The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

Jonathan Stone Mailman

From Cold-Blooded

Through rain, snow, sleet, hail, gloom of night, fog of morning, and torpor of afternoon; through cutbacks, and post office closings, and diversity initiatives, and reorgs, and a bureaucratic succession of postmasters general; through truck breakdowns, and snow-tire flats, and post office shootings and bombings, and the holiday rush; through the rise of FedEx and UPS with their swashbuckling, gym-pumped young drivers swerving at high speed arrogantly around you; through the days, weeks, months, through time itself, George Waite has delivered the mail. Thirty-five years now. Through American invasions and wars, and famines and genocides, and tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes, George Waite’s red-white-and-blue mail truck has lurched from mailbox to mailbox with the utter predictability of a brightly painted figure on a cuckoo clock.

And not only that — he’s delivered the mail for all these years to this same neighborhood. Well, the same, and different. The original, simple, unprepossessing capes and ranches had now transformed into McMansions, some expanding gradually over the years, growing as if through a painful adolescence; others literally scraped from the face of the earth and replaced with something grander and prouder, looming and spanking new. But he has delivered it with the same smile and wave to the neighbors watering their lawns, pushing their kids in strollers, heading out on or back from bike rides. The same exchange of pleasantries.

He knows these people, and they know him.

Hiya, George. How’s everything?

He’s actually — arguably — saved two of their lives. He watched Jimmy Swale — special needs/autistic — stroll right into the pond, and George jumped out of his truck, splashed into the water after him, pulled out the already flailing kid. His uniform was soaked. The pond turned out to be shallow, so did he really save him? And in his rearview mirror he saw eighty-year-old Mrs. Ostendorf, shuffling back from her mailbox to her house, suddenly grip her chest and drop her mail, and George sprinted from the truck, carried her into her house, called the ambulance (this was before cell phones), and she survived.

For both, George was thanked profusely. The neighborhood threw him an appreciation party. Just a half hour or so — he couldn’t take more time than that from his route. John Tepper made a speech — “Honorary Member of the Neighborhood.” Gave him a plaque they’d had made. What a day.

Here was the unspoken little secret of being a mailman: he loved it. He loved the routine and the predictability. He loved how even today, despite the Internet and smartphones, people still looked forward to their mail. To the surprise and excitement of good news or bad.

The other unspoken little secret was that he knew their mail. By this time George pretty much knew who was getting what. Who had which banks and which brokerage accounts (statements delivered monthly; most of them hadn’t switched to paperless yet). He knew where their kids and parents lived by the birthday cards and letters; he knew the good news and the bad news of the households by the obvious look of a condolence card or colorful birthday card envelopes. He knew the acceptance and rejection letters from colleges, even the paycheck stubs from which employers, until pay stubs largely stopped. He saw the legal-size documents which still went by mail for signatures — for real estate closings, divorces, wills, life-altering events. He often knew what was in the packages he delivered by the size and shape and weight of the box — books, or DVDs, or specialty foods, or even what article of clothing it was from a given retailer: sweaters, or a coat, or slacks, or shoes. (He would also see the FedEx or UPS package waiting at the garage or at the front door, and could often tell what it was in the same way, and often would do the favor of bringing the box in for them if not already at the front door along with the rest of their mail.)

You couldn’t help knowing. You had to sort it all; you couldn’t help seeing who was getting what. In some lives, there was lots of mail. In some lives, there was very little.

He had seen many residents grow old with him, and you couldn’t help but note all the change, all the years, evident in their bodies and faces. He’d watched their kids grow. Tricycles, to training wheels, to sleek racing bikes, to reckless teenage driving as they passed his truck, and soon enough adopting the responsible waving and greeting they’d observed all their lives, addressing George with the same postures and cadences as their respective mothers and fathers, the stupefying power of genes.

New people moved into the neighborhood and old people moved out, and occasionally, of course, passed away. Wistful, inevitable, proof of life. An undertone of transition that the neighborhood yards and gardens and routines did their collective best to belie.

Then the Muscovitos moved in. And then, by god, there was change.

