Kwik Krimes (15 page)

The young man in the hat is surrounded by four officers and forced into the back of a police car.

The old woman cries.

In the back of the car, the young man in the hat stares out of the window with nothing in his eyes.

You’re in the kitchen. Another woman is there, shorter, darker, in a suit the same dark color as yours. She looks away from the blood and up at you expectantly. You motion for her to join you. When she does, an unvoiced question hanging between you, you nod and you say maybe.

The young man in the hat sits in a small gray room in the pale glare of the fluorescent light. There’s a table tucked into the corner. His left arm is resting on it. The hat is gone.

In one of the stalls, a toilet flushes. You run a hand through your hair, then take a travel toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste out of your pocket. You tuck your tie in between the buttons of your shirt and lean forward while you clean your teeth. When you’re done, you spit again into the sink and make a cup out of your hand. You slurp water out of your palm, swish it around for a few seconds, and swallow. Another glance in the mirror, a deep breath, and you’re done.

The old woman who was crying on the porch sits at a Formica-topped dining table staring down at an untouched sandwich. She doesn’t eat. She is still crying.

Outside the room where the young man waits, the woman from the kitchen speaks to you. Tries to change your mind about something. You don’t change it.

You sure? she says.

Yes, you say.

You’ve both taken off your coats. Your shirts are the same color, too.

In the room it’s just you and the young man without the hat.

You speak to him kindly, offer him food, something to drink. He says he is, now that he thinks about it, hungry. You leave but come back quickly with a sandwich and a can of soda. He thanks you.

You talk to him while he eats.

He answers between swallows.

You say something funny, and he lets out a little laugh.

The friendliness is surprising.

In the hall with the woman before you came in, you were serious and composed. Not like this. Not like this at all.

You ask him about baseball, about his hat. You talk about his favorite team. You sound like you know a lot about the game. After a lot of talk about teams and players and games, you’re talking about the team at the high school he graduated from and the community college where he’s now enrolled.

He doesn’t realize you’re talking about him now.

You lean forward and talk to him in an understanding and compassionate tone. As you lean back, you grasp the seat of your chair and pull it forward a few inches, so that when you settle against the backrest your face is the same distance from the young man as it was before, but now your knees are closer.

Tell me about Heather, you say.

In the next room, the woman in the same color shirt watches you on a video monitor and smiles a sad smile.

The old woman who was crying on the porch and who didn’t eat her sandwich is sitting up in bed, holding her knees to her chest in the dark. She is still crying.

You loved her, didn’t you? you say.

The young man nods.

Tell me about her, you say.

He does.

The two of you speak for a long time.

You do the thing with your chair two more times. You’re very close to the young man now.

He’s sad.

So are you.

You talk about unrequited love. You tell him a story about a girl you loved. How hard it was when she didn’t love you back. How sometimes it even made you angry. Angry enough to do something bad.

He looks in your eyes. He begins to weep.

The woman watching the monitor in the next room nods. There it is, she whispers to the empty room.

The old woman in the dark is still crying.

You wrap your arm around the young man’s shoulder and lean in even closer, your forehead almost touching his. I understand, you say, I understand. But I need to know about the hammer.

The young man without the hat looks at you, lowers his eyes, and tells you about the hammer.

After his confession, something is different.

There is a receding.

A fading.

And the darkness comes again.

And though I don’t understand why, I imagine that the cold does not follow, and that the emptiness, after you, is not quite so empty.

Tyler Dilts is the author of the novels
A King of Infinite Space
and
The Pain Scale.
His shorter work has appeared in
The Best American Mystery Stories,
the
Los Angeles Times,
the
Chronicle of Higher Education,
and in numerous other publications. He received his MFA in creative writing from California State University, Long Beach, where he now teaches.

Sean Doolittle

I
n the morning we met Julie for breakfast in the restaurant next door to the motel. She breezed in ten minutes past seven wearing jean shorts with the pockets showing, a low-cut T-shirt, and the cowboy boots she’d bought at a truck stop along the way. She looked almost like someone else’s grown daughter until she smiled and slid into the booth. Our girl.

“Look at you,” I said. “All ready for the rodeo.”

Donna kicked my ankle under the table. Julie poked out her tongue, admiring her own heel. “I think they’re drop-dead,” she said. “Plus they make me taller.”

“You were born taller.” I handed her a menu. “Order up, cowgirl.”

While she browsed her options, Julie remarked that she liked people in this part of the country. “They just trust you. It’s nice.”

Donna said, “Just trust you like how?”

“Like this morning I went down the hall for ice,” Julie said. “But I left the key card in my room. So I went to the counter and asked for another, and the girl? You know what she did?”

I sipped my coffee. “Gave you another key card?”

“Just asked my room number and handed one over.”

Donna laughed. “Why on earth wouldn’t she?”

“She wasn’t the same girl as last night,” Julie said. “She’d never seen me before. I could have been anybody off the street.”

“Maybe it was the boots,” I said.

Donna bit back a grin.

“Just for that I’m ordering extra everything,” Julie said. “I’m completely starved.”

