Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

“Where have you been?” was all Vivian said. Like she knew all along he wasn’t dead, though I never told her, and she never asked.

I had hold of Jake. He kept growling and the hackles went up all along his back. The last time I saw him do that was when we’d cornered a rattlesnake and I was throwing rocks at it. Vivian motioned at Jake.

“Hush, Dog.” She said it quiet and level-like.

Billy kind of leaned against the doorway, looking over top of Vivian. “Well, hello there, April-May. Ain’t you glad to see me?”

“What do you want here, Billy?” Vivian was still talking quiet.

“I jus’ come back to see April-May.”

“Now you’ve seen her. Get off my porch.”

Billy grinned and I could tell he was missing some teeth. “No, I think I’ll jus’ come in. Get myself out a the sun.”

“You think you can waltz in here? After all you’ve done?”

He was starting to sidle closer, like he was gonna push Vivian out of the way, and her being not even half his size, she sure couldn’t do much to stop him.

“Well, now, old woman, I don’t know what you’re talkin ’bout.”

“I know what you did.”

Billy made a sound in his throat, I think was supposed to be a laugh, though his eyes didn’t look like they should if something was funny.

“Everyone knows you set the fires. You better get out of here.”

Vivian was still sounding calm but I could see Billy’s mouth go all slack and his eyes stopped blinking like a snake that’s getting ready to do something.

“You burned my rabbits.”

“Them was your rabbits? You should a been there. Yeh, I knowed them was your rabbits.” Billy was starting to push past Vivian. “They sure did scream. Jumpin around. All lit up.”

Mama called me funny bunny when she lucked me in at night. She was warm and soft and her hands smelled like Ivory soap.

Jake was getting hard to hold. He was near pulling me cross the floor, trying to get at Billy. Then I heard myself hollering, “You mean-eyed sumbitch! You tried to burn me up!”

And I remembered that night like I was still in it. The smoke, hanging on to Jake’s neck, him pulling me outside, running with him to hide in the ditch.

“I should turn him loose on you! He’d rip your sumbitch throat out!” I was yelling so loud I wanted to cover my own ears.

“April-May! Hold Dog!” Vivian was shouting at me.

It brought me up short, and Jake too. Next thing I knew, quick as a cat, she had the shotgun she kept behind the door and was pointing it at Billy. Billy’s jaw dropped, like he never expected the trouble he was into, and started backing away fast.

“You’re trash, Billy,” was all Vivian said, and pulled the trigger. It caught Billy in the neck, and face, and blew him clean off the porch.

I’d peed all over myself and Jake was licking my face. Vivian stuck the shotgun back behind the door.

“Well, there’s an end to it then,” she said so quiet I could barely hear.

I started to cry a bit, not being sorry about Billy, but thinking about those rabbits set on fire and not being able to run away.

From Expletive Deleted

There are violent hurricanes all the time, in my world.

Five men tried to kill my younger brother over some logging rights money, but he lived. By the time I got to the hospital in Spokane, he was sitting up and eating solid food. Recovering. He talked to me about what had happened to him. The five men set him up, to rip him off. They hadn’t counted on his dog being so tough. He never went anywhere without his dog and she’d saved his life that night in the woods. She was dead. I got on the phone and the guys I knew in the Pacific Northwest and across Montana, guys who owed me favors, guys who sometimes paid me to move the index finger of my right hand less than an inch, depending on where the barrel was pointing — lots of eyes started to look for this group of five men. I took my brother home to Bozeman, to keep recovering.

The cost of pain and revenge finally dipped into a range I could afford. I got a late-night call, and when it was all said and done, there were Montana state police questions about five men and their sudden death with my name as the answer and the court decided my house should be made of concrete and steel for about eight years or more. That I should wear an orange jumpsuit. Very little proof let me get off light. Three of the men were shot from three football fields away, most likely the result of hunting accidents. Maybe bullets that overreached their animal mark and struck a human. The other two were shot at distances that were deemed impossible by the court forensic expert. No bullet could be accurate, at that range. That’s what the forensic expert said. I went to the private prison in Shelby and made my way to Deer Lodge, like everybody in Montana held accountable for their actions. I read the Bible, the most violent story I’ve ever known — an eye for an eye — and walked the yard when I could. I left when they told me to leave. It had all become one long night to me and that didn’t change when I got out. Things didn’t seem real to me anymore. My brother met me at my release, eight years and he was doing well, and after a month, we started to talk about money and work and the aspects of the normal world that needed to be attended to.

My brother and I delivered a load of big timber to Lethbridge and a trucker up there put us on to it.

“Biggest storm ever,” he said. “Going to wreck the whole Gulf Coast. Hurricanes, the real shit. Lots of work for loggers with their own gear. Big money in the cleanup. You boys headed south?”

My brother nodded. “We are now,” he said.

When we got back into Montana, we stopped in a bar in Bozeman and watched the storm develop on the bar TV. Sat drinking and watching those hurricanes sow the seeds of the future for everybody in the Gulf. People abandoning their homes, running to stay alive. For some of those folks, the wind and water would change everything. They’d move, they’d live a life in a part of the country they didn’t know existed, or that they hated. They’d be buried in cemeteries that didn’t have any stones with their last name already on them, far away from family. The whisper from a voice can make a train jump the rail. And this was a lot more than a whisper. The endless piles of torn trees were sacks of dollars, to me and my brother.

We drove back to our woodlot and rented house and started sharpening saws and collecting equipment into the big pickup truck.

“Do you want to say goodbye to your girl?” my brother asked.

“Not really,” I said. I’d been seeing a girl in town for three or four months.

“Okay,” he said.

I stood next to the truck. “I don’t have anything to say.”

“Sure,” he nodded.

We packed some guns too, the rifle and ammo, all in the lock box. Just in case trouble knocked and we wanted to knock back. The drive took us through Nevada and Texas. We stopped and drank with a couple of my brother’s friends. Driving into east Texas, the disaster started to show and by the time we hit the Louisiana line, it looked like God had been pretty mad that day. Houses torn from foundations, boats in the streets, abandoned cars everywhere, no power, no sewer, no drinking water. We got some papers that allowed us to work, through a connection of my brother’s, and we stayed in New Orleans — signed on to cut trees around high voltage at four hundred and fifty a day each, plus food and lodging. Anything we made on the side belonged to us and it was cash paid at the end of each day. It was tragedy for those folks, but it was a license to print money for the contractors. The whole city smelled, when we first got there. I thought of Sodom. And other things.