The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

  There was no good answer to this. So I didn’t give one. He looked down at himself, at his balls, and held out his arms. “Afraid she’ll like this too much?”

  Some nights I prayed for a delivery just so I could get out of there. We had our regulars, people who called like clockwork every night or every other night. They’d have a nice little routine set up, particular ways they’d rub their hands before they took out their money, a certain kind of music playing on the tape deck. Those were the good ones. Other times I’d get called out to a place I’d never been. Once it was a competitor, another cook, and he opened the door and stuck a steak knife in my face and said, “You’re not going to come around here anymore.” This was early on. We were encroaching on his territory. I said, “Okay,” stepped back, tossed the meth at him, shut the door, and ran. I kept looking back, and he wasn’t chasing, so I slowed down, gave it some thought. That guy, I thought, he’s probably not even for real. He probably just wanted some free drugs. So I slashed his tires, broke his windshield with a rock, bashed off his side-view mirrors, cut his seats open and gave them a good piss. He must have come out not long after that. Maybe he decided to hunt me down. I don’t know. Wherever he was going, on his way there, the highway patrol pulled him over for driving a car that was all beat to hell. He was high. He had a gun without a license. He went to jail. Sometimes I thought about him when I was fingering the ring in my pocket. I’d do some quick math: three thousand to go. Two thousand eight hundred. Two thousand.

  “Thank you,” I started saying at the end of a delivery. “Be sure to call us again.” Given my math, if we had enough nice customers, I could take a pass on the bad ones.

  One lady was particularly regular. Like clockwork, every Friday night she’d call, and I’d come by her place. There were some soft boards on the porch and no doorbell, but if that’s the worst a person can say about your place, you’re doing okay. She always looked nice: recently showered, trim and put together. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was a first-grade teacher—she just had that look, like my mom but on meth. A weekend warrior. She didn’t even need to call. Her needs were understood. So one night I pulled up like usual and knocked on her door. It was late, and no lights were on except for one deep inside her house. In the moonlight filtering through the bare tree branches, you could just make out the car and the Pizza Hut sign on top.

  The door opened, and I put on a smile.

  “Well, hey, stranger.” It was Marissa, peering at me and then throwing the door open. Both of us looked at the box in my hands, and she gave me this funny look before yelling back into the house, “Mom, did you order a pizza?”

  From way back down a hallway came the reply. “Oh, shit.”

  “What is this?” Marissa said, and I could have pointed at the box with its cold pizza and my shirt and hat. I could have said, “Pizza delivery, ma’am.” But instead I just stood there too long. Even after her mom came out and things got ugly, I just watched it all like an idiot. I’d never seen Marissa so mad. Her mom kept apologizing and asking how Marissa knew me. “I don’t,” Marissa said. “I have no idea who he is.” Then she went inside and screamed, “Well, might as well get what you ordered.”

  Even then I didn’t move.

  Her mom held up one finger, stepped into the house, and then came back outside. “When you leave,” she said, “just be sure to drop it in the bushes where I can find it.” Then she tucked some bills in my pocket.

  I drove around town for a while, pounding my fists on my steering wheel, worried that Marissa might call the cops. So I switched out the delivery car for my truck and drove out of town. I probably covered half the county, maybe more, until I wound up at the tank yard, dark except for a single utility light that shone from a pole over the tin shed. I hadn’t come with a plan, but one came to me when I saw a blanket spread over the top of the fence and a guy sprinting away into the fields. I waited for his partner, the one inside the fence who would lift the full tank over. I got out of the truck, slammed the door so he’d hear it, and walked right up to the fence. “Did you get yourself killed? Either way, I want you out of there now.”

  When there wasn’t an answer, I banged the fence good and yelled, “I’m not the cops. I work here, so get over to this fence now. And bring the tank with you.”

  The guy skulked out from behind the tank where he’d been hiding. He came up to the fence. Even in the moonlight, I could see the sickly color of his skin and his rotted teeth. He smelled like he hadn’t showered in a year.

