The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

  The man with the slicked-back hair jumps in, as if to set George’s mind at ease. “We’ll have plenty of use for your skills and your knowledge. We’ll compensate you very fairly. We’ll be in touch.”

  And then, more philosophically, the man says, “Listen, we all need something to occupy us. A hobby, a focus in life . . .”

  “Continue your appointed rounds,” instructs the second man.

  The first man smiles. “The neighbors will be so happy, won’t they, George? Good job! You did it! Muscovito is gone.”

  “Welcome, mailman . . . ,” says the second.

  “Yes.” The first one smiles wider, as if with sudden inspiration. “Welcome to our neighborhood.”

  ART TAYLOR

  Rearview Mirror

  FROM On the Road with Del & Louise

  I HADN’T BEEN thinking about killing Delwood. Not really. But you know how people sometimes have just had enough. That’s what I’d meant when I said it to him, “I could just kill you,” the two of us sitting in his old Nova in front of a cheap motel on Route 66—meaning it figurative, even if that might seem at odds with me sliding his pistol into my purse right after I said it.

  And even though I was indeed thinking hard about taking my half of the money and maybe a little more—literal now, literally taking it—I would not call it a double-cross. Just kind of a divorce and a divorce settlement. Even though we weren’t married. But that’s not the point.

  Sometimes people are too far apart in their wants—that’s what Mama told me. Sometimes things don’t work out.

  That was the point.

  “Why don’t we take the day off?” I’d asked Del earlier that morning up in Taos, a Saturday, the sun creeping up, the boil not yet on the day, and everything still mostly quiet in the mobile home park where we’d been renting on the biweekly. “We could go buy you a suit, and I could get a new dress. Maybe we’d go out to dinner. To Joseph’s Table maybe. Celebrate a little.”

  He snorted. “Louise,” he said, the way he does. “What’s it gonna look like, the two of us, staying out here, paycheck to paycheck, economical to say the least”—he put emphasis on economical, always liking the sound of anything above three syllables—“and suddenly going out all spiffed up to the nicest restaurant in town?” He looked at me for a while, then shook his head.

  “We don’t have to go to the nicest restaurant,” I said, trying to compromise, which is the mark of a good relationship. “We could just go down to the bar at the Taos Inn and splurge on some high-dollar bourbon and nice steaks.” I knew he liked steaks, and I could picture him smiling over it, chewing, both of us fat and happy. So to speak, I mean, the fat part being figurative again, of course.

  “We told Hal we’d vacate the premises by this morning. We agreed.”

  Hal was the man who ran the mobile home park. A week before, Del had told him he’d finally gotten his degree and then this whole other story about how we’d be moving out to California, where Del’s sister lived, and how we were gonna buy a house over there.

  “Sister?” I had wanted to say when I overheard it. “House?” But then I realized he was just laying the groundwork, planning ahead so our leaving wouldn’t look sudden or suspicious. Concocting a story—I imagine that’s the way he would have explained it, except he didn’t explain it to me but just did it.

  That’s the way he was sometimes: a planner, not a communicator. Taciturn, he called it. Somewhere in there, in his not explaining and my not asking, he had us agreeing. And now he had us leaving.

  “Okay,” I told Del. “We’ll just go then. But how ’bout we rent a fancy car? A convertible maybe. A nice blue one.” And I could see it—us cruising through the Sangre de Christos on a sunny afternoon, the top tipped back and me sliding across the seat, leaning over toward him, maybe kicking my heels up and out the window. My head would be laid on his shoulder and the wind would slip through my toes and the air conditioner would be blowing full-blast since June in the Southwest is already hot as blazes.

  Now that would be nice.

  “No need to waste this windfall on some extravagance,” he said. “No need to call attention to ourselves unnecessarily. Our car works fine.”

  He headed for it then—that old Nova. Flecks of rust ran underneath the doors and up inside the wheel well. A bad spring in the seat always bit into my behind. Lately the rearview mirror had started to hang a little loose—not so that Delwood couldn’t see in it, but enough that it rattled against the windshield whenever the road got rough.