No one ever saw them. Any of them. Doorbell rung, casseroles and homemade cookies left on the front steps, no thank-you notes or calls or acknowledgments.

“Seen the new neighbors, George?”

“No, you?”

Shake of head. Shrugs. But people are busy. The neighborhood has always had its absentees: dads who travel, couples in Florida or Georgia for half the year. Jim O’Brien, a trader in Asian currencies, went in to work at 3 a.m. You never saw him — until the weekends, when he lived in his yard, happily planting and trimming and mowing, waving his shears like a television neighbor, tossing a Nerf football with his kids.

George did see Alberto Muscovito’s shadow a couple of times, just inside his front door. His silhouette. Arms crossed. Like a criminal or convict interviewed on TV, not wanting to reveal his features or voice. Obviously waiting until George’s truck moved down the street, and then heading out quickly to get the mail — focused, not looking up, making no eye contact with any part of the neighborhood.

First came the walls.

Stone walls; elaborate fencing. Nine feet high, three feet over code. Offhand grumbling to George from the neighbors getting their mail. (George was safe to grumble to, always merely passing through, always merely a visitor.) Construction vehicles, crews of Nicaraguan masons and laborers, issuing friendly uncomprehending shrugs when a neighbor wandered by and asked about the new owner. George caught wind of some neighborhood debate about filing formal complaints about the (possible) height violation. But it was the man’s own property, after all, and nobody wanted to spend on a legal battle, and it was an aesthetic judgment after all, so, grumbling, they let it go...

Little bits of gossip. The two Muscovito boys, nine and twelve, were in boarding school. Muscovito worked in financial services.

And George, you still haven’t seen them?

No, haven’t.

Pretty mysterious. And all this construction — pretty annoying.

Of course, George knew more than he was saying. He couldn’t share the information. Privacy of the U.S. mail; he’d taken an oath and respected it.

But right off, almost immediately, Alberto Muscovito had piles of mail — yet no personal mail at all. Envelopes addressed to both Muscovitos’ P.O. address, and to this new house of theirs, so it was a little confusing for the postal system. From senders who obviously wanted to be very sure it got there — putting the P.O. box and the home address to be double certain.

Yes, piles of mail. Contracts from individuals and firms George had never heard of. Legal documents from a law firm in the Cayman Islands and from outfits in New Zealand and Malaysia and Micronesia. The Maldives. Mauritius. None of the conventional standardized brokerage and bank envelopes that the rest of the neighborhood got. And the numerous legal and financial documents required no signatures, George noticed, which would have necessitated his actually meeting Mr. Muscovito.

Even though he shouldn’t have, even though it came dangerously close to the line on respecting and safeguarding the privacy of the U.S. mail, George jotted down and Googled a couple of the firms.

He was surprised — and then again, not surprised at all — by what he found. Firms with numerous ethics violations. Fraud warnings from various business and trade associations. Warnings from an international watchdog group. And in several cases, no website, no contact info, no information, no Web presence at all. No evidence of existence beyond an address on an envelope. A return address that was just a post office box — on an island overseas.

After the walls and the fencing came satellite dishes. Weird lines to the house. Unmarked small white vans pulling in at night, parked there for hours, sometimes even overnight, then pulling out, the drivers in sunglasses.

Jeez, what’s he doing there, George? Tracking satellites? Going off the grid?

The annoyance of the neighbors shifts to a much higher gear with the hammering, drilling, noise, activity at two in the morning. Can’t tell what it is, behind the high new walls. And by the time a neighbor frets and paces and fumes and finally calls the police, the sound has stopped, and the police do nothing. It happens a few nights in a row. The neighbors come to anticipate and dread it.

(Soon there’s a police cruiser driving slowly through the neighborhood. Drifting slowly past the Muscovito residence, circling lazily — and doing nothing. Even more infuriating, in a way, because of its obvious impotence. The neighbors shake their heads — incompetent suburban cops.)

George hears more anecdotes. Muscovito’s Cadillac SUV, with the blacked-out windows, driving in and out at unpredictable hours — midnight, three in the morning, 5 a.m. — and always too fast, way too fast for the neighborhood lanes. The other morning Muscovito almost hit the two Miller kids on their bikes at the corner, up early catching worms. Never even stopped to look and see if they were OK! Tommy Miller fell back into the rhododendrons in terror, crying, poor kid was so scared...

