The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

Michael Bracken SMOKED ^{from Noir at the Salad Bar}

When Beau James raised the twin service-bay doors of the converted Conoco station at 11 a.m. Tuesday morning, he had already been smoking brisket and ribs for more than eight hours, just as he had six days a week since opening Quarryville Smokehouse twelve years earlier. Rain or shine, Tuesday through Sunday, he served a two-meat menu, offering a single side and no dessert, and closing when he had no brisket, ribs, or coleslaw remaining.

Beau worked the indirect-heat pit alone, not allowing anyone to learn his technique for preparing fall-off-the-bone beef ribs and moist brisket with dark peppery crust, and four days a week he also worked the counter alone. He only hired help—his girlfriend’s teenage daughter, Amanda—on the weekends, when business typically doubled. The Quarryville Smokehouse lunch plate consisted of a choice between chopped brisket, sliced brisket, or beef ribs, accompanied by a scoop of coleslaw, four bread-and-butter pickle slices, a slice of sweet onion, two slices of Mrs Baird’s Bread, and a twelve-ounce can of Dr Pepper. He offered no sauce and had been known to refuse service to anyone who requested it.

That Tuesday morning he wore his graying black hair in a ponytail that hung below his shoulders and a red paisley bandanna covered the expanding bald spot on the crown of his head. He had on an untucked black T-shirt that covered the tattoo on his left upper arm, faded blue jeans, and well-worn black harness motorcycle boots, a clothing selection that never varied and simplified dressing in the dark. He had gained a few pounds since opening the smokehouse, but at six foot two, he remained slender.

Like most mornings, Tommy Baldwin was sitting at one of the picnic tables beneath the canopy that had once sheltered the gasoline pumps. He had retired from Shell Oil after a lifetime spent as a roustabout, was living comfortably on his pension, and had nothing better to do each morning than read, eat barbecue, and visit with Beau. As the service-bay doors rolled up, Tommy stood and grabbed the popular state-named magazine he had been reading. He walked through the six picnic tables arranged in the service bays and into the former Conoco station’s showroom, which had been transformed into the smokehouse’s order and pickup counter.

“The usual?” Beau asked of the grizzled retiree.

Instead of answering, Tommy tossed the open magazine on the counter. “Have you seen this?”

Beau wasn’t much of a reader, so he hadn’t. He picked up the magazine and found himself reading a review of Quarryville Smokehouse, a review that referred to his place as “the best-kept secret in West Texas, certain to be a serious contender in the forthcoming roundup of the fifty best barbecue joints in the Lone Star State.” Next to the review were a photograph of the chopped brisket lunch plate and another of him working behind the counter—a photograph for which he had not posed.

“Jesus H.” He threw the magazine down and glared at Tommy. “When did you get this?”

“This morning’s mail.”

Beau swore again. He had been relocated to Quarryville thirteen years earlier so no one could find him. Without asking again if Tommy wanted his usual order, Beau scooped chopped brisket into a Styrofoam three-compartment takeout container, added coleslaw and accessories, and shoved the container across the counter, not realizing he’d gone heavy on the brisket, light on the coleslaw, and had completely forgotten the pickles. He slammed a cold can of Dr Pepper on the other side of the still-open magazine.

Tommy slid back exact change. “I thought you’d like the publicity, maybe get more business. You can’t be making much from this place.”

“I get by.” Beau glared at his most reliable customer. “That’s all I ever wanted.”

“What about that girl of yours? You want to take care of Bethany, don’t you? Her and her daughter?”

“What do they have to do with it?”

“I see the way she looks at you,” Tommy said. “I’ve never had anybody look at me the way Bethany looks at you. I’ve seen you look at her the same way.”

“So?”

“You can’t live for yourself, Beau. You have to live for the people you love,” Tommy explained. “I thought I could help, so about a year ago I sent a letter to the editor, telling her about your barbecue.”

Beau stabbed at the magazine article with his forefinger. “This is your fault?”

“I suppose so.” Tommy glanced at the magazine and the open Styrofoam container next to it. “You forgot my pickles.”