  He’d jury-rigged a hitch under the bumper and hooked up a flat-as-a-pancake trailer he’d rented to carry some of the stuff that wouldn’t fit in the trunk. A tarp covered it now.

  I stood on the steps with my hip cocked and my arms crossed, so that when he turned and looked at me in that rearview mirror, he’d know I was serious. But he just climbed in the car, then sat there staring ahead. Nothing to look back at, I guess. He’d already packed the trunk and the trailer both while I slept. The mobile home behind us was empty of the few things we owned.

  “A new day for us,” he’d whispered an hour before, when he woke me up, but already it seemed like same old, same old to me. When I climbed in beside him, I slammed the passenger-side door extra hard and heard a bolt come loose somewhere inside it.

  “It figures,” I said, listening to it rattle down. The spring had immediately dug into my left rump.

  Del didn’t answer. Just put the car in gear and drove ahead.

  When I first met Del, he was robbing the 7-Eleven over in Eagle Nest, where I worked at that time. This was about a year ago. I’d been sitting behind the counter, reading one of the Cosmos off the shelf, when in comes this fellow in jeans and a white T-shirt and a ski mask, pointing a pistol.

  “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said. “I’m not a bad man. I just need an occasional boost in my income.”

  I laid the Cosmo face-down on the counter. I didn’t want to lose my place.

  “You’re robbing me?” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I bit my lip and shook my head—no no no—just slightly.

  “I’m only twenty-eight,” I said.

  He looked over toward the Doritos display—not looking at it, but pointing his head in that direction the way some people stare into space whenever they’re thinking. He had a mustache and a beard. I could see the stray hairs poking out around the bottom of the ski mask and near the hole where his mouth was.

  “Excuse me?” he said finally, turning back to face me. His eyes were this piney green.

  “I’m not a ma’am.”

  He held up his free hand, the one without the pistol, and made to run it through his hair—another sign of thinking—but with the ski mask, it just slid across the wool. “Either way, could you hurry it up? I’m on a schedule.”

  Many reasons for him to be frustrated, I knew. Not the least of which was having to wear wool in New Mexico in the summer.

  He glanced outside. The gas pumps were empty. Nothing but darkness on the other side of the road. This time of night, we didn’t get much traffic. I shrugged, opened the cash register.

  “You know,” I said, as I bent down for a bag to put his money in, “you have picked the one solitary hour that I’m alone in the store, between the time that Pete has to head home for his mom’s curfew and the time that our night manager strolls in for his midnight to six.”

  “I know. I’ve been watching you.” Then there was a nervous catch in his voice. “Not in a bad way, I mean. Not voyeuristically.” He enunciated both that word and the next. “Surveillance, you know. I’m not a pervert.”

  I kept loading the register into the bag. “You don’t think I’m worth watching?”

  Again, with the ski mask, I couldn’t be sure, but he seemed to blush.

  “No. I mean, yes,” he said. “You’re very pretty.”

  I nodded. “There’s not much money here we have access to, you know? A lot of it goes straight to the safe. That’s
procedure.”

  “I’m a fairly frugal man,” he said. “Sometimes I need extra for . . . tuition.”

  “Tuition?”

  “And other academic expenses.”

  “Academic expenses,” I repeated, not a question this time. I thought that he had a nice voice, and then I told him so. “You have a nice voice,” I said. “And pretty eyes.” I gave him my phone number, not writing it down because the security camera would have picked that up, but just told him to call, repeating the number twice so he would remember it. “And my name is Louise.”

  “Thanks,” he said, “Louise.”

  “Good luck with your education,” I called after him, but the door had already swung closed. I watched him run out toward the pumps and beyond, admired the way his body moved, the curve of his jeans, for as long as I could make him out against the darkness. I gave him a head start before I dialed 911.

