The Mammoth Book Best International Crime Read online

  “They don’t have to know nothing to lick we up,” Danny said cagily. “He only have to suspect is me and my ass is grass.”

  Trey laughed at the unwitting pun. “Don’t fret yourself, cousin. We safe like Selassie I briefcase, man.”

  On the other end, Danny was bitting his lip. “Man . . .”

  Trey, blowing out a thick cloud of smoke, repeated his assurances.

  Danny wasn’t appeased. “I coming down. We have to deal with this man or he go find we and mess we up bad bad, brother. I coming down tonight.”

  Trey hung up the phone just as a voice called, “Good afternoon,” from outside the house. Ambling to the door in shorts and a plain white undershirt, he jumped visibly when he saw his visitors – Garvin and Tasha. He walked to the gate.

  “What going on?” Trey greeted Garvin. “Tasha.” He couldn’t help his eyes, which drank her in. She smiled lightly and held Garvin’s arm tighter.

  “Trey, my brother!” Garvin was all fake good cheer but his eyes were flint. His grip around Tasha’s waist contracted. “I hear you have some excellent smoke. I was wondering if you could make a deal with us. I need two kees. Will you give it to me?”

  “I don’t know about give,” Trey said coolly. “But I could certainly sell it to you if you want.” Garvin was half-listening. His eyes were busily roaming the facade of the house, trying to bend around the corner to see what lay on the other side. In time, his brain churned the information around. “How much?” he asked. Trey called his price. Garvin whistled. “Even with the employee discount that sounding high,” the drug pusher said with a small, cold laugh. Tasha stood up taller, bristling.

  Trey was casually taking out a sample for them. “Smoke that and tell me it not worth it.”

  Garvin rubbed the thick, fragrant leaves between his fingers, pulling them apart to feel the stickiness of the plant. It was perfectly dried, and full of illegal goodness. He didn’t have to smoke it to know it would be a sweet, potent ride.

  They were standing at the gate in the fence surrounding the yard, Trey on one side and Garvin and Tasha on the other. Garvin jerked his head in farewell and pulled Tasha down the road after him into a black Lexus SUV.

  Tasha was livid. “What the hell was that? You don’t have to pay he for that weed! Just take it!”

  Garvin sucked his teeth and drove faster. “Hush your stupid mouth, nah,” he mumbled threateningly. “What you think I planning to do?” They reached his house, drove through the electronic gate past the half-dozen dozing Rottweilers, parked, and walked through the triple-locked front door with its alarm system. “But I had to find out if he had the weed. No sense robbing he for a ounce. And look, he have it. Nice grade too.” Tasha waited in silence for him to get to the point. “So while you bulling him to distract him, I go find the weed and take it.”

  She recoiled instantly. “What you mean?” She pushed a finger into his face. “What you take me for? Some kinda ho?”

  “Aye, take it easy. What, you can’t bull the man one more time? I sure when you was living there allyuh wasn’t playing patty-cake when the night come. What is one more, for this? For me?” He paused, giving her a canny look. “Or I know what it is. You want me to get lick up. You want Antonio to shoot me.”

  Tasha’s face grew hot. She slapped him hard. “Don’t be an ass, Garvin. I done tell you already, me ent no ho.”

  Rubbing his face, he cut her a sideways look and lifted his hand to hit her but stopped. “Why you always have to slap me, Tasha? I tell you don’t do it. One of these days I will slap you down.”

  Instantly contrite, Tasha snuggled a hand on the reddened cheek. “Sorry, darling.”

  He sucked his teeth in disgust. “Anyway, you go have to distract him somehow. Whether you sex him or not is your choice. Me ent business with that. Just make sure he don’t come out. I go handle it from this end.”

  But she doubted Garvin could. “Why you don’t distract him and let me tief it?” Garvin shook his head, but before he could speak, she interjected, “I know the house better than you. I know where he does like to hide things. It make more sense this way, Garvin.” She pressed her round breasts into his chest and thrust her hips forward until their pelvic regions touched. By the time she kissed him, Garvin had changed his mind.

  “No scene.” He couldn’t maintain a blood flow to both his brain and his penis, so he aimed low.

