The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 Page 6

  After he hung up, he ordered a beer, the night’s last tug from the bartender’s tap.

  Sitting by the picture window, he looked down into the canyon, and up to the Hollywood sign. Everything about the moment felt familiar. He’d worked this precinct for twenty years, minus three to Uncle Sam, so even the surprises were the same.

  He thought about the girl, about her at the station. Her nervous legs, that worn dress of hers, the plea in her voice.

  Someone should think of her for a minute, shouldn’t they?

  He looked at his watch. Two a.m. But she won’t see her little men tonight.

  A busboy with a pencil mustache came over with a long stick. One by one, he turned off all the dingy lanterns that hung in the window. The painted clowns faced the canyon now. Closing time.

  “Don’t miss me too much,” he told the sour waitress as he left.

  In the parking lot, looking down into the canyon, he noticed he could see the Canyon Arms, the smoke still settling on the bungalow’s shell, black as a mussel. Her bedroom window, glass blown out, curtains shuddering in the night breeze.

  He was just about to get in his car when he saw them. The little men.

  They were dancing across the hood of his car, the canyon beneath him.

  Turning, he looked up at the bar, the lanterns in the window, spinning, sending their dancing clowns across the canyon, across the Canyon Arms, everywhere.

  He took a breath.

  “That happens every night?” he asked the busboy as the young man hustled down the stairs into the parking lot.

  Pausing, the busboy followed his gaze, then nodded. “Every night,” he said. “Like a dream.”

  STEVE ALMOND

  Okay, Now Do You Surrender?

  FROM Cincinnati Review

  LOOMIS WAS HEADED out of work, or out of his workplace, which is what you were supposed to call it now, so that later when the TV vans showed up and disgorged their heartbroken androids they would be able to utter sentences such as “The suspect was a familiar and friendly presence in his workplace . . .” Anyhoo, he was done for the day—done whoring himself to the hipster lords of Marketing, done creating content—and just a few steps from his car when two men appeared in his path. They wore vintage suits. The larger of the two had a furrowed scar that curled across one cheek. “You gotta minute here?” he said.

  “What?” said Loomis.

  “We were hoping for a few words.” The men were suddenly very close to him, smelling of matches and Brut.

  Loomis had taken off early to beat traffic and was parked in the back of the building. Bobito the Security Guard was doubtless sprawled out in the smoker alcove, flirting with HR specialists who were going to fuck him only if their lives took a harrowing turn.

  “A few words about what?” Loomis said.

  The pair scanned the parking lot.

  “Are you guys FBI or something?”

  The one with the scar winced. “Afraid not.”

  “It’s about the thank-you notes,” said the smaller one. He had the velvety rasp of Tony Bennett and a Roman nose that had been derailed a few times.

  “What thank-you notes?”

  “For the kid’s party,” Scarface said.

  “The kid?”

  “Your kid. The older one. Isabelle.”

  “Isadora?”

  “Right.”

  “How the hell do you know the name of my daughter?”

  Scarface set a hand on Loomis’s shoulder. It was a tender gesture that suggested profound brutality. “Settle down,” he said. “There’s no reason for this to turn in the wrong direction.”

  Tony Bennett patted his coat in the way of an ex-smoker. “Quicker we clear this thing up, quicker we’re out of your hair.”

  “What thing?” Loomis couldn’t figure out how frightened he should be. He had to pee rather ardently.

  “A beautiful day like this,” Scarface said. He gestured toward the sky as if the director of a community theater production had just stage-whispered at him to gesture toward the sky. “Who wants to be standing around in a parking lot? Not me.”

  “To review,” Tony Bennett said. “You throw this party, what, two weeks ago? All these kids bringing your daughter gifts and whatnot. So then, just as a common—”

  “How do you know what’s going on in my house?” Loomis said. “Have you been spying on us?”

  Scarface exhaled through his nose, as if he’d been expecting Loomis to behave this way and it bored him. “Nobody’s spying on anybody. You’re missing the point, Mr. Loomis. Just listen.”

