The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Read online

  George called for frequent stops. Their packs were obscenely heavy, having increased 50 percent as their numbers dropped. Mine, in contrast, got lighter as we used up all our food, since they were unwilling to trust me with their lethal cargo.

  In the dull rhythm of putting one ski in front of the other, I had lots of time to consider exactly what these men were carrying. The red marks on Yuri’s back looked like radiation burns to my inexperienced eye.

  We stopped again after a while, sitting in a circle, sipping from our water bottles. There was some discussion in Russian, which may have concerned sharing the load with me. The only decision made was to put Scarface immediately behind me, thus leaving Thanh at the end. There was a fair amount of loose snow from the storm, and breaking trail made the going harder. The farther back in the line one was, the more packed the trail.

  “How much longer until we get out of this fog?” George asked.

  “It looks like it’s settled onto the glacier for good. Once we start climbing, we’ll probably get above it.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe seven kilometers. Depends on how fast we go.”

  He scowled, and then gave the order to move.

  About a half-hour later, as my right ski slid forward, I thought I heard a soft crunch in the snow under me. My numbed brain took a moment to decipher the meaning of this sound, but my body kept its rhythm, one ski ahead of the other, and an instant later I heard a louder crack behind me. Instinctively, I threw myself to the ground, kicked off my skis, and dug my heels into the snow; at the same time, both of my hands grabbed the rope connecting me to the others. There was a violent yank on the rope, only a little of which I was able to absorb with my arms. I was being pulled back, my heels making deep grooves in the packed snow as I slid toward a wide black opening. On the other side of the gap I could make out Thanh, in much the same situation. We continued to skid, from opposite sides, toward the edge of the crevasse, pulled by the weight of the three men dangling on our rope.

  For a moment the mist thinned, and I could clearly see the horror in Thanh’s eyes as I swiftly pulled out Yuri’s knife and cut the rope. Thanh struggled, but even for the two of us the weight had been too much. Thanh’s face had a look of reproach as he disappeared over the lip of the crevasse.

  I scrambled farther away from the edge, taking my skis with me. I dug a trench parallel to the opening, tied another rope to my skis, and then buried them to form an anchor. Using the rope as a belay, I crawled on my stomach until I could look over the lip.

  The crevasse was very deep, and the walls were almost vertical. Not even Joe Simpson could climb out of it. I could barely see Thanh lying face-down deep below, on a narrow ledge. He looked to be unconscious, and there was a red smear near his face. I couldn’t even see the others.

  I crawled back to my pack, dug out the skis, put them on, and started trudging toward the border. I could sneak into some small town, pick up a few supplies, and then head back to Nelson.

  The rhythm of my motion provided a hypnotic background to the thoughts swirling around in my head. I had deliberately killed four people, yet I felt no guilt. For one thing, Thanh and I could not have held the other three, so the alternative was that all five of us would die.

  But I had to admit that even if there had been a way to save the others, I would not have done it. Like Oetzi, their bodies, along with their lethal cargo, would be spit out by the glacier in a few thousand years. I wondered if any humans would be left to find them.

  As a kid, during the Cold War, I had lived with the constant threat of nuclear war. It had been averted, and we believed we had emerged into a new era of tranquility, where we would not have to be thinking about death from an outside, impersonal force. But we were wrong.

  Terrorism became the new boogeyman. It made me think of Orwell’s 1984; our government always finds some outside threat, so that we stay docile.

  I’m tired of being held hostage to someone else’s fanatical ideas, whether it’s some desperate character in the Middle East or some religious zealot in Washington. I’d rather face any danger in the wilderness than be hostage to their insanity.

  I thought about what had held those six disparate men together. After all, Yuri and Scarface had most likely fought on opposite sides in Afghanistan. And how did Thanh fit in?

  There was only one logical explanation. Their blind hatred of the U.S. was the bond that could overwhelm even their own natural antipathy toward each other.

  I wondered what Owen would say now about my lack of political commitment.