“Fuck your pickles.” Beau didn’t bother with the serving spoon. He reached into the pickle jar, grabbed a handful of bread-and-butter pickle slices, and threw them on top of Tommy’s chopped brisket lunch plate, flinging juice across the counter, the magazine, and Tommy.

The retiree shook his head, tucked the magazine under his arm, and carried his lunch to one of the picnic tables outside, where he adjusted the holster hidden at the small of his back and set aside most of the pickles before he began eating.

The lunch rush, such as it was, kept Beau busy for the next few hours. After he sold the last order of ribs, put the cash and checks—he didn’t accept credit or debit cards—in the office safe, and shut everything down, he saw Tommy still reading his magazine. He rolled down the service-bay doors, carried two cold cans of Dr Pepper outside, and settled onto the picnic table bench opposite Tommy. “Don’t you ever go home?”

Tommy looked up. “There’s nothing there for me.”

Beau put one Dr Pepper in front of Tommy and opened the other. After a long draw from the can, he said, “About earlier.”

“Sorry for the surprise,” Tommy replied. “I didn’t think a little publicity would be a problem.”

“You have no idea the world of hurt that’s about to crash down on me,” Beau said. He drained the last of the Dr Pepper. “There’s no way you could know.”

Beau had been one of the United States Marshals Service’s easiest Witness Security Program relocations, a man without baggage. He had no family and no desire to drag any of several random female companions with him into a new life. The San Antonio office had recommended Quarryville, a dried-out scab of a town in West Texas that had once shipped granite east to Dallas. After the quarry closed in the early 1950s, the town began a long, slow slide into oblivion, and few people lived there by choice. With the U.S. Marshals Service’s assistance and money from the Harley-Davidson he’d sold before disappearing into his new identity, Beau purchased and renovated a foreclosed home. On his own he later purchased the abandoned Conoco station he could see from his front window and turned it into Quarryville Smokehouse.

He mentioned none of this to Tommy as they sat in the afternoon heat watching traffic pass the smokehouse on the two-lane state highway. When they finished their drinks, Tommy excused himself to use the men’s room around the back, leaving behind the magazine he’d been reading all morning.

Beau spun the magazine around, thumbed through the pages until he found the article about his smokehouse, and read it again. Had it not been for the accompanying photo capturing his face in three-quarter profile, nothing about the article would have bothered him. In fact, everything the author wrote was quite complimentary.

Beau lived on the other side of the railroad tracks that paralleled the state highway bisecting Quarryville, on a street that also paralleled the tracks, at the leading edge of a neighborhood of single-family homes constructed for quarry employees during the town’s heyday. He waited until he was safely inside the living room of his two-bedroom bungalow before using his cell phone to call a phone number he had memorized years earlier.

A no-nonsense female voice answered. “United States Marshals Service.”

“I want to talk to William Secrist.”

“He retired nine months ago,” said the voice. “May I help you?”

Beau paced in front of the gun cabinet containing his and Bethany’s deer rifles. “This is Beau James. Secrist was my case officer.”

“I’m his replacement, Deputy Marshal Sara Arquette. How may I help?”

“I’ve been outted,” Beau said. He told her about the magazine article and accompanying photo.

“I should visit someday to see if your ’cue is as good as the writer says.”

“You read the article?”

“I picked up a copy of the magazine yesterday.”

“So everybody’s seen it?”

“Not everybody,” she said. “They don’t read Texas magazines in Ohio.”

Beau stopped pacing and stood at the front window, staring at his smokehouse and the other businesses on the far side of the railroad tracks and state highway. The storefronts along Main Street that weren’t boarded up might as well have been. Only a pawnshop, the ubiquitous Dairy Queen, and a Texaco that still offered full service showed signs of life. “All it takes is one.”

“What do you expect us to do?”

“Your job,” Beau yelled into the phone. “Protect me. Relocate me. Express some concern for my health and well-being!”

“I’ll reach out to the Columbus office and see if there’s been any chatter about you,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”

“You do that!” He could have slammed the receiver down if he’d phoned from the landline at the smokehouse. Instead he jabbed his finger against the disconnect button of his cell phone so hard he almost knocked it from his hand.