  The knock was soft. It was close to midnight. This time Trey wasn’t surprised to see Garvin outside his window. “What’s the scene, man?” Trey asked.

  Garvin grinned. “I come to do the deal, partner.” Trey rubbed his eyes. He had been napping before the visit. He yawned and stretched as he closed the window and went to open the front door. His nemesis was still grinning. “Two kilos, man. Look, the money there,” Garvin said, gesturing at a small package on the steps of the front porch.

  Trey didn’t move from the doorway. Something felt wrong. “Look, man, I change my mind. I not selling you again.” As he moved to close the door, Garvin sprang forward with surprising grace and speed.

  “How you mean you ent selling me? Man, don’t talk foolishness now. Two kilos. Go and bring it.”

  Trey shook his head. “Nah, partner. I done. You go have to get that someplace else—”

  The report of the gunshot silenced them both. Blood drained from Garvin’s face and he was as white as the wall he had to lean against to keep from falling.

  Leaving him standing there, Trey ran to the back of the house from where the noise had come. Tasha’s still body was sprawled on the ground by the kitchen door. Danny was standing in the doorway, dazed, a .38 in his hand. Trey rushed to his side and grabbed the gun.

  “She was picking the lock, Trey. She was coming to tief the weed . . .”

  “Boy, you mad or what? What we going to do now? Eh?” He turned to his dead ex-girlfriend. Knowing she had probably been trying to steal the ganja was no consolation. He stooped and stroked her silky, dark cheek. It was still warm, unblemished, and as soft as it had been in life.

  Danny sprang to action. “Boy, we don’t have no time for that. We have to move she.”

  Trey nodded. At least he had some garbage bags at hand.

  When Garvin got home he was trembling and pale. Antonio found him there, still jittery and sickly yellow, four days later. Tasha was gone, and so were two kilograms of product. Antonio wanted an explanation and he wanted one quickly.

  “Is-is-is Trey!” Garvin stammered, breath cut short by the fingers tightening around his throat. “He trust the weed and then tell me he don’t have the money.” Antonio relaxed his grip. Trust the weed? Why would Trey want two kilos of weed on credit? Antonio glared at his brother, but Garvin just gave an anxious smile.

  They pulled up at Trey’s gate in Antonio’s Lexus SUV, a shiny black monster that Antonio probably loved more than he did his whiny, dishonest little brother. It was nearly one in the morning.

  “Trey!” Garvin bawled at the top of his lungs. “Trey!” There was no answer. Antonio leaped from the van and strode up to the house. Kicking in the front door, he entered. There were no signs of life or weed, except for endless ashtrays overflowing with cigarette and spliff butts.

  Garvin murmured weakly, “Like they gone.”

  Antonio, a stronger, larger version of Garvin, was not amused. He pulled his Magnum Desert Eagle from his waistband and put it to his brother’s temple. “You go find them, right? And find my weed. If I only find out you had anything to do with this—”

  “But how you go say that, Antonio?” Garvin whined.

  “You like to tief too damn much. You feel I don’t know you?” Antonio flicked off the gun’s safety and rubbed the chrome muzzle against Garvin’s cheek. “If I only find out,” he repeated. Then he uncocked the gun and stuck it back into his waistband. He turned to look at the contents of the house again. It was on the dresser in Trey’s bedroom that he found what he was looking for—a block of board wax wrapped in a plastic bag labeled, Zo
ra’s Sweetbread and Cakes, Toco Road, Sans Souci. He grinned. There was no humor in the smile.

  Once again, Trey was surrounded by black garbage bags. This time they were empty. Danny, sprawled in a beanbag next to the bed, was nearly unconscious. Trey was feeling no pain himself. It was the last of the weed, a nearly impossible amount to smoke out in three days, but with dedication and a lot of help from their friends, mothers, and Jimmy, they had done it. The evidence was up in smoke. Mostly, anyway. Aunty Zora had seen her way to baking a most excellent batch of sweetbread with an unusually strong herbal kick.