  Sometimes we’re forced to take sides, even if it’s just for a few split seconds. But that doesn’t obligate me to buy into the rest of the bullshit.

  As soon as I get back to Nelson, I’m heading for high ground. If I’m lucky, I’ll have a few years before the serious shit begins.

  KEVIN LEAHY

  Remora, IL

  FROM The Briar Cliff Review

  We were desperate, it’s true. That doesn’t excuse what happened, but we don’t know what we could have done differently. As soon as the last car rolled off the line, the owners shuttered the plant, sold the machinery, and returned to Europe. To this day, the mention of it turns a heart to lead. The kids weren’t scared, though. The night the plant closed, a handful of them drove to the property’s edge with cases of beer. Girls danced in headlights while the radio blared from open doors. Boys carved doughnuts in the Blooms’ nearby cornfield until Kyle Rouse’s pickup got stuck in mud. They laughed it off. All their lives they’d been told the plant would be waiting for them with a good job once they turned eighteen. Now they’d be spared the fates of their parents, who had built boxy, affordable sedans and carried a vague unease in the lines around their eyes.

  But to everyone else it seemed like a bomb had gone off in the center of town—the shock wave knocking down stores all through the summer. Hal’s Bakery went first, followed by the record shop and the Bailey Café. By the time the leaves changed colors, even the grand old Cineplex was hollowed out, its marquee denuded of the letters we sometimes found rearranged into profanities. Sheets of plywood with spray-painted X’s blinded its windows, and tufts of crabgrass reclaimed its parkway. The town manager shifted public workers to a four-day week and promised to do everything he could to attract business.

  We all hoped things would return to normal and tried to get by. We flushed our cars’ engines and scoured the sediment from our hot water heaters, hoping both would last another winter. We bought dry beans instead of canned, and canned vegetables instead of fresh. Our wallets grew fat with coupons.

  It would not be a stretch to say those first hard months made us closer, as a town. We stopped feeling sorry for ourselves, and lingered in the church basement after services for crumb cake and coffee. Helen Bree, whose late husband had worked at the plant for thirty-eight years, organized a clothing drive. Parents tutored each other’s children when the schools closed on Fridays. People invited out-of-work friends to dinner, and they pretended not to notice their gratitude, or their envy. And when they left, the hosts lay in bed and prayed that the spirit that had claimed their guests would pass over them.

  No one recalls who came up with the prison. It might have been Herman Floss, who had sold life, car, and homeowner’s insurance to nearly the whole town, and who was given to making uncomfortably deep and probing eye contact with each of us at town meetings. It could have been Deputy Ken Dufresne, who muttered to anyone who would listen that the uptick in unemployment meant a looming epidemic of bar fights, drunk-and-disorderlies, and what have you. In any case, around the first of the year the council invited a consultant from a private prison company to lay out our options.

  Not that there weren’t objections. At the town meeting, the Bloom family, who came from Quakers, spoke against it right in front of the consultant, who sat behind the dais at the front of the hall with the selectmen and manager. Herman Floss said that the Blooms had farm subsidies to fall back on, so why didn�
�t they tend to their soybeans and keep out of it? Helen Bree stood and declared it “unseemly.” We loved Helen Bree, and we had nothing against the Blooms, but by then the town was so mired in debt that we canceled the Christmas parade and cut our trash collection to twice monthly. All winter the town lay dormant, the trees along the main thoroughfare naked—no lights, no foil Santas or tinseled candy canes. Parents bought dollar-store toys for their children and baked gingerbread for relatives. Husbands and wives surprised each other with nothing, and were disappointed and glad in equal measure. The weather was likewise stingy. Though the ground was packed hard with frost, little snow fell, and rows of desiccated cornstalks, ordinarily invisible under a blanket of white, thrust up from the Blooms’ fields like grave markers.

  “There’s real opportunity here,” said the prison consultant. “This would mean jobs not only in the facility but for the shops that serve visitors.”

  Ed McConnell, who owned a ranch not far from the abandoned plant, stood to speak. “The plant bought meat from me for twenty years. What kind of guarantees can you give us that you’ll do likewise?”