  “As a courtesy,” Tony Bennett continued, “your wife went out and bought some nice thank-you cards. And you, Mr. Loomis, told her there was no need to waste good money on such an extravagance. Then you threw the cards straight into the garbagio.”

  “I didn’t throw them in the garbage,” Loomis said. “I dropped them into a wastepaper basket. I was making a point.”

  Scarface ran a thumb down his nose. “What exact point would that be, Mr. Loomis?”

  “That it was overkill. We’d already thrown these kids a whole party with lunch and two art activities and gift bags, and I was just sick and tired of feeding into this never-ending arms race of bourgeois pieties.”

  Tony Bennett yawned. “I don’t understand what you just said, Mr. Loomis. But I didn’t like the tone.” He stretched in such a way as to make visible the outline of something gun-buttish against his sport coat.

  Loomis felt the flutter in his gut go spastic. The air took on a sour radiance. Scarface’s hand was on his shoulder again, again very gently. “Calm down, Mr. Loomis.”

  “I feel like you’re threatening me.”

  “Nobody’s threatening anybody.”

  “We’re having a conversation.”

  “Who are you? What do you want from me?”

  “You don’t ask the questions,” Tony Bennett said quietly. “That’s not how this relationship works.” He slipped his hand inside his jacket and let it stay there. “How it works is you go get in your car there and drive home and kiss your wife and send those thank-you notes.”

  “And you do one more thing,” Scarface said. “You play it smart and keep your mouth shut.”

  Loomis drove straight to Taco Bell and ordered three chalupas and a Diet Pepsi and ate them in his car, like an American, then fished a Camel Light from the pack hidden in the wheel well. Later he would vomit or have the runs, perhaps both, perhaps simultaneously.

  The police officer he spoke to on the phone was a female who sounded black, which was fine.

  “When you say accosted, can you be more specific?”

  “They approached me in a threatening manner. They spoke about my wife and daughter, about intimate details of our life.”

  “Intimate details being what?”

  “Just, you know, domestic issues between my wife and I.”

  “Are you in the midst of a dispute with your wife?”

  “No,” Loomis said. “That’s not the point. Wait a second. Are you accusing me—”

  “Nobody’s accusing you, sir.”

  “I’m practically gunned down in broad daylight by a couple of mooks who’ve been surveilling my family, and your response is to suggest that I beat my wife?”

  The officer took some time to absorb this. “What do you mean by mook?” she said finally.

  Loomis closed his eyes and whispered, just in his mind, Nigger, kike, spic.

  “Did either of these gentlemen make an explicit threat?”

  “They didn’t say, We’re going to kill you. We were in a parking lot. One of them had a gun!”

  “Did he aim the gun at you, sir?”

  “He stretched in a way that made it obvious he had a gun.”

  “So you didn’t actually see the gun?”

  “I saw the clear outline of a gun.”

  “Did they demand money or property?”

  “No.”

  “What did they want, exactly?”

&nbs
p; Loomis flashed to the thank-you cards, which were in the shape of little ice cream cones, no doubt hand-cut by an order of incorporated monks. Fourteen bucks for a pack of twelve—the sort of quaint corruption upon which American capitalism now relied.

  “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me everything, you know,” the cop said in her patient, insinuating tone. “Let me ask you this: Have there been problems in your marriage recently?”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Loomis said. “I’m the victim.”

  Kate had made her virtuous stir-fry. She was feeling fat, though she weighed only five pounds more than the day they married, whereas Loomis, upon reaching forty, had bloated up like a tick. He stared down the soggy broccoli florets and tempeh chunks and felt a surge of empathy for his children, Izzy, age ten, and four-year-old Trevor, who had once referred to this meal, in a phrase appropriated from Izzy, who had appropriated it from Loomis, as “Mommy’s shit-fry.”