Beau ate barbecue for lunch every day and relied on his girlfriend to prepare dinner. That evening Bethany made deer stew, using meat from a white-tailed buck she’d killed the previous season. Beau had never hunted until he dated Bethany, and after many meals prepared using the game she brought home, he had learned to appreciate her marksmanship.

Bethany’s teenage daughter, Amanda, had plans with one of her friends, so Beau and Bethany dined without her. They were nearly finished when Bethany said, “You’ve been quiet all evening. Is something wrong?”

Beau looked up from his last spoonful of stew. Bethany had not changed when she’d returned home from the veterinary clinic and still wore her blue scrubs. Six years his junior, she had the figure of a younger woman, but a lifetime in the Texas sun had weathered her. She wore her highlighted golden-brown hair cut in a stacked bob—short in the back but almost shoulder length in the front—and her pale blue eyes searched his for an answer to her question.

“I got some bad news today,” Beau said. “I may have to leave you.”

Stunned, Bethany asked, “Why?”

“Some people never forget the past, the rest of us try not to remember it,” Beau explained, “and something I did a long time ago caught up to me today.”

“You can’t do this to me.” Bethany dropped her spoon and leaned forward. Her hair had been tucked behind her ears as she ate and one lock fell free to swing against her cheek. “You can’t do this to Amanda. Her father walked out on us when she was three. You promised us you would never—”

“It’s for your own good.”

“I don’t believe you,” Bethany said. “Where will you go?”

“I don’t know.”

“When are you leaving?”

“I don’t know. It could be soon.”

“What about the smokehouse?”

He shrugged.

“Don’t you care about anything?”

“You,” he said, “and Amanda.”

“You can’t care all that much if you’re willing to walk away from us.”

“It’s because I care about you that I have to leave.”

Bethany snorted with disgust, folded her arms under her breasts, and glared at Beau. “That’s the worst line of crap I’ve ever heard. You don’t know where you’re going or when you’re leaving, but you’re doing it because you care about us?”

“I’ve done some bad things,” Beau said. “The people I did them with might be coming for me.”

“I thought we didn’t have any secrets,” Bethany said with equal parts anger and dismay. “Apparently I was wrong.”

Beau did not know when—or even if—the U.S. Marshals Service would relocate him. “I’ll say goodbye before I leave. If anything happens before I do, you call this number and ask for Sara Arquette.”

As Beau recited the number, Bethany grabbed her smartphone to enter it into her contact list. He snatched the phone from her hands. “Don’t put it in your phone. Don’t write it down. Memorize it.”

At 2 a.m. Wednesday morning, as he was dressing for the day and Bethany lightly snored on her side of the bed with her back to him, Beau heard the distinctive potato-potato-potato rumble of a lone Harley-Davidson motorcycle cruising along the state highway that bisected Quarryville. He kept a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun under the smokehouse’s front counter, but he had grown complacent over the years and had long ago stopped carrying personal protection. The fading sound of the motorcycle haunted Beau until he unlocked the gun cabinet in the living room, removed and loaded his 9mm Glock, and tucked it into a worn leather holster at the small of his back. Then he relocked the gun cabinet and walked across the street, the train tracks, and the highway to the smokehouse, where he fired up the indirect-heat pit and prepped the brisket and ribs he would serve for lunch later that day.

Alone in the dark, in the fenced area beside the converted Conoco station where Beau smoked his meat away from the prying eyes of customers and competitors—though until the magazine article had appeared, he had never considered the possibility of competitors—Beau contemplated his actions during the coming days. He had more baggage than the first time he had been relocated, and he wondered how easy it would be to walk away this time.

Quarryville was a two-day ride from Columbus, a distance not much different than that from Columbus to North Dakota, a ride he had made several times with the Lords of Ohio to attend the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. He likely had only a few days to decide where he wanted to go and who he wanted to be before the U.S. Marshals Service came for him. He was considering the Pacific Northwest when he finally rolled up the service-bay doors to find Tommy sitting at one of the picnic tables outside.

Tommy rose, tucked the magazine he’d been reading into his back pocket, and headed inside. He placed his usual order and added, “You aren’t planning to throw pickles at me this morning, are you?”

“I should charge you extra for them,” Beau said as he filled a Styrofoam three-compartment takeout container with Tommy’s lunch order.