  “You’re really not going to turn me in?” His wedding band shone in the utility light. So did the burns on his hand. “I’ve got kids.”

  “Give me the tank,” I said. He flipped it over the fence, which isn’t easy with seventeen gallons of anhydrous, and then scrambled over. I gave him the tank back, and he stared, incredulous.

  “You’re giving it back?”

  I said, “That’s right, I am. What am I supposed to do with it?” I followed him to his car. When he was over the hill, I jumped back in my truck and drove after him. I kept my lights off. The gravel had a soft gray light under the moon, and I stayed right in the middle of it, watching the dark for the man’s headlights.

  He pulled up to a farmhouse and went inside, the screen door slapping the wood frame behind him. I parked on the road so that I wouldn’t have to back out of the drive and crept through the yard, past a dozen or so cars on blocks, the grass dead and tall around them. Through the window I saw the living room, the TV, and two kids lying on the floor in blankets. A woman was standing in front of them, yelling into a room out of sight. I couldn’t hear her. Those old farmhouses are soundproof: storm windows, plaster walls. It was a good place that they were letting go down the drain. I walked up to the porch and knocked. The guy’s wife answered.

  “Your husband here?” He must have recognized my voice, because from inside the house I heard the sound of footsteps and then a slammed door. I went inside and shut off the TV so that the wife could hear me crystal clear. I was standing close enough to the kids that I could have kicked them.

  “Nice kids,” I told the wife. They were asleep. I held my shoe over the fingers of the smallest one. “Tell your husband I said so.”

  Then I walked out the door. I stopped at the guy’s car and dug around until I found an empty bag of meth. It was the sandwich kind with the opening that you had to fold over. The idiot didn’t even use a Ziploc.

  Rob was awake and cooking when I came in. He didn’t jump or start when I let the door slam, just turned around with the gun tucked in his underwear. I went to the fridge, got a beer, and sat down in a chair that had materialized in the living room, one of those old-fashioned wooden kinds.

  “Nice chair,” I said. “Where’d it come from?”

  He shrugged.

  I said, “I met some of the competition tonight.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” he said. He didn’t look at me when he said it. Instead he acted like he was busy with the lab, but it was running. He wasn’t fooling me.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Your girlfriend called. She wanted to give you a message.” He turned around, and whatever look was on his face made me stop looking at it and start watching his hands and their distance from the pistol.

  “Expecting somebody dangerous?” I asked, nodding at it.

  He took the gun out of his waistband and held it up so we could both have a good look. “You mentioned some competition. Did you mess him up?”

  “He had kids.”

  Rob said, “We sell to kids.”

  “Small kids.”

  “So you’re saying you let the guy get away.” He batted the gun barrel in the palm of his hand, like he was thinking something over, and then he walked back into his room. He came out in a pair of jeans. “I’ve got to go back and take care of what you should have done. Otherwise, everybody’s going to think we’re weak.”

  I stepped in front of the door.

  “I can’t let
you do that.”

  He put his hand on the butt of the gun.

  “Or what?”

  “Or nothing. You don’t know where he lives, and I do. It’s going to stay that way. Now tell me what Marissa said.”

  We were standing eye to eye. The gun was there, in his pants, and I could have grabbed it. I wanted to. I was stronger than him, and he was grinning at me. He shook his head. “You can ask her yourself.”

  “Okay,” I said, and he smiled in a way that I didn’t like.

  “Well?” He looked at the door. “You’ve got work to do.”

  It was three in the morning when I drove past Marissa’s house. The lights were out, but her car was gone. I went to her mom’s next: lights on, at home. No Marissa, but maybe she’d gone for a drive, gotten mad, and walked back here. Or maybe she’d parked out of sight so no one would know she had a tweaker for a mom. I parked down the street and planned out my strategy: “I quit. Done,” I’d say. “And you”—I’d point at her mom. “You’re done with meth. I’ll make sure that every cook around knows that if they sell to you, I’m coming at them.” Then I’d point to Marissa. Maybe I wouldn’t point. I’d lower my voice, get softer. “I’m sorry,” I’d say. “I should have told you.”

