James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

Jeffery Deaver (1950-) was born outside Chicago and received a journalism degree from the University of Missouri, becoming a newspaperman, then received a law degree from Fordham University, practicing law for several years. A poet, he wrote his own songs and performed them across the country.

One of the most prominent and consistently excellent suspense writers in the world, Deaver is the author of twenty-three novels and two short story collections. He has been translated into twenty-five languages and is a perennial bestseller in America and elsewhere. Among his many honors are six nominations for Edgar Allan Poe Awards (twice for Best Paperback Original, four times for Best Short Story); three Ellery Queen Readers’ Awards for Best Short Story of the Year; the 2001 W. H. Smith Thumping Good Read Award for The Empty Chair; and the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers’ Association for Garden of Beasts. In 2009 he was the guest editor of The Best American Mystery Stories of the Year. He has written about a dozen standalone novels, but is most famous for his series about Lincoln Rhyme, the brilliant quadriplegic detective who made his debut in The Bone Collector (1997), which was filmed by Universal in 1999 and starred Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. Other Rhyme novels are The Coffin Dancer (1998), The Empty Chair (2000), The Stone Monkey (2002), The Vanished Man (2003), The Twelfth Card (2005), The Cold Moon (2006), and The Broken Window (2008). His nonseries novel A Maidens Grave (1995) was adapted for an HBO movie titled Dead Silence (1997) and starred James Garner and Marlee Matlin.

“The Weekender” was first published in the December 1996 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; it was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 1997.

I looked in the rearview mirror and didn’t see any lights, but I knew they were after us and it was only a matter of time till I’d see the cops. Toth started to talk, but I told him to shut up and got the Buick up to eighty. The road was empty, nothing but pine trees for miles around.

“Oh brother,” Toth muttered. I felt his eyes on me, but I didn’t even want to look at him, I was so mad.

They were never easy, drugstores.

Because, just watch sometime, when cops make their rounds they cruise drugstores more often than anyplace else. Because of the prescription drugs.

You’d think they’d stake out convenience stores. But those’re a joke, and with the closed-circuit TV you’re going to get your picture took, you just are. So nobody who knows the business, I mean really knows it, hits them. And banks, forget banks. Even ATMs. I mean, how much can you clear? Three, four hundred tops? And around here the Fast Cash button gives you twenty bucks. Which tells you something. So why even bother?

No. We wanted cash and that meant a drugstore, even though they can be tricky. Ardmore Drugs. Which is a big store in a little town. Liggett Falls. Sixty miles from Albany and a hundred or so from where Toth and me lived, farther west into the mountains. Liggett Falls is a poor place. You’d think it wouldn’t make sense to hit a store there. But that’s exactly why—because like everywhere else people there need medicine and hairspray and makeup, only they don’t have credit cards. Except maybe a Sears or Penney s. So they pay cash.

“Oh brother,” Toth whispered again. “Look.”

And he made me even madder, him saying that. I wanted to shout, Look at what, you son of a bitch? But then I could see what he was talking about, and I didn’t say anything. Up ahead. It was like just before dawn, light on the horizon. Only this was red, and the light wasn’t steady. It was like it was pulsing, and I knew that they’d got the roadblock up already. This was the only road to the interstate from Liggett Falls. So I should’ve guessed.

“I got an idea,” Toth said. Which I didn’t want to hear but I also wasn’t going to go through another shootout. Sure not at a roadblock where they was ready for us.

“What?” I snapped.

“There’s a town over there. See those lights? I know a road’ll take us there.”

Toth’s a big guy, and he looks calm. Only he isn’t really. He gets shook easy, and he now kept turning around, skittish, looking in the back seat. I wanted to slap him and tell him to chill.

“Where’s it?” I asked. “This town?”

“About four, five miles. The turnoff, it ain’t marked. But I know it.”

This was that lousy upstate area where everything’s green. But dirty green, you know. And all the buildings’re gray. These gross little shacks, pickups on blocks. Little towns without even a 7-Eleven. And full of hills they call mountains but aren’t.

Toth cranked down the window and let this cold air in and looked up at the sky. “They can find us with those, you know, satellite things.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“You know, they can see you from miles up. I saw it in a movie.”

“You think the state cops do that? Are you nuts?”

This guy, I don’t know why I work with him. And after what happened at the drugstore, I won’t again.

He pointed out where to turn, and I did. He said the town was at the base of the Lookout. Well, I remembered passing that on the way to Liggett Falls that afternoon. It was this huge rock a couple of hundred feet high. Which if you looked at it right looked like a man’s head, like a profile, squinting. ltd been some kind of big deal to the Indians around here. Blah, blah, blah. He told me, but I didn’t pay no attention. It was spooky, that weird face, and I looked once and kept on driving. I didn’t like it. I’m not really superstitious, but sometimes I am.

“Winchester,” he said now, meaning what the name of the town was. Five, six thousand people. We could find an empty house, stash the car in a garage, and just wait out the search. Wait till tomorrow afternoon — Sunday—when all the weekenders were driving back to Boston and New York and we’d be lost in the crowd.

I could see the Lookout up ahead, not really a shape, mostly this blackness where the stars weren’t. And then the guy on the floor in the back started to moan all of a sudden and just about give me a heart attack.

“You. Shut up back there.” I slapped the seat, and the guy in the back went quiet.

What a night.

We’d got to the drugstore fifteen minutes before it closed. Like you ought to do. ‘Cause mosta the customers’re gone and a lot’ve the clerks’ve left and people’re tired, and when you push a Glock or Smitty into their faces, they’ll do just about anything you ask.

Except tonight.

We had our masks down and walked in slow. Toth getting the manager out of his little office, a fat guy started crying and that made me mad, a grown man doing that. He kept a gun on the customers and the clerks, and I was telling the cashier, this kid, to open the tills and, Jesus, lie had an attitude. Like he’d seen all of those Steven Seagal movies or something. A little kiss on the cheek with the Smitty and he changed his mind and started moving. Cussing me out, but he was moving. I was counting the bucks as we were going along from one till to the next, and sure enough, we were up to about three thousand when I heard this noise and turned around and what it was, Toth was knocking a rack of chips over. I mean, Jesus. He’s getting Doritos!

I look away from the kid for just a second, and what’s he do? He pitches this bottle. Only not at me. Out the window. Bang, it breaks. There’s no alarm I can hear, but half of them are silent anyway and I ‘m really pissed. I could’ve killed him. Right there. Only I didn’t. Toth did.