“Fat chance you could collect it.”

Beau slid a cold can of Dr Pepper across the counter and Tommy slid back exact change.

There were no other customers in the smokehouse and none approaching as far as Beau could see. “Yesterday you said there was nothing for you at home,” he said, “but why do you keep coming here?”

“When I retired, I came home to care for my mother because she was all I had in the world,” Tommy said. “She died a couple of years later, and I planted her in the Methodist cemetery, next to my father. I was spending every afternoon in the Watering Hole, drowning my sorry ass in cheap beer, before you opened this place.”

“You chose brisket over beer?”

“You’re better company than a bottle of Lone Star,” Tommy said.

“What about your old friends, the people you grew up with?”

“The few that didn’t move away are dead or as good as,” Tommy said. “These days you’re the closest thing to a friend I’ve got.”

Unsure how to respond, Beau stared across the counter at his customer.

“I never hear you talk about your people.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Beau said. “They’re gone.”

“That’s a damn shame,” Tommy said. “Good thing you found Bethany. When I had to put my mother’s cat to sleep a couple of years ago, your Bethany held my hand. That’s a good woman you have there. Worth fighting for, don’t you think?”

Without waiting for a response, Tommy picked up his lunch and carried it outside. A lone biker drifted by on the highway, the potato-potato-potato sound echoing into the former showroom until the door swung closed. Beau stiffened.

Beau waited until he was in the privacy of his own home that afternoon before dialing the number he had memorized all those years earlier. After identifying himself to Deputy Marshal Arquette, Beau asked, “Have you heard anything?”

“Nothing,” Arquette replied.

“Are you planning to relocate me?”

“Not at this time.”

“I have people now.”

“That complicates things.”

“You have no idea.”

“I’ll be away from the office tomorrow and Friday,” she said, “but my calls will be forwarded to my cell. Let me know if anything changes.”

“Yeah,” Beau said. “I’ll call when I’m dead.”

He stabbed the phone’s disconnect switch with his finger and began pacing the living room. His first thought the previous day had been to abandon this life just as he had abandoned his previous life, but Bethany and Tommy had made him realize he had more to lose and nothing he wanted to leave behind.

He was sitting at the kitchen table nursing a bottle of Dos Equis when Bethany returned home from the veterinary clinic. He reached into the refrigerator behind him and brought out a second bottle. As he held it out to her, he said, “I’m sorry about last night.”

“You should be.” Bethany took the bottle and settled onto a chair on the other side of the table.

During preparation for relocation, William Secrist and other deputy marshals had promised that no one who followed their instructions had ever been hurt or killed while in the Witness Security Program under the protection of the U.S. Marshals Service. One of those rules was never, ever to divulge his prior identity, not even to a lover who entered his life after relocation. Too many relationships turn sour, and a spiteful ex who revealed his identity would endanger his life. Beau knew he had to risk that possibility.

“You know who I am,” Beau said, “not who I was. I’m not that man anymore.”

“Does this have something to do with your tattoo?”

Tattooed on Beau’s left upper arm, usually covered by his shirt sleeve, was a skull with a crown of thorns and the phrase VENGEANCE IS MINE written in Old English script in a ribbon below the skull.

He nodded. “I was an enforcer for the Lords of Ohio.”

She shook her head.

“Hell’s Angels. Banditos,” he said. “Like them, but a much smaller organization.”

“Organization?” Bethany said. “You mean gang? You’re in a motorcycle gang?”

“I was, a long time ago. I’m not now.”

“So how do you quit? Do you just mail in a resignation letter?”

“I wish it were that easy.” He told her about his arrest and the deal he’d made to roll over on his fellow Lords of Ohio. “The feds had me dead to rights,” he said. “I was facing life in prison with no possibility of parole.”

Bethany listened without interruption.

“The feds dropped all charges in return for my turning state’s evidence, and they put me in the Witness Security Program, relocating me here when all the trials ended,” Beau explained. “Eighteen members of the Lords of Ohio went to prison because of my testimony. Chainsaw Roberts must be out by now.”