  “Goddamn right you should have told me.”

  Whatever grief she wanted to throw at me, I’d take it. I wasn’t a Methodist, but I’d gone to church as a kid, and I knew how it went: there was an angry God and a forgiving God, and you had to go through the first to get to the second. I’d just have to sit there and listen and nod and agree. Eventually she’d get tired. It was already so late. She’d slump over. By that time, maybe light would be coming through the windows. The birds would start chirping. “You need to eat,” I’d say. “I’ll make breakfast.”

  Just in case Marissa wasn’t there, I grabbed a ski mask that I kept under the seat and stuck it in my pocket. This time I didn’t knock. I tried the door. “Hello?” No answer, but there was a body on the floor. Her mom. The bag of meth was on the floor beside her, so I picked her up and carried her to my truck. The hospital would ask questions, and besides, she was still breathing. So I took her to the only place I could think of.

  The tank yard was quiet at this late hour. Marissa’s mom was still unconscious but starting to mumble as I taped her to a chair with a roll of duct tape I found in a drawer. I thought about gagging her but didn’t want her to suffocate. Her eyes rolled in their sockets. She twisted her head around and found me, sitting on the floor against the wall, but she couldn’t hold her head steady.

  “Pay up,” I said.

  She struggled at the tape but gave up almost immediately. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Somebody you owe.”

  She said, “I don’t owe anyone. Now let me go. I’ve got to take a piss.”

  “Not till you pay.”

  Her eyes got wide. “I really have to go.”

  I didn’t want a puddle of piss in the shed. It wasn’t a big place, and even if I opened the windows, the smell would be terrible. If I opened the windows, we’d both be cold. So I dragged the chair outside, pulled her pants down. She screamed, and I said, “That is not what’s happening here.” I tipped her forward and said, “Now, go.”

  She pissed in the gravel and then I pulled up her pants and dragged her back inside. “You want something to eat?”

  She shook her head.

  “Thirsty?” She nodded, and I went out to the truck and got the jug that I kept in it. Luckily there was some water inside, and I let it run into her mouth.

  “Anything else?” I asked, and she nodded.

  “Let me out of here.”

  But that wasn’t going to happen. I said, “I’ll be back in a while. If you try to escape, I’ll kill you.”

  Then I went to find Marissa.

  It was seven o’clock. The sun wasn’t up, but there was enough light to see to drive without headlights, which I did. I pulled right in her driveway. It went along the side of the house, where her car was parked, and I blocked her in. She’d deadbolted the door, but I gave it a good kick.

  “Go away,” she said, through it.

  “Hear me out first.”

  “Don’t want to. I’m calling the cops.”

  “I’ve gone straight. No more drugs, I promise. I’ll be such a straight arrow you’ll think I’ve gone native.” She didn’t laugh. “Sorry,” I said. “No more jokes. Just give me a chance.”

  “Never come back here again. That’s your chance.”

  “Do you remember how we met?” I asked.

  “I’m not messing around here,” she said. “Get out.”

  “It was only seven months ago, but it feels like forever. You know?” Of course she remembered. It was only seven months ago. It was at the courthouse, on the lawn. Saturdays in the Park, the city called it, even though there was no park, just grass and marble. Some kids from the high school jazz band were playing up by the courthouse. People had set up lawn chairs. They were lined up at tables where some organization of old ladies was selling homemade ice cream. Marissa was lined up. She ordered peaches and cream, and I came up to her and I said, “You should have picked vanilla. Always pick vanilla when it comes to homemade.”

  “Says who? You?”

  She dipped her spoon in the soft ice cream and took a bite. She made a face and spit out a chunk into her cup.

  “The peaches are like rocks, aren’t they? It always happens.”

  She said, “Are you an ice cream salesman?”

  “Nope, just an interested party.”

  Now I stood back so that I could kick in the door. “Seriously,” I said, “do you remember that? Are you there?” When she didn’t answer, I kicked as hard as I could, right under the knob, and felt the jamb crack—not all the way, but enough. I got ready to kick again, and she screamed at me to stop. Please, just stop.

