Kwik Krimes (22 page)

Chris Grabenstein is the Anthony and Agatha Award–winning author of the John Ceepak/Jersey Shore mysteries for adults, the Haunted Mystery series for kids, and the Riley Mack comic capers, also for kids. He has also co-authored a pair of middle-grades books with James Patterson.

James Grady

E
leanor was like any long-retired schoolteacher who believes in punctuality, punctuation, propriety, and that the universal bar code on everything everywhere is the Mark of the Beast. Lord knows it must be so, or why else would she be marching over the sidewalk on a Tuesday morning past second-rate stores on her way to shoot two people? She wore sensible shoes, a blue pantsuit under her formal tan overcoat, and not a fleck of makeup or a dollop of dye in her gray hair.

Just because the day requires crime doesn’t mean everything gets thrown out the window.

Eleanor, of course, had been on time for the robbery.

7B was late—
running late
, she told Eleanor when they met by the elevator in the pine-ammonia-smelling hall outside their apartments.

“Could you help me?” lied Eleanor, who’d been standing at the elevator with feigned innocence for twenty-four ticking-clock tardy minutes. “My hands. Arthritis. I can’t push the call button.”

7B looked at the old lady she talked to half a dozen times a week—more, actually, but 7B seldom noticed this gray-haired woman who was so slight the wind off the cold river could blow her away. 7B had her yoga mat plus gym bag slung over her left
shoulder, and that hand clutched a metal coffee cup logoed by a save-starving-children charity of which Eleanor approved. The frayed shoulder strap on the attaché case cut into the right shoulder of the business suit 7B wore down to her properly panty-hosed knees. A cell phone filled her right fist.

7B put the cell phone in her suit’s side pocket, stretched across the old lady to push the elevator summons button—and didn’t feel Eleanor’s deft fingers slip the cell phone out of 7B’s pocket and into her own black purse.

“Thank you,” said Eleanor. “For helping with the elevator, I mean.”

“No problem,” said 7B.

Eleanor said: “We all take care of each other.”

The elevator arrived.

As 7B let the old lady enter first, she heard a motherly voice say: “Your coffee is getting cold.”

Lord please don’t let the cell phone ring!

The power of prayer got the cage to the lobby in blessed silence.

Eleanor watched her neighbor stride off to her doom in the coming End of Days and, before then, to the sorrows of this life someone should do something about, then went on her own dreaded way.

The alley alongside the grocery store where young men awaited temptation held only the thug called Knucks. Eleanor’s eyes leveled at the chrome cross dangling from his rhinestone-speckled neck chain.

Knucks stared at the twenty-dollar bill the old lady gave him and what she held.

“You want me to show you how to use that? Don’t you watch TV?”

“There is no substitute for direct instruction.”

“What’s keeping me from
direct
taking you off an’ taking that?”

“You are smarter than you think. You know a risk should equal its gain.”

Knucks blinked.

“Your cross is on upside down. Lord knows it is not for me to judge anyone’s faith, but the cross bar belongs at the top. Do you know why?”

Knucks shook his head.

The little old lady stuck her arms straight out from her sides.

Waited.

Fifth grade is forever. Knucks stuck his arms out like hers.

“Your arms are wide because the nails make you hold your own weight.”

Knucks showed her what she wanted to know: “Just point and shoot.”

Eleanor sat on that Brooklyn park bench until noon. Then, like most days, to the park fountain came the handsome lawyer who’d been squiring 7B for nineteen months and was the “he” in overheard elevator cell phone calls about “when was he
finally
going to ask.” Next came the black-haired receptionist for the nearby museum, who Eleanor first saw having an apparent business meeting in a hipster coffee shop with 7B’s intended—innocent until the receptionist slid the lawyer’s hand up her skirted thigh to the strap of her black garter belt, which Eleanor spied through tea’s steam and realized that she herself should have said yes more often to long-gone Hank, an epiphany she now luckily could do nothing about.

What she could do something about was God’s challenge. If she walked past the sin of betrayal, was she not condoning, even committing that sin? And as Hank’s direct instruction in divorce had taught her, what crime is worse than betrayal? Was
committing one sin to battle another worse than doing nothing at all?

The nails make us hold our own weight.

Eleanor reached into her black purse as the lawyer and receptionist kissed.

Used 7B’s cell phone camera to point and shoot, shoot, shoot.

Strolled back to the front desk of their apartment building where she watched the doorman call 7B’s emergency numbers until a human answered and took the information about the anonymously found cell phone that Eleanor was certain 7B would check if not tonight then soon, so before the end of this world, she might find someone worth loving.

James Grady’s first novel,
Six Days of the Condor,
became the Robert Redford movie with only the loss of three days. Grady has published more than a dozen other novels and as many short stories, been an international investigative reporter, a screenwriter, an Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee, and a recipient of the Grand Prix du Roman Noir (France) and the Raymond Chandler Award (Italy) for his fiction career.

Derek Haas

Y
ou should know, first off, I’m a coward. I get squeamish, and if there’s a choice between fight or flight, well, it’s really no choice for me.

