I visited Jimmy Work twice and he stayed at my new apartment for a month. I had to move out of my old cabin because I couldn't make rent.

The first time I saw the DEP cop after that was in a bar, Cody's, a one-pool-table joint a mile off the reservoir. It was night and snowing. The DEP cop was parked behind my truck when I came out.

"Hey," he called out his window. "Where's your friend Jimmy?"

Jimmy had moved in with this woman he knew, not far down the road. "I have no idea," I said.

"Tell him I'm trying to get some money together," he said. "In fact, why don't you give me what you've got in your wallet?"

n.o.body else was in the parking lot. "p.i.s.s on you," I said.

He took his foot off the brake of his patrol car and tapped the back of my truck. "I could total it," he said. "You're drunk, and this car isn't going to hurt me."

I couldn't afford a new truck. I took fifty dollars out of my pocket and handed it to him.

"You're a good boy," he said. The cruiser spit gravel at me as he pulled into the night.

I was off, headed to this girl's house, when through the park, behind me, came a DEP cop. He followed me for over a mile and then the flashers went on. I pulled over.

When he got next to the truck I recognized him and he had his gun in his hand. "Hey," he said. "You were speeding and weaving and out of control and then we had a high-speed chase." He was grinning from ear to ear as he said it. Behind him it was pitch black.

"Here's my license," I said.

"I don't want your license," he said. I could smell booze on him. "I want two hundred bucks." I reached into my wallet and pulled out some twenties and handed them to him.

"I bet you didn't know this was a toll road," he said.

I didn't say anything.

He took out a knife and stuck it in the sidewall of the front driver's-side tire. I listened to the hiss as he yanked it out of the split rubber.

"Front tire's flat," he said. "Flat flat flat. That's too bad." He had his gun in one hand and a knife in the other.

"Come on, man," I said. "Give me a break."

"Sure," he said. He started to walk back to the patrol car, stopped at the end of my truck and kicked out a rear light. The whole truck rocked. "Got a back light out too," he said. "That's a violation. Better get that fixed." He slammed his door and swung around me. I watched his taillights get smaller in the dark as he drove off.

A couple months later they found his patrol car empty on a logging road near the reservoir. The door was open, the cop radio was turned on. There was money and blood all over the place, like green and red leaves blowing in the wind, and as the investigation went on, the BCI determined it was his money. He came to that spot to pay someone for something. But they didn't take his money. They took him.

Contributors' Notes.

Richard Burgin is the author of eleven books, including the novel Ghost Quartet and the recent story collections Fear of Blue Skies and The Spirit Returns. Four of his stories have won Pushcart Prizes and thirteen others have been listed by the prestigious Pushcart Prize anthology as being among the year's best. His forthcoming New and Selected Stones will also include a CD of his musical compositions. He is a professor of communication and English at Saint Louis University, where he edits the nationally distributed and award-winning literary journal Boulevard.

"The Ident.i.ty Club" grew out of my thinking about how enamored so many people are with celebrities. I imaged a secret club of people so obsessed with various famous dead writers or artists, etc., that they literally attempted to live their lives and die their deaths. To justify what they do, they devise a theory of reincarnation suited to their needs. New York City seemed a logical place for the Ident.i.ty Club to exist. I also thought it important to make the protagonist an outsider from New England who innocently and enthusiastically, at first, becomes involved with this bizarre organization.

Louise Erdrich grew up in North Dakota and is enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. She is the author of ten novels, including Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also published children's books, poetry, and a memoir of early motherhood, The BlueJay's Dance. Her short fiction has won the National Magazine Award and appeared in the O. Henry and Best American short story collections. She lives in Minnesota with her children and runs a small independent bookstore, the Birchbark.

Daniel Handler is the author of the novels The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth, and serves as the legal, literary, and social representative of Lemony Snicket, whose sequence of books for children, known collectively as A Series of Unfortunate Events, have been alleged international bestsellers. He has worked intermittently and inexplicably in film and journalism, and has been commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony to create a piece in collaboration with the composer Nathaniel Stookey. An adjunct accordionist for the pop group The Magnetic Fields, Mr. Handler lives in San Francisco with his wife, the ill.u.s.trator Lisa Brown, and a baby.

On March 14, 2003, the novelist and short story writer Amanda Davis died in a plane crash. She was a friend of mine. We used to meet up at my local bar from time to time to chew over problems both literary and personal. When I was asked to contribute to an anthology of genre writing, I thought it would be a kick to try a locked-room mystery, and as my religious beliefs do not contain much in the way of an afterlife, I had the idea to place Davis somewhere she might enjoy. Discerning readers may also note some references to Davis's fiction within the story. I have an enthusiasm for complicated c.o.c.ktails and perhaps there'll be some more rounds at the Slow Night, but among the lessons of Davis's death is that I ought not to make reckless promises about the future.

