The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told (21 page)

“It is possible that he is the worst fighter who ever lived,” I say. “At the very least, he is the worst fighter still licensed to get his brains beat out. He has fought forty-seven times, and has been knocked out forty-six times. His greatest triumph was when he lost a unanimous decision to Glass Jaw Malone eleven years ago.”

“I see,” said Mtepwa.

“So what are we going to do?” I say. “The Goniff never backs down on a threat. If the Kid doesn’t win, I won’t be alive the next morning.”

“No problem,” says Mtepwa.

“No problem for
you
, Mtepwa,” I say. “But what about
me
?”

“I’ve got twenty-eight hours to figure it out,” he says. “And I wish you’d start calling me Cool Jumbo Cool. Mtepwa just doesn’t seem right in this venue.”

“Just get the Goniff and his zombie off my case once and for all, and I’ll call you anything you want,” I promise.

“Every occupation has its hazards,” he says. “You shouldn’t let this upset you.”

“I don’t mind being upset,” I tell him. “It’s being dismembered that bothers me.”

I am just as upset when we show up at the Garden the next night. Mtepwa has gone into some kind of African swami trance, and only comes out of it an hour before the fight. I ask him what he was doing, and he says he was napping, that he’s a 683-year-old man and he’s had a lot of excitement and he needs his sleep.

“Did you solve our problem?” I ask.

“Well, actually, it’s
your
problem,” he explains. “Nobody’s going to bother me no matter how the fight comes out.”

“All right, did you solve
my
problem?” I say.

“I’m working on it.”

“Well, work faster!” I snap. “If the Kid wins, I’m broke, and if he loses, I’m dead!”

“Fascinating problem,” he said. “Rather like Fermat’s Unfinished Theorem. Of course, if he’d simply paid me the five cattle and the virgin, I’d have shown him how to solve it.”

“Will you please concentrate on Harry the Book’s Unfinished Theorem?” I say pleadingly.

Before he can answer, I sense a presence hovering over me, and I turn and there is Sam the Goniff, smoking one of his five-dollar cigars, and with him is a guy who smells kind of funny and whose eyes seem to be staring sightlessly off into the distance and who has a lot of dirt under his fingernails, and I know that this is Dead End Dugan.

“Hi, Harry,” says the Goniff. “I’m glad to see you’re a fight fan. I’d hate to think that I’d have to go looking for you after the Kid knocks out Terrible Tommy.”

“I’ll be right here,” I say pugnaciously, but that is only because I know that hiding from the Goniff is like hiding from the IRS, only harder.

“I’ll count on it,” he says, and heads off to his ringside seat with Dugan, and I notice that Seldom Seen Seymour is already there waiting for him, just in case he needs a little help collecting after the fight.

“Have you come up with anything yet?” I ask Mtepwa.

“Yes,” he says.

“What is it?” I ask eagerly.

“I’ve come up with a sinus problem, I think,” he answers. “Too much cigar smoke in here.”

“What about Kid Testosterone?” I demand. “If he loses I die!”

“Then he can’t lose, can he?” says Mtepwa.

“But if he wins, I’m not only broke, but I haven’t got enough cash to cover the Goniff’s bet, and Seldom Seen Seymour will take me apart piece by piece.”

“Then he can’t win, can he?” says Mtepwa.

“I’ve got it!” I say. “You’re going to shoot him before the fight starts!”

Mtepwa just gives me a pitying look, and turns to concentrate on the ring, where they are carrying out what’s left of the Missouri Masher, and then Kid Testosterone and Terrible Tommy Tulsa enter the ring, and the ref is giving them their instructions, such as no biting or kicking or low blows, and because this is New York he also tells them no kissing, and then they go to their corners, and the bell rings and they come out and Tommy swings a haymaker that will knock the Kid’s head into the fourth row, but somehow his timing is off and he misses, and the Kid delivers a pair of punches that couldn’t smash an empty wine glass but sudden Tommy’s nose is bleeding, and he blinks his eyes like he can’t believe that the fight is thirty seconds old and the Kid is still standing.

