Kwik Krimes (25 page)

“You’re getting pretty good at this,” the voice said. “How does it feel to be out of strikes?”

“I didn’t do what Riley did,” she said.

The voice in her ear almost screamed, “You have no idea what Riley did or why he did it.”

“I trust the system.”

“The system,” snarled the voice. “I know all about the system.”

“What do you want?” she asked simply.

“I want Riley freed.” Still too loud.

“I can’t do that,” she said. “You know I can’t do that.”

Then, “I need to concentrate for this next turn.”

She slowed and felt his weight against the seat. In her mind’s eye, she pictured the curve and the ravine. Slowly she eased the wheel to the right, and counted. At thirty she straightened.

“I never thought you’d make it,” the voice said. “Not that it matters.”

When she heard the click of the hammer, she floored the accelerator. The huge Mercedes leaped forward. She heard a gasp and felt the gun fall away. A horn blared, and then she felt the shuddering impact of the stone wall, the chest strap cutting into her, and her face sinking into the air bag. A weight flew by her right shoulder. She heard him slam against the dash.

Her airbag deflated, and she reached up and shakily pulled off the black bag. The man lay in a crumpled heap on the passenger floorboard. A hand pounded on the driver’s side window.

“Are you okay?” someone yelled.

She patted the air bag console. “You have to trust the system.”

In addition to blogging on politics and society (under the pseudonym Otherwise at
ScholarsandRogues.com
) and writing, John Harvin works with the CEOs of major corporations on strategic problems. He splits his time between his apartment in Chicago and various countries and cities around the world. This year he will attempt his fourth Ironman triathlon.

Michael Haynes

D
etective Collins straightened his jacket before entering the residence. He’d pulled Maple Hill’s first homicide in years and wasn’t about to walk in looking like a slob. He took one more swipe at his hair and stepped inside.

“What have you got for me?” he asked those already at work.

“Deceased is Margot Harris,” an officer named Hoffman said. “She lived here with her husband and two children.”

That children lived here was apparent. Toys were scattered on the floor—here a plastic dinosaur, there several random building bricks.

Collins looked at the corpse. Dressed for a day at the office, but blood stained her clothing. A purse was on the floor, and yet another toy, a stuffed animal, sat by her left hand. It, too, was bloodstained.

“A maid comes in once a week,” Hoffman continued. “She found Mrs. Harris like that and called 911. We had to have her taken down to St. Paul’s; she was awful shook up.”

Hoffman gestured at the body. “The techs say she was stabbed multiple times. She either moved herself or was moved before she died, but not far.”

Collins crouched, thought. “Where was Mr. Harris when this happened?” he asked.

“We’re still trying to get in touch with him. A neighbor says he takes the kids in to school before going to work.”

A tech stepped between Collins and Hoffman, bagged up the purse and bloodied toy, took them away as evidence.

“So, hubby and kids leave,” Collins said. “And sometime between then and when the maid shows up, Mrs. Harris is killed.”

“That’s what we’ve got so far.”

“Not much, is it?” Collins stood up. “Call me when you have something new. And get me the address of where Mr. Harris works. I’m going to pay him a visit.”

Collins entered the offices of Harris & Parker Accounting shortly after ten. In the reception area, a well-dressed man talked with the woman behind the desk.

“Pardon me,” Collins said, showing his identification. “Could I speak with Mr. Harris?”

“He’s out for coffee,” the man said. “Can I help you?”

“Actually, he just came back, Mr. Parker,” said the receptionist. She spoke quietly into her phone, then directed Collins to Harris’s office.

Half an hour later, Collins left, certain that Arnold Harris wasn’t their guy. He seemed stunned when told his wife was dead. Naturally. Anyone who’d watched a TV knew to act that way. But he also had people who could vouch for his movements all morning.

Collins also met with the maid when she came into the station to give her statement. A tiny middle-aged woman with thin hair and a premature stoop to her shoulders. No chance she overpowered Mrs. Harris.

He went home feeling like he’d gotten nowhere. That evening he spread the case file contents on the dining table. His wife, Claire, walked by. She muttered something he didn’t catch.

“Hmm?” he asked.

She gave a nervous laugh. “Oh, it was just…A joke in poor taste.”

“What about?”

“That photograph.”

Normally Claire avoided talking about his work. She said she preferred not knowing.

“What about it?”

Her face flushed. “I said you could rule out Yak Yak Bird kidnapping as the motive.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The doll there. It’s a Yak Yak Bird. They were hot last Christmas.”

“Never heard of them.”

She smiled crookedly. “Maybe if you’d helped me shop for your nieces and nephews you would have.”

“Huh. So, what was the big deal?”

“Oh. They talk.”

Collins shrugged. “Haven’t there been talking toys since we were kids?”

“No. I mean they talk back to you, repeat what you say.”

Claire kept talking, but Collins didn’t hear. He looked at the photo again. The bird sat by Harris’s hand. And the techs said they thought she’d tried to move herself…

He called the station. Frank Butcher took the call.

“Frank,” he said, “Could you sign out one of the pieces of evidence for the Harris case? I want you to check something. It’s the toy, a stuffed animal.”

Collins waited while Frank was away.

“I’ve got it. Ugly thing, ain’t it?” Frank said.