George V. Higgins (1939-1999) was the author of more than twenty novels, most notably his first, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, published in 1972 and filmed the following year. The short story collection from which "Jack Duggan's Law" was taken, The Easiest Thing in the World, was published posthumously.

Edward P. Jones is the author of the novel The Known World, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and of Lost in the City: Stories.

"Old Boys, Old Girls" began with the main character in "Young Lions," a story in Lost in the City. In the latter story, Caesar is a thief, not quite twenty-five, and growing into a not very nice man. Now, with "Old Boys," we have that fully formed man - a prisoner who has murdered two human beings.

Stuart M. Kaminsky is the author of more than sixty published novels and forty short stories; he has also produced screenplays, television episodes, two plays, and even a book of poetry and a graphic novel. He writes four different series, featuring the 1940s private eye to the stars Toby Peters; the depressed Sarasota process server Lew Fonesca; the put-upon Chicago police detective Abe Leiberman and his partner, Bill Hanrahan; and the one-legged Russian police inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov.

"The Shooting of John Roy Worth" was written in two sittings. I had no idea what I was writing or what was going to happen. That's not the way it usually works for me, but I tried it successfully once before, enjoyed the ride, and decided to take another one. My hope was that this tale would surprise the reader just as it surprised me when I wrote it. I just let my central character come alive and followed him down the street.

Dennis Lehane is the author of Mystic River and Shutter Island, as well as five novels featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. He lives in Boston, where he is currently writing a novel about, among other things, World War I, the great influenza outbreak of 1918, the Boston police strike of 1919, and the Tulsa race riot of 1921. The only thing he's sure of is that it won't be short.

I'd had the first line of "Until Gwen" bouncing around in my head for a few years when John Harvey asked me to write a story for a British anthology called Men from Boys. The only requirement was that it have something to do with fathers and sons. The deadline was maybe a week off, at best, when I finally tried writing it. I was going through a lot of personal turmoil at the time and I've never been the kind of writer who can write directly about my own life, but I think I do OK when I approach it obliquely. So I took a notepad out onto my front porch, which is surrounded by a hundred-year-old wisteria, and this rainstorm hit, a huge one, bending trees, clattering all over the street and the roof. But the wisteria kept anything from hitting me. I wrote the first draft that night on my porch in this crazy storm. It was supposed to be a comic story - that first line, h.e.l.l, the whole first scene, is pretty absurd - but page by page it kept getting darker and darker until it ended up being arguably the darkest thing I've ever written. The writing of it, though - that whole storm-within/storm-without, mad-scientist vibe - was one of my favorite creative experiences.

Since publishing her first Tess Monaghan mystery in 1997, Laura Lippman has won virtually every major American crime-writing prize including the Edgar, Nero Wolfe, Anthony, Agatha, and Shamus. She lives in Baltimore.

"The Shoeshine Man's Regrets" came about through the usual combination of solicitation and serendipity that guides most of my short stories into print. Bob Randisi asked me to contribute to his jazz-themed anthology, and I gave my usual conditional reply: "Sure, if I can think of something." A few nights later, a strange white gob appeared on my boyfriend's shoe as we left a restaurant - and a shoeshine man appeared providentially from the shadows to clean it up. But the most important aspect of the story, in my opinion, is that it describes the local sartorial flourish known in these parts as the "full Towson" - white shoes, white belt, and white tie.

My laptop died, taking this story with it, and I became so frustrated in my attempts to find and salvage it that I almost reneged on my promise to Bob. I'm glad I persevered and finally recovered it.

Tim McLoughlin was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he still resides. His first novel, Heart of the Old Country, was a selection of the Barnes & n.o.ble Discover Great New Writers program and won Italy's Premio Penne award. He is the editor of the crime-fiction anthology series Brooklyn Noir.

I began writing a novel about a white graffiti artist growing up in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, and the story got away from me. It became a complicated tale about fathers and sons, one I was not yet prepared to write. "When All This Was Bay Ridge" is taken from the core of that novel, and I think it scratches the surface of the emotional landscape I found myself navigating. I hope to return to it on the broader canvas one day, older, wiser, and better girded.

Lou Manfredo was born in Brooklyn and holds a bachelor of arts degree in English literature from St. John's University in New York. A former New York City schoolteacher and legal investigator, he has recently completed a novel in which "Case Closed" appears as the first chapter. He is the father of one daughter, Nicole, and currently lives in Ma.n.a.lapan, New Jersey, with his wife, Joanne, and their long-haired dachshund.

I always strive for a realistic character-driven flavor in my fiction, with strong attention to dialogue. That is what I attempted in "Case Closed." When I read fiction, or, for that matter, view a film or television show, I need to believe that the "who" and "what" being portrayed reflect reality. I feel that if a writer can successfully develop believable characters and dialogue, the plot will often develop on its own.

David Means's stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories 2001. His second collection of stories, a.s.sorted Fire Events, won the 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His third book, The Secret Goldfish, has just been published by HarperCollins.

