By Hook or By Crook Page 9
I wasn’t going to be the one to get in the way of that.
Valentina stirred. “How’s Linda?” she asked sleepily.
“Badly beaten,” I said. “But they think she’ll be all right.”
“Good.” Valentina looked at Annie. “Bastard beat her too. I had someone look at the bruise. She doesn’t have a concussion.”
“That’s a relief,” I said.
Valentina was still looking at the sleeping child. “Think they’ll be all right?”
“At least now they have a chance,” I said.
And no one could ask for more than that.
• • •
KRIS N ELSCOTT has written six Smokey Dalton novels so far. The first, A Dangerous Road, won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was short-listed for the Edgar Award for Best novel; the second, Smoke-Filled Rooms, was a PNBA Book Award Finalist, and the third, Thin Walls, was one of the Chicago Tribune’s best mysteries of the year. Days of Rage received a Shamus Award nomination as one of the best private eye novels of the year. Entertainment Weekly says her equals are Walter Mosley and Raymond Chandler. Booklist calls the Smokey Dalton series “a high-class crime series” and Salon.com says, “Kris Nelscott can lay claim to the strongest series of detective novels now being written by an American author.”
SURVIVAL INSTINCTS
by Sandra Seamans
Penny pulled the worn quilt tight around her body in a futile attempt to stay warm. It wasn’t the cold drafts sneaking through the walls of the old motel that were making her shiver. It was them. The men who killed her father.
She wanted to cry until her heart finished breaking with the loss, but then they’d find her. They’d follow the sound of her grief, yank her from the hidey-hole and kill her. Just because, but maybe not before they did worse than just snuff the life out of her.
They’d come off the nearly dead highway, their car slipping into the motel parking lot long after Daddy had turned off the lights and gone to bed. The slamming of car doors and the incessant zzzing of the buzzer had woken her. She heard her father stumble from his bed, then fumble with the locks. The tinkle of the little bell above the entry, the breaking of glass as the door hit the wall, then his panicked shouts as he tried to warn her without giving her away. Penny grabbed the quilt and Burly Bear, then scurried into the hidden cupboard her father had built into the wall to keep her safe. He always said there was no telling what kind of trash the wind would blow off the highway.
The men were nothing more than a pack of wild dogs, ripping and tearing through the motel, stealing everything of value and leaving no witnesses behind. It had been the wrong night for the newly wed Mr. and Mrs. Kipps to take a room at the rundown Savoy Motel. From her hiding place, Penny had heard them, one after another, raping the bride before finally killing the couple. Clamping her hands over her ears couldn’t keep Mrs. Kipps’ screams at bay.
An hour after they came, the night went dead quiet, then an unearthly howl sounded through the stillness. In a second pass through the motel office they’d found the door to her bedroom hidden behind a pair of drapes. Heard the curses when they pushed through to find her mussed bed, the small pile of dirty clothes in the corner and her backpack ready for school in the morning.
The sound of footsteps and shouts of, “Find that girl.” announced that the hunt was on. She fought down the panic that threatened to expose her. All she could do was make herself smaller and try not to make a sound that could give her hiding spot away. If they found her? She shuddered at the awful pictures her twelve-yearold mind conjured up.
Penny calmed herself by going over everything her father had told her to do if she ever found herself in the hidey-hole. Stay quiet like a mouse, the least little move and they’ll hear you. If they hear you, know that they’ll find you and you’ll have to fight your way out to stay alive. Remember that the most deadly creature on earth is a cornered rattlesnake. Think like a rattler, strike when they least expect it, and you might survive, depending on how many of them there were.
She closed her eyes, forcing herself to remember, thinking hard, sorting through the sounds she’d heard earlier and the ones she was hearing now. There were at least three of them. Three distinct voices drifting through the thin motel walls when they killed the Kipps. If they came at her all at once, she’d be joining her father. One at time, she might have a chance. A slim one, but a chance.
Her ears pricked up at the scrape of a chair being dragged across the floor of her bedroom. One pair of heavy boots stomping around the room, a single fist banging on the walls, looking for a hollow spot. Penny heard the chair hit the wall above her head. Plaster board exploded around her as the chair was jerked down through the wall leaving an opening big enough for the man to step through.
A quick prayer and her straight razor slashed out and sliced across the big artery in his leg. He grabbed for her, but the blood drained too fast and he dropped to the floor his hands holding only air. As he crashed, she heard the others rushing down the hallway. She took her shooting stance and aimed at the doorway, just like Daddy had shown her. The shotgun killed the first man outright but only winged the man behind him.
“You’d best put that gun down, girlie, cause there ain’t no way in hell you’re getting out of here alive.”
Was it the man she wounded or another one? He didn’t sound too hurt.
“You killed my Daddy and the Kipps, you think I’m going to listen to you?”
“You’re up against it, kid, we got you outnumbered.”
“Had me outnumbered. You’re the only one left. Walk through that door and you’ll be joining your friends. Leave, and you get to live another day.”
“I can’t leave you here. Not alive.”
