Джеффри Дивер - The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

So I went in undercover, and in the middle, the fucking middle of it all, there was an hour when nobody was watching me and I had a little money and I slipped away, on the ghost train out of there.

I can’t even imagine how many people are looking for me now.

Karen E. Benderis the author of the novel Like Normal People. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, and other magazines. They have been reprinted in the Best American and Pushcart Prize anthologies and read on the Selected Shorts program on NPR. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and is working on a collection of stories.

“Theft” began because I wanted to write something from the point of view of a swindler. Ginger was a great character to let out the id. It was fun trying to figure out how she would use people and try to figure out her own theories on how the world worked.

I chose a cruise ship because once I weirdly ended up on a cruise to Alaska, and the setting had to be used — the general sense of desperation and sequins and the constant eating opportunities, particularly the chocolate buffet, which was one of the most poignant and piggish experiences I have ever witnessed. A friend told me that he had heard of instances in which lonely people went on cruise ships to die and be found. That was incredibly powerful to me and somehow seemed to fit into Ginger’s perspective — that was the container that would hold the story. So I put that in, too, which made the story darker and sometimes hard to write, but so goes the puzzling escapade of writing fiction.

C. J. Boxis the author of six novels, the most recent being In Plain Sight. He is the winner of the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 Award (France), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, the Barry Award, and an Edgar Award, and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Open Season (2001) was a New York Times Notable Book and three of the novels have been Book Sense 76 picks. Box lives with his family outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and is currently writing a stand-alone thriller called Blue Heaven.

When the editors of “Meeting Across the River” — an anthology based on the Bruce Springsteen song — approached me about submitting a story, my first thought was: I don’t do urban. Then I read the lyrics with their vague, mysterious references to planning a crime, the girl Cherry, a $2,000 score. While contemplating how to put my stamp on a story with those elements, my family vacationed in Yellowstone. As we left the park, we witnessed an unexpected and somewhat jarring scenario — dark, leather-clad, menacing Eastern Europeans loitering on the corners and sidewalks of little Gardiner, Montana. They were wildly out of place, like a pawnshop in a cow pasture. Turned out they’d come to the United States for jobs in Yellowstone but couldn’t get them. They had that look about them like they’d do just about anything for $2,000. At the time, my daughters were listening to Eminem. Suddenly, everything fit. Voila: “Pirates of Yellowstone.”

James Lee Burkewas born in 1936 in Houston, Texas, and grew up on the Louisiana-Texas coast. He attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now called the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and later the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he received an A.B. and M.A. in English literature.

Over the years he has published twenty-five novels and one collection of short stories. The stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, The Southern Review, Antioch Review, and Kenyon Review. His novels Heaven’s Prisoners and Two for Texas were adapted as motion pictures.

Burke’s work has received two Edgar Awards for best crime novel of the year. He is also a Breadloaf fellow and a Guggenheim fellow and has been a recipient of an NEA grant. He and his wife of forty-six years, Pearl Burke, have four children and divide their time between Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.

My best and oldest friend passed away three years ago, and I wrote “Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine” and two other stories in memory of him. The real “Nick Hauser” was a remarkable man and a great friend to have. Even though we were born in the Great Depression, the era in which we grew up was one that I do not think will come aborning again. The quiet tree-shaded street on which we lived was next to a horse pasture and a grove of live oaks that were perhaps two hundred years old. “Nick” and I had a shoeshine business, yard-service, and were masters at harvesting blackberries on property that was not ours and selling them in bell jars, door-to-door, for two-bits ajar. But our great loves were baseball and Cheerio yo-yo contests.

It was a grand time to be a kid. Minor league baseball players were celebrities and the Canadian men who set up street-corner yo-yo competitions all over town seemed possessed of magic. Even the gangsters with whom “Nick” and I associated the word criminal had a Hollywood aura about them. I think the innocence of the boys in the story is a reflection of the mindset of the times. On V-J Day we knew with absolute conviction that our nation was on the right side of things and that the evil that had threatened our tiny microcosm on that dead-end street had been purged from the earth forever. Perhaps one could say that our national perspective was one of illusion, but I believe otherwise. I believe my generation will be the last one to remember what is called traditional America. We believed in ourselves. We were a united people. Each day was like waking to music and sunshine and the smell of flowers. Anyway, I’m proud of this story and the others I wrote about “Nick” and me. I hope you enjoy it.

Jeffery Deaveris a former journalist, folksinger, and attorney. The creator of the Lincoln Rhyme series of thrillers, he’s the author of twenty-two novels, has been awarded the Steel Dagger and Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association, is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story of the Year, and is a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. He’s been nominated for six Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony Award, and a Gumshoe Award. His book The Bone Collectors was made into a feature release from Universal pictures starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. His most recent books are The Cold Moon, The Twelfth Card, and Twisted: Collected Stories. And, yes, the rumors are true, he did appear as a corrupt reporter on his favorite soap opera, As The World Turns.

“Born Bad” is typical of my short stories. They don’t come from real-life experiences and are meant to be pure entertainment; I simply sit down and came up with a scenario that I think will make a fun story. Like my novels, the short stories are carefully plotted and move along quickly to an unexpected ending. The difference, though, is that in a novel I strive to create an emotional roller coaster for my readers. Accordingly, I have to keep in mind the connection that readers have with the book’s characters and never disillusion them. In short stories, that’s not the case, since it’s hard to form more than a marginal connection with the characters over the course of twenty pages or so; the payoff of a story is a gut-wrenching surprise. To stay with the amusement park metaphor: if novels are roller coasters, then short stories are like the parachute drop ride — when the parachute doesn’t open.