And finally, of course, an electric locking gate and — symbolically, inevitably — a new mailbox with it. A large locking mailbox built like a strongbox into the elaborate gate’s left stone pillar. Stark contrast to the rickety, rural-route-style mailboxes along the rest of the lanes — cheap, casual, periodically knocked over by a delivery van or snowplow and propped up, dented and brave, their hinged tongues opening and closing with a squeak and falling wide open half the time.

The Muscovitos’ new mailbox, a narrow, tamper-proof slot to slip mail into methodically. For George to collect any outgoing mail, a special key issued through the post office and now an official part of the route, forms properly filled in, the whole key-issuing procedure processed through the mail, so George, once again, never sees Muscovito in person.

George gets it all in bits and pieces. Hearing the anecdotes of misery, of mystery. Many of them wrapped in the bland manila envelope of resignation: “The neighborhood is changing, I guess. The world is changing...”

George ponders this from the worn, duct-taped driver’s seat of his truck. Isn’t that what all the resentment is really about? People resent change, they’re suspicious of it, they’re wistful and nostalgic for the familiar. Doesn’t Muscovito have a right to his weird mail? A right to alter his residence and property? A right to his privacy and his odd hours? He’s a symbol, a lightning rod of change, in the neighborhood, in the world. A reminder of nature’s cycle of decay and replacement, the myth of stasis. Life is change; death comes to all eventually — people, neighborhoods, political systems, nations. All of it. All of us.

George would come to wonder in the days ahead how much this line of thinking had taken hold of him.

He starts small, and quickly. George slips the next Caymans document out of its envelope, snaps a shot of each of its eight pages with his iPhone, slips the document back into the envelope, and reseals it. All postal carriers know how to reseal. They carry special glue in the truck for items that have opened in transit. It takes less than twenty seconds. If you see him in his truck, it looks as though he is sorting mail.

He prints the photos at home.

Overseas account statements. Offshore investments — no doubt unreported and untaxed. Clearly illegal — there in black-and-white. You didn’t have to be a genius to see it. Exhibit A.

The only thing more clearly illegal? Opening someone’s mailed financial documents. So this is evidence that can be officially used exactly nowhere. Revealed to no one. It serves only as evidence to George.

Across the street from the Muscovitos: the lovely old Davidoffs. Now with their canes and osteoporosis and skin drooping from necks and arms, full lifetimes etched and stretched on them, but smiles of greeting unchanged for all the years since they had moved in as spry newlyweds. And they are a walking mirror, of course. George isn’t much behind them. Mandatory retirement with full benefits at the end of the year. Not something he can afford to jeopardize with illegal behavior.

Next door, the Schumans. Doctor Schuman, an old-fashioned GP. Four Ivy League kids: two Harvard, a Yale, a Princeton. He remembers their acceptance letters. Now two physicians, one cancer researcher, one oceanographer. God, he remembers all their bikes. The color of each one.

The neighbors he has grown to love, the neighbors who have grown to love him.

George feels their frustration, their sense of powerlessness. He feels identity with them. It isn’t just their neighborhood. It is his neighborhood too.

One option: he can simply stop delivering the Muscovito mail. Just kind of lose it. What would that do? Create a disruption, a delay certainly. But eventually Muscovito would simply get on the phone with the overseas entities he is dealing with, they would resend, and the disruptions and delays would ultimately trace back to the U.S. Postal Service, and ultimately to George. No, that would accomplish nothing, except temporary mischief and permanent dismissal.

But what if Muscovito were to begin to receive contracts where the details of the deal were different? Where the terms were slightly altered? Certainly that would rattle Muscovito, infuriate him, sow seeds of paranoia and mistrust. Or what if the return documents that Muscovito sent back had different deal terms, the agreements had been altered, the documents had been changed, retyped, forged, as if trying to slip in more favorable terms for himself? Clearly his overseas business partners and entities — when they discovered the changes — would not be pleased about that. Could hardly continue to do business with someone so capricious, so unsteady.