  We hated McConnell for asking that, as if the wrong question might blow our chances. We’d become shy about making demands. But the consultant nodded and said, “I don’t think that’ll be a problem. We usually make use of local producers.” He gestured to the screen on the stage, where a chart was projected from a device he’d hooked to his laptop. “There are ancillary benefits, too,” he said, scanning our faces. “Each prisoner counts as a resident. That means more dollars for your district.”

  Most of us didn’t need persuading. We were using one credit card to pay off another. We ransacked our filing cabinets and dresser drawers for half-remembered savings bonds. People looted their pensions and college funds and spent the inheritances they’d hoped to leave their children. Young couples postponed their weddings. Though we weren’t supposed to know, we heard whispers that Grace Chilton, the kindergarten teacher whose unemployed husband, Robert, once worked double shifts between the record shop and the Cineplex, had stopped her fertility treatments. We were ready for something good to happen, and we hoped this was it.

  Corvus Correctional won the bid, with construction to begin after the first thaw.

  On a cold March morning we watched a wrecking ball punch through the plant’s façade. The structure collapsed on the fourth swing, coughing up plumes of dust we could taste from a quarter mile away. It fell so easily—we had no idea how frail it was. For a while a great number of us worked as unskilled laborers, heaving broken pieces of the building into dumpsters. Rumor had it that Kyle Rouse smuggled out all the copper pipes that first night and sold them for scrap two towns over, but nothing came of it. Who could blame him? We would have done the same, if we’d thought of it. Those first paychecks were intoxicating. We’d forgotten the feel of having money, and were starving for it.

  After work we were exhausted but happy. There was pleasure in our aching shoulders, in the newfound roughness of our hands. On paydays some went to Barry’s Tap to drink. Those who’d worked at the plant confessed to feeling funny about Corvus using that space. They’d be loading a wheelbarrow with cinder block when a remnant of floor tile signaled they were standing in the old break room, where Bill Bree had hustled them and many of their fathers in penny-ante poker. The banks of lockers they hauled away were the same ones in which they’d hung their coveralls and filter masks, glittering with metallic dust, at the end of a shift. It wasn’t that the plant had been problem-free. There’d been strikes and wage freezes and every so often an accident that claimed a limb. But day by day, as they dismantled what was left of their old workplace, they marveled that anyone had looked at that site and imagined a prison.

  Then there came a need for construction workers and tradesmen–welders, pipefitters, laborers, and the like. But only the skilled among us could do that work, and a fresh wave of discord passed through as we were sorted yet again into those with jobs and those without. From the ground rose a fortress of towers joined by ramparts, its perimeter enclosed by a cursive scrawl of razor-wire fence. Inside, men slotted together racks of iron bars. They partitioned the floor into six-by-eight-foot cells, which everyone deemed both too small and entirely appropriate. They studded common areas with concrete embankments to disrupt foot traffic and minimize opportunities for mayhem. They painted lines that prisoners would not be allowed to cross.

  With thousands of inmates arriving in a year, we expected a boon from the prisoners’ relatives and police who would eat in our restaurants, gas up at our filling stations, and shop in our stores. The council rezoned everything, which would allow us to rent out unused bedrooms to overnight visitors. Real estate speculators from upstate bought foreclosed businesses and leased them out. The Baileys reopened their café, though they rented the space they once owned. Robert Chilton, Grace’s husband, found occasional work.

  The Sunday after the grand reopening of the Bailey Café, only three people stayed after church for Helen Bree’s crumb cake social. As if relieved of a great burden, her heart stopped until Pastor Kimble shocked it back to life with the portable defibrillator the church had bought during fatter times. Few of us visited her in the hospital, we’re embarrassed to say, though once she returned home the Bloom boy trekked over from the farm twice a week to deliver groceries, remove her trash, and sit on her couch watching the Nature Channel, which she was immensely fond of.

