The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (45 page)

The Popovs were Russian and had moved to the States ten years earlier. Harold was convinced that Vlad had been a member of the KGB who had gambled the wrong way when the spirit of glasnost finally petered out. Their faces were always shiny and suffering, their accents heavy. They butchered English to the point that we wondered just how much they really understood.

“Well, good luck with your consensus,” I told them as my thumb hit the 9 and then the 1
.

Harold reached out and covered the phone with his hand. “Seriously, we think you should talk to her first.”

“Who?”

He gestured toward the bungalow with his pipe. “Her. Ramba.”

“And say what, for chrissake?”

“Talk,” Vlad said with a nervous grunt. “No police.”

“Yes,” Anna said. “Please to be talking only.”

Harold added, “Try to get her on our side.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” I said.

“Look,” Harold said, “I’ve seen this kind of thing many times before, mostly with new students on campus. Moving into a new environment is one of the biggest stressors in life, and this may have been her way of getting it out of her system. If we just tell her we’re nice people who don’t want any trouble, then—”

“There’s already trouble,” I said, jabbing a finger at my Michelin 3000 in desperation. “Jesus Christ, Harold, look at my tire! Look at your tires!”

He maintained a serene demeanor, even raising one eyebrow scoldingly. His expression seemed to say,
In the grand scheme of all that is life, what’s a tire?
“She just moved in, and she clearly has issues,” he said. “But getting the police involved at this juncture could make things worse. Today, we hold the deescalation card. Tomorrow, she could be cutting our throats.”

Vlad winced and Anna gasped and both of the dogs—their names were Foo-foo and Rocky, or Rocko and Fee-fee, I wasn’t exactly sure—began to whimper.

“Harold,” I said, pleading for reason. But he just stared back at me. I had known him since I moved in. We shared a love of landscaping and exotic beer but beyond that didn’t have much in common. I suspected he was a bleeding-heart lib, and he probably thought I was a right-wing warmonger. But since we never knew for sure how the other felt, we generally got along. I admit that for once, his psychobabble was appealing. As I said, I wasn’t interested in escalating anything with anyone, least of all a bowie-wielding lunatic.

“It’s for the good of us all,” Harold said.

I smirked. “Then maybe we should all go up there. We could deescalate together.”

Anna gasped again and muttered something in Russian.

Harold was shaking his head. “Too confrontational. Besides, she’s got a POW flag, so maybe she’s prior military. Tell her you were in the air force. Tell her about Iraq. Connect with her. Above all, don’t take an aggressive posture.”

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this,” I repeated, even as I shoved my phone into my shirt pocket and began walking up her driveway.

When I mounted the porch steps, the lawnmower buzzing in the distance hit a patch of rock and stopped dead. The wooden planks of the porch creaked with neglect and resentment beneath my feet. I could feel the eyes of my huddled neighbors watching me. And right before I knocked, I heard Anna’s weak, frightened voice utter, “Is he just to be talking, Mister Harold?”

Harold answered her in an unruffled, professorial manner. “That’s correct, my dear,” he said, teeth clenched on the stem of his pipe. “He will just to be talking.”

She opened the door on the first knock. I was prepared for anything, especially hostility, but she was wearing the same tremendous smile she wore when she introduced herself. I made sure to locate her hands. One was on the door, and the other was brushing some dust off the front of her shirt. The features of her face were stark white against the darkness of the hall behind her, her eyes open wide and gleaming, as if the strain of her pulled-back hair had stretched the skin too tight. She looked about as crazy as I’d ever seen a person look, like a mad monk preparing to burn a heretic at the stake.

The effect left me speechless. My mind fluttered between what I wanted to say and, per Harold’s suggestion, what I was supposed to say. Was it
I’m here about the tires, you crazy bitch?
Or
Gee, I just love your POW flag, so let’s connect?
But I couldn’t even open my mouth.

She stood up on her toes and looked past my shoulder at the other neighbors. “Let me guess,” she said. “You’re not happy I moved here.”

I cleared my throat and tried to soften my tone, all the while hearing Harold’s droning voice:
Don’t take an aggressive posture.
“That’s not exactly true,” I said, “but I—”

“And you don’t know what to do or say because you’re not used to having someone—especially a new neighbor—greet you like I did?”