  Everything was fine. He was home, his drafty little home on the outskirts of Boston. Kate ate like she always ate, mauling her food, punishing it for her hunger. She asked everyone to say their Favorite Part of the Day. It was part of her Gratitude Agenda. Izzy said reading Harry Potter. Trevor said building a cave for his Uhmoomah. Kate said snuggling with her Uhmoomahs before school. Loomis said being here with all of you right now. He looked round the table and felt the truth of it punch his throat.

  “Awwww,” Kate said.

  “Dad’s being sweet,” Izzy said suspiciously.

  Trevor farted. “Broccoli fart,” he observed.

  They’d been married a decade: met in grad school for library science, danced to the wretched bands then being danced to, broke up, found new people, backslid. Then Kate announced her move to Boston, do or die, and Loomis did, in a small Vermont ceremony officiated by Kate’s best friend, The Lesbian Anita. It was a modern arrangement.

  When Trevor came along, Kate quit her position at Widener Library to become a full-time mom, and Loomis was suddenly the sole breadwinner. He bid farewell to his post at the branch library reference desk and made for the ergometric wards of biotech, where remarkable things were being done to override our loser genetic material.

  After dinner Kate read a story to Trevor while Loomis forked at the crud in the toaster oven and tried to figure his approach.

  In the bedroom, Kate was rubbing coconut butter into her ankles. “What’s with you?” she said. “You seem tense.”

  “What’s with me,” Loomis said, “is that your goons came and talked to me.”

  Kate’s expression landed somewhere between bewilderment and mirth. “My what?”

  Loomis saw his error at once. Kate didn’t hire goons to resolve marital issues. She communicated. She lit candles and acknowledged the underlying conflict, and sometimes later they screwed in some mildly raunchy yoga way, though not so much recently because Loomis was fat and often failed to be present in the moment.

  “Did you say goons?”

  “Did I say what?”

  “Goons.”

  “I said,” Loomis said slowly, experimentally, “that I’m sick of the balloons. I feel like they’re stalking me. We had this thing at work—”

  “Balloons?”

  “Just listen, honey. We had this thing at work, one of these team-building exercises, and they ordered everyone to blow up huge balloons with, like, foot pumps, and the balloons had all these, like, Buddhist affirmations on them, like Tranquility is the ultimate dividend. And after a while with these balloons, it was like they were stalking me.”

  Kate stared at him for several seconds. “That’s not what you said, Todd.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Loomis said. He despised his imagination; it was a retarded psychopath. “I’m sorry, sweetie. It is what I said. About the balloons. It was a strange experience. I don’t know if I can explain it, really.”

  Kate inspected her buttered ankles. The room smelled like a Caribbean island they would never visit for ethical reasons. “Why are you smoking again?”

  “I’m not smoking. I had one cigarette. It was a long day.”

  “What with the balloons and all?”

  Kate was being an asshole, but only because he had been an asshole first. This was their dynamic.

  “Hey. Remember those thank-you cards? For Izzy’s party?”

  Kate closed her eyes in forbearance. “We settled that. She’ll make homemade cards next time and put them in school cubbies.”

  “Right. No. Of course. That’s a great plan. I meant the ones for the party we just had.”

  “Do we have to go over this right now?”

  “No. We don’t have to.”

  “Good.”

  Izzy appeared in the doorway. “Why are you guys fighting?”

  “We’re not fighting,” Loomis said.

  “Yes, you are. I heard you.”

  “Nobody’s fighting, sweetie. I promise you.”

  “You better not be,” she said.

  Kate rose from the bed and hug-steered their daughter back toward her room. She was a tough kid, beating boys in soccer and letting them know about it. But she was in a fragile phase. Kate said it was because her best friend, Maya, had moved away after her parents split. Loomis was putting his money on early puberty and bracing himself.

  Later, in the dark, Loomis said, “I just wondered if those cards ever got sent out. Because I’d be cool with that. I’d even send them out myself. I feel like I might have overreacted before.”

  “Are you trying to apologize for throwing the cards in the garbage?”

  “More or less.”

  “Which is it?”

  “I’m apologizing.”

  He reached out and touched his wife’s hip.

  She hummed noncommittally. “I already sent them out.”