Clearly that kind of elaborate forgery and fraud would not originate from a meek veteran postman on his daily rounds. It was too involved, too outrageous for that. Fraud like that would come from a longtime practitioner — such as Muscovito himself. Finally going a little too far. After all his caution and cleverness, he would become a little too risky and too bold.

George is no longer simply slipping documents out of and back into their envelopes. Now he is looking into everything, reading through it all, really getting to know Muscovito’s businesses.

Lots of overlapping bank accounts. Shell financial companies inside shell financial companies, a shiny nautilus of dummy corporations and paperwork, echoes upon echoes in dark empty chambers. George sees some themes and patterns — schemes so complex, so cross-border, that it would be hard for legitimate investors caught in the maze to ever get their money back.

He studies some of them closely. Tries to follow all the steps. Like a land purchase, 1050 acres of what at first appears to be an Indonesian atoll in the Pacific. With the help of Google Maps and GPS coordinates and a little further investigation, George ascertains that there is no such atoll, no corresponding piece of geography. So the money is being sheltered somehow, to be funneled somewhere else.

The money for that purchase, George sees, comes partly from a wire transfer out of an account at a bank in Montevideo, Uruguay. George digs further: there is no such bank. So — a transfer from a bank that doesn’t exist to buy land that doesn’t exist. Laundering the money twice, George tentatively concludes. Making it squeaky clean, for some further expenditure.

On the one hand, he doesn’t follow a lot of it. On the other hand, he follows it enough.

Then there are the names of the corporations: Parcel 666, Devil’s Bluff Partners, Black Hole Trust. How arrogant.

No, George can’t follow it very well — hell, that is the idea in a lot of cases — but retyping and altering the terms of the contracts and forging the signatures — that he can do. If the signatures on these “new” contracts look forged, give themselves away, well, that would be even better. Because that would tell Muscovito that his partners are trying to pull a fast one on him — or tell his partners that Muscovito is trying to put one over on them. Either way, it would be an ugly development in any prospective partnership. Courtesy of George.

An intensive Internet search on Muscovito himself turns up nothing. Which tells George something: Muscovito has managed to scrub himself. When George checks the government databases open to government employees, he finds nothing. No mention of Muscovito.

He can report Muscovito for mail fraud. With all the documents he’s photographed and copied, everything he’s learned, he can practically present the case himself. But prosecutions take forever. Years, probably. At any point, with the right lawyers, an operator like Muscovito could manage to wiggle out of it and slip away. Plus, after all these opened envelopes and copied documents, George is now guilty of repeated, systematic mail fraud himself. No different from Muscovito, probably, in the blindfolded eyes and impartial scales of the law. He could be charged and prosecuted in the same courtroom. No, reporting the fraud is too risky, and maybe useless. Dealing with the fraud directly is the best, the only course of action — if action is what one wants.

The neighborhood has always had a rhythm. Men leaving in early morning for the commuter train, then the buses and carpools for school, then the garbage truck, then the household repair vans — plumber, carpenter, electrician, appliances, the store delivery trucks, the dry cleaner’s van. And at half past two in the afternoon, the mailman. Part of the rhythm. Like the phases of the moon or the seasonal shifting of the sun. Ingrained in the nature of the place.

Squirrels gathering nuts from beneath the shedding oaks, a wild turkey or a fox darting across the lane. The autumn rain pattering on the fallen leaves, the snow’s coating of white silence, the rich warm smell of spring. A primal orderly march, a deep rhythm, that Muscovito has tampered with.

Or is it bigger than that? Is Muscovito simply guilty of... modernity? Personifying an atomized, disconnected age. An age without social connection. An age of complexity. An age that leaves neighborhoods behind. Is George’s tampering with Muscovito and his mail simply, at some level, a rebellion against that age?

Which leads to a broader philosophical question: in wanting to preserve the world around him, is George the one tampering with the rhythm of things, inserting himself into their natural processes? Is he the one creating change, just as guilty as Muscovito? Overstepping — a highly unfamiliar position for a U.S. postal employee.

Playing god, or superhero?

Superman. Batman. Mailman.

