The Best American Mystery Stories 2013 Page 46

  Burke, alarmed, straightened in his chair. “I was hoping,” he said, “you’d be able to do that for me.”

  “But I thought she’d sent you!” Enrique said, then pleaded, “Why torture me with your note?”

  “I’m trying to find her,” Burke said.

  Enrique was silent a moment. Then something seemed to catch. “Why?” he asked. A nervousness entered his voice. “Who hired you? Was it Don Hernán?”

  “I’m under his employ, but he didn’t—”

  “He knows?” At that he went to the window. A gauzy sheet hung there, luffing in the wind. “Oh, no no no.”

  “I can assure you Don Hernán knows nothing,” Burke said, “and I can further assure you that he will learn nothing. You are safe. I’m charged only to find Marcita. That I will do, and nothing else.”

  Enrique pulled back the curtain and looked out. Then he stepped back toward Burke. “I love her,” he said. “When she is free, we’re going to move to Santo Domingo, away from the don, away from this island. I’ve been saving money to help her. See?” He offered Burke a handbill. It was for a brand of tinned butter. “I sell this, for my living, for her. I was waiting for her last Tuesday. We were going to have an hour. But then she didn’t show. I worried. I thought the don had found out. Then I saw the notices the don put in the paper, and I thought maybe she had run.”

  Burke’s mind began to leap with what Enrique had told him. “You were waiting for her on Tuesday?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes,” Enrique said.

  “Where, exactly?”

  “At the corner of O’Reilly and Compostela.”

  “And you kept a hard watch for her?”

  “I always do.”

  Burke rose. “Thank you,” he said. Then, without another word, he went to the door.

  “Is that all?” Enrique asked, still standing by the window and staring after Burke.

  “It is enough.”

  Burke walked directly to the Calle O’Reilly. There, halfway between the Habana and Compostela intersections, he planted himself in the center of the street. He looked eastward, toward the intersection where Miércoles and Domingo had waited, O’Reilly and Habana. Then he pivoted and looked westward, toward the intersection where Enrique had kept a sharp lookout, O’Reilly and Compostela. Between these two lookouts, one at either entrance to the block, Marcita had vanished.

  On the left side of the street were the oyster shop, the bookseller’s, and the tobacco shop he’d seen before, and farther on a linen shop and a silversmith’s. On the right stood a tea shop, a music shop, a large shop selling glassware, and a perfumery. There was nothing strange about the block. The shops were all elegant, glass-fronted establishments that catered to the city’s gentry. They had preposterous names like the Empress Eugénie (the perfumery) and the Bower of Arachne (the linen shop) written in gold letters above their doors. Burke walked up and down before them, observing everything around him, looking again and again into the same glazed shop fronts and at the crowds moving past, the gentlemen, the vendors, the slaves. He even knelt and examined the street itself, paved in smoothed cobblestones. But after two hours’ investigation, Burke had found nothing. Returned to the Calle del Sol, he sat at his desk to think, and when Fernandita brought in his supper, he refused the plate of red sausages and rice with a distracted wave of his hand.

  “As you wish,” Fernandita said. In a moment, though, she had returned. “I almost forgot,” she said. “A boy brought this.” She handed Burke a message. It was from Galván, and he’d written only three words: Body not found.

  Later that night, once full darkness had fallen, Burke dressed in trousers and a shirt made of old sailcloth and left his rooms to walk through the city. It was all he could think to do. He hoped that, passing among slaves, visiting their night haunts, he might hear rumors—of Marcita, of the murdered slave, of the others the don mentioned had gone missing. He went to the abandoned lots and shadowy groves where slaves were known to gather for their dances and their guinea magic, but each one he found deserted. The only slave he saw that night he stumbled on by chance—a fresh bozal standing outside a tavern, far from any of the slaves’ usual places. He seemed agitated—he was staring in through the tavern’s window at white men eating and drinking, gnashing his lips.