  Trey stumbled to his feet and zigzagged to the bathroom. As he let a stream of urine hiss urgently into the toilet bowl, he vaguely heard a car pull up outside in the silence of the Sans Souci night. Moving to the window, he saw the moonlight bouncing off the glossy surface of a familiar black Lexus. “Shit,” he muttered. Danny was bleary-eyed when Trey tried to shake him awake. “Danny, boy, get up. Garvin and he brother come looking for we.”

  This was instantly sobering. Danny shook his head to clear it. “What the hell we go do?” he asked in a whisper.

  Trey was down on his hands and knees, avoiding the windows. “Well, first thing is to get to ras out of here.”

  They slipped silently out the back door as Garvin and Antonio walked through the front gate. The three dogs, rushing at the strangers, kept them occupied, and at first they didn’t see the two figures running down the road. It was Garvin, shaking Sarah off his left ankle, who spotted them.

  “Look them running!” Antonio and Garvin gave chase into the bush. But the dark night, even lit by a full moon, confounded them. They were soon lost. There was a rustling to their right. Garvin, who had never been in a forest before, whimpered, “Antonio, what was that?”

  Antonio sucked his teeth and kicked at the undergrowth. “What you get me in here, Garvin? You’s a real clown, boy. I don’t know why I does trust you with anything.” They kept walking for about an hour, drifting further and further into the bush. Then they spotted it—a sloped clearing planted with lush marijuana trees higher than their heads. Garvin was the first to rush in.

  “So, is here he get it!” he exclaimed. In the quiet forest, his voice was a cannon.

  “What you talking about?” Antonio asked, fingering a leaf with admiration. Even in the dark he recognized it was good weed.

  “Trey. This is where he get the—”

  Too late, he realized his mistake. But Antonio already had the gun to his head.

  “I thought you say he tief the weed from we.”

  Garvin gave a sickly smile. “Well . . .”

  “I tell you already, I go kill you for tiefing from me.”

  “But Antonio, listen, this is the weed, man! I smoke it myself!”

  Neither of them heard the footsteps behind them. A pair of gunshots shattered the quiet of the night. Antonio never had time to turn and fire a single bullet.

  The tall, bald-headed man with the smoking gun spat on the two bodies before turning on his heel, saying, “Come back to tief my weed again, you bitches. Not one fart of that.”

  In the fisherman’s hut on the beach, Trey and Danny shivered for a few hours until dawn before creeping back to the house. Garvin and Antonio never came back for the Lexus, so eventually it replaced the battered Land Rover as Zora’s delivery van. And in Zora’s backyard, a new bed of ixora bloomed unusually well that year.

  Angel Child

  Tove Klackenberg

  It had been her job to hold the piglets when it had been time to castrate them. She could still feel the hard little body struggling in her lap, the scream that penetrated her every pore. The child’s scream was unpleasant, but quite bearable. The small, chubby arms that flailed weren’t even an inconvenience. She had a good grip on the little head and stuck the nail a few centimeters into the left ear, then scraped around thoroughly. The girl’s screaming became stronger, but she didn’t hesitate a second. Instead, she turned the head and repeated the procedure in the other ear. Castrating the pigs had been necessary. This, too, was necessary. Nothing strange about that. Soon it would be over – this time. The howling had stopped and turned into hiccupping sobs.

  Swollen. Fulfilled. She was something, for the first time in her life. A kind of power came from her belly, and it almost allowed her to float along past the rows of plastic boxes, that were filled with candy. Red frogs, pink mushrooms, and small, sour cola bottles. Not licorice, that disgusted her. Her belly gave her the right to eat whatever she wanted. Eat as many sweets as she wanted. There was nothing strange about it. She was just as valuable as anyone else, in fact more valuable. Thanks to her belly.

  She prepared herself carefully. On the shelf above the towel hooks in the bathroom, all the pacifiers were lined up in a row One with Mickey Mouse, one with Dumbo, and two pink ones with little hearts on them – in case it was a girl. The pram had been purchased, and it had been expensive, but her child wasn’t going to have anything used.

  The days passed with a comfortable tempo. She had to be careful, she knew that. It was not just a time of waiting, but more a condition. A kind of happiness.

  It ended on one of those medium-gray days in March. She’d been five days overdue, and suddenly it was time. Everything went as planned and the little, red-faced, baby-doll lay in her crib. Now, she would never again have to be lonely, she had her child to take care of. The child needed her and she needed the child. Such relationships are called “symbiotic” and were encouraged on the maternity ward.