  I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I was some bored, bubblegum-popping, Cosmo-reading girl, disillusioned with the real world and tired already of being a grownup, and along comes this bad boy and, more than that, literally a criminal and . . . Sure, there’s some truth there. But here again you’d be missing the point.

  It wasn’t exciting that he robbed convenience stores.

  It was exciting that he was brave enough to call me afterward, especially in this age of caller ID, when I had his phone number and name immediately—Grayson, Delwood—and could have sent the police after him in a minute.

  That Cosmo article? The one I was reading when he showed up in the ski mask? “Romantic Gestures Gone Good: Strange but True Stories of How He Wooed and Won Me.”

  Not a one of those stories held a candle to hearing Del’s voice on the other end of the phone: “Hello, Louise? I, um . . . robbed your 7-Eleven the other night, and I’ve been percolating on our conversation ever since. Are you free to talk?”

  That takes a real man, I thought. And—don’t forget those academic expenses—a man who might be going somewhere.

  But it had been a long time since I believed we were going anywhere fast. Or anywhere at all.

  We took the High Road down from Taos. That figured: two lanes, forty-five miles per hour.

  “Afraid they’ll get you for speeding?” I asked.

  “One thing might lead to another,” he said. “And anyway, the rental place stressed that it was dangerous to exceed the speed limit while pulling the trailer here.”

  As we drove, he kept looking up into the rearview mirror nervously, staring back across the sweep of that trailer, as if any second a patrol car really was gonna come tearing around the bend, sirens wailing, guns blasting. He had put his own pistol in the glove compartment. I saw it when I went for a Kleenex.

  “If we get pulled, are you gonna use it?”

  He didn’t answer, but just glanced up again at the mirror, which rattled against the windshield with every bump and curve.

  I was doing a little rearview looking myself.

  Here’s the thing. Even if I had become disillusioned with Del, I don’t believe I had become disappointed in him—not yet.

  I mean, like I said, he was a planner. I’d seen my mama date men who couldn’t think beyond which channel they were gonna turn to next, unless there was a big game coming up, and then their idea of planning was to ask her to pick up an extra bag of chips and dip for their friends. I myself had dated men who would pick me up and give me a kiss and ask, “So, what do you want to do tonight?”—none of them having thought about it themselves except to hope that we might end up in the back seat or even back at their apartment. I’m sorry to admit it with some of those men, but most times we did.

  On the other hand, take Del. When he picked me up for our first date, I asked him straight out, “Where’s the desperate criminal planning to take the sole witness to his crime on their first date?” I was admiring how he looked out from under that ski mask—his beard not straggly like I’d been afraid, but groomed nice and tight, and chiseled features, you’d call them, underneath that. Those green eyes looked even better set in such a handsome face. He’d dressed up: a button-down shirt, a nice pair of khakis. He was older than I’d expected, older than me. Thirties maybe. Maybe even late thirties. A touch of gray in his beard. But I kind of liked all that.

  “A surprise,” said Del, and didn’t elaborate, but just drove out of Eagle Nest and out along 64, and all of a sudden I thought, Oh, wait, desperate criminal, sole witness. My heart started racing and not in a good way. But then he pulled into Angel Fire and we went to Our Place for dinner. (Our Place! That’s really the name.) My heart started racing in a better way after that.

  Then there’s the fact that he did indeed finish his degree at the community college, which shows discipline and dedication. And coming up with that story about his sister and why we were moving, laying out a cover story in advance, always thinking ahead. And planning for the heist itself—the “big one,” he said, “the last one,” though I knew better. Over the last year, whenever tuition came due, he’d hit another 7-Eleven or a gas station or a DVD store—“shaking up the modus operandi,” he said, which seemed smart to me, but maybe he just got that from the movies he watched on our DVD player. He’d stolen that too.

  That was how we spent most of our nights together, watching movies. I’d quit the 7-Eleven job at that point. It was dangerous, Del said—ironically, he said—and I’d got a job at one of the gift stores in town, keeping me home nights. Home meaning Del’s mobile home, because it wasn’t long before I’d moved in with him.