  Burke approached him. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  The slave turned to him. Tribal scars ridged his forehead and shoulders. His front teeth were filed into points, and his breath stank of aguardiente. “I lost my little Anto,” he said.

  Just then the tavernkeeper came out and waved a stained rag at the two of them. “Bah!” he said. “Go on! Get moving!” He snapped the rag at the slave and then at Burke, who, as he leaped back, bumped into a creole passing by. Without breaking stride, the man struck him with his gold-tipped cane, then continued on down the street, paying him no more attention. Burke recognized the fellow—Maroto? Sánchez?—had even shaken his hand at a salon where he’d been invited to play cards and share stories about his cases. He wanted to shout, but by the time he’d overcome his shock at being struck, the creole was gone, disappeared into the night. He turned to find the slave with the pointed teeth, but he was gone, too.

  After an hour’s more wandering, Burke returned to his rooms, lit a lamp, and sat at his desk. The slaves were frightened of something—he could see that in their emptied gathering places and in the eyes of the bozal. But what was the connection to Marcita’s disappearance? He thought of the head found outside the city, and of the street where Marcita disappeared. He could sense a tie between them, but try as he might, his brain failed to take hold of it. Outside, the sereno called the second hour of morning. Burke took a cigarette from the canister on his desk—Fernandita had just restocked them with the don’s money—and struck a match. As he brought the light to the cigarette tip, he stopped, letting the match burn down and singe his fingers. The labels in Marcita’s room—the shop in the Calle O’Reilly with the too-high prices—the cigarette factory next to the field where the slave was found. He recalled now that its owner, Pedroso y Compañia, had gone bankrupt two months before. Theirs was the Gallitos brand, theirs the shop where Marcita must have disappeared.

  “Fernandita!” he shouted. “Fernandita!”

  After the fourth shout she emerged from her closet, cursing and blinking.

  “Go to the captain-general’s palace. He’ll be up, playing cards. Give him this message.” As Burke spoke, he quickly scrawled a letter telling the captain-general he was acting in the affairs of Don Hernán and asking him to send troops to the Pedroso y Compañia factory without delay.

  “Why? What’s happening?” Fernandita looked about the room, as if someone else might be there.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Burke said, the unlit cigarette still in his mouth. He shoved the letter in Fernandita’s hands. “But I’m going to find out.”

  At that he left his rooms and ran through the dark streets until he found an idle volanta waiting near the cathedral. Dropping a handful of reales into the postilion’s palm, Burke yelled for him to drive to the Calle de la Soledad, outside the city. “Race the devil!” he shouted. Then he threw himself into the volanta’s seat and the man took off.

  They came past the field where the head had been found, then to an empty lane just off the paseo—the Calle de la Soledad. The volanta pulled to a stop, and Burke got out, telling the driver to wait. The white macadam glowed in the light of the moon, and the air carried the scent of meat cooked over a fire. A night bird called from a far line of trees, but otherwise everything was still. Just up the lane stood the three factories Burke had seen earlier that day when he’d come to inquire about the murder. The snuff mill lay dormant, and Burke stepped quickly, carefully past its low, silent hulk. Just beyond it was the yard of the cigarette factory. He halted. The factory’s yard was untended, overgrown with weeds and littered here and there with bottles, but light shone through the cracks in its shuttered windows, and once he stilled his own br
eathing, Burke could hear the murmur of men talking.

  He knew he should wait for the captain-general’s soldiers, but he couldn’t hold himself back. What were these men up to? Might Marcita still be alive, trapped inside? He crept to one of the windows and edged open a shutter and looked. In the factory’s single hall, where women once worked rolling cigarettes, a black-skinned body hung from a hook. It was being stripped by one man while two others worked at one of the old rolling tables, turning a grinder. The grinder jammed and one of the men working it kicked at the table while the other shouted. The man stripping the body, cutting meat from the legs, just whistled. Burke recognized him as the corpulent, red-haired tobacconist from the Gallitos shop.