“Well . . .”

“Well what?”

“Well, um, I really love your flag. Were you in the service? The military? I was too, so I thought we could, you know—”

Her response was immediate and electric. She clapped her hands together, and her eyes glistened. “A veteran? Why the hell didn’t you say so? Come on in.”

And here I retreated a step. I was no fool. I had lived long and bore the scars of many narrow escapes to prove it. But then Harold’s voice persisted, like some kind of suburban secretary of state.
Play the deescalation card. Get her on our side.

“Okay, sure,” I said, unsurely. “Thanks.”

I stepped across the threshold and paused as my eyes fought to adjust. The fading afternoon light I brought with me did nothing to illuminate the dark interior, although my eyes fixed on a glowing lampshade within. There was some kind of cheap, ridiculous foyer chandelier slung low enough that it grazed my head. It was missing several glass hangings and rattled as if mocking me.

The woman had moved on ahead and disappeared. I managed to follow her voice as it faded deeper into the shadows. “You’ll have to excuse the mess,” she said. “As you can see, I’m having a wonderful adventure in moving. Shut the door, will you?”

By now my eyes had settled, and the foyer took shape as well as the open living/dining room beyond. The layout wasn’t that different from my own house. The couple who had lived here prior were an air force sergeant and his South Korean wife. They’d gotten orders to Minot, North Dakota, and, like everything else headed that way, disappeared in the quiet of night, never to be seen again. Despite our shared service, we had never socialized.

I took a few more cautious steps, navigating around a clutter of cardboard boxes, their lids open in mighty yawns of disgorged packing paper. Rather than an adventure in moving, it looked more like one of exile, a picture of abandonment, as if the moving truck had simply backed up to the front door and dumped its contents through the opening.

I moved past a kitchen area to my left and into the living room, where I found the woman crouched over and rummaging through some boxes. “Make yourself at home,” she said. “So you were in the army?”

“Air force.”

Something flittered across the ceiling above me, some rodent nesting in the ductwork. I couldn’t imagine what she might be looking for in those boxes or how she expected to find it. All the windows were covered by thick sheets or curtains. Although my eyes had adjusted enough to see, the only legitimate light source was from the lamp. Near the back of the house was a sliding glass door, where a brush of sunlight glinted below the hem of the curtain.

More disturbing than the lack of light was the smell. The air inside was overwhelmingly musty, scented with low-grade alcohol or perhaps some kind of cleaning product.

“Let’s see. Where is it?” she said. “Ah-ha!” With a flourish, she produced a darkened wine bottle and held it out to me, as if it were a small animal she had shot in the woods and expected me to cook. “This was a wedding gift,” she announced. “Although I couldn’t tell you what kind it is. My husband was the wine expert in the family.”

“Please, no,” I said. “Really, I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

I shifted closer to the lamp, which was positioned atop a round end table, making sure to keep my back to the front door. In the small circle of light was an eight-by-ten picture, neatly framed and standing amid a jumble of prescription pill bottles. I squinted, but couldn’t read the labels.

The photo showed a Marine pilot in flight suit, nestled in the open cockpit of what looked to be an F-18 fighter. He was wearing aviator sunglasses and smiling, one gloved hand extended in a thumbs-up salute. A vast desert landscape fell away behind him, and I knew immediately it was Iraq. It could have been anywhere. Nevada, California, or even Kuwait. But I knew by the cast of the shadows that it was the place I’d spent six miserable months at the height of the insurgency. Just looking at the photo, I could taste the desert dust in my mouth and feel it thicken on my teeth. This recognition was a frequent occurrence, most especially whenever I watched a news report about the war on television. Harold probably would have diagnosed me with PTSD if I’d mentioned it to him, which I wouldn’t.

While the woman continued to rummage, I gestured toward the picture. “That your husband?”

She glanced at the photo, then at me, blinking in an almost sleepy gesture. Her shoulders wilted, and the smile was gone again. I felt my heart clench up.

“That’s right,” she said. “He’s in Iraq.” She shimmied sideways on her knees to another box, this one tattered and torn at the corners.

