Fiction River Special Edition: Crime, page 5
“No. And I don’t need the money anyway. I can’t buy anything. My suitcase is too full as it is.”
“You liked your Atari. Don’t you want another?”
“So Mom can make me leave it behind like she did last time?”
“We have to travel light. You know that. And just look—you got the money for another like she said you would.”
“Well, I don’t want some dumb game I have to play back in our room. I want to do something out in the real world. With you. Can’t we see if they have an amusement park or a waterslide or something around here?”
“An amusement park?”
Biddle looked thoughtful.
There are a lot of scams you can pull at an amusement park.
Movement caught his eye. A flutter of drapes in a picture window.
“Time to roll. I think someone’s about to come rescue you from me.”
“Let ’em try,” the girl said, though she often fantasized about getting caught, arrested, even kidnapped. Just a few years before, she’d become obsessed with Sasquatch and the possibility that he’d come carry her off to his moss-covered cave. It would be scary, and she’d miss movies and TV and books and Biddle, but at least it wouldn’t be another Holiday Inn. Then one day her mother walked in on her watching an In Search of... about Bigfoot, and the woman had laughed one of her rare laughs and said, “All this fuss over a guy in a gorilla suit? And I thought the biggest bullshitter on TV was Jim Bakker.” And the girl had stopped waiting for the missing link to steal her away.
Biddle talked to a guy at a gas station. The nearest amusement park was three hours away, and it might not open till Memorial Day anyway. So Biddle bought ten scratch-off lottery tickets and gave half to the girl.
“What are these?” she said.
Official lotteries were something new. Most people weren’t used to states running their own scams yet.
“Those raffle tickets gave me an idea,” Biddle said. “Scratch off the gray stuff on these cards. Here, gently, like this. Just enough to see the numbers. No words. Just numbers. Then we’ll have us some real fun together.”
“You promise?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“Right. Like you were ever a Boy Scout.”
Biddle pinched the girl’s cheek.
“That’s my girl,” he said.
All the tickets were losers, but it didn’t matter. They found two candidates. On one, a seven could become a nine after just a little careful work with a black Bic. On the other, a five could become a six.
Biddle did the seven, the girl the five. They agreed that hers looked better.
They had a winner.
“Now we just have to find the right neighborhood,” Biddle said. “We may be in the Wonder Bread capital of the world, but they’ve gotta have a wrong side of the tracks around here somewhere.”
It took them half an hour to find it.
Another half hour after that, the girl stepped up to a middle-aged man pushing a shopping cart out of a discount grocery store.
“Can you help me? I’m lost.”
The man stopped.
“I can see that,” he said.
He was black, and so was everyone in the store and the parking lot and the streets around them.
“I was on the bus and I must have gotten off at the wrong stop,” the girl said. “But I didn’t realize it at first and I started walking around and now I can’t even find my way back to where I started from.”
“Alright,” the man sighed, “here’s what you want to do.”
He started giving directions. The girl nodded as if she cared. Then another man walked up.
“Excuse me, please,” he said. He had a thick accent of indeterminate pan-Caribbean origin. “I need your help.”
The older man rolled his eyes. “This is my lucky day.”
“Maybe it is, sir,” the other man said. He held up a scratch-off lottery ticket. “I think this is a winner, but I can’t turn it in.”
“Why not?” the girl asked.
“I’m not from here. I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t have papers. I can’t collect a hundred dollars from a state lottery.”
“A hundred dollars? Let me see!” The girl grabbed the ticket. “Wow. You’re right. It’s a winner.”
The older man peeked over her shoulder. He didn’t get much time to look. Just enough to see that the right numbers seemed to match.
“Where’d you buy it?” the girl asked.
“Right here. In this store.”
“And it can be turned in here, too?”
“Yes. You’d get the money immediately.”
“And then I’m supposed to come out and just give it to you?”
“No. I’d give you...twenty dollars.”
“Hey,” the older man said. He had a “What am I—chopped liver?” look on his face.
“How do I know you wouldn’t take it all?” the girl said.
The man from Trinijamahaiti looked offended.
“What a thing for an innocent little girl to say! How do I know you wouldn’t try to keep it all? Maybe you would accuse me of being a thief when I tried to collect my money!” He snatched his ticket back and turned away. “I’ll find someone else to help me.”
“Hey,” the older man said again.
“Wait! I know how we can do this!” the girl cried out.
She jammed a hand into her Jordache jeans and pulled out a wad of crumpled bills. She counted quickly.
“I’ll give you twenty eight dollars right now. Then you just give me the ticket, and we can be done.”
“Twenty eight dollars? I don’t know....”
The older man whipped out his wallet.
“I can give you thirty nine! No! Forty! That’s practically fifty percent, cash on the barrelhead.”
He thrust the money at the other man.
The other man took it and handed over the ticket.
“No fair,” the girl whined.