“Well, you’re getting taller,” I said.

We made it to Laramie and found campus by midday. We could see mountains from the stoop of her dorm. Julie clapped and giggled. “Would you look at this place?”

I still couldn’t get used to the idea. This kid of ours, who’d tripped over her own feet until she was fourteen, had offers to play volleyball for half a dozen schools, at least four of them closer to home. But the best had come from the University of Wyoming, located in—of all places—Wyoming. To Donna and me, it might as well have been the moon.

We spent the afternoon unpacking the U-Haul and lugging her things up to her room. Then we all traipsed to a local used-car dealership. “I want a pickup truck,” Julie said. “With a gun rack!” We settled on a six-year-old Jetta with no rust and decent miles.

An hour before dusk, we stood around hugging and telling our baby girl good-bye. “Only till Thanksgiving,” she said. “And Christmas. And I’ll call every week.” She waved from the parking lot as we pulled away.

Donna made it almost to the edge of town before she broke down sobbing. I pulled over and rubbed her back. “Enough of that,” I said. “She’ll be fine.”

Donna nodded and wiped at her eyes. I dug in the console, handed her a tissue. She honked her nose. Then she took a deep breath and shoved open her door. “Trade places,” she said. “I need to drive.”

We followed our shadow and watched the prairie roll by until the sun disappeared behind us. The empty U-Haul rattled on our tail in the dark. The Tahoe felt bigger with just the two of us.

We stopped for the night at the same place where we’d started the morning. Donna said she was hungry for junk food and asked if I wanted anything from the gas station nearby. A bag of chips sounded all right. I sat on the bed and watched the news while she was gone.

When she hadn’t come back in an hour, I started to worry. Then the door clicked and in she came, reeking of cigarettes, a bulging grocery sack in her arms. She had a look on her face I hadn’t seen in years. As far as I knew, she hadn’t smoked a cigarette since before Julie was born.

“What’s all that?” I said.

She came over and showed me: two laptop computers, two touch-screen smart phones, and a dashboard GPS unit. All used. She pulled them out one after the other, like steaks from the market. I looked at her.

“I asked the girl at the counter for another key card to room 172.” She wore a goofy smile. “Know what she did?”

I looked at the pile of loot on the bed and couldn’t believe this woman I’d married. Room 172. We were in 124.

I said, “So, no chips?”

When our next-door neighbors sent their kids off to college, Carla picked up her photography again; Roger bought a solid-body Fender and turned the other bedroom into a recording studio. “What empty nest?” he asked me on their patio one evening, grinning like a pirate as he cracked another home-brewed beer.

Over the years I’ve wondered what Roger and Carla would say if they knew our real story. Donna and I lived pretty fast, once upon a time—we weren’t high school sweethearts, like
we’ve always told them; the man who introduced us died alone in prison when Julie was small. As far as Julie knows, she grew up in the suburbs with small-business owners for parents. It would knock that kid right out of her cowboy boots to learn she was born in the back of a getaway car.

“I should feel guilty,” Donna said in the morning, somewhere in the Nebraska Sandhills. “They looked like a nice pair.” She was still talking about the couple from room 172—at least what she’d seen of them, heading for a late-night dip in the motel pool, just before she’d slipped in and robbed them blind.

I couldn’t help smiling. “Well,” I said, “At least you got that out of your system.”

We drove on toward the sunrise, the empty U-Haul rattling behind us, nowhere to be anytime soon. A sign up ahead said
LODGING NEXT RIGHT
. She raised her eyebrows at me.

Sean Doolittle is the award-winning author of six novels of crime and suspense, including
Lake Country,
his latest. Doolittle’s books have been praised by such contemporaries as Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, Harlan Coben, Michael Connelly, and Lee Child. His short fiction has appeared in
The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
and elsewhere. The author lives in western Iowa with his family.

Brendan DuBois

I
n the lower Connecticut Valley town of Spencer, Olsen sat in his Crown Victoria sedan, eating a container of boysenberry yogurt, when things around him drastically and spectacularly went to shit. He was on Main Street in a Police Cruisers Only spot, the radio on so he could listen in to the dispatcher’s infrequent calls, the latest being that the sole day cruiser suddenly was at the town garage for unexpected repairs.

It was a grand spring day with people milling along the sidewalks, most of them local college students from Massachusetts or Connecticut, spending their parents’ hard-invested money. Stores lined both sides of the street, and there was a brown UPS truck making deliveries, a white van near a deli unloading plastic-wrapped food boxes, and a shiny black armored van in a handicapped zone, with a bored-looking guard leaning against the closed doors. The van’s paintwork said
IRON VAULT PROTECTION SERVICE
. Olsen shifted in his seat. The Kevlar vest he wore under his blue blazer, shirt, and tie was stiff, but it was part of the job. Jobs. It looked like everyone out there was quietly doing his or her job, and it made Olsen content. He liked professionalism in everything, whether something as complex as space travel or something as simple as street cleaning. But parking in
a handicapped spot was definitely not professional. Maybe he should do something about it. The van’s rear doors opened up.