Richard Burgin - The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

“You’re a good boy,” he said. The cruiser spit gravel at me as he pulled into the night.

I was off, headed to this girl’s house, when through the park, behind me, came a DEP cop. He followed me for over a mile and then the flashers went on. I pulled over.

When he got next to the truck I recognized him and he had his gun in his hand. “Hey,” he said. “You were speeding and weaving and out of control and then we had a high-speed chase.” He was grinning from ear to ear as he said it. Behind him it was pitch black.

“Here’s my license,” I said.

“I don’t want your license,” he said. I could smell booze on him. “I want two hundred bucks.” I reached into my wallet and pulled out some twenties and handed them to him.

“I bet you didn’t know this was a toll road,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

He took out a knife and stuck it in the sidewall of the front driver’s-side tire. I listened to the hiss as he yanked it out of the split rubber.

“Front tire’s flat,” he said. “Flat flat flat. That’s too bad.” He had his gun in one hand and a knife in the other.

“Come on, man,” I said. “Give me a break.”

“Sure,” he said. He started to walk back to the patrol car, stopped at the end of my truck and kicked out a rear light. The whole truck rocked. “Got a back light out too,” he said. “That’s a violation. Better get that fixed.” He slammed his door and swung around me. I watched his taillights get smaller in the dark as he drove off.

A couple months later they found his patrol car empty on a logging road near the reservoir. The door was open, the cop radio was turned on. There was money and blood all over the place, like green and red leaves blowing in the wind, and as the investigation went on, the BCI determined it was his money. He came to that spot to pay someone for something. But they didn’t take his money. They took him.

Richard Burginis the author of eleven books, including the novel Ghost Quartet and the recent story collections Fear of Blue Skies and The Spirit Returns. Four of his stories have won Pushcart Prizes and thirteen others have been listed by the prestigious Pushcart Prize anthology as being among the year’s best. His forthcoming New and Selected Stones will also include a CD of his musical compositions. He is a professor of communication and English at Saint Louis University, where he edits the nationally distributed and award-winning literary journal Boulevard.

“The Identity Club” grew out of my thinking about how enamored so many people are with celebrities. I imaged a secret club of people so obsessed with various famous dead writers or artists, etc., that they literally attempted to live their lives and die their deaths. To justify what they do, they devise a theory of reincarnation suited to their needs. New York City seemed a logical place for the Identity Club to exist. I also thought it important to make the protagonist an outsider from New England who innocently and enthusiastically, at first, becomes involved with this bizarre organization.

Louise Erdrichgrew up in North Dakota and is enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. She is the author of ten novels, including Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also published children’s books, poetry, and a memoir of early motherhood, The BlueJay’s Dance. Her short fiction has won the National Magazine Award and appeared in the O. Henry and Best American short story collections. She lives in Minnesota with her children and runs a small independent bookstore, the Birchbark.

Daniel Handleris the author of the novels The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth, and serves as the legal, literary, and social representative of Lemony Snicket, whose sequence of books for children, known collectively as A Series of Unfortunate Events, have been alleged international bestsellers. He has worked intermittently and inexplicably in film and journalism, and has been commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony to create a piece in collaboration with the composer Nathaniel Stookey. An adjunct accordionist for the pop group The Magnetic Fields, Mr. Handler lives in San Francisco with his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, and a baby.

On March 14, 2003, the novelist and short story writer Amanda Davis died in a plane crash. She was a friend of mine. We used to meet up at my local bar from time to time to chew over problems both literary and personal. When I was asked to contribute to an anthology of genre writing, I thought it would be a kick to try a locked-room mystery, and as my religious beliefs do not contain much in the way of an afterlife, I had the idea to place Davis somewhere she might enjoy. Discerning readers may also note some references to Davis’s fiction within the story. I have an enthusiasm for complicated cocktails and perhaps there’ll be some more rounds at the Slow Night, but among the lessons of Davis’s death is that I ought not to make reckless promises about the future.

George V. Higgins(1939–1999) was the author of more than twenty novels, most notably his first, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, published in 1972 and filmed the following year. The short story collection from which “Jack Duggan’s Law” was taken, The Easiest Thing in the World, was published posthumously.

Edward P. Jonesis the author of the novel The Known World, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and of Lost in the City: Stories.

“Old Boys, Old Girls” began with the main character in “Young Lions,” a story in Lost in the City. In the latter story, Caesar is a thief, not quite twenty-five, and growing into a not very nice man. Now, with “Old Boys,” we have that fully formed man — a prisoner who has murdered two human beings.

Stuart M. Kaminskyis the author of more than sixty published novels and forty short stories; he has also produced screenplays, television episodes, two plays, and even a book of poetry and a graphic novel. He writes four different series, featuring the 1940s private eye to the stars Toby Peters; the depressed Sarasota process server Lew Fonesca; the put-upon Chicago police detective Abe Leiberman and his partner, Bill Hanrahan; and the one-legged Russian police inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov.

“The Shooting of John Roy Worth” was written in two sittings. I had no idea what I was writing or what was going to happen. That’s not the way it usually works for me, but I tried it successfully once before, enjoyed the ride, and decided to take another one. My hope was that this tale would surprise the reader just as it surprised me when I wrote it. I just let my central character come alive and followed him down the street.

Dennis Lehaneis the author of Mystic River and Shutter Island, as well as five novels featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. He lives in Boston, where he is currently writing a novel about, among other things, World War I, the great influenza outbreak of 1918, the Boston police strike of 1919, and the Tulsa race riot of 1921. The only thing he’s sure of is that it won’t be short.

I’d had the first line of “Until Gwen” bouncing around in my head for a few years when John Harvey asked me to write a story for a British anthology called Men from Boys. The only requirement was that it have something to do with fathers and sons. The deadline was maybe a week off, at best, when I finally tried writing it. I was going through a lot of personal turmoil at the time and I’ve never been the kind of writer who can write directly about my own life, but I think I do OK when I approach it obliquely. So I took a notepad out onto my front porch, which is surrounded by a hundred-year-old wisteria, and this rainstorm hit, a huge one, bending trees, clattering all over the street and the roof. But the wisteria kept anything from hitting me. I wrote the first draft that night on my porch in this crazy storm. It was supposed to be a comic story — that first line, hell, the whole first scene, is pretty absurd — but page by page it kept getting darker and darker until it ended up being arguably the darkest thing I’ve ever written. The writing of it, though — that whole storm-within/storm-without, mad-scientist vibe — was one of my favorite creative experiences.