The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 Read Online Free PDF

Mickey just felt sorry for him. He was a chip off the old block, that was for sure. He already looked like his father—of whom, Mickey remarked, there had been no sign.
    He ate fast food and slept in the car. After three days he could smell himself. He’d blown his tail on Sunday, he was sure of that, running a red light on Geary, and good sense told him to clear out before he got himself arrested. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. For the clouds to part and reveal the firmament—he didn’t know. He thought he’d figure it out when the time was right.
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    4
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    Henry Marsh checked into the Airport Hilton with a change of socks, a toothbrush, and a pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He needed some time to think.
    First thing Saturday, he called in sick for the week. He had AIDS, the Ebola virus. He’d come down with the bubonic plague. There was a family emergency, his grandmother was flooded out of her house in Mississippi, there was a war starting up in Bosnia again—whatever. He wasn’t going back to work, not for as long as he lived. His last official act as assistant general manager of the Radisson Hotel in downtown San Francisco was canning Tommy Reardon.
    â€œHe’s been late every day for a month. I think something’s going on. I caught him drinking during his shift twice last week, and I think he’s sniffing cocaine at work, too. He looks all bug-eyed and paranoid.”
    The open line hummed. He could hear Robert “Call-Me-Bob” Zimmer, the bar manager, making little clicking noises with his tongue.
    â€œI tried to give him a chance,” Marsh said. “I’ve been telling him to clean up his act. But I think it’s time something was done about it.”
    â€œWhere are you, Henry?” Zimm said finally. He was a big, poker-faced man with a dry sense of humor and an easy way with people. Everybody he worked with liked him. Marsh had been trying to get him fired for years. “People have been talking,” he said. “They’re worried about you. There’s been some concern. They say you’re showing all the signs of a real crack-up.”
    â€œSan Diego,” Marsh said. “We’re waiting for a flight. It’s Gina’s mother. She’s in the hospital again. Leukemia or something. Look, our flight’s boarding. I’ve got to go.”
    â€œIf anyone asks, Henry, you didn’t hear it from me, all right? But people are talking.”
    â€œThanks, Zimm. Just take care of Tommy for me, will ya?”
    â€œCall me Bob,” Zimm said, and he hung up.
    Time folded in on itself after that. He finished one pint, went across the street for another. When he finished that one, he went back out and bought a fifth. He passed out sometime around noon, and when he woke up, it was dark again.
    He watched
Saturday Night Live,
flipping channels with the bottle balanced precariously on his stomach. He watched Jenny Jones and thought about his wife. The thing was, he hadn’t expected the guy to show. Never in a million years did he think there were people who did this kind of thing for money. He hadn’t been prepared. The Cub Scout motto came back to him, and he remembered his father, a remote, congenitally disturbed man plagued by a host of neuroses who had deferred in all matters to his wife, Henry’s mother, a woman whose overweening influence had driven him, Henry, to the far ends of the earth—to California—to escape, to make a life for himself, to raise his children where the woman could not smother them as she had smothered him. But curse of curses, fate of fates, he had married his mother, or a woman just like her, a woman who seemed in every way different from her but who had, in fact, turned out to be so much the same he could no longer separate the two in his mind, and the bitches at his back had become one.
    Had she cheated? She’d lost interest in him sexually years