  So I stopped. I put my mouth right up to the door so she’d be sure to hear me.

  “You know what I was doing that day? I was on my way to a delivery, and I had my windows rolled down. I rolled through downtown, and I heard the music and saw all those people there and the old buildings around them and the trees. And I said to myself, ‘What would it feel like to be like them?’ So I stopped and got out. And I met you.”

  I waited for her to say something.

  “I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” I said, “but that wasn’t one of them. I can be a good person if you’ll let me. Now, are you going to let me in so we can talk?”

  “I’m holding a knife. Go ahead. Kick the door in the rest of the way.”

  It was a relief, in a way. It’s good to know where things stand.

  “Fine,” I said. “But I should probably tell you where your mom is right now.”

  Marissa drove her own car and followed me. At the tank yard, I told her to wait at the gate. “Not until you tell me what’s going on,” she said, but she’d followed me this far. She wasn’t going anywhere. I held a finger to my lips and crept up to the office, listened at the door, and then opened it. Her mom was still tied up as I’d left her except that she’d tipped the chair over and was lying on her side. She had a bruise on the side of her forehead that you could see as soon as I set her upright again. I went back out and called Marissa over. When she saw her mom, she ripped off the blindfold and the gag.

  “Apparently she owed some other dealers money. They weren’t as nice as me.”

  Marissa stood with her back to the wall, next to the door, as far from her mom as she could get. “How did you know that?”

  I sighed. “Because I’m a caring person who looks out for his customers.” She opened her mouth to tell me what she thought of that, and I said, “Because I know things. That’s why. After I heard, I went by her house to check on her, and I found this.” I held up the sandwich bag. “This had meth in it, now it doesn’t. And I didn’t leave it there. Now, you want to get her out of here or what?”

  Together we carried her to Marissa’s car and sli
d her into the back seat. I followed her back into town, to the hospital, though I didn’t go in. I had thirty-three thousand dollars in a jar under my porch, and that was what I could do, I realized. I could pay for her mom to get clean. So I went home, got down on my hands and knees, and reached under the porch. I reached as far as I could but felt only dirt. I went and got a flashlight. Only dirt. The jar was gone.

  I waited until after dark, way after, closer to sunrise than sunset. I wanted to make sure Rob was done cooking, that he was asleep, that he was alone. First I went back to the tank yard, filled up a propane tank with anhydrous, and put it on the floor on the passenger side of my truck, close enough that I could hold on to it around curves so it wouldn’t roll around. When it was almost morning, I went over to Rob’s. I carried the tank to the back of the house, where his bedroom was. With my finger, I poked a hole in the tinfoil covering his window. There was some old tubing in his backyard, stuff we’d thrown out because of wear and tear, but it was good enough for this. I slid the tubing through the hole until I felt it hit the floor. I connected the other end to the tank and turned the valve. The smell of the ammonia was unbearable, even from twenty feet away, where I stood listening for him to wake up, which he did. He thrashed and threw himself against the wall. He screamed. But he couldn’t see, and so he never did find his way out of the room.

  When it was over, I went to the back porch to start looking for my money. It wasn’t much of a porch, not much bigger than a bathroom floor. He’d moved the new chair onto the middle of it, and I stood there looking at that chair. Somebody had spent a lot of time on that chair. The owner probably had a flower garden with a trellis and a climbing rose, and maybe there were kid toys in the yard and a basketball hoop and one of those lawn-art roadrunners with legs that spin in the wind. You work hard, pay your property taxes, paint your siding when it peels or invest in vinyl, and somebody runs off with whatever isn’t chained and bolted to a concrete slab. I climbed on top and stuck my hand up through the soffit hole where there should have been a screen but now was open. I reached around until I found my jar and the Maxwell coffee can. I took both back to my truck, and then I came back for the chair. He didn’t deserve something so nice, and neither did I, but I intended to one day, so I took it.