  After lunch Loomis did a cigarette consult with Bobito the Security Guard.

  “Hold up, chief,” Bobito said. “Someone stepping up on you with heat? In my parking lot? That shit is gangfucked.”

  “Pretty gangfucked,” Loomis agreed.

  “That shit is raped, man. What was they hassling you about?”

  “Some fight I had with my wife.”

  Bobito rapped his skull (shaved, bluish) with his knuckles; this was how he applauded. “Oh, shit. You got a pig on the side, chief? That what this is about? I ain’t making value judgments, man. Shit. I fucked half the bitches in this building on my fianceé’s futon.”

  “There were two of them,” Loomis explained. “Sort of Godfather types. Like the movie.”

  “ ‘Take the cannoli,’ ” Bobito said. “That shit is classic.”

  “One had a huge scar on his cheek.”

  “Naw. That’s a fake. Ain’t nobody profiling you with some scar.”

  “It looked real.”

  “That’s how you know it’s fake.” Bobito scratched his neck tattoo with a scythelike pinkie nail. “I’ll make sure they’re not creeping round here. That’s the easy part, chief. What I’d be asking is who hired them.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mos def. Villains gotta make rent in a recession too, bro. Now along comes the Internet, Angie’s List, all that direct-sales shit. It’s got so easy to bring heat a fucking bonobo could do it.” Bobito held his cigarette like a dart and poked out little rings of wisdom. “You gotta think about your enemies, chief. ’Cause they’re sure as shit thinking about you.”

  Bobito now began narrating his own criminal record and the various OG motherfuckers with whom he had compiled this record.

  “You’ve been in prison?” Loomis said.

  “Oh, hell yeah,” Bobito said. “I’m a ex-con. Did a dog’s year in Pondville. That’s like seven on the outside, chief.”

  “What’d they get you for?”

  “Felony two. Check fraud. Tried to buy some body spray for my boo at Bed, Bath & Beyond, where, by the way, I fucking worked. The whole thing was a reverse sting. These corporate lawyers do not fuck around. They flat-out gangster.” Bobito finis
hed his cigarette and flicked the butt into the koi pond. “I been thinking about your situation,” he said. “I’m prepared to help you out in the form of personal security services.” He produced a crisp business card with the image of a rooster in boxing trunks. “Check out the website.”

  “Thank you,” Loomis said. “I’ll do that.”

  “Cheap and deep, chief. That’s how I do what got to get done.”

  Loomis spent the afternoon compiling suspects. He came up with two: his father-in-law, Kent, and The Lesbian Anita.

  Kent was a soft-spoken Kansan who sang in a barbershop quartet and had the mustache to prove it. He had grown up on a farm but worked at a car dealership now, sweet-talking gullible sophomores into sleek Korean shitboxes. Kate was his only daughter; she looked almost exactly like his late wife, Mindy. He’d called her “Mindy” the previous Christmas, then wept without embarrassment, a practice endorsed by his men’s group. Kent despised Loomis in that affable midwestern manner that often passed for affection on the coasts.

  “Well hello there, stranger,” he said when Loomis greeted him. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”

  “No reason. Kate mentioned you had a little surgery.”

  “Oh, jiminy. I wouldn’t call a colonoscopy surgery. They just run a thingamabob up your bottom and broadcast your guts on a little TV.”

  “Still.”

  “There’s only three things that can kill a farmer,” Kent said. “Lightning. Rolling a tractor. And old age.”

  Loomis wanted to say, What about cancer? This was how his mind worked. It had made him popular in college. “Hey, by the way, thanks for sending Izzy that birthday check. It was very generous.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Between you and my mom she’s gonna bank her first million by twelve.”

  “It’s a good thing to save with the economy the way it is.”

  Loomis cleared his throat. “I hope you got the thank-you card Izzy sent along.”

  “I did. Lovely. I’m going to put it on the wall here.” Kent gestured at his wall over there in Kansas.

  “Good,” Loomis said. “Because I wouldn’t want you to be angry on account of a thank-you card.”