The con goes like this: Coombs and I explain we’re with the property board, and we need to survey the measurements of the house to make sure the homeowner isn’t paying too much in taxes. I tell the mark to hold a piece of string standing at the front door while I take the other end to various rooms inside the home and call out measurements to Coombs, who writes them down on his clipboard. What I’m really doing is cleaning out any drawers of silver, jewelry, or knickknacks, or whatever I can find that I can slip into my tool sack. I have free rein of the house because I know the homeowner is on the other end of that string. When I return, we tell the mark, “The city will talk to you soon,” and we’re in Coombs’s car and down the road before anyone knows what’s what.

I have no idea if there’s a “property board.” Neither does 99 percent of the housewives and hillbillies living in single-level homes around major cities in Texas. We’re not scamming rich people…too many alarms, too many safes, too much house, too many problems. Nope, we hit people who are scratching by but
still own homes. You’d be surprised how many of them have jewelry worth pawning stuck in the back of their sock drawers.

On this particular day, the woman who opened the door was dressed as skimpily as a prostitute and said her name was Devin. I went through my spiel, and she lapped it up and took her end of the string, but I saw her making eyes at Coombs, and I was already thinking, “This is no good.”

Coombs has one of those dimples in his chin that gets women steamed. I’m not ugly by any stretch, but I have a forgettable face, so I have no problem blending into the wallpaper. Why I partnered with someone with a dimpled chin is beyond me.

We were locked up in county together, shot the shit for a couple of hours, and when we both were released, we ate some barbeque at Vitek’s, sort of laid out this grift, and here we were five months later.

The string was tight, and I called out, “Four ninety-five,” which didn’t mean anything, and rummaged through the kitchen but didn’t find squat. I walked on to the first bedroom, which had been converted into a pathetic office—sagging desk and five-year-old Mac sandwiched between filing cabinets—not expecting to find much of value. I opened the first drawer of the desk, nothing. My hand must’ve grazed the computer mouse because the monitor clicked on, and at first I didn’t look at it and, to tell you the truth, I wish I hadn’t. I saw the browser open, and the website displayed an order for a one-pound bag of lye, which struck me as odd. The only thing I know lye is used for is making soap or soft pretzels or bodies disappear.

I still felt the string tight in my hand and realized I hadn’t said anything for a while, so I called out, “Six twenty-one.” Usually Coombs calls back the number so I know we’re good, but if he parroted it back to me, I didn’t hear it. I should probably have moved on to the next room, but instead I moved the cursor up to
the History tab and clicked it. Here were the search terms: “acid,” “dead body,” “disposing of a dead body,” “body decay,” and “lye.”

I blanched and gave a lookie-loo out the window to the backyard, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t see a mound of freshly plowed dirt. Scratch that. Two mounds, side by side, three feet apart, six feet long. Right then, the string went slack.

“Wilson!” I called out, which was the code name I used for Coombs, but he didn’t answer, the string limp in my hand. I felt my cheeks go hot the way they do when I’m nervous, and I called out again, “Wilson!” but I only heard a grunt and the sound of a body collapsing on the furniture coming from the front.

I swallowed hard and poked my head out in the hallway, which gave me a clear sight line to the front door, but all I saw was the other end of my string lying slack on the floor.

I tiptoed as quiet as a cat down the wooden slats of the hallway, hoping to hell one of those boards wasn’t loose, and maybe I could make it out the front door before Devin got me like she got Coombs.

My pulse was racing like a locomotive, and I could hear it in my ears as I moved toward the front door. I heard more grunting, and I told myself to keep moving, but I looked over into the living room, and on top of the couch Devin was on top of Coombs, pounding, pounding, and I realized she wasn’t stabbing him, she was riding him like a thoroughbred. He was having the time of his life. He spotted me over her shoulder and gave me the thumbs-up. I couldn’t process what I was seeing, and I think I gave him a slight nod, but it’s not too clear in my mind.

I left him to it and headed outside toward the car. As I stepped into the street, I saw a giant man pull up in a plumber’s truck and get out from behind the wheel, fisting a massive wrench. He nodded at me, neighborly-like, and headed toward Devin’s door.

I’d love to say I helped Coombs, but I’m a coward, Detective. You gotta believe me. I’m telling the truth.

Derek Haas is the author of
The Silver Bear, Columbus, Dark Men,
and
The Right Hand.
He also cowrote the screenplays with his partner Michael Brandt for
3:10 to Yuma, Wanted, The Double,
and the NBC show
Chicago Fire,
which premiered fall 2012. He is the creator of the website
PopcornFiction.com
, which promotes genre short fiction. He lives in Los Angeles. Follow Derek on Twitter
@popcornhaas
, or “friend” him on Facebook.

Parnell Hall

H
e didn’t want to do it. It went against every fiber of his being, taking another person’s life. He wouldn’t have even considered it.

And yet…

He wanted to get into Delta Pi, the most elite fraternity on campus. They took only a few students a year, and then only when the alumni got tired of banging the co-eds and moved on, leaving a vacant room. For Kevin, who had spent his whole life on the outside looking in, it was everything he ever wanted, status, recognition, the impossible dream. One few achieved.

And now he knew why.

Kevin couldn’t believe it was true, thought it must be some sick hazing stunt. Even if a pledge were depraved enough to go through with it, surely at the last moment the frat brothers would step in and stop it, the young man’s willingness to commit the act all that had been required all the while. Even so, Kevin couldn’t plan a person’s death, whether he intended to go through with it or not.