“The only fair’s the one with farm animals and cotton candy,” the older man said. He swung his cart around and headed back into the store. “Good luck catching that bus.”
The other man and the girl stalked off in different directions.
They met again two blocks away, on the quiet side street where they’d left the car.
“Told you it’d work,” Biddle said.
He unlocked the passenger door and let the girl in, then walked around and slipped behind the wheel.
“It’s crude, though,” Biddle went on. “There’s gotta be a way to spin it into something more than a nickel-and-dime short con. The big lotto jackpots—that’s the angle to play.”
The girl was looking out the window. The houses lining the street were small and old. A few were boarded up. The rest looked like they should be.
“I don’t like it when we take money from poor people.”
“If it’s good enough for McDonald’s and Mogen David, it’s good enough for me.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Neither am I. Hey, I’ve got family in neighborhoods like this. Believe me—plenty of these people are just as greedy and stupid as the rich people up the road. So why discriminate?”
“But it just doesn’t seem....”
The girl stopped herself. She wasn’t even sure if she’d been about to say “fair” or “right” or something else. But she knew the look she’d get.
She got it anyway.
Biddle cocked his head and gazed at her with eyes filled with pity.
“Sometimes I forget you’re not a midget,” he said.
“Oh, blow it out your ass.”
“My word!” Biddle gasped. “Wherever did you learn such nasty language?”
Then he smiled.
He knew.
“Look,” he said, “are all rich people bad?”
“No.”
“Are all poor people good?”
“No.”
“So what makes them different?”
“Money.”
Biddle shook his head. “Luck. Dumb luck. Some people are born Kennedys, and some people are born here. It has nothing to do with who deserves it. Hell, nobody deserves anything. We don’t deserve a Russian bomb to fall on us, but it might any minute. So we may as well buy us some ice cream with the money we didn’t deserve to get today.”
“I don’t know, Biddle.”
“You don’t know if you want to go to Baskin-Robbins?”
“No. I don’t know if—”
There was a hard rapping sound. Metal tapped to glass three times.
The glass was the driver’s-side window.
The metal was the barrel of a gun. Pointed at Biddle.
The girl made a sound that wasn’t a word and wasn’t quite a scream. She wasn’t surprised, though. Not entirely. Some part of her had been expecting this for a long, long time.
How long could you do wrong and not be punished? Forever?
No. There had to be a sometime. There had to be a finally.
And here it was.
“Gimme your money!” someone said. He sounded young and angry. All the girl could see of him was his plain white T-shirt. It hung on him limply, like a toga. The body beneath was lean.
Biddle pulled out his wallet, then rolled down the window and handed it over. He was moving very, very slowly.
“Men with guns either want respect or to kill you,” he’d told the girl once. “If they don’t kill you right off, just give them the respect and you’ll be fine.”
“Hers, too,” the boy or man outside the car demanded. He pressed the gun against the side of Biddle’s head. “Come on, come on!”
Slowly, calmly, Biddle held a hand out to the girl. Her hands were shaking so badly the bills she pulled from her pockets rustled and fluttered like wings. But she managed to give Biddle every dollar she had, and he brought it all to the window, and then it was gone.
The gun and the T-shirt disappeared, too. The girl could hear footsteps slapping on asphalt hard and fast.
“Don’t look back,” Biddle said.
He was staring straight ahead. After a long, silent moment, he started the car and put it in gear. He was still moving slowly, slowly, slowly. He drove away slowly, too.
The girl felt light-headed. Her scalp and feet tingled. There was a low buzzing in her ears that sounded like the static between TV channels. Her hands were still shaking. A sob was welling up in her chest.
Biddle burst out laughing. He laughed and laughed and laughed. More than a block went by before he could even speak.
“Round and round she goes!” he said. “Where she stops, nobody knows!”
“It’s not funny, Biddle! It’s not funny!”
Biddle stopped laughing. But he couldn’t keep the grin off his face even as he looked over at the girl and saw that she was crying.
“Oh, don’t be upset, sweetie. Everything’s fine. The universe just has to mess with you every once in a while, that’s all. It’s over now. Before you know it, you’ll be eating rocky road on a sugar cone.”
“What are we gonna do—steal it? That asshole took all our money!”
And the girl began crying even harder, though it wasn’t the money she was crying about at all.
Biddle let her cry for a while. Then he pulled something small and stiff from his shirt pocket and put it on the girl’s lap.
“Now, now,” he said. “See there?”
The girl looked over at him, sniffling.
Biddle was still smiling.
“We’ve got another lottery ticket,” he said. His smile grew wider. “People like us always do.”
Introduction to “The Good Brother”
Right now, the current crop of mystery short story writers is among the best the field has ever seen. The superlatives I’ve piled on Doug Allyn and Steve Hockensmith could easily be placed on Brendan DuBois as well. His short work repeatedly appears in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and many anthologies. He’s won the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of American twice, and is a three-time Edgar nominee. His short fiction has also appeared in The Best American Noir of the Century and The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. Plus, he knows things. He’s one of those illusive characters—a Jeopardy! game show champion.
