The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 Read Online Free PDF Page B

ago, but then she’d never been much interested in sex. Still, he remembered times when it was free and easy between them. Certainly they’d fornicated once—twice, if they’d conceived the two brats, the bloodsuckers, and he wondered if that was when it had ended, when the first or the second of the kids had popped out, if that was the precise moment when the gates had swung closed, when the dream of better things and better times had died, stillborn. They—she and the children—had made his life a prison.
    Sunday morning he washed his socks and his underwear in the sink. He found a Chinese takeout menu in the drawer by the bed, tucked into the obligatory Gideon’s, and he ordered spareribs and egg rolls for breakfast. He drew the curtains and paced the room naked. He stood under the shower until it ran cold. He passed out again in the afternoon, and when he woke, it was a quarter of two and he had fifteen minutes to haul himself out of bed and across the street to the store for another bottle.
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    5
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    The girl crept downstairs after dark. The television was blaring in her parents’ room, an apocryphal white noise, a bluish blush of light showing under the door. It gave the impression of something trying to get out, something she’d seen in a hundred horror movies, but it was only her mother in there, hiding away.
    The lights in the hall burned like sentries and made her think of Bedouin fires in the desert, something she’d seen in
National Geographic,
though it was the words that came to her and not the image.
Like Bedouin fires,
she thought. The house was dark, as still as a mausoleum.
    She’d just reached the front door when the noise from the television upstairs died and her mother’s voice carried shrilly down the hall.
    â€œWhere are you going at this time of night, Jaime?”
    The woman had some kind of sixth sense; she had sonar like a bat’s.
    â€œI’m just going for a walk, Mom. I’ll be back in a while.”
    Her mother didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
    â€œWell, okay, sweetie. But you be careful, will you? I hate to think about you walking around out there all by yourself after dark. I know it’s a good neighborhood, but don’t be long. I can’t stand to think about it.”
    The girl rolled her eyes.
    â€œThen don’t think about it, Mom.”
    She didn’t wait for her mother to answer.
    Outside was the roiling sky, the moon like a hole punched in the clouds, and the faint taste of the ocean on the air. She took it for granted they were near the water, although she couldn’t see it from the house. When they’d gone to Sacramento to see her grandparents, she’d missed it. She’d felt some nameless dread, an anxiety she couldn’t place until they’d come back across the San Mateo bridge, and she’d realized it was the ocean she missed all along.
    She felt reflexively in her pocket for her keys before she pulled the door shut and stood on the front step for a minute, looking up and down the quiet street, the starlit confines of her world. A couple walked slowly past, dappled in shadow. They were climbing the hill, leaning into the grade, and they were maybe a few years older than she was. Moonlight glinted off the boy’s glasses, and the girl’s face shone, her lips parted in an expression that was at once abject and leery and was somehow frightening on both accounts. The boy was neat, clean-cut, and maybe a little embarrassed. He held her hand awkwardly, as if unsure what to do with it.
    Boys were puzzling, Jaime thought, only in the depths of their stupidity.
    A man went quickly past on the other side of the street, ducking under the trees, his face hung in shadow. His jacket flashed like a warning signal, bumblebee yellow, and the girl hesitated, letting him dart past before she came down the steps and crossed the lawn, turning up the hill toward the bus stop. Her