“Sure you can. I ain’t seen your face and I don’t know who you are. There’s no way I can testify against someone I ain’t seen. You leave, who’s to know you were even here with these other two?”
“Can I trust you?”
“Why not? I have to trust you, don’t I?”
Penny crouched low, making herself small. She heard the car door slam and the engine start. Listened for the spray of gravel against the motel and the squeal of tires hitting the pavement. They were too slow in coming.
She waited, like a rattlesnake in the rocks. Remembering the car doors. Four of them slamming when they first arrived. Penny caught a whiff of perfume on the cold draft blowing through the silent hall. With the scent, everything fell into place. The reason her father had opened the door. A woman alone in the middle of the night wouldn’t have set off the normal alarm bells in his mind. He’d have taken pity on her and that’s when the men had struck.
Hours of watching Animal Planet with her dad clicked through her brain. The female was almost always deadlier than the male, of any species. She coiled up, ready to strike. There would be no hesitation.
• • •
SANDRA SEAMANS is a short story writer whose work can be found scattered about the Internet in zines such as Spinetingler, The Thrilling Detective, and Beat to a Pulp. Several of her stories have been short-listed for The Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award and Spinetingler Magazine’s Spinetingler Award.
JULIUS KATZ
By Dave Zeltserman
We were at the dog track, Julius Katz and I. I had finished relaying to Julius the odds I’d calculated for the greyhounds running in the third race; odds that were calculated by building thousands of analytical models simulating each dog’s previous races, then, in a closed loop, continuously adjusting the models until they accurately predicted the outcome of each of these races. After that, I factored in the current track and weather conditions, and had as precise a prediction as was mathematically possible. Julius stood silently mulling over what I had given him.
“Bobby’s Diva, Iza Champ, and Moondoggie,” Julius murmured softly, repeating the names of the top three dogs I had projected to win.
“Eighty-two percent probability that that will be
the order of the top three dogs,” I said.
“That high, huh? Interesting, Archie.”
Julius’s eyes narrowed as he gazed off into the distance, his facial muscles hardening to the point where he could’ve almost been mistaken for a marble sculpture. From past experience, I knew he was running his own calculations, and what I would’ve given to understand and simulate the neuron network that ran through his brain. Julius Katz was forty-two, six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, with an athletic build and barely an ounce of fat. He was a devoted epicurean who worked off the rich food he consumed each night by performing an hour of rigorous calisthenics each morning, followed up with an hour of intensive martial arts training. From the way women reacted to him, I would guess that he was attractive, not that their flirting bothered him at all. Julius’s passions in life were beautiful women, gourmet food, even finer wine, and, of course, gambling — especially gambling. More often than not he tended to be successful when he gambled — especially at times when I was able to help. All of his hobbies required quite a bit of money and, during times when he was stuck in a losing streak and his bank account approached anemic levels, Julius would begrudgingly take on a client. There were always clients lining up to hire him, since he was known as Boston’s most brilliant and eccentric private investigator, solving some of the city’s most notorious cases. The truth of the matter was, Julius hated to forego his true passions for the drudgery of work and only did so when absolutely necessary, and that would be after days of unrelenting nagging on my part. I knew about all this because I acted as Julius’s accountant, personal secretary, unofficial biographer, and all-around assistant, although nobody but Julius knew that I existed, at least other than as a voice answering his phone and booking his appointments. Of course, I don’t really exist, at least not in the sense of a typical sentient being. Or make that a biological sentient being.
My name isn’t really Archie. During my time with Julius I’ve grown to think of myself as Archie, the same as I’ve grown to imagine myself as a five-foot-tall, heavyset man with thinning hair, but in reality I’m not five feet tall, nor do I have the bulk that I imagine myself having, and I certainly don’t have any hair, thinning or otherwise. I also don’t have a name, only a serial identification number. Julius calls me Archie, and for whatever reason it seems right; besides, it’s quicker to say than the eighty-four-digit serial identification number that has been burnt into me. You’ve probably already guessed that I’m not human, and certainly not anything organic. What I am is a four-inch, rectangular-shaped piece of space-aged computer technology that’s twenty years more advanced than what’s currently considered theoretically possible — at least aside from whatever lab created me. How Julius acquired me, I have no clue. Whenever I’ve tried asking him, he jokes around, telling me he won me in a poker game. It could be true — I wouldn’t know since I have no memory of my time before Julius.
So that’s what I am, a four-inch rectangular mechanism weighing approximately 3.2 ounces. What’s packed inside my titanium shell includes visual and audio receptors as well as wireless communication components and a highly sophisticated neuron network that not only simulates intelligence, but learning and thinking that adapts in response to my experiences. Auditory and visual recognition are included in my packaging, which means I can both see and hear. As you’ve probably already guessed, I can also speak. When Julius and I are in public, I speak to him through a wireless receiver that he wears in his ear as if it were a hearing aid. When we’re alone in his office, he usually plugs the unit into a speaker on his desk.
