Read Online The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 by James Patterson, Otto Penzler - Free Book Online Page B

times in the past week, trying to scope out the neighborhood. On their second drive by, David had seen the camera in the tree, so they waited a couple days before coming back. The last time they’d come, they sprung for a rental car so the drug dealers wouldn’t recognize his truck. They didn’t know how carefully anyone was monitoring the camera (or cameras, if they hadn’t spotted all of them), but they wanted to be cautious.
    Jack stopped several houses from their target, parking the truck on a slight curve about a hundred yards away to give David a good shooting lane down the street. They’d discussed this. It would be hard on Jack getting back to the truck after the shooting started, but David’s rifles would be able to reach out a lot farther than anything the guys inside would have. So the distance was in their favor.
    “This is it, brother,” Jack said.
    “Good luck.” David didn’t stir; he spoke from beneath the blanket.
    Jack’s heart beat hard. Sweat slid down his skin inside his button-down shirt.
    “I’m leaving the window down,” he said. “You probably won’t be able to hear the Derringer, but listen anyway. Be ready when I come busting out of that place.”
    “When you grab a gun,” David said, “don’t get nothing too complicated.”
    “I reckon I’ll grab what I can grab.”
    “Grab something you know how to use is all I’m saying. You don’t want to be fumbling with the damn safety or figuring out how to get a round in the chamber.”
    “I ain’t gonna have time to be choosy, I don’t think.”
    “Don’t miss.”
    “You neither.”
    Jack got out of the Chevy and started walking down the street. His boot heels clicked on the pavement, loud in the morning silence. His hat felt heavy on his head, weighed down by the Derringer. They’d talked about him dressing different, trying to fit in better, but they decided once he opened his mouth, the people in the house would figure him for a redneck anyway. He’d had a shaved head and worn the same green clothes as everyone else in boot camp, but it didn’t stop them from nicknaming him Hillbilly. Might as well make it part of his story.
    Jack thought as he approached the house, If we can’t kill the sons of bitches, if it all goes to hell, please just let David get away.
    He’d been nervous from the start about bringing David. But just because he was sixteen didn’t mean he had any less right to want to avenge Jamie than Jack did. Jack had never been as close to David as he had been to Jamie, and Jamie had probably been closer to his little brother than his older. Jack was eight years older than David; Jamie had been born right in between them. When Jack had gone into the army, David was a kid still; when he came back, his baby brother was a young man, already shaving and dipping snuff, with a pretty girlfriend and a deer mounted on the wall bigger than any he or Jamie had ever shot. And Jamie was gone to college in Reno. Jack had been in such a hurry to get away from Montana, but when he was away he missed the ranch and the mountains and waking up in the morning in the house and having breakfast with his brothers. When he came back, though, it was all different. And then there was this; how had it gotten so bad that he was here now, walking down some Carson City street with a gun under his hat?
    The neighborhood wasn’t bad, some crappy houses and some nice ones. A white cat hurried across the street in front of him. An automated sprinkler kicked on at one house; one nozzle was busted and sprayed water all over the sidewalk. Jack walked right down the center of the street. He thought of a gunfighter in an old western walking down Main Street and into trouble; he told himself this was going to be different from the movies he’d watched growing up.
    The house was nondescript. Beige siding. Roof in need of repair. A couple of brown patches in the lawn. A few trees out front, nothing too big.
    He ignored the camera. He stepped