  As the third Christmas since the plant closing approached, workers put the finishing touches on the prison. In each cell they installed steel toilets that were, strangely, also sinks. They wired up a network of cameras and reinforced the doors with metal plates. In the hallways they passed burly men in shirts embroidered with the Corvus Correctional logo, who stocked the armory with shotguns, rifles, batons, tear gas, and pepper spray. On their belts the Corvus people wore plastic zip cuffs resembling the six-pack rings that poisoned sea turtles or ensnared gulls, and which Helen Bree had once led a campaign to ban. Corvus was hiring soon, was the word.

  “You have no idea what you’re in for,” said Ken Dufresne to a group of young men at Barry’s. They’d applied to be guards. “Corrections officers,” he said, and looked away with a slow shake of his head. The group left soon afterward. Our town hadn’t had a murder in eight years, not since Gene Shipsky, Dufresne’s old fishing buddy, shot his wife and her lover dead in the Shipskys’ bedroom. He then put the pistol to his own temple and pulled the trigger. Ken had been first on the scene.

  There was no horsing around during guard training. The new hires knew what they were up against. They learned the basics of the daily prison routine, the rules for visitors, and how to search a cell for contraband. They had a classroom refresher on the criminal justice system. None of them could exactly remember what the Fourth Amendment was. They wrestled each other until the veins in their necks threatened to burst. Kyle Rouse volunteered to be shocked for the taser demonstration, but then again, Kyle always had been a crazy son of a bitch. They learned how to club an aggressive prisoner—on the biceps, on the legs, but never the skull, which lawyers would eat them for. They were divided on their preferences for straight or side-handled batons. The weapon’s weight on their belts was strange at first. But they got used to it.

  One winter morning a caravan of buses with waffled grating over their windows came plowing down the highway. Those of us who lived within sight of the road watched from our windows as the chain of buses carved a trench in the gray slush, carrying their freight of human cargo to the prison, where so many of our husbands and sons, our friends and neighbors, waited to receive them. The buses were only the beginning—soon retail stores and good service jobs would follow. To the extent that we thought about the men in those buses, we imagined them as one type, multiplied: sullen, dangerous, and deserving of punishment, but potentially redeemable, through faith and good works. Even from afar, they radiated menace. We were thrilled and terrified to see them.

  Slowly, money b
egan to circulate. We drew paychecks instead of unemployment. To our children’s dismay, the town could afford teachers on Fridays again. Ed McConnell’s ranch did well enough that he had to hire a dozen more people. Perhaps best of all, Grace and Robert Chilton were finally expecting a baby. We splurged on $20 bottles of Zinfandel to celebrate our good fortunes, but we still clipped coupons.

  A number of Corvus people moved into town, and while we were friendly with them, we couldn’t say we were friends. The men had a stiffness to them; the women, brittle smiles. We asked them how they were and they always seemed miffed by the question, hiding the answers in their cheeks before spitting them out. Some guessed privately what they thought of us: bumpkins, hicks, rednecks. We chafed at that. We were a distinguished enough bunch. Joshua Bloom, not even in high school yet, was a state fair prizewinner in canning and preserving. We had an active community theater and a two-wing library. Many of us had been to college. To the extent that we had an idea of ourselves as a town, it was as families and good neighbors. The newcomers had pronounced a silent judgment upon us, made sharper by the fact that many of them were our bosses. It almost made us miss the light touch of the German plant owners who ruled our parents and grandparents.

  If we were unprepared for anything, it was the number of visitors. They trickled in at first, women and the occasional child, mostly, until it seemed they were everywhere. A group of us would be holding a book club at the Bailey Café and a red-eyed stranger would order a coffee and sit at the window for an hour, steeling herself for whomever she was about to see. Three blocks and one diner booth away, an unfamiliar mother and her teenage son chewed sandwiches in silence, then departed in a car with Kentucky plates. We saw couples at the gas station on the outskirts of town, buying trail mix for the squalling children on their hips as we stood in line for cigarettes, their faces washed free of any emotion but a trace of shame.