  We’d make dinner—something out of a box because I’m not much of a cook, I’ll admit—and I’d watch Court TV, which I love, while he did some of his homework for the business classes he was taking over at the college or read through the day’s newspaper, scouring the world for opportunities, he said, balancing work and school and me. Later we’d watch a movie, usually something with a crime element like Bank Job or Mission: Impossible or some old movie like The Sting or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or all those Godfather movies like every man I’ve ever been with. I suggested Bonnie and Clyde, for obvious reasons, but he said it would be disadvantageous for us to see it and so we never did.

  “Is that all you do, sit around and watch movies?” Mama asked on the phone, more than once.

  “We go out some,” I told her.

  “Out out?” she asked, and I didn’t know quite what she meant and I told her that.

  “He surprises me sometimes,” I said. “Taking me out for dinner.”

  (Which was true. “Let’s go out for a surprise dinner,” he’d say sometimes, even though the surprise was always the same, that we were just going to Our Place. But that was still good because it really was our place—both literally and figuratively—and there’s romance in that.)

  “He loves me,” I’d tell Mama. “He holds me close at night and tells me how much he loves me, how much he can’t live without me.”

  Mama grunted. She was in North Carolina. Two hours’ time difference and almost a full country away, but still you could feel her disappointment like she was standing right there in the same room.

  “That’s how it starts,” Mama would tell me, “ ‘I can’t live without you,’ ” mimicking the voice. “Then pretty soon ‘I can’t live without you’ starts to turn stifling and sour and . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. And violent, I knew she’d wanted to say.

  And I knew where she was coming from, knew how her last boyfriend had treated her. I’d seen it myself, one of the reasons I finally just moved away, anywhere but there.

  “I thought you were going to start a new life,” she said, a different kind of disappointment in her voice then. “You could watch the tube and drink beer anywhere. You could date a loser here if that’s all you’re doing.”

  I twirled the phone cord in my hand, wanting just to be done with the conversation but not daring to hang up. Not yet.

  “Frugal,” Mama said, making me regret again
some of the things I’d told her about him. “Frugal’s just a big word for cheap.”

  “Are things gonna be different someday?” I’d asked Del one night, the two of us lying in bed, him with his back to me. I ran my fingers across his shoulder when I asked it.

  “Different?” he asked.

  “Different from this.”

  He didn’t answer at first. I kept rubbing his shoulder and let my hand sneak over and rub the top of his chest, caressing it real light, because I knew he liked that. The window was slid open and a breeze rustled the edge of those thin curtains. Just outside stood a short streetlight, one that the mobile home park had put up, and sometimes it kept me awake, shining all night, like it was aiming right for my face, leaving me sleepless.

  After a while I realized Del wasn’t gonna answer at all, and I stopped rubbing his chest and turned over.

  That night when I couldn’t sleep, I knew it wasn’t the streetlight at all.

  For that big one, that last last one, Del had roamed those art galleries in downtown Taos after work at the garage. He watched the ads for gallery openings, finding a place that stressed cash only, real snooty because you know a lot of people would have to buy that artwork on time and not pay straight out for it all at once, but those weren’t the type of people they were after. He’d looked up the address of the gallery owner, the home address, and we’d driven past that too.

  I liked watching his mind work: the way he’d suddenly nod just slightly when we were walking across the plaza or down the walkway between the John Dunn Shops, like he’d seen something important. Or the way his eyes narrowed and darted as we rode through the neighborhood where the gallery owner lived, keeping a steady speed, not turning his head, not looking as if he was looking.

  We had a nice time at the gallery opening itself. At least at the beginning. Delwood looked smart in his blue blazer, even though it was old enough that it had gotten some shine at the elbows. And you could see how happy he was each time he saw a red dot on one of the labels—just more money added to the take—even if he first had to ask what each of those red dots meant.