“Yeah, listen…What I need you to do is…” He realized he had no idea and put his hand over the mouthpiece.

“Claire, how do you get the thing to talk back to you?”

She thought about it for a moment. “Squeeze the wing.”

“You’re sure that won’t erase the recording?”

Claire nodded brightly. “Oh yeah, you have to push in its tummy to do that.”

Collins shook his head. This was nuts. Still, he uncovered the mouthpiece. “You got gloves, Frank?”

“Yeah.”

“Get ’em on. Then squeeze the bird’s wing.”

There was a long silence. Butcher finally answered, “It’s got two wings, Detective Collins. Which one do you want me to, um, squeeze?”

“I don’t know. Try one, then the other. Let me know what happens.”

There were some rustling sounds as Butcher followed his directions. Moments later, Collins heard everything he needed to hear.

“Whoa. Is that…” Frank said.

“Yes.”

The recorded voice of a woman making her dying declaration echoed through Collins’s head.

“Get it back to the locker right away,” he told Butcher. “And whatever you do, don’t press on its tummy…its stomach. I need to get some warrants.”

Collins went down to the holding cell.

“Want to tell me about it, Parker?”

“There’s nothing to tell because I didn’t do anything.” Parker picked at his shirt cuffs. “I’ll be out before lunchtime, Detective,” Parker said. “What makes you think you can arrest me for this?”

“Because I know you killed her. Because she wouldn’t help you cheat your partner, her husband, out of the partnership’s profits. And because she wouldn’t leave him for you.”

Parker’s eyes gave his fear away, but he still snorted a laugh. “Right. And where’d you get that idea?”

Collins smiled as he turned to leave. “A little birdie told me, Parker. A little birdie.”

T
HIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN
E
VERY
D
AY
F
ICTION
.

Michael Haynes lives in central Ohio, where he helps keep IT systems running for a large corporation during the day and puts his characters through the wringer by night. An ardent short-story reader and writer, Michael has had more than twenty stories accepted for publication during 2012 by venues such as
Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction, Nature,
and many others. Visit his website at
MichaelHaynes.info
.

Gar Anthony Haywood

T
hrough the bedroom door—
his
fucking bedroom door!—Lester could hear them inside. Laughing. Cooing. Moaning.

He gripped the gun in his hand tighter, all reservations gone now.

The sonofabitch had been right. This was the only way.

“She’s fucking around on you, isn’t she?”

Lester had spun around. “What?”

“I know, I know. It’s none of my business,” the guy had said, nine days ago, “but I kinda recognize the look. I’ve been there myself, man. I used to see that face in the mirror all the time.”

He’d taken the next seat at the bar without Lester noticing. It hadn’t been much of a trick: Lester was here for the liquor, not the company, and nothing else had warranted his attention.

The stranger, a shaggy-haired beach-boy type who had to be Lester’s junior by ten years, held out his hand. “Scotty Henson.”

Lester shook the hand but didn’t offer his own name, too inebriated to tell yet what this was.

“It does something to a man, the pain,” Henson said, sounding as if he’d already had a few drinks himself.

“The pain?”

“Finding out your woman is doing some other guy. This the wife or your girlfriend?”

Lester thought about lying, decided there was little point. “The wife,” he said.

Andrea. Eleven years of marriage. A home, two cars, money in the bank. All the clothes and shoes to wear she could want, and no kids to pin them down. The bitch should have been happy. Sure, Lester played around on her, but so what? Sex was nothing to a man; it was as strictly physical an act as taking a leak. But for women? For Andrea? There had to be feelings involved. Andrea couldn’t watch sex on television unless the people having it were madly in love.

“The wife, that’s rough,” Henson said, emptying his glass. “That’s, like, the ultimate betrayal. And it’s not like you can just walk away, right? Without rewarding her ass with half of everything you own?”

Lester was finally getting irked. What did this punk know about it? “Hey, look…” he started to say.

But Henson wouldn’t quit, oblivious to every attempt Lester made to shut him up. Before Lester knew it, the guy was buying them round after round of fresh drinks as he rambled on about the inequities of divorce and a man’s need for some greater form of justice when his woman had slipped another man’s joint between her legs.

Not talking about Lester’s situation at all, Lester realized, but his own. Some woman somewhere had fucked him over, too, and Henson was still feeling the sting.

“So what do you suggest?” Lester asked him, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Murder?”

Truth be told, Lester had been thinking a lot about murder that day, ever since he’d found the bottle of scented sex jelly buried at
the bottom of Andrea’s workout bag that morning. But murder was just a pipe dream, because a man couldn’t kill his wife and get away with it. His obvious motive would always make him the cops’ prime suspect, and they wouldn’t stop digging until they’d found a way to nail him for the crime.

What Lester hadn’t considered was Henson’s ingenious, if somewhat costly, solution to the problem: not worrying about “getting away” with murder at all.

Premeditation was the key, Henson had said. Planning the murder over time was what always brought the law down hardest on a man’s head when he killed his wife, but when he killed her in the heat of passion, at the very moment he discovered her infidelity?
That
was a man the court could pity. He’d do some time, sure, but probably not much; it was the difference between a lifetime behind bars and two or three years, maybe even less.