But the Kid is still on his feet at the end of the round, and it later turns out that one of the three judges actually gives him the round, and another calls it even, and that is the way the fight goes for three rounds, but I am not watching the fight, I am watching Sam the Goniff, and between the third and fourth round he somehow gets the Kid’s attention and holds his fist out with his thumb down and I know he has just signaled the Kid to end it in the fourth round.

I am not the only one who has seen it. Mtepwa is staring right at the Goniff, and he just smiles, and I know he’s got something up his sleeve besides his arm, but I don’t know what.

The bell rings and the fighters come out for the fourth round. Terrible Tommy connects first, a blow to the solar plexus that should double the Kid over in pain, but instead Tommy screams and pulls his hand back like he’s just broken it punching a concrete wall, and then they circle around until the Kid’s back is to me, and suddenly Mtewpa starts mumbling again, and the Kid throws his money punch, and I look, figuring this is the end and Terrible Tommy is going down for the count, but it’s
not
Terrible Tommy, it’s the Goniff, and he takes the punch on the point of his chin and goes reeling around the ring, and the Kid starts pummeling him, and it occurs to me that the Kid looks a lot more like Rocky Marciano and a lot less like Kid Testosterone.

Every time he delivers what looks like a knockout blow, Mtepwa starts mumbling again, and no matter how much punishment the Goniff takes he stays on his feet. Finally the Kid winds up and knocks him through the ropes and he falls to the floor right in front of me.

“Is there something you’d like to say to me before you climb back into the ring?” I ask pleasantly.

“I ain’t climbing back in there!” he mutters through bleeding lips.

“Yes you are,” says Mtepwa, and against his will the Goniff gets to his feet and turns to face the ring.

“All right, all right!” he says. “I cancel the bet!”

“You don’t even have to cancel,” says Mtepwa before I can stop him. “Just promise you’ll never bet with Harry again, or use Dead End Dugan to hex a sporting event.”

“I promise,” says the Goniff.

The instant the words are out of his mouth he collapses, the referee declares Kid Testosterone the winner, and the Goniff is carted off to the hospital.

“Thanks for nothing!” I say to Mtepwa. “We didn’t cancel, so I still have to pay off! The bet was that the Kid would knock Terrible Tommy out, and he did!”

“The evening’s not over yet,” he replies, and indeed it isn’t, because the Kid fails a urine test, which doesn’t surprise anyone given that he made it all the way to the fourth round, and the fight is declared a draw—not a non-contest where I would have to return the Goniff’s money, but a draw, where everyone who bet on either fighter loses and only those who bet there’d be a draw win.

And that’s the story.

Well, not quite all of it. I’m not a bookie anymore. I took on a full partner—Cool Jumbo Cool, who eventually decided that
this
was the payment he wanted—and these days we head a pretty successful betting syndicate.

Jumbo’s really gotten into the swing of things; he
likes
this millieu. Tonight he’s hexed the big game between the Montana Buttes and the Georgia Geldings. I gave Benny Fifth Street a promotion, and we’ve even got a couple of new runners. In fact, I have to close now. It’s time to pass my money to Dead End Dugan and the Goniff and tell them where to lay our bets.

STEVE PERRY

Nobody is immune to Glamour.

In the ten years she’d had the talent, Darla had never come across anybody who had seen through it, far as she could tell. Old, young, men, women,—it fooled everybody, every time.

Not that she’d need it here: Fifteen feet away, the widow Bellingham snored fully-dressed upon her bed. The old lady had put down a bottle of very expensive champagne earlier at the party, and Darla could probably could bang a Chinese gong and not rouse her, but still . . .

She opened the last drawer of the jewel box, her movements slow and careful. The smell of cedar drifted up from the intricately-carved wooden box, which was probably worth more than Darla’s car.

Ah. Here we go . . .

It was an oval pin about the size of a silver dollar. Inset into the platinum were thirty-some diamonds, fancy yellows, the majority of them a carat or so each. Not worth as much as clears and nowhere near the value of the intense pinks or fancy blues encrusting the pieces in the top drawer, of course, but that was the point. These were good stones—good—but not outstanding, and with what she could get from her fence, plenty to keep her going for six months.