George works on the documents late at night. Lights burning brightly in his little dining room. Spreading them out at his dining room table. Retyping and spell-checking sections of the documents on his old Dell desktop. Downloading font libraries from suppliers around the world to let him match typefaces perfectly. Choosing printing paper that matches the weight and color of the originals, from the wide selection of papers he has purchased for just that purpose. Checking his handiwork with a magnifying glass, to scrutinize the telltale edges of the letters where ink meets page. Getting the appropriate international stamps and markings (which proves easy for a postal employee).

He has been alone in the little ranch house since Maggie’s passing three years ago. All the retirement magazines recommend a hobby. George’s current activity isn’t what they mean, but it does keep him occupied, after all. Something to do. A craft. Focusing his mental energy. He can only take a day with each document so that Muscovito still receives it in a timely manner. The swift completion of his appointed rounds — with a slight detour.

It adds up to a primer in white-collar crime. Mail fraud. He is a student of it, cramming assiduously at night.

Making Muscovito, in a way, his partner in crime. Probably sitting at his own dining room table late at night — or in his locked home office, or wherever — cooking up a scheme for George to slightly, subtly modify.

Why is he doing this? Why really? Retirement is approaching fast, Maggie is gone, and once he is no longer behind the wheel of the truck, making his way through the neighborhood, he will lose his last connection to the world. He’ll have no focus, nothing to do. So is this a last act, a desperate bid for preserving not a neighborhood’s way of life but his own? The neighborhood of his route is not his own neighborhood, after all. But after thirty-five years, it is his past, his existence, his tie to daily life, and perhaps he is doing everything he can — even something completely crazy — to avoid at all costs the total, annihilating disconnection to come. Is keeping the neighborhood intact really about keeping himself intact? Doing something crazy to head off the aloneness he faces? Doing something uncharacteristically risky, utterly insane, as an alternative to utter quiet, utter resignation, utter loneliness?

One day, as he delivers Muscovito’s mail, the gate opens. A disembodied voice comes on a speaker built into the gate: “Can you bring the mail in today? I want to ask you something.”

George’s heart accelerates, pounds as if on cue. Does he know? Does Muscovito know?

George watches himself, observes it from outside himself: backing the truck out, in a screeching-rubber retreat, hustling the truck down the familiar lane, guilt on plain display, abandoning his bright trusty vehicle in a commuter lot by the highway just as he’s imagined for years, disappearing into a new life. A flash of extreme action, of clear procedure, shooting through his brain.

But George is George, with a mailman’s temperament and a mailman’s soul, and he drives his bright, cheerful mail truck obediently through Muscovito’s new front gate and up the drive.

Muscovito is there in the driveway to meet him.

Squat, thick. Skin pale, almost translucent. Clearly a man who spends an inordinate amount of time in front of computer screens. An ungroomed mop of black hair. Big, fleshy arms folded across his considerable, Buddhistic chest and stomach.

George rolls the truck to a stop. Takes out the pile of Muscovito’s mail. Holds it out to him with a friendly smile.

The smile is not returned, making George’s smile hang there, awkward, unacknowledged.

Muscovito: No greeting. No niceties. Going right to it. “I’ve got a question.”

George: “Yes, sir?”

Muscovito: “Could anyone be tampering with my mail?”

George frowns with concern.

Muscovito: “At any point in the process?”

George (pausing, considering): “When you say tampering, what do you mean?”

Muscovito (irritably): “I mean tampering. Opening it somewhere.”

George (leadenly): “Well, where exactly?”

Muscovito (irritation rising): “Somewhere! Anywhere! That’s what I want you to tell me.”

George (shaking his head): “I can’t imagine that happening, sir. That kind of thing is very rare. I’ve been on this route for thirty-five years, haven’t had a problem. But it’s not unheard of. I can file a report if you want.”

Muscovito (looking somewhat alarmed, shifts on his feet a little, looks out past George to the gate): “No, that’s OK. Just wondering if it’s possible.”

George: “Well, if you change your mind, I can have it looked into. You let me know.”

And pulling out of the driveway, a huge exhalation of relief. His relief fills the truck cabin. But he is wistful, philosophical, as well.