  The child, who was baptized Angelica, was gifted with angel hair and big, naive, blue eyes, but she also had vocal resources that could compete with the best smoke detector. The child always found something to screech about, but she took care of her responsibilities, as a mother should, and was quick to read from a book she’d gotten about babies. She prepared herself thoroughly for each new stage of development. And how she loved to comb the gleaming hair. The small tufts of it turned into petit braids. She fastened them with the kind of rubber bands that were covered and didn’t damage the hair. They were also decorated, most often with tiny hearts.

  The woman on the other side of the desk leaned forward and her voice hardened.

  “We have some concerns,” she repeated. “The child’s need for security and stimulation . . . Can you describe how you satisfy . . . No, perhaps I’ve started at the wrong end. Tell me a little about yourself, your childhood and such.”

  Her gaze had fastened just above the caseworker’s left shoulder. Her lips moved when she read one of the messages on the notice board: “The most important thing about life is not where we’re standing, but in which direction we’re headed.” She had to ask the caseworker to repeat the question, and the woman’s voice cracked as she nearly shouted, “I asked you to tell me about your childhood!”

  After a moment of silence, she answered, “Normal. It was normal. Just like everyone else’s, just about.”

  She saw the pen move a little helplessly above the notebook without leaving any marks. Wrong answer, obviously.

  “What assistance do you think you need?”

  “Do I need help, you mean . . .? A little something extra for Angelica’s birthday would be nice, you know. I was thinking of having a real party, with all the children getting a bag of candy to take home. That can get expensive, you know.”

  The caseworker suddenly smiled encouragingly, and shoved the candy dish on her desk forward, as though in reward. “Good. Excellent. That’s more like it. A social network. Tell me more, please, who had you thought to invite to the party?”

  The inquiry had resulted, six months later, in a “Care Plan” including “Assistance” that she accepted without the slightest resistance. The “Assistance” came in the form of her very own At-Home-Aid, a large breasted creature, with a wide open embrace, who loved children, all children, but especially an angel child such as Angelica. It felt so good to be able to let go and let the Aid take control. She enjoyed being able to stay in bed while t
he Aid pottered about. Angelica’s jarring screams, that had been impossible to get away from, earlier – even in the shower with the little, turquoise radio turned up to full volume – were handled by the Aid’s steady hand. This was practical, as the child seemed to cry more often as she got older.

  The Aid was also clever at organization, at getting past busy health clinic receptionists, emergency room nurses and foreign-born doctors who were unwilling to make referrals. During her second year of life, Angelica had developed into a frequent client of the Health Care System. The Aid was concerned, but happy in secret. Each new visit to the doctor gave her an extra kick of self-esteem. She was “The Child’s Mother”. She alone guaranteed its regular intake of penicillin and insured recovery. Her knowledge of the intimate details of ear inflammation, often exceeded that of the various “white-coats” they met. Things like plastic tubes and resistance to antibiotics – life revolving around the never-ending ear problems – were all so much simpler for her.

  Everyone around her, in the conference room, was serious. Some looked sad, one looked indignant. The dirty, yellow walls seemed to be closing in. When she was faced with the words on the paper in front of her, she laughed, but no one smiled with her. A memory, of a teacher from her years in college, popped up. He hadn’t had long to go until his retirement, and had gotten bored with tenses, word classifications and burnt out teenage students, long ago. Instead, he spent class time reading aloud. Baron Von Münchausen came riding on a cannonball in her mind’s eye, as she attempted to make her way through the meaning of the words on the papers, that everyone seemed so eager for her to understand. Her lawyer tried to explain them, but she wasn’t listening. She just felt so tired.

  “Have to get home to Angelica,” she mumbled and rose to leave. She sank back down into her chair when a woman with horse teeth, and big earrings took command, and obviously decided to speak in simple terms:

  “Angelica is no longer in your home. She will be living with your At-Home-Aid until further notice. Think how good . . . it is for her, to be staying with someone she knows. Angelica has not fared well, and is at risk of further injury if we do not do this. You don’t want that, do you?”