EQMM, May 2012 (18 page)

*** Dave Zeltserman:
Julius Katz Mysteries
, Kindle e-book, $.99. Another small but worthwhile collection pairs the two
EQMM
stories about Boston private detective Katz and science- fictional assistant Archie, who resemble Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin only in some ways. Purely as a detective story, the separately published novel
Julius Katz and Archie
(Kindle e-book, $2.99) is even better.

** M.J. Rose:
In Session
, Kindle e-book, $1.99. In a clever cross-promotional stunt, sex therapist Dr. Morgan Snow's encounters with Steve Berry's Cotton Malone, Barry Eisler's John Rain, and Lee Child's Jack Reacher effectively introduce the characters but prove slight as mysteries or thrillers.

** J.A. Konrath:
Jack Daniels Stories: Fifteen Mystery Tales
, CreateSpace, $13.95 paperback, Kindle e-book, $2.99. A very mixed bag ranges from strong and well plotted (two locked-room puzzles featuring Chicago policewoman Daniels and some of the stories about cancer patient and Mike Hammerish avenger Phineas Troutt) to tiresomely self-indulgent (most of P.I. Harry McGlade's cases, with sub-standard Marx Brothers-style humor). If the author's warning on the offensiveness of the final story puts you off reading it, you won't bemissing much.

A sampling will suffice to recommend John Harvey's
A Darker Shade of Blue
(Pegasus, $25), cop and P.I. stories by one of the best contemporary British crime writers, and the first gathering in book form of a series Fred Dannay discovered in the early days of
EQMM
, Vincent Cornier's
The
Duel of Shadows: The Extraordinary Cases of Barnabas Hildreth
(Crippen & Landru, $18 trade paper, $28 hardcover), edited and introduced by Mike Ashley, rich in impossible crimes and sometimes science fictional solutions.

Recommended reprints and regatherings: John Mortimer's
Forever
Rumpole: The Best of the Rumpole Stories
(Viking, $30), fourteen tales of the Old Bailey hack, surely the greatest literary character ever created for TV, plus the novel fragment “Rumpole and the Brave New World,” left unfinished on the author's death in 2009; Max Allan Collins’
Chicago Lightning: The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories
(Thomas & Mercer/Amazon, $14.95) including three previously uncollected among its thirteen and an introduction by the author; Lawrence Block's
The Night and the Music: The Matthew Scudder Stories
(Telemachus, $16.99 paperback, $2.99 Kindle e-book), including two previously uncollected;
Love and Night: Unknown Stories of Cornell Woolrich
(Perfect Crime, $12), a 2007 collection edited and introduced by Francis M. Nevins; and an unjustly forgotten 1899 collection by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace,
The Gold Star Line
(Ramble House, $18), about ship's purser George Conway.

Copyright © 2012 by Jon L. Breen

[Back to Table of Contents]

Gordon McEachern has had two graphic novels and several short stories published in his native Canada, but since he has never before been paid for his fiction, he qualifies for
EQMM
's Department of First Stories. The Fort McMurray, Alberta resident is a silkscreen artist who works days in a screenprinting shop and nights as a cook in a local restaurant. His
EQMM
debut takes us to another part of Canada—the forests of the Pacific Coast—and another period in that region's history.

The ancient two-lane blacktop disintegrated into bitumite before surrendering, at last, to reddish gravel. The gravel road pressed up the elevated thighs of the range, testing the old Bronco's gears, the doors and hood and windshield splashed with mud against which the wipers could barely compete.

Sergei eased the brake, shifted into park, and pulled the key from the ignition. The key was a simple silver key, no lights, no buttons for locks or alarms. You lost it, you walked. He drew one finger along the dash, which was grey with the previous owner's cigarette ash.
Best thousand dollars I ever spent
. He climbed out of the battered Bronco and stretched.

Sergei Kostyn possessed a flat, wide face, sooty hair, and Slavic eyes, the classic look of Old Moscow, where his lineage went back to the time of Ivan the Terrible, perhaps even further. Thin and muscular, Sergei felt at home in old denim, and his heavy boots and callused hands made him look like he belonged here.