Chainsaw had not been convicted of any of the murders Beau had witnessed in his previous life, the evidence too circumstantial despite Beau’s testimony, and had gone away for ten years on a combination of lesser charges. Beau told Bethany the big man used a chainsaw for easy disposal of bodies while leaving behind copious amounts of physical reminders attesting to the deceased’s violent end to discourage the deceased’s friends and family from pursuing matters further.

“Sweet Jesus,” Bethany said under her breath. She opened her bottle of Dos Equis and downed half of it before she spoke again. “So you were just going to walk out on us?”

He told her about the magazine article and how he thought the photograph outed him.

“I thought if I left, you and Amanda would be safe.” Beau didn’t mention that the U.S. Marshals Service had not yet committed to relocating him. “I realized today that if I walk away, I leave behind everyone and everything I’ve ever loved. I couldn’t leave without you knowing why.”

“No,” Bethany said. “You’re staying. We’ll get through this. Somehow, we’ll get through this.”

Amanda, a young woman who resembled photographs of Bethany at the same age, opened the back door and stepped into the kitchen. Her presence ended their conversation.

Tommy ordered his usual lunch on Thursday. As he paid, he said, “You didn’t exist until you moved here, and you barely exist now.”

“How’s that?” Beau asked.

“I spent some time on the Internet yesterday. You’re not on social media, don’t have an email address I can find, and I’ve seen your cell phone. All it does is make calls.”

“You have a problem with that?”

“A man has a right to privacy,” Tommy said. “But your reaction to the magazine article got me to thinking.”

“About?”

“About why a man might be hiding. About why a man might have no past to speak of,” Tommy said. “I worked in the oil fields with men like you. Quiet men. Just wanted the world to leave them alone.”

“And?”

“Some were good men,” he said. “Some weren’t.”

“And what do you think I am?”

Tommy smiled. “I haven’t decided.”

He took his food outside, and Beau watched Tommy through the front window until a pair of tellers from Quarryville Bank & Trust interrupted his contemplative observation with an order for seven lunch plates to go.

The rest of Beau’s day was uneventful. Dinner that evening consisted of the last of the deer stew, and Bethany joined him in bed that night for a physical reminder of what he risked losing.

Friday was different from Thursday only because Beau received his weekly meat delivery at 10 a.m. and dinner that night came from the Dairy Queen because Bethany was too tired to cook.

Saturday brought a slew of unfamiliar faces to the smokehouse counter, people who had seen the magazine article and had ventured out of their way to experience Quarryville Smokehouse’s limited menu. The phone also rang more than usual, with people phoning for directions or asking questions. Amanda answered most of the calls.

Just before 2 p.m., after they had sold out of ribs but still had brisket and coleslaw, Amanda picked up the ringing phone, listened for a moment, and then said, “There’s no one here by that name.”

After she hung up, Beau asked, “What was that about?”

“Some guy wanted to speak to ‘Stick.’”

Beau looked out the window, saw nothing unusual, and then told his girlfriend’s daughter, “You should head home.”

“But you still have brisket.”

“Not much,” he said. “I can handle the last few sales.”

Amanda removed her apron, hung it by the office door, and was on her smartphone to one of her friends before she stepped outside. She turned back just long enough to wave her fingers before sashaying down the street toward the Dairy Queen, where her best friend had yet to master the art of making dip cones.

Beau watched her walk away, glanced at Tommy sitting at one of the picnic tables outside, his nose buried in yet another magazine, and examined the other remaining customers—a young couple outside making goo-goo eyes at one another over a single lunch order of chopped brisket, and a somewhat older couple wrangling two young children at a table in the service bays.

Deputy Marshal Arquette had been in Midland Thursday and Friday and was returning to the San Antonio office when she decided to take a slight detour to check in on Beau James and taste his brisket. Her unmarked black SUV entered Quarryville from the north, avoiding the east-west state highway that bisected the town. In a rush, she parked behind the Quarryville Smokehouse, climbed out, and hurried into the women’s restroom.

The veterinary clinic closed at 2 p.m. that day, and Bethany was almost home when she saw a dozen motorcycles pulling into the Quarryville Smokehouse parking lot. The colors affixed to the backs of the bikers’ jackets matched the tattoo on Beau’s arm.

