Kansas City Noir by Steve Paul Read Free Book Online

Wallace.”
    “Oh, dear,” Steingart said.
    “What did you do with her?”
    “Oh, dear.” He was still smiling.
    Outside, snow decorated the windowsills. It came down and down over the rooftops and the parked cars. It fell big and luminous in the streetlights’ glow. It fell big as aspirin tablets.
    Armand withdrew the gun.
     
    * * *
     
    “She’s in a tan Kia Sentra parked at the airport. Lot B, four or five spaces east of stop 7. She’s probably still alive.”
    Jackson was silent on the other end of the phone. “What the fuck?” he said at last, but by then Armand had hung up.
    It had been a pleasure getting the information out of Steingart. A real pleasure. And now he’d spent six hours driving in circles around the Plaza just thinking about it, watching the restaurants close, watching the bars close, watching as one by one the cars that lined the streets disappeared.
    It was a beautiful snow. A lovely, numbing snow that decorated the windshield for just a moment before the wipers brushed it away. Again and again. For hours.
    The cat meowed on the seat beside him. He still had to bring it to Lamar, but it was far too late now. Tomorrow. He’d do it tomorrow. Christmas Eve. It would be like a Christmas present.
    And what did it matter if he retired six days before he’d intended? What did it matter if they put him in a box, in a cage? He was already in a cage and it got smaller every day.
    The cat scratched at the box, stuck its paw through one of the air holes, meowed.
    And the murderer in the trunk was just coming to—Armand could hear him back there moving, his first half-hearted kicks. Then the sound of the tire iron hitting the wheel wells, fists banging on the ceiling. “Let me out of here!” the murderer called.
    Armand wondered if he ever would.

MISSION HILLS CONFIDENTIAL
    BY G RACE S UH
    Mission Hills
    Allison sits in the breakfast room and watches the cardinal pair, male and female, dipping in and out of the holly bushes where they make their home. She avoids this room in the morning—too much sun. But it’s tolerable starting from early afternoon, which it now is, when she can drink her tea and look out the tall windows and watch the shadows sit neatly under the trees like coasters.
    Her husband Britt is upstairs in the green guest room. Since winter, when he fell in with a new group of friends, he’s been tumbling into bed at all hours, reeking of vodka and smoke and sweat. A month ago she asked him to use a guest room on nights he goes out, and mostly he remembers. For some reason he eschews the gray one with the nautical theme and king-sized bed in favor of the mint-green one with the Colefax chinoiserie print that swathes the walls, draperies, armchair, and dainty canopy bed.
    She doesn’t know if he’s alive. If he isn’t dead, he’s probably close. The last time she saw him was three hours ago, at ten in the morning. He was sprawled on the tall double bed, his great spread-eagled mass covering nearly the whole of it, bedclothes tangled around his legs. He was either OD’ing or unconscious, his hand cold, his breathing shallow, irregular pants. No visible pain or discomfort. No panic like last time. Pants and socks thrown on the floor. She felt for his phone in his pocket and hung the pants on the back of the bathroom door. Most likely the battery was dead, but just in case, this would make it that much harder for him.
    The house is so vast, and the walls and floors so solid and thick, that one can barely hear a thing from one room to the next. And the green guest room is over the library, clear on the other side of the house. In the house Allison grew up in, two blocks away, she and her father used the staticky intercom system to reach one another, but this house, though almost as large, is strangely without one.
    Last time was two months ago. Allison awoke to screaming. It was six in the morning. A girl was shrieking so hysterically and insistently that the scream’s gauzy