Charles Ardai - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

“So she invites half the town in so she can have her fun while I vegetate in my wheelchair.” Now it was his turn to down his whiskey. He hurled the glass into the fireplace. A long, uneasy silence followed.

I tried to remember the easy friendship the three of us had enjoyed back when we were in high school, before Kenny and I’d been in Nam, and before the three of us had taken up bank robbery for a living. Hard to believe we’d ever liked each other at all.

Kenny’s head dropped down then. At first I thought he might have passed out, but then the choking sound of dry sobs filled the room and I realized he was crying.

“You’re such a wimp,” she said.

And then it was her turn to smash her glass into the fireplace.

I’d never heard two people go at each other this way. It was degrading.

He looked up at me. “You stick around here long enough, Chet, she’ll make a deal with you. She’ll give you half the money if you beat me up and make me tell you where it is.”

I looked over at her. I knew what he said was true.

“She doesn’t look as good as she used to — she’s kind of a used car now instead of a brand-new Caddy — but she’s still got some miles left on her. You should hear her and some of her boyfriends out here on the couch when they get goin’.”

She started to say something but then she heard me start to laugh.

“What the hell’s so funny?”

I stood up and looked at my watch. I had only ten minutes left to get back to the depot.

Kenny glanced up from his wheelchair. “Yeah, Chet, what’s so funny?”

I looked at them both and just shook my head. “It’ll come to you. One of these days. Believe me.”

And with that, I left.

She made a play for my arm and Kenny sat there glowering at me, but I just kept on walking. I had to hurry.

The cold, clean air not only revived me, it seemed to purify me in some way. I felt good again, whole and happy now that I was outdoors.

The bus was dark and warm. Polly had brought a bag of popcorn along. “You almost didn’t make it,” she said as the bus pulled away from the depot.

In five minutes we were rolling into countryside again. In farmhouses lights were coming on. In another hour, it would be dawn.

“You took it, didn’t you?” I said.

“Huh?”

“You took it. My gun.”

“Oh. Yes. I guess I did. I didn’t want you to do anything crazy.”

Back there at Kenny’s I’d reached into my jacket pocket for the .38 and found it gone. “How’d you do it? You were pretty slick.”

“Remember I told you I’d gotten into a little trouble? Well, an uncle of mine taught me how to be a pickpocket and so for a few months I followed in his footsteps. Till Sheriff Baines arrested me one day.”

“I’m glad you took it.”

She looked over at me in the darkness of the bus and grinned. She looked like a kid. “You really didn’t want to do it, did you?”

“No,” I said, staring out the window at the midwestern night. I thought of them back there in the house, in a prison cell they wouldn’t escape till death. No, I hadn’t wanted to shoot anybody at all. And, as things turned out, I hadn’t had to either. Their punishment was each other.

“We’re really lucky we met each other, Chet.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of Dawn and Kenny again. “You don’t know how lucky we are.”

Copyright © 1990 by Reginald Hill. Reprinted by permission of the author and Ellen Levine Literary Agency, Ltd.

Many series characters seem never to age, or to age at a quite different rate from the rest of us, leaving us to wonder what they’d be like in their golden years. Reginald Hill gives us a hilarious forward look at his Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel in the year 2010. Dalziel is not yet in his dotage, but his protegé Pascoe now calls the shots in a case that takes the duo to — of all places — the moon. “One Small Step” is a revised and shortened version of a novelette by Reginald Hill published in the U.K. in 1990...

The first man to land on the moon was Neil Armstrong on the twentieth of July, 1969. As he stepped off the module ladder, he said, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The first man to be murdered on the moon was Emile Lemarque on the fourteenth of May, 2010. As he fell off the module ladder, he said, “Oh mer—”

There were two hundred and twenty-seven million witnesses.

One of these was ex-Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel, who was only watching because the battery of his TV remote control had failed. What he really wanted to see was his favorite episode of Star Trek on the Nostalgia Channel. By comparison, Michelin men bouncing dustily over lunar slag heaps made very dull viewing, particularly with the Yanks probing to the edge of the solar system. But the Federated States of Europe had waited a long time for their share of space glory and the Euro Channel had been ordered to give blanket coverage.

In the U.K. this met with a mixed response, and not just from those who preferred Star Trek. Britain’s decision to opt out of the Federal Space Programme had seemed a welcome economy in the niggardly nineties. Once the moon came in sight, however, the patriotic tabloids started screaming, how come these inferior foreigners were prancing around in the Greatest Show Off Earth with no U.K. involvement unless you counted the use of English as the expedition’s lingua franca?

But all most True Brits felt when they realized their choice of channels had been reduced from ninety-seven to ninety-six was a vague irritation, which Andy Dalziel would probably have shared had he been able to switch over manually. Unfortunately he was confined to bed by an attack of gout, and irritation rapidly boiled into rage, especially as his visiting nurse, who had retired to the kitchen for a recuperative smoke, ignored all his cries for help. It took a violent splintering explosion to bring her running, white-faced, into the bedroom.

Dalziel was sinking back into his pillows, flushed with the effort and the triumph of having hurled his useless remote control through the telly screen.

“Now look what you’ve made me do,” he said. “Don’t just stand there. Fetch me another set. I’m missing Star Trek.”

It took three days for it to emerge that what the two hundred and twenty-seven million witnesses had seen wasn’t just an unhappy accident but murder.

Till then, most of the U.K. press coverage had been concerned with interpreting the dead man’s possibly unfinished last words. The favourite theory was that Oh mer ... was simply oh mère , a dying man’s appeal to his mother, though the Catholic Lozenge stretched this piously to Oh mere de Dieu. When it was suggested that a life member of the Société Athéiste et Humaniste de France (Lourdes branch) would be unlikely to trouble the Virgin with his dying breath, the Lozenge tartly retorted that history was crammed with deathbed conversions. The Jupiter , whose aged owner ascribed his continued survival to just such a conversion during his last heart attack, showed its sympathy for this argument by adapting Camden’s couplet in its leader headline — BETWIXT THE MODULE AND THE GROUND, MERCY HE ASKED, MERCY HE FOUND. The Defender , taking this literally, suggested that if indeed Lemarque had been going to say Oh merci, this was less likely to be a plea for divine grace than an expression of ironic gratitude, as in, “Well, thanks a bunch for bringing me so far, then chopping me off at the knees!” The Planet meanwhile had torpedoed the oh mère theory to its own satisfaction by the discovery that Lemarque had been raised in a Lourdes orphanage where he had been very badly treated and never taken to the seaside (the Planet’s italics), persuading the editor that this poor deprived foreigner had reverted to infancy in the face of annihilation and was once again pleading to be taken au mer. Chortling with glee, the Intransigent pointed out that mer was feminine and congratulated the Planet on now being illiterate in two languages. Then it rather surrendered its superior position by speculating that, coming from Lourdes, Lemarque might have fantasized that he was falling into the famous healing pool and started to cry, Eau merveilleux!