Tell her about Iraq
, Harold broke in.
Connect with her.
“I was over there too,” I said. “Back in 2006. I worked in the theater hospital. Administrative stuff mostly.”

“Really? You must have seen a lot of death.”

I detected a trap in her comment and chose my words carefully. “Actually, we had over a ninety percent save rate once the casualties reached us. It’s unusual to have that kind of—”

She cut me off with a grunt and said, “
Save rate?
Is that what you said? Wow, that’s funny.” Her concentration was now focused entirely on the tattered box. She had set the bottle down and started removing small items one by one, each individually wrapped in newspaper. I noted well the size and shape of each package. I didn’t want her emerging from the cardboard with a loaded AK-47.

I inched forward again, waving a hand to get her attention. “Please, please, you don’t have to go to any trouble.”

“There you guys are,” she said to something in the box. She produced a bundle cocooned in newspaper. She sat back on her haunches and unwrapped two wineglasses, delicately setting each one down on the floor beside the wine bottle.

Harold started to whisper into my ear again, but I cut him off. “Listen,” I said, reverting to my gruff sergeant’s voice. “We should really talk about the tires. You’ve got to understand.”

“So you say you were in Iraq?” she said, still not looking up.

I sighed, feeling the weariness of the entire exercise. I said, “I don’t think you understand how serious what you did was. I wanted to call the police.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I thought we could talk first.”

“So let’s talk. Over some wine.”

“I’m really not in the mood to drink wine.”

“That’s good. Because I never intended you to drink it.” She reached back behind her head with both hands and yanked at her ponytail, tightening the hair even further, as if girding herself for battle. Then she grabbed the neck of the bottle, rose up to her feet with the quick grace of a lioness, and hopped over the box toward me.

“Okay, look,” I said calmly, and then watched in utter disbelief as she reared back and swung for the fences. I could still feel my mouth forming the words
I really think you need to
when the bottle collided with my skull.

I staggered backward, arms flailing. The bottle, which did not break, felt like it was filled with concrete. The point of impact burned, and my vision boomeranged from focused to double to triple. Some glass or porcelain knickknack, perhaps even a precious memento of her marriage, crackled beneath my sneaker.

I shook my head fiercely and managed to restore my vision. Still, my brain refused to process what had happened. I could feel blood trickling down the side of my head, but I was very much aware and conscious. Somewhere in my brain’s circuitry, deep and falling fast away, was Harold’s voice saying,
Get her on our side.

My new neighbor had by now set the unbroken concrete bottle aside and stooped to retrieve something from another box. My heart clutched again, and I thought for certain that her hand would soon be holding the Buck knife. But it was a frying pan. One of those heavy jobs, with a titanium nonstick surface.

Then she was crouching, shoulders back, hips tight, and with a yelp she charged at me, the cookware held high like a caveman’s club.

I said, “Wait—listen—you can’t—” as if my mind was stuck in reason mode, still looking for a way to talk myself out of it. She swung before I could get my hands up. I took the flat, hard metal of the pan to the left side of my face. Something gave and rattled. It wasn’t the skillet.

I was thrown back again, this time into the foyer. I heard the pan drop and hit the floor, another weapon used and discarded. The next few seconds were a blur of bulging eyes, gritted teeth, ringless knuckles. She punched, kicked, elbowed, and pushed, backing me toward the front door. Throughout the attack she huffed and yipped like a redheaded ninja.

Although her blows were not as painful as the bottle or pan, she was much too quick for me and seemed to anticipate every defense I attempted. When I parried low, she head-butted high. When I blocked high, she kneed low. She took my polo-shirt collar in both fists and pogo-sticked me down the tight foyer, up and over the boxes, my head crashing into the chandelier, which sent about a dozen glass hangings smashing down in our violent wake. She snatched the doorknob and then kicked open the door. She yanked and pulled me across the threshold by my shirt. I almost tumbled over, but she reined back and kept me upright as I floundered across the porch. Finally, using the momentum of my attempt to flee, she sent me airborne diagonally over the steps and the hedge. I landed directly on a patch of hard, grassless dirt.