One-carat gems of this grade were easy to move.

She limited herself to a job every three or four months, enough to keep her below heavy police radar—or at least it had done so for eight years.

Truth was, it had been almost too easy. Never a really close call. At first, it it had seemed a grand adventure, but it wasn’t long before it turned into just a part-time job, no more exciting than shopping for fruit at New Seasons Market. Go in, pick out the organic apples you like, leave—without paying—and take a few months off, ta dah!

Disappointing in a way how easy it was, though certainly better than working for a living . . .

Six or seven million in fine jewelry here, and that just the dailywear stuff. The really good pieces would be in a bank vault somewhere . . .

Darla wrapped the pin in a square of black velvet and slipped it into her jeans pocket. She slid the jewelry box’s drawer closed.

As always, she was tempted to clean the box out, but she knew better. Unique pieces were hard to move, worth only what the loose stones would bring, unless you wanted to mess around trying to find a crooked collector, and that was risky. This particular pin? It might not be missed for weeks or months. The top-drawer stuff sure; the bottom drawer? Maybe the widow would never even notice. When you could go in and plunk down a million bucks for a brooch or a necklace without having to look at your checkbook balance? A pin worth a couple hundred grand? Shoot, that was practically costume jewelry . . .

So, she’d take just the one piece.

The perfect crime, after all, was not one where the cops couldn’t figure out who did it; it was one the cops never even heard about . . .

Darla uttered the cantrip just before she pushed open the stair door into the apartment building’s lobby. When she stepped through, she looked the same to herself, save for a slight bluish glow to her skin that told her the Glamour was lit.

The guard at the desk looked up. “Morning, Mr. Millar. Early start today, hey?”

Darla grinned and sketched a two-finger salute at the guard.

The armed man touched a button on his console and the building’s door slid open. As she left, Darla waggled one hand over her shoulder, in what she thought was a friendly gesture. Silently, of course. Her Glamour fooled the eyes, but not the ears—if she spoke, she would sound like a twenty-something woman and not the sixty-something man she picked as a disguise.

She had been careful coming down the stairs to avoid the surveillance cams, too, since her trick wouldn’t fool them, either.

When the real Mr. Millar exited for his morning walk, the guard wouldn’t say anything—he wouldn’t want anybody to think he was crazy . . .

It was a fantastic thing, her trick, even if it had a couple drawbacks: She had to touch somebody before it would work on them, and do that within a day, since the effects of the touch faded away after that. Still, it was impressive.

She had no idea why or how she had come by it. She had been found in a dumpster as a baby, raised in an orphanage. The words to the cantrip were from a dream she’d had on the night she turned sixteen. Eventually, she had come to realize that, somehow, the dream had come true.

Magic? No such thing, everybody knew that. But here she was. She’d wondered about it over the years. She’d cautiously nosed around in a few places, but never found any other real magic, only people faking it. Why did it work? How? She didn’t know. Still, you didn’t have to be a chemist to strike a match, and apparently you didn’t need to know jack about magic to use the stuff. Case in point.

Worrying over the reasons might drive her nuts if she let it, so she didn’t try any more. She just thanked whatever gods there might be for bestowing it upon her and that was that.

She had a car, but she seldom used it on a job where public transportation was available. She walk to the bus stop. The TriMet driver would see her as a white-haired Japanese man, since she had touched his shoulder earlier in the day when she’d ridden the bus in this direction. She would exit six blocks from her apartment and walk home. Nobody could connect Darla Wright to the expensive Portland penthouse occupied by the widow Bellingham, even if the woman ever did notice she’d been robbed.

Smooth as oil on glass, no muss, no fuss, just like always, and she planned to sleep in until at least noon.

Life was good.