Because the man never imagines that it might be George. Based on the immutable, unchanging, common perception that George — after thirty-five years — knows he can utterly rely upon: not that mailmen are honorable and above reproach, but that mailmen are stupid. Why else would you be just a mailman?

Presumably Muscovito is calling the various parties. Either accusing them of changing the contracts or apologizing for the bizarre changes in the contracts coming back to them. If he is accusing them, that tone of accusation is undoubtedly not going over very well with his overseas partners. And if he is apologizing, he is raising their anxiety about being involved with such a reckless, untrustworthy party. And if he is apologizing, then they will be doubly irritated when the alterations and forgeries continue. Either way, his partners aren’t going to be happy.

At the very minimum, it is producing an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust. And phone calls, normally a recommended mechanism for clearing the air, might in this case only heighten that mistrustful atmosphere, hearing the annoyance, frustration, and suspicion in each other’s voices. So go ahead, call away. Talk as smoothly and reasonably as you like to each other. You’re only going to amplify each other’s suspicions and dark alertness that a few weeks ago existed not at all.

George continues to deliver the mail. Through rain, snow, sleet, and hail. And at night he continues to inspect Muscovito’s mail and make small alterations and amendments. George drives toward some ultimate action, but what action he does not know.

It turns out he does not know at all.

On a gray afternoon, George is sliding Muscovito’s mail into the locking box in the stone pillar when the gate opens.

The disembodied voice comes over the speaker again. “Could you come in the gate for a minute? I’ve got a package to go out that didn’t fit in the box.”

George hears both the heightened friendliness and interest in the voice and the little edge to it, and he once again imagines throwing the truck into reverse, hitting the accelerator, screeching the tires, exiting the neighborhood one last time, and disappearing into the world. But he doesn’t, of course. He does instead what he knows how to do, what he has done for thirty-five years. He heads in to deliver and pick up the U.S. mail.

Muscovito is standing in the same place in the driveway, arms crossed.

“Hi again,” says Muscovito, with a thin smile, eyes steady on George, with evident fresh interest.

George gives a friendly nod hello. “Where’s the package?”

Muscovito uncrosses his arms to reveal he’s holding a Walther 9mm. “Right here.” He points it at George, the black muzzle only two feet from George’s chest.

The slamming into reverse, the screech of tires, is no longer an option.

George feels himself going dizzy. He blinks hard to keep from passing out.

“Into the house,” instructs Muscovito.

Dazed, blank-brained, George steps gingerly out of the truck and walks up the steps and into the house.

The living room is rococo, ornate. A huge, glittering chandelier, big deep couches, heavy Empire mirrors, bold commanding patterns on the couches and throw pillows, a fanciness and high decoration and vibrancy of color entirely out of character with the gruff, grim Muscovito.

The furniture is not the most attention-getting feature in the room. That honor goes instead to the two men sitting on a couch and chair in the middle of it. Men several years younger than George or Muscovito. Younger, and tan, and fit, with healthy white teeth and big smiles. And each of them, like Muscovito, holding a weapon.

“Sit down, mailman,” says one of them, the one with the slicked-back hair, gesturing casually with the gun to a chair opposite them. A mild accent of some sort, unplaceable — Eastern European?

George sits. His body, his brain, are in a mode they have never experienced — a fog, a haze, in which he can barely process what is going on around him, can barely hear or see — and yet he feels a hyper-alertness to everything. Like being a disembodied observer of your own fate, your own approaching destiny. A destiny approaching fast.

There is silence for a moment, while the men study him. Then the one with the slicked-back hair says, “It’s illegal to tamper with the U.S. mail.”

An accent, yes, but clearly fluent and at ease with English.

George is silent.

“Of all people, you should know that,” says the second man — a shaved head, a deeper, more curt voice than the first.

“You can be punished for something like that,” says the first man, circling the gun lazily, almost casually, in his hand.

There is obviously no one else in the house. Kids away at boarding school. Wife traveling.

“We’ve been waiting for you, mailman. But not for very long. Your schedule is extremely reliable,” says the one with the shaved head.

