Kwik Krimes (21 page)

Ed Gorman’s work has appeared in magazines as various as the
New York Times, Redbook, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine,
and
Penthouse.
His work has also won numerous prizes, including the Shamus, the Spur, and the International Fiction Writers awards. He’s been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe, the Anthony, the Gold Dagger, and the Bram Stoker awards. Former
Los Angeles Times
critic Charles Champlin noted that “Ed Gorman is a powerful storyteller.”

Ron Goulart

Y
ou wouldn’t think burying a dead cat could cause you so damn much trouble.

The scruffy orange tomcat’s name was Pumpkin, and it wasn’t exactly Roger Overman’s cat. It was his wife’s. Although Bonnie insisted that Pumpkin was “
our
darling little pussycat.”

In fact, Roger didn’t like the thing, and the cat quite obviously loathed him. Had it been tiger-size, it would long since have leaped upon him, ripped him asunder, and chewed on his bones the way tigers did to their hapless victims on PBS nature documentaries. Among the things the surly Pumpkin had been able to accomplish was to bite his shanks, claw his hands, trip him by suddenly popping underfoot on numerous occasions and, more than once, by climbing up the back of the sofa to nip his right ear.

When he complained, his wife told him he simply didn’t understand Pumpkin’s playful nature. The cat would give him a guileless look, clearly implying that he’d once again gotten the best of Roger.

Roger had never done a bit of harm to the odious Pumpkin, who was the color of a slightly spoiled sweet potato. Well, nothing beyond an occasional kick in the backside when Bonnie was off shopping and Roger was doing the house cleaning.

He really couldn’t afford to antagonize his wife. Roger was nearly fifty—well, fifty-three, actually—but he didn’t always put that on his résumés. He’d been out of work for eleven months now, ever since he lost his assistant account executive job at a Westport advertising agency. They had to rely on the stocks, bonds, and annuities that Bonnie’s father, who’d made his fortune from his swimming pool water-supply business, had bestowed on her.

Pumpkin went on to glory in this way. Roger, after he’d finished vacuuming, had made himself a cup of cocoa and settled on the sofa in the small, cluttered den to watch the local news channel. Bonnie wouldn’t be back from her shopping trip and luncheon date for several hours. The handsome newsman was in the middle of a story.

“Three known organized crime figures in our area have suddenly vanished. Police suspect gangster conflict may be behind this. Now, Natalie, how about that recipe for homemade pizza you promised us earlier?”

Just as the chipper blonde co-anchor appeared on the small screen, Pumpkin came galloping into the den in pursuit of a catnip ball.

“Shoo,” suggested Roger, standing. “Be gone.”

The tom obviously had no intention of following his ball into the dusty corner next to the rickety TV stand. He instead began making that sound, a wail suggesting a banshee with a toothache that indicated you had to fetch something for him.

“Okay, all right, asshole.” He crossed toward the set. Somehow his left foot got tangled in the frayed cord.

Pumpkin yowled again as the heavy old TV dived from the collapsing stand and fell smack on top of him with a thud.

“Oh, shit.”

But Roger realized there was plenty of time to clean up the evidence. He’d clean the wood floor, upright the TV set. It didn’t suffer as much damage as the cat, and Bonnie rarely entered the den.

Okay, what had actually happened, he decided, was that Pumpkin had pushed his cat door so hard that he broke out and ran off into the overgrown woodlands in back of their house. He’d search the woods, calling out, “Pumpkin, dear Pumpkin.” They’d take out an ad in the local paper, put up a sign in the post office: “Lost cat, friendly and amiable, answers to the name of Pumpkin.”

But he couldn’t bury him in the woods because Bonnie would obviously scour them.

“Ah,” he said aloud, pointing a forefinger ceiling-ward. “The New Beckford Nature Preserve.” It was forty acres of rundown, overgrown forest. The town hadn’t had the budget to take care of it for years, and nobody went there except for teenagers late at night. “Perfect.”