About “The Good Brother,” he writes, “I’ve always been fascinated about the ‘good brother’ and the ‘bad brother.’ Born and raised in the same way, for some reason each will make different choices. Think of Jimmy Carter and his ne’er-do-well brother Billy or the brothers Bulger in Massachusetts: one becoming a State Senate president and the other becoming a convicted murderer.”
Of course, Brendan puts his own spin on this topic, with chilling results.
The Good Brother
Brendan DuBois
That night I was working at home on a speechwriting project that was going about as well as the Hindenburg’s final trip, so I decided to step outside to clear my mind. It had been a long time since I’d tried to come up with a speech of my own, and it was turning into a hell of a challenge. But instead of clearing anything, I nearly had a coronary when someone whispered from the shrubbery, “Hey, John, is that you?”
I froze. “Luke?”
A nervous laugh. “Yeah.”
I came closer to my house, near a large stand of juniper bushes. In the dim light from the living room’s windows, I made out my older brother, sitting with his back against the concrete foundation. It had been a while since I had last seen him. He was wearing dirty, torn blue jeans, work boots and a plain gray hoodie sweatshirt. His hands were in the front pockets of the hoodie.
“Luke, what’s going on? How the hell did you get in here?”
He laughed. “What, you think a gated community like this can keep me out? Hah.”
Lots of thoughts were tumbling through my mind, none of them particularly good. “So you’re here. Do you want to come in?”
“Ah, well, is your wife home?”
“Terry? Of course. And the kids.”
He hunched over. “I don’t want to come in. I’ll just mess things up.”
It was a warm night but my feet and hands were getting cold. “Luke, what’s going on? What did you do?”
“Ah, shit, bro, I’m in trouble. Lots of trouble.”
It felt even colder. “What did you do? Does your parole officer know?”
“Of course he doesn’t know! Christ…”
“Luke….”
“There was this guy. We were at a bar. He was dissing me… and I had to knife him.”
“You had to knife him?”
“Yeah.”
“You had to knife him?”
“John, heard you twice the first time. Look, you don’t understand, you’ll never understand, let’s leave it at that. Your life, my life, it’s all different, I know.”
Out in the woods I could hear some birds calling around. Such a sign of peace and tranquility. Or so someone once said.
“So what now?” I asked.
“John, you gotta help me…”
“Luke…”
He pulled out an arm, checked his watch. “There you go. I’m already overdue at the halfway house. Pretty soon my P.O. will get the word that I’ve missed bed check, and then every cop in the state will be looking for me.” He paused. “Not only because of me, you know… but because of—”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, cutting him off. “So how can I help?”
A short laugh. “You’re the one with the smarts, the money, the connections, the big house, wife and kids. Can’t you figure something out?”
More thoughts bouncing around in my brain, including the deadline I was trying to meet.
But I had no choice.
I had to take care of my brother.
***
I took a breath. “You found your way in, you think you can find your way back out?”
“Sure.”
“You know Toland Road?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a Seven-Eleven at the intersection of Toland and Spring. I’ll see you there in about fifteen minutes.”
He sounded suspicious. “Why not put me in your car now?”
“You really have to ask me that?”
“Hah.” Luke shifted some on the ground. “All right, I’ll do it. But John…”
“Yes?”
“Don’t get any ideas about calling the cops to pick me at that Seven-Eleven. You won’t like what happens next.”
“Never entered my mind,” I lied.
***
After my older brother slipped into the shadow of the woods, I took another deep breath. What a night. What a mess. I walked around to the other side of the house, went into the large and shiny kitchen. Sounds of a television came from the adjacent living room. On a pegboard were two sets of car keys. I grabbed the ones belonging to my wife Terry and called out, “Honey, going for a little ride to clear my head! Be back as soon as I can!”
“Hey!” came a voice from the living room. “Shouldn’t you wait…”
I ducked out through the door leading to the garage, went to Terry’s black Lexus. Got in, started the car, toggled a switch that smoothly opened the door behind me. I backed out and went down the wide and empty streets with the big homes.
***
There were two main entries to our little neighborhood, but there was also a little-known access gate that was used for landscapers and deliveries, and which didn’t have much in the way of prying eyes. I went down a narrow side road, went up to the gate, lowered the window. There was a keypad on a post, I punched in the code, and in a few minutes, I was on Toland Road, a residential street with a couple of convenience stores and gas stations. I slowed down, and from the shadows at the rear of the 7-Eleven, Luke came out, and got in.
“Thanks, bro.”
“It’s what I do,” I said, as we sped off into the night.
***
From the illumination of the dashboard, I spared a glance at Luke. His brown hair was stringy and tied at the back in a ponytail. His face was gaunt, with a wispy beard. His eyes flicked around. His hands were moving in his lap. I looked again.