As I wrote this story, my characters moved according to their own wishes, and I watched as they became locked into the mystery of their relationship with each other, but also with the hard realities of postindustrial Michigan where they were venturing and the fact that erotic energies are most often best served between two people, not three. When I was doing the final edits on this story, I was staying in West Cork, Ireland, living for a few weeks in a small town called Durrus, working at a little table on the back patio. One day I looked up from the pages to watch a cow graze in the field just behind our cottage. As I watched, a farmer came out and began to pat the side of his cow, talking softly into her ear, and I thought: Man, I'm a long way from the world of Michigan and the place where these characters reside. I was happy to be away from all of that violence and chaos, but then I got back to work and was perfectly content to be amid the darker forces I'd set in motion.

Kent Nelson has published four novels and four collections of short fiction. His most recent novel, Land That Moves, Land That Stands Still, published in 2003, won the Colorado Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. In addition, with his daughter, Dylan, he has edited Birds in the Hand, a collection of stories and poems about birds. Nelson has run the Imogene Pa.s.s Run three times and the Pikes Peak Marathon twice, most recently in 2001. He is also an avid birder, with 739 North American species on his life list.

When my son was four or five, my older daughters got him into a dress and put lipstick and eyeliner on him, and he looked as beautiful as any girl possibly could. This was a fleeting image that stayed with me, and I meant to merge it somehow with some of my brutal experiences playing ice hockey in college. It was originally to be called "Girly Boy," but what emerged in the writing of it was a much darker story than I'd ever intended.

The point of view became important, too. I experimented with a perspective I'd never tried before - the general viewpoint of a town, as Faulkner uses in "A Rose for Emily." "Public Trouble" is not Faulkner, but at least the point of view worked well enough to get the story published.

Daniel Orozco was a Scowcroft and L'Heureux Fiction Fellow at Stanford University, then a Jones Lecturer in Fiction in the creative writing program there. His stories have appeared in the Best American and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and in Harper's Magazine, Zoetrope All-Story, and others. He currently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Idaho.

When I taught cla.s.ses at Stanford, I commuted there by train. It was a short walk to the station, a short wait for the train, and a ten-minute ride after that, so I never had the s.p.a.ce I needed to really read anything. I killed time thumbing through the free local dailies. The police blotters caught my eye, and I started clipping them: Woman yelling for help. Officers found man and woman arguing over trash.

Citizen reported a suspicious man crouched down in a driveway. Man was gone when officers arrived.

Citizen shooting BB gun.

Resident reported a bad odor and said it might be a dead animal. Officers determined it was pollen in the air.

Dogs running loose.

Phone fell off a truck.

Sterling silver ring found near bleachers.

Man found his watch in a p.a.w.n shop. His daughter had sold it.

Fourteen-year-old boy cited for allegedly possessing a cigar.

One student burned another with a penny.

Karate instructor suspected of injuring domestic partner.

Two men fighting. One ran away carrying scissors.

Four large women suspected of stealing from a beauty supply store.

Drunken nineteen-year-old crashed Jefferson High School prom and wouldn't leave.

Skateboarders causing disturbance.

Student out of control, yelling and screaming.

Suspicious person seen.

Suspicious person spotted.

Solicitor selling magazines was being abusive to residents.

A resident woke up and saw a strange man crawling on his knees in the living room of his house. Suspicious crawler escaped through sliding gla.s.s door.

Caller reported bald man in his late forties sitting in a white BMW for thirty minutes.

Caller reported a loose German shepherd. Officers couldn't find the dog.

Caller reported squashed watermelons on a car.

Caller reported lost tortoise.

Terrier found whose name is Owen.

I thought about the officers who would respond to such incidents on this metaphorical day, and I thought about what their story might be as they attended to all these other stories. And I thought, How could I not at least try to write this?

David Rachel has worked as a factory laborer, forest fire fighter, hospital chaplain, ma.s.sage therapist, letter carrier, teacher, professor, and professional storyteller. Author of several technical works, he now concentrates on fiction and poetry and divides his time between Europe and North America. His work has been broadcast on public radio stations and published in more than eighty literary journals in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia, including Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, Indiana Review, Midwest Poetry Review, Pangolin Papers, Prism International, and South Carolina Review.

"The Last Man I Killed" had its origins in two widely separated experiences. One was many years of observation of corporate decision-making in universities. In this process evidence and logic, the stock-in-trade of academics, are seldom employed. In public, arguments tend to the personal and anecdotal, while the important decisions are usually made behind closed doors.

The second experience was as a child growing up in wartime Britain in a village all of whose men of military age were away in the armed forces. For a prolonged period, the village was. .h.i.t almost every night by high explosive and incendiary bombs jettisoned by German planes returning from bombing raids on London. This experience, exhilarating at that age, led to a lifelong interest in the Second World War, and with the innumerable moral fables it engendered.