Was this what he’d been checking in the saddlebag? A gift for a child? Then Kirwan squeezed the doll, felt the unyielding lump inside.
He turned it over, lifted the cloth flap of the poncho. Stitches ran up the back of the doll, thick ones