Roger didn’t anticipate that
perfect
was not the apt word.

Roger put the remains of Pumpkin in an old gunnysack. Parking his six-year-old Toyota on a narrow street with two foreclosed houses on it, he walked a quarter mile to the thick, overgrown forest. He’d first wrapped the cat’s remains in a plastic bag, so there was no blood showing on the sack he carried in his right hand, swinging it to and fro. The garden trowel he used to do his weeding was also in the sack.

He shifted his grip on Pumpkin and pushed his way into the welter of trees, brush, and weeds. Thorns scratched his sleeves while fallen twigs crackled beneath his feet.

After struggling through the forest for more than ten minutes, Roger decided he’d gone far enough.

Just then he heard voices from up ahead and saw two men in dark suits about twenty yards away. They were digging a large hole in a patch of earth in a narrow clearing. And lying on a small stretch of mixed wildflowers, face down, was the body of a man with two large splotches of dried blood on the right side of his candy-striped dress shirt.

“Oops,” murmured Roger, grabbing up his sack, clutching it to his chest, and commencing, very quietly, to back away.

Crackling, thrashing sounds started off to his left. A third man in a blue suit emerged from the trees. He had a revolver in his left hand. “Too much noise, friend,” he said in a soft voice. “We heard you sneaking up on us five minutes ago.” He pointed the gun directly at him.

“No. Nope. I wasn’t sneaking up on anybody. Just taking a hike in the woods.”

“Thing is, we can’t really let—”

“Enough already,” called one of the men with a shovel. “Shoot the guy.”

Just before the gunman pulled the trigger, Roger said, “That goddamn cat got the best of me again.”

Ron Goulart is a cultural historian who has written extensively about pulp fiction, including the seminal
Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of Pulp Magazines,
and has written dozens of novels and countless short stories, spanning genres and using a variety of pen names, including Kenneth Robeson, Joseph Silva, and Con Steffanson. Goulart’s
After Things Fell Apart
is the only science-fiction novel ever to win an Edgar Allan Poe Award.

Chris Grabenstein

“S
arge?” cried the dame they called Trixie. “Hey, Sarge. That you? Yeah! Over here.”

Sarge ambled over. Reluctantly.

“What is it this time, Trixie?”

“It’s Moose and that bunch.”

Sarge let out a long sigh. “Moose Murphy?”

“Yeah, yeah. Murphy. Him and his trouble boys have been bothering that old guy, you know, the mug with the missing leg—Lucky they call him. Lucky Rabinowitz. You know Lucky, right?”

“Yeah, I know him. What’s Lucky doin’ out here? I told him last weekend, certain stretches of this park are too shady for an old-timer like him to be nosin’ around in.”

“Hey, leg or no leg, the guy has his pride. We used to run together, Lucky and me.”

Sarge wasn’t surprised. Trixie was the kind of dame who would run with just about anybody, even if they didn’t have enough limbs to
really
run anymore.

“Come on, Sarge. You know Lucky Rabinowitz still has his pride. He ain’t gonna tuck his tail and sulk home just on your say-so.”

“Then tell him, for his own good, to keep far away from Moose Murphy. Like somewhere in the next zip code.”

“I did, Sarge. But that ain’t how it works with Moose and that bunch. They sniff out you’re old or weak, they move into your territory, and boom, they grab everything that ain’t nailed down.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear it, Trixie. But I gotta go. Nice bumping into you. Enjoy your day.”

“Hey, hey, hey. You’re leavin’?”

“Yes, Trixie, I’m trying to.”

“What about Lucky?”

Sarge let out another, longer, sigh.

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“Sure there is.”

“Look—tell your pal Lucky to call the cops.”

“Ah, come on, Sarge. You know the cops don’t care about you, me, Lucky, or none of us. Not like they used to, anyways. Not like they did when you was on the force.”