As the bikers parked and silenced their motorcycles, Beau stepped out of the former showroom and suggested the couple with children clear out. They didn’t hesitate. The couple at the outside table also wrapped up their things and slipped away. Tommy Baldwin closed the magazine he’d been reading and watched as the bikers dismounted. None of the bikers paid attention to him as he slid the pistol from the holster at the small of his back.

As Bethany pulled her pickup into the driveway at home, she retrieved her smartphone from her purse and dialed the number Beau had made her memorize.

The roar of the motorcycles brought Amanda and her friend out of the Dairy Queen, and they captured the scene with their smartphones.

Two of the bikers entered the showroom, where Beau stood behind the counter. The others began overturning the tables in the service bays and tearing apart the limited decorations.

Bethany ran into the home she shared with Beau and shoved her smartphone into her pocket before she unlocked the gun cabinet and retrieved her deer rifle. She loaded it as she ran back outside and braced her arm on the hood of her pickup. She peered through the scope at the two men inside the showroom with her boyfriend. Both were armed. Beau had one hand beneath the counter.

“Been a long time, Stick,” Chainsaw said. “You’ve put on weight.”

Though they were of similar height, Chainsaw weighed more than twice what Beau weighed, heavy muscle hidden beneath rolls of fat. He wore a sleeveless jean jacket revealing arms liberally decorated with violent tattoos, and a crown of thorns was tattooed on his bald head. A chainsaw hung from his left hand, a .38 from his right.

Beau replied, “Not long enough.”

Chainsaw glanced around. “Looks like this here’s your last supper.”

The deputy marshal in the women’s restroom looked down at her cell phone when it rang. A call was being forwarded from the office.

Chainsaw raised the .38 he carried in his right hand and aimed it at Beau.

Bethany had Chainsaw’s head squarely in her crosshairs. When he pointed his revolver at Beau, she squeezed the trigger, hoping the window separating them would not deflect her shot.

Before Arquette could answer her phone, she heard gunfire through the concrete wall. Then she heard the roar of a shotgun.

At the sound of the first shot, the ten bikers tearing apart the seating area in the former service bays drew their weapons.

The sounds catapulted Arquette, her sidearm drawn, from the restroom and around the building into a firefight involving a gang of bikers hiding behind overturned picnic tables in the former service bays, Beau James behind the smokehouse’s counter, and an old man hiding behind one of the pillars supporting the canopy outside. What she didn’t see was the woman on the far side of the railroad tracks using a deer rifle to pick off bikers.

The bikers had superior firepower, including automatic weapons, but expecting no resistance they had trapped themselves in a box. The entire melee lasted less than ten minutes and left the Quarryville Smokehouse riddled with bullet holes and every biker dead or dying. Sorting out the chain of events took much, much longer and involved the use of video provided by Amanda and her friend.

The coroner was unable to determine if Chainsaw was killed by the single shot to the head or by the dual shotgun blasts to the abdomen. Slugs retrieved from the other bodies also came from more than one weapon.

No charges were brought against Bethany or Tommy, and after intervention from the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. attorney’s office declined to pursue charges against Beau for possession of a sawed-off shotgun without proper tax-paid registration.

When the smoke cleared, Beau James refused the U.S. Marshals Service’s offer to relocate him. He had survived being outed, and the Lords of Ohio had disbanded, the few remaining members in Columbus absorbed into the local Hell’s Angels chapter.

At Bethany’s insistence, Beau did not patch any of the bullet holes before reopening the smokehouse. A significant increase in business followed, not just from being named the ninth best barbeque joint in the Lone Star State, but also from the notorious reputation the smokehouse had gained from the shootout.

The smokehouse had been highly rated for the quality of its brisket and ribs but lost points for the limited menu. So Beau added two sides—macaroni and cheese, made from Bethany’s recipe, and potato salad made from Tommy’s mother’s recipe.

Business increased so much that Beau could no longer handle it all himself. Each morning at eleven, Tommy rolled up the service-bay doors and worked behind the counter with him until closing. On weekends Amanda and two of her high school friends waited tables.

And at the end of every day Beau returned home to his new wife, Bethany. She still knew him only as Beau James, the man he was, and not the man he had been.