The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

After they had been gone a couple of hours, I glanced out the window and saw three uniformed cops out back. A female officer, dark, Hispanic, held the taut leash of a German Shepard as it nosed around the back of the dumpster and then moved out across the vacant lot that separated the bar from the rest of the strip mall. Only then did I realize that I might be suspected of something worse than kidnapping my own son. They might be looking for his body.

And why not? You read the papers; these things happen. Some enraged psycho wants to make his ex-wife regret leaving him, and he knows the way to her heart, he knows how to do real damage.

I made it to the bathroom in time to vomit in the toilet, retching up Victoria 's coffee, something in my skull rumbling. Something big, monstrous, had broken free and was lurching around on the deck of a world so fucked-up that the worst stuff, the unthinkable, had a hundred, a thousand, precedents.

I lay on the bed for a while, and then I got up and went down to the bar. Evil Ed saw me and brought me a beer.

"You need to lawyer up," he said. I was impressed: advice from Evil Ed!

"Thanks," I said. "But I didn't

do anything. I don't have anything to hide. And Da

Evil Ed shrugged and mopped the counter with a grey cloth. "You notice I don't ever take a drink? Might be you are bringing yourself bad luck, swallowing it right down your throat."

"What are you talking about?"

"They got this old Chinese saying goes like this: 'First the man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink. Then the drink takes the man.'"

"I still don't know what you're talking about."

"I guess you don't." Evil Ed slapped his palm down on the counter. Beneath it was a white envelope. He took his hand away, revealing my name on the front of the envelope, printed crudely with what looked like black crayon. "This was here on the counter when I opened this morning. I don't know what's inside it, and I don't want to know, and I should have handed it on to the cops when they were talking to me earlier today, but I didn't. It's yours. You do what you like with it."

I took the envelope and turned it over. It was sealed, and too light to contain anything more than a sheet or two of paper. I looked at the front again. All caps: SAM SILVERS.

I turned away from my unfinished beer and went back up to my room. I lay on the bed, my heart beating fiercely. I was afraid to open the envelope. Should I call the police? Perhaps it was a ransom note, and in opening it I'd destroy evidence. Forensics could do wonders, right?

Should I call Victoria? But that would be the same as calling the police; Victoria trusted authority. And I did not. I was raised on media tales of law enforcement agencies that bungled kidnappings, hostage situations, terrorist confrontations. Too often the i

Hands trembling, I tore open the envelope and pulled the single sheet of paper free. A ball-point pen with blue ink had printed words whose letters jumped above and below the baseline, investing the sentences with a childish energy.

This is what I read:

I have solved your child support! If there is no child there can be no support of a child and no need for these moneys of which your wife makes you pay and pay! Ha! I am very clever you must agree. This is bragging, but it is so. All your worries are overboard! I hope to talk to you sooner. -D.T.

I walked around the room, sneezing. My body ached, an aggressive pain, as though I'd been injected with poison. My throat was on fire. I was not feeling well. But that wasn't the problem, except to the extent that this flu-thing might keep me from thinking clearly. Why, for instance, hadn't I said anything to the police about Derrick Thorn? Did I really think it was a coincidence that he had shown up at the zoo? Did I think he was harmless? Did his crooked diction make him somehow childlike, did an i

I sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to recall what I'd thought and said to the detectives. I shook my head to clear it, which made the room waver like an undulating funhouse mirror. At Victoria 's… the thought of Derrick Thorn had not

once entered my mind. It was as though I'd completely forgotten the man's existence. Surely he was too strange to forget. I tried to picture him now, to bring him into focus by an act of will, but all I could see was his stout, pear-shaped body, a silhouette in the Reptile House, his face in shadow, his words… something about Da

How would I describe him to the police? A fat man in black who might, or might not, be sporting purple lipstick and false eyebrows? Wait, Evil Ed must have seen him. Sure. He brought us drinks. He came to the booth with the drinks.

I ran downstairs, too fast, slipping, saving myself from a sudden dive forward by snagging the wooden railing just in time. I stumbled into the bar. Evil Ed was at the opposite end of the bar listening to Rat Lady, who appeared to be wearing a bathrobe.

"Hey!" I shouted, and Evil Ed looked my way, saw me, and nodded, no doubt pleased to be moving out of the range of one of Rat Lady's monologues.

He drew a beer from the keg as he made his way toward me, but I shook my head.

"I don't want a beer. I've got a question."

Evil Ed raised his eyebrows, set the beer down, folded his arms, and leaned back some.

"You saw him. Could you describe him?"

"Describe who?"

"The guy I was talking to the night before last. Fat guy, really pale skin?"

He shook his head. "Wasn't but you. Sitting in that booth, drinking yourself into a coma, talking to yourself, coming out with a laugh every now and then, nothing happy about it, that laugh."

I kept on: "His name was Derrick Thorn. He was some kind of foreigner, spoke fu

But no accent, I thought, for the first time. "He paid for the beers."

Ed frowned. "You paid for your beers your ownself."

I had him there. "Then how come I didn't have a tab run up?"

"You did. You paid it at the end of the evening."

"I never do that," I said.

Evil Ed laughed. "That's right. Took me by surprise. You was drunker than usual, which is saying something."

Reflexively, I reached for the beer. This was to be a medicinal beer, a beer for clarity. If I could slow my thoughts down, I could sort them out.

It took more than one beer. A lot more. When Evil Ed came by, he would glower at me, maybe thinking I had more important things to do then sit and drink beer. But I was working, thinking, and finally it came to me: I remembered what I needed, staggered to my feet, and headed back toward the stairs.

Back in my room, I headed straight for the nightstand, grabbed the drawer, yanked it-

too hard-and it flew out, and all the cards and pens and antacid tablets jumped up in the air and scattered over the floor. Shit.

There were a lot of business cards. And, of course, amid this ridiculous surfeit of self-advertising, there wasn't,

of course, of course, any card bearing the name Derrick Thorn and promising "good deals by mutual bargain" a phrase goofy enough to lodge in my mind even if the creator of that inanity was as elusive as truth at the White House, even if-

I let out a whoop of triumph and pounced on the card. I turned it over, saw the number, and without consulting my fever-riddled and almost worthless mind, I ran to the phone, snatched up the receiver, and made the call.