But he did not belong here.

The silence of the woods blanketed the road. The trees were monstrous and close, and the air felt cold. Sergei pulled an Oh Henry!from his pocket, devoured the bar, then neatly flattened and folded the yellow wrapper and placed it in his pocket. He drew the Glock 9mm from the other inside pocket of his jacket. Oiled. Smooth. Black. He'd traded ten stolen game jerseys for the pistol. Sergei touched his thumb to the muzzle, where it left a smudge of soot on his curlicues. The Glock had recently been fired.

He left the Bronco and padded into the deep green of the rain forest, stepping so carefully an observer would think he was walking through a minefield. Whitish twigs snagged his clothes and scrabbled like claws toward his cheeks. The ancient trunks creaked. A spongy squash rose up from the moss with every hesitant step.

By the time he reached the edge of a sheer inland cliff, he was shivering. All the river valley and the body of the Pacific Range exploded before him in a panorama of giants. It could have been Romania, or Norway, or Patagonia. But it wasn't. It was British Columbia, 100 kilometers northwest of Pemberton. Sergei was running out of options, out of time, and out of map.

Hard to believe
, he thought,
I
came to this country to play hockey
.

He stared. The misty mountains stared back. The sheer cliff face plummeted beneath his feet in an ugly Precambrian scar.

As he turned to leave, a sound touched his ears—a rhythmic beating that bounced amongst the hills. Sergei scanned the landscape, squinting, and then he spied it. Small and fast. A helicopter. They were looking for him.

He pulled out his cell phone and tossed it over the cliff, then began to maneuver his way back to the Bronco. North was Alaska. South, Washington. East was the high Rockies and west the ocean.

That's the problem with mountains,
Sergei thought.
A million places to hide. Nowhere to run.

It would be dark soon but there was no way he could risk headlights. A damp chill set in amongst the trees and the goldenrod. He thought he heard a wolf howl, but maybe it was his imagination.

Sergei set off in four-wheel drive toward the abandoned work camp. The gravel road wound higher through the oppressive B.C. woods.

Around him Sergei could see tire ruts and tread marks and footprints and animal tracks. At the abandoned camp the gravel road became a logging road, all mud and puddles and cigarette butts. The camp—vacant windows, rusting roofs—noticed the Bronco as it passed. Maybe, it whispered, you will be reclaimed by nature, just like me. The camp made Sergei sad. A piece of history . . . lost.

No,
spoke another voice,
history is never lost. Only camouflaged.

After the work camp the tire tracks disappeared and the Bronco bounced through the muck like its namesake. Sergei grew seasick from all the movement.

When the logging road surrendered to a slim cart track the human footprints, too, disappeared. It was dusk. The sky was silver with mist. The radio didn't work and neither did the heater.

Sergei tapped the lump in his denim jacket once again and thought of how all of this had happened. There was, he had learned, a civilization in nature. And, too, there were wolves among men.

Twenty-second overall. That was how Sergei Kostyn had been drafted, in 2008, by the L.A. Kings, then traded to the Vancouver Canucks. The embassy hand-delivered his visa. The team deposited a million dollars into his bank account. He flew to Vancouver first class on KLM. Canadians didn't mess around when it came to professional hockey.

Russians didn't mess around when it came to making money.

Sergei was barely in Canada a month when he was contacted by an emigré social committee: the Winter Palace Friendship Club. It was a front, of course. During Stalin, the club would have been involved in espionage. Today, crime. Tomorrow, who knew? Sergei went to their hall, laughed at their jokes, played their dominoes, sipped their vodka. He quickly discovered theirs was more than a committee, it was a network. The Winter Palace had friends at the airport, relatives who were border guards, contacts on all the Native reserves along the west coast, bus drivers for Greyhound, stewards on the ferries, and entire crews on crab boats who went far into the Bering Sea, sometimes too far.

"One small favour,” the man had asked, and he smiled like a salamander in his Italian suit as they drank Slivovitz at a café on Knox Avenue as though it were Odessa and not Vancouver.