Darla strolled into her neighborhood Starbucks, next to Fred Meyer’s, and inhaled the fragrances of brewed coffee and freshly baked pastries. She was scouting for a fattening cherry turnover she figured she’d earned, when she bumped into a good-looking guy about thirty who stopped suddenly ahead of her in the line.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, turning to steady her. “My fault.” He smiled. Nice teeth. Black hair, blue eyes, rugged features, pretty well-built under a dark green T-shirt and snug jeans. Three or four years older than she was, but that was nothing.

“No problem,” she said. She returned the smile.

Ice cream, she thought, looking at him. To go with the pastry, hey . . . ?

No . . . She couldn’t. Not today. She had to meet Harry at two, and she’d slept past noon, so Ice Cream here would have to wait. Business before pleasure.

There were plenty of other men in the pond, and she was going to have free time to do a little fishing, lots of time . . .

Nothing as obvious as running a pawn shop, Harry had a guitar store, a hole-in-the-wall place twenty minutes from Portland, in Beaverton. Beaverton was where Portlanders went to buy fast food and shop at the 7-Elevens, a bedroom community that had once been swamps and filbert orchards and beaver-dammed streams.

The guitars at Harry’s ran from a few hundred bucks up to ten or fifteen thousand on the high end, mostly acoustic and classicals, and the place actually did a pretty good business. Today being Sunday, the shop was closed, but Harry answered the bell at the back door. She waited while the four big and heavy locks snicked and clicked, bolts sliding back, and the door, made of thick steel plate, swung quietly open on oiled hinges. Trust a crook to know how to protect his own stuff.

The shop smelled of wood, and some kind of finish that was not unpleasant, a sharp, turpentine-y scent.

“Layla. How nice to see you, as always.”

Even Harry didn’t get her real name. Darla was very careful.

“Harry. How business?”

“I can’t complain. Come in. Some tea?” He was seventy-five, bald, thin, and wore thick glasses that kept slipping down his nose. He thought she was hot, though he’d never made a move on her.

“Thanks.”

She sat at a table while Harry made tea. “Oolong today,” he said.

Eventually, he sat the steaming cup in front of her.

“So, kiddo, whaddya got for me?”

She produced the pin, opened the velvet wrapping.

“Ah.” He picked it up, pulled a loupe from his shirt pocket, held the pin up to the light. “Quality stones. Nice cuts, nothing outstanding. Say . . . fifty?”

“What, did I get stupid since you saw me last? Eighty,” she said.

He smiled. “Might could go sixty, because I like you.”

“It’s a steal at eighty, Harry. Two and a quarter for the bigger stones, and maybe another ten or fifteen for the little ones. Plus seven, eight hundred for the platinum. Pushing a quarter million, and you can pocket half that.”

“Honey, we both know it’s a steal at any price, but since I’ll have to fly down to Miami to move the rocks, sixty is a gift. You know how I hate air travel.”

“Miami? What’s wrong with Seattle?”

He pulled the loupe off and put the piece onto the table. “Too warm for Seattle. Even broken up, thirty stones this close will have to be moved a few at a time. Could take me months. Who has that kind of time at my age?”

“Warm? The, uh, previous owner doesn’t even know it’s gone.”

“Alas, dear girl, I’m afraid she does. Mrs. Bellingham, widow of the late Leo Bellingham, owner of steel mills and shipyards, right? Probably pays her boy toys more than this bauble is worth, but she has definitely missed it.”

Darla shook her head. “How could that happen? And how do you know it?”

He shrugged. “Maybe today was inventory day. Or it was a gift from a special friend with sentimental value. Who can say? All I know is, I talked to Benny the Nod this morning and he said the Portland cops had come to call upon him early, waving a picture of this very item.” He tapped the pin.

“Sweet Jesus,” she said.

“I doubt He would have any part of this, hon, though you can tithe if you want. So, sixty?”

“Yeah, well, I guess. Sure.”

They drank more tea and he prattled on about some new classical guitar he’d just bought, Osage Orange this, cedar that, Sloane tuners, a genuine Carrith, look at the little owl inlay here—it all flowed into one ear and out the other. How unlucky was this? That the old woman had discovered the theft within hours of it happening? That cost her at least twenty thousand dollars!

There was just no justice . . .