  It took Burke a moment to understand, and once he did he felt his reason trickle away. He couldn’t turn away—the ghastly sight held him. Instead, without noticing, he leaned forward. His hand was still on the shutter, and it creaked. At that all three men looked up from their work. Burke let go of the shutter and it creaked again, and now they saw him. Burke tried to move—tried to run—but his legs felt suddenly weak. A lightness was washing forward from the back of his skull. The men at the grinder snatched knives from the table, and the one stripping the body picked up an ax. Burke watched, paralyzed. He could hear the cannibals’ footsteps—they were out of the factory now, on the grass, closing. At last Burke beat back the lightness, pulled his feet from the morass, and ran. Just as he made it to the volanta, he heard the trumpets of the captain-general’s troops. The men chasing him turned, but two cavalrymen appeared in the street and ran them down. Burke, wishing to see nothing more, ordered the volanta’s driver to take him home.

  “In the sausage!” Don Hernán repeated, his face green. He was sitting in Burke’s bedchamber, slumped in a cane chair. “Oh, my poor cinnamon! To think I—” He stopped. It seemed for the moment he could not bring himself to mention the sausage again.

  Burke lay on his cot. When he’d returned to his rooms, he’d felt the lightness return, a sickness overtaking him, and he’d not been able to stand or sit. Now, morning having come, he was explaining his findings to the don. Fernandita stood by the door folding and refolding a cleaned sheet as she listened.

  “The shop was a ruse. That’s why the price on the cigarettes was so high, to keep people away. Marcita must have wandered in, looking for new labels for her collection, and that’s when they took her.”

  What he’d seen through the window of the cigarette factory flashed again before Burke’s eyes.

  “All of Havana eating slave flesh!” the don said. “Horrible.” When the don first arrived, his skin was tinged green. But already he seemed to be recovering a little. “What I can’t understand is why. I’ve thought over the numbers. There couldn’t have been much money in it, not nearly as much as the slaves were worth in the field.”

  “For that,” Burke said, “I’m afraid I’ll never have an answer.”

  Once the don had left, Burke called to Fernandita to help him to the window. She held him by the arm, and he pushed aside the curtain and looked out. The sun shone brightly on the harbor ships, ignorant of all that had just passed.

  In the moment of his discovery, along with horror, along with disgust, Burke had felt relief. In the end, he had been working to save slaves, not trap them. But in the light of the morning his relief had begun to crumble.

  “I took this case before I knew the slaves were in danger,” he said now. “I didn’t like it, I fashioned excuses, but I was willing to hunt Marcita for pay.”

  Below him a bell was tinkling—a procession of priests taking the viaticum to a dying man. He turned back from the window. Fernandita, grown uncomfortable, smiled uncertainly up at him.

  “Oh, I think I shall never loose these villains from my mind,” he said, and, shaking free of Fernandita’s hand, he stepped back toward his cot. In taking this case, had he become the equal of the men he caught, had he stepped irrevocably away from the goodness he’d not long ago imagined his? This he wondered as he sat. To these questions, too, he worried he’d never have an answer.

  HANNAH TINTI

  Bullet Number Two

  FROM Tin House

  HAWLEY HADN’T BEEN in the desert since his mother died. That was four years ago. The hospital had tracked him down with the news and he’d taken the bus all the way from Cheyenne to Phoenix. They made him identify her body in the morgue. The place was dank and cold compared to the heat outside and smelled of chemicals and bleach. He stood underneath the fluorescent lights and they rolled his mother out of a drawer in the wall.

  She’d been dead for more than two weeks. Her face had sunken in and most of her teeth were gone, but she still had that square chin and those long, delicate fingers, the ones he remembered running through his hair in the dark when he was a kid. He buried her alone in a cemetery near the hospital. Then he took the bus back to Cheyenne.