"But I only play hockey,” Sergei resisted.

The man in the Italian suit reclined. “In our lives . . . we do many things that are one thing.” Then he had spread his hands and smiled apologetically, as if there was nothing else to be done.

It was a package. Destined for a team trainer who spoke Vietnamese. Sergei knew it was drugs. Five pounds of marijuana, a few other goodies. The teams are a ripe market, the trainer blabbed, for everything from steroids for the rookies to Viagra for the coach. But mostly weed.

Over the course of the winter, Sergei Kostyn became a power forward and a courier. Teammates kept him at a distance. The Winter Palace demanded more and more favours. Unsavoury characters in black leather coats began to linger around the rink. There were incidents. An expensive Audi had its tires slashed. The fiancée of the arena security chief was beat to a pulp on her way home from work. The Vietnamese trainer quit unexpectedly, then disappeared. Eventually, the owners had enough. Better to ship trouble off than deal with it. Sergei got a pink slip. Unconditional release. He'd heard of players, prominent players, dogged by mobsters and banished back to Russia—Bure, Yashin, others—but Sergei never dreamed it would happen to him.

He shook his head, smiling grimly, and accelerated up the overgrown cart track at a suicidal speed, the old Ford motor screaming like a senior citizen forced to lift weights. The Winter Palace had underestimated him. Just because they lived in North America didn't mean Sergei Kostyn wasn't as Russian as they were, so Sergei thought with the mind of a Tsar and acted with the temper of a Cossack. The man with the Italian suit showed up at his condo grinning like a jackal. Sergei beat him to death with a fiberglass hockey stick. He broke into the city's biggest grow-op and released five gallons of Roundup. He rammed his Escalade into the foyer of the Winter Palace hall and lit the gas tank with the Glock. Then he bought the Bronco and ran.

And they were looking for him.

A tremendous jolt snapped Sergei out of his reflection and he realized it was twilight and that he was no longer on the track because there was no track.

He stopped the Bronco and got out. A wide, marshy meadow, bordered by sentinel hemlock, surrounded him. The white mist that had hovered over the mountaintop was now hovering over Sergei. Unfolding a tattered map, he found the logging road, and the cart track, but nothing more. His finger traced off the edge of the paper.

"Here there be monsters,” Sergei whispered.

Far above, or far below, the helicopter went on beating. Searching. Waiting for a headlight, a campfire. Anything.

Sergei knew he couldn't stay.
You're on the run,
he thought.
So run.

He buttoned his denim jacket and entered the steep forest on foot. It was true, the past didn't ever die. It slept, it hid, it blended in with its surroundings, but it never truly went away. The past cast a shadow, owned a taste and a smell. The past, Sergei sensed, lay all around him, large as a mountain.

The promising Russian forward, clammy beneath his clothes, wove through the saplings and the tree trunks, disappearing up the incline into the Pacific forest gloom. He was trying to climb away from something that could not be outrun. Sergei Kostyn's entire life up to that point suddenly condensed. Missed opportunities and wrong turns. Hesitant choices and broken promises. Bad people, bad timing, and bad luck. All of it hovered over him. All of it lay across his shoulders like a backpack nuke whose timer was counting down to zero.

The high-elevation forest was an obstacle course where a broken ankle waited around every turn. Sergei sweated. His breath came in ragged chops despite an athlete's lungs. In the blank and starless sky, the helicopter continued to buzz.

Christ, how much fuel could one chopper carry?
Then Sergei understood: There was more than one. Perhaps two or three, working in shifts. They must really want him. He must have pissed off the Winter Palace in a
serious
way.

Out of nowhere, a branch, sharp as talons. It missed his eyeball by a millimeter. Sergei grunted and spun and fell to the ground, instantly wet. The moment his body hit the moss, a tsunami of exhaustion rolled over him, the most profound wave of fatigue he had ever experienced. All the jetlag, all the hangovers, all the early-morning practices and late-night drills rolled into a ball couldn't compare. Going to sleep and dying on this cold Canadian mountain suddenly seemed like not a bad thing after all.