“Our partner, Muscovito, he didn’t think a mailman could be doing this. Never even occurred to him,” says the one with the slicked-back hair, who looks momentarily annoyed — as if personally offended by Muscovito’s provincialism. “You’re about to retire, aren’t you, mailman? Aren’t you, George? Whose Maggie has died? Who now knows our business, inside and out?” He shakes his head of slicked-back hair and pretends to ask the rococo ceiling, “What are we going to do with you, George? What are we going to do?”

But George knows it is merely a rhetorical question.

He knows it is the last rhetorical question he will ever hear.

The last question of any sort.

“Well, we do have an answer, mailman. Here’s what we are going to do.”

An answer, not a question, thinks George, and the thought cuts bluntly through the thick haze of his terror.

His world will end with an answer, not a question.

All obedient, cooperative George can do is watch as the second one, the shaved-head one, grimly, matter-of-factly, with no evident glee but only focus on the task, checks his weapon, levels the gun, and applies the answer.

He fires a single shot.

Unerring. Professional. Passionless. Corrective.

Right where he aims it.

Right into the brain.

Right where all the troublesome scheming and illegal solutions and overreaching hubris began.

Right into Muscovito’s forehead.

George is paralyzed. He has stopped breathing. He is only eyes. He is panic, terror personified.

The man with the shaved head silently, immediately, begins attending to Muscovito’s body. Solemnly, like a mortician, folding arms, shifting him. But first, of course, handing Muscovito’s fallen Walther to the man with the slicked-back hair, who watches the proceedings while addressing George.

“He never fit into the neighborhood, did he, George? Built walls, gates, drove his car with blacked-out windows too fast, never even introduced himself to the neighbors. That’s not how you make yourself welcome. That’s not how you blend in, is it? You’ve got to ingratiate yourself. Make yourself part of the scenery. You garden. Play some tennis and golf. You host a party or two. Everyone knows that’s how you conduct yourself, right?”

He shakes his head with pity. “He never even thought that a mailman could be doing all that to the contracts. That’s not a very alert or interested view of life, is it, George? A pretty prejudiced, unenlightened view of the postal service and its employees, don’t you think? You’ve probably observed that view all your life. When the fact is, in our business, the postal service is one of our best friends.”

The man stops watching the proceedings with Muscovito’s corpse and looks directly at George. Demanding, it seems, that George look directly back at him.

“We knew it was you. We could tell. So we looked a little further. Did some research. Just like you did, George. And George, you have been utterly reliable.” Smiling for a moment. “Someone to count on through rain, snow, sleet, and hail. And now you’ve studied our businesses, and what you don’t understand, and I’m sure there’s still plenty, we can teach you. You are about to retire, you live alone, you’re healthy and alert and skilled in the subtleties of the mail services. You are ready for the next phase, the next challenge in life, yes? So you are now our partner. And of course you have no choice. If you refuse, Muscovito’s murder will be tied to you, very easily in fact, with your truck in his driveway at the time of death, which Muscovito’s security camera clearly shows on the tape we will take from it shortly. The murder weapon, which will in a moment have your handprints on it, will be sitting for all time in a post office box that you have already requested and paid for with cash and will have mailed the weapon to for safekeeping.”

“We’ll take care of everything from here, partner,” says the other man, the one with the shaved head. He gestures to Muscovito’s body, already wrapped in plastic sheeting and taped up, a package ready for transportation and disposal. “We’ll load it in the truck for you. We have instructions for where you will dump it. Don’t worry, no one will see. But we’ll be taking photos of you doing it, for our own insurance.”

The man with the slicked-back hair jumps in, as if to set George’s mind at ease. “We’ll have plenty of use for your skills and your knowledge. We’ll compensate you very fairly. We’ll be in touch.”

And then, more philosophically, the man says, “Listen, we all need something to occupy us. A hobby, a focus in life...”

“Continue your appointed rounds,” instructs the second man.

The first man smiles. “The neighbors will be so happy, won’t they, George? Good job! You did it! Muscovito is gone.”

“Welcome, mailman...,” says the second.

“Yes.” The first one smiles wider, as if with sudden inspiration. “Welcome to our neighborhood.”