A man’s voice announced over the loudspeaker that bettors had two minutes to place their final bets for the third race. That brought Julius back to life, a vague smile drifting over his lips. He placed a five-hundred-dollar wager, picking Sally’s Pooch, Wonder Dog, and Pugsly Ugsly to win the trifecta — none of the dogs that I had predicted. The odds displayed on the betting board were eighty to one. I quickly calculated the probabilities using the analytical models I had devised earlier and came up with a mathematically zero percent chance of his bet winning. I told him that and he chuckled.
“Playing a hunch, Archie.”
“What you’re doing is throwing away five hundred dollars,” I argued. Julius was in the midst of a losing streak and his last bank statement was far from healthy. In a way, it was good because it meant he was going to have to seriously consider the three o’clock appointment that I had booked for him with a Miss Norma Brewer. As much as he hates it, working as a private investigator sharpens him and usually knocks him out of his dry gambling spells. I had my own ulterior motives, for his taking a new case would give me a chance to adapt my deductive reasoning. One of these days I planned to solve a case before Julius did. You wouldn’t think a piece of advanced computer technology would feel competitive, but as I’ve often argued with Julius, there’s little difference between my simulated intelligence and what’s considered sentient. So yes, I wanted to beat Julius, I wanted to prove to him that I could solve a case as well or better than he could. He knew this and always got a good laugh out of it, telling me he had doomed that possibility by naming me Archie.
Of course, I’ve long figured out that joke. Julius patterned my personality and speech on some of the most important private-eye novels of the twentieth century, including those of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Rex Stout. The name he gave me, Archie, was based on Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe’s second banana who was always one step behind his boss. Yeah, I got the joke, but one of these days I was going to surprise Julius. It was just a matter of seeing enough cases to allow me to readjust my neuron network appropriately. One of these days he was going to have to start calling me Nero. But for the time being, I was Archie. The reason I had an image of myself as being five-foot tall was also easy to explain. Julius wore me as a tie clip, which put me at roughly a five-foot distance from the ground when he stood. I never quite figured out where my self-image of thinning hair and heavyset build came from, but guessed they were physical characteristics I picked up from the Continental Op. Or maybe for some reason I identified with Costanza from Seinfeld — one of the few television programs Julius indulged in.
The dogs were being led around the track and into their starting boxes. Julius sauntered over to get a better view of the track, seemingly unconcerned about his zero-percent chance of winning his bet.
“You’re throwing away five hundred dollars,” I said again. “If your bank account was flush, this wouldn’t be a problem, but you realize today you don’t have enough to cover next month’s expenses.”
His eyes narrowed as he studied the dogs. “I’m well aware of my financial situation,” he said.
“You haven’t had any wine since last night, so I know you’re not intoxicated,” I said. “The only thing I can figure out is some form of dementia. I’ll hack into Johns Hopkins’ research database and see if there’s any information that can help me better diagnose this — ”
“Please, Archie,” he said, a slight annoyance edging into his voice. “The race is about to begin.”
The race began. The gates to the starting boxes opened and the dogs poured out of them. As they chased after the artificial rabbit, I watched in stunned silence. The three dogs Julius picked led the race from start to finish, placing in the precise order in which Julius had bet.
For a long moment — maybe for as long as thirty milliseconds — my neuron network froze. I realized afterwards that I had suffered from stunned amazement — a new emotional experience for me.
“T-That’s not possible,” I stammered, which was another first for me. “The odds were mathematically zero that you would win.”
“You realize you just stammered?”
“Yes, I know. How did you pick these dogs?”
He chuckled, very pleased with himself. “Archie, hunches sometimes defy explanation.”
“I don’t buy it,” I said.
His right eyebrow cocked. “No?”
He had moved to the cashier’s window to collect on his trifecta bet. Forty thousand dollars before taxes, but even what was left over after the state and federal authorities took their bites would leave his bank account flush enough to cover his next two months’ expenses, which meant he was going to be blowing off his three o’clock appointment. I came up with an idea to keep that from happening, then focused on how he was able to win that bet.
“The odds shouldn’t have been eighty to one, as was posted,” I said. “They should’ve been far higher.”
He exchanged his winning ticket for a check made out for the after-tax amount and placed it carefully into his wallet. He turned towards the track exit and walked at a leisurely pace.
“Very good, Archie. I think you’ve figured it out. Why were the odds only eighty to one?”
I had already calculated the amount bet on the winning trifecta ticket given the odds and the total amount bet on the race, but I wanted to know how many people made those bets so I hacked into the track’s computer system. “Four other bets were made for a total of six thousand dollars on the same trifecta combination.”
“And why was that?”
I knew the answer from one of the Damon Runyon stories that was used to build my experience base. “The odds of anyone else picking that trifecta bet given those dogs’ past history is one out of 6.8 million. That four other people would be willing to bet that much money given an expected winnings of near zero dollars could only be explained by the race being fixed.”
“Bingo.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “If you knew which dogs were going to win, why didn’t you bet more money?”
“Two reasons. First, fixing a dog race is not an exact science. Things can go wrong. Second, if I’d bet more, I would’ve upset the odds enough to where I could’ve tipped off the track authorities, and even worse, upset the good folks who set up the fix and were nice enough to invite me to participate.”