  Now Hawley had a car of his own, an old Ford Flareside, and he opened up the engine on the highway, the windows rolled down and the blazing hot air channeling through, the sand blowing against his skin and the red cliffs of Arizona stretching into the distance. Behind his seat were a twenty-gauge Remington shotgun, a 9mm Beretta, a Sig Sauer pistol, a crossbow tire iron, his father’s rifle from the war, and $7,000.

  He’d gotten a postcard from his old partner, McGee, who was working in Colorado at an Indian casino. McGee had dreams of buying a boat and sailing it down the East Coast, but he had a bad habit of burning through his money fast. Now he had an angle for ripping off the casino, and he’d asked Hawley if he wanted in.

  It was night by the time Hawley crossed into the Four Corners. He’d taken Route 191 to 160, and for more than an hour his was the only car for miles. When he looked in the rearview it was nothing but blackness, and when he looked out the windshield it was nothing but blackness and he could see only to the end of his own headlights beaming into the dark. An hour later he was in the middle of a dust storm, tumbleweeds flashing past like ghosts, sometimes hitting the grate or getting caught under the body of the truck. The wind swept down in gusts, shimmying the Ford left and right. It was late and his eyes were already bleary and now he had to struggle with the steering wheel to keep his tires on the highway.

  After a long while of this he saw a light ahead, a motel standing all by itself at the crossroads. He pulled into the parking lot and went into the office to get a room. The guy at the desk was a Navajo Indian. He was wearing a red bowling shirt with a white collar and a pair of pins embroidered over the heart. Behind the desk was a small back room, and Hawley saw another Navajo and a freckled guy at a table playing cards. It was close quarters and they looked like they’d been going all night, empty bottles of beer lined up on the floor and ashtrays full.

  “You’re big blind,” the man with the freckles called out.

  “Just take it from my stack,” said the Navajo in the bowling shirt. “Want to join us?” he asked Hawley.

  The other two men leaned forward in their chairs. The Navajo gave Hawley the once-over and returned to his beer. But the one with the freckles kept staring. He had hair the color of motor oil and marks that blossomed across his face and neck like a rash. There was something about those freckles that made Hawley’s stomach ache.

  “What’s the game?”

  “Hold ’em.”

  Hawley was tempted. He hadn’t held cards in nearly a week. He watched as the man with the freckles reached over, grabbed some chips from the Navajo’s pile, and threw them in the center of the table. The sleeves on the freckled man’s sweatshirt were pushed up and his forearms were covered with homemade tattoos, the kind done in prison. One was a poorly drawn figure of Christ on a cross; the other was the number 187, the section of the California penal code for murder. The ink was still blue. The edges had not faded.

  The Navajo slid a key across the counter.

  “Thanks,” said Hawley, “but it’s late. I’ll pass.”

  He made his way back to the truck, holding h
is shirt over his face to keep the sand out of his eyes, then drove around to the back of the building and pulled into the parking spot with his room number spray-painted on the asphalt. He climbed the stairs to the landing, carrying his bag full of guns and clothes and the money, which he’d been keeping in a jar of black licorice. The bills were stuffed at the bottom of the jar and the thin strips of candy were layered on top, like a pile of shoelaces. He hated licorice and he figured most people didn’t like it either.

  The motel room smelled like corn chips and cigarettes, and there was a hole punched through one of the walls. On the bedside table was a clock, the digital kind with glowing numbers. He stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes for a few minutes, and when he opened them he noticed the clock hadn’t changed—the numbers were stuck on 4:16. His own watch had stopped outside Flagstaff, and he had no idea what time it was. He unzipped the side pouch of the bag and took out his Beretta and set it on the bedside table. Then he put the bag with the rest of the guns in the closet.

  When Hawley was a boy, he had trouble keeping his hands still while he was shooting. His mother taught him to set a quarter on the barrel, but it would fall off, again and again. Take a breath, she told him, take a breath and let half of it out. She’d said it so often that he nearly always breathed this way, even when he didn’t have a gun in his hands. He took in what he could and he held half of it back, and that’s how he kept himself steady, day to day, year to year, every time he squeezed the trigger.