“That’s ancient history, Trix. I’m not a cop anymore.”

“Sure you are, Sarge. Once a cop, always a cop, am I right? That’s why you’re still out here every weekend patrolling your old beat.”

“I’m not patrolling anything, Trixie. It’s Sunday. I’m just trying to grab a little fresh air.”

“Cut the chin music, Sarge. Save that noise for someone who don’t know you no better.”

“I’m telling you straight up: I’m done. I’m out of all that.”

Trixie looked at Sarge hard.

“This is on account of what happened to your partner, ain’t it?”

“Trixie?”

“Yeah?”

“We’re friends.”

“I know.”

“You want to maybe stay that way?”

“Sure I do.”

“Then drop it.”

Trixie flicked her hair to the side. She always did that when she was annoyed.

“When are you gonna get it through that thick skull of yours that what happened to Joe weren’t none of your fault?”

“Oh, really? Try telling that to Mrs. Amodio. Or their three kids.”

In a flash, it all came back.

The night down in the subway. Sarge and his partner tailing two suspects. The thugs getting the drop on Joe, a good cop with the bad habit of walking where he maybe should’ve looked first. Shots were fired. Both officers went down.

Sarge still carried a lead souvenir in his left hip. He hadn’t lost a leg like Lucky. But he did lose the best partner any cop ever had.

“We were together a long time, me and Joe,” said Sarge, biting back the hurt the memories always stirred up.

“Then do this thing for him. Help a sad sack like Lucky Rabinowitz get back his stuff from Moose Murphy. Joe Amodio sure would.”

Sarge heaved one last sigh. “Where’d this incident go down?”

“Over this way. By the bench near the garbage can.”

Trixie scampered over to the spot. Sarge loped after her.

“Hiya, Sarge!” The big lug Lucky limped out of the shadows under a tree. “Thanks for taking my case.”

“What’d they steal?”

“The only thing my kid ever gave me!” whined Lucky. Then he started whimpering.

“Ease up on the waterworks,” barked Trixie. “Sarge don’t need no more emotional baggage. He’s already over his limit. Am I right, Sarge?”

Sarge ignored her. Studied the mud.

“Moose and that bunch sure left a lot of prints. A one-year-old could follow this trail.”

“That’s because they knew nobody had the guts to chase after them,” said Trixie.

Sarge looked to where the path made its curve around the oval-shaped lawn.

A pack of six rough mugs were tossing a ball back and forth under the shade of a towering oak tree.

“That’s my ball,” said Lucky. “The one my boy gave me. It’s got great sentimental value, you know?”

Sarge nodded. “Yeah.”

One of Joe Amodio’s kids had given Sarge a ball once, too.

He took off. Dashed up the pathway. Weaved his way through the Sunday strollers.

Moose Murphy saw him coming. Grinned.

“Well, hello, Sarge. Funny runnin’ into you out this way. I heard you quit the copper life.”

“You heard wrong.”

Sarge snarled. Just once.

Moose Murphy acted tough. Made like he wouldn’t mind having Sarge chase him around in circles.

Sarge was in no mood for circles.

So he bared his fangs and lunged forward.

Tasted fur.

Moose yelped and dropped Lucky’s ball. The thing was slimed with drool and a little chewed up but otherwise okay.

“Hey!” shouted one of the people holding a leash. “Keep away from my Moose!”

It was the Murphy dame wearing a fanny pack and a fancy Ivy League sweatshirt.

“Whose dog is this?” she shouted like she owned the park. “
Whose dog is this?
” She went to protect Moose.

Sarge smiled.

He knew whose dog he was: Officer Joe Amodio’s. Late of the NYPD K-9 Unit. Sarge Amodio was a dog who’d always track down the bad boys like Moose Murphy to protect the weaker mutts like Lucky Rabinowitz.

He picked up Lucky’s ball with his snout.

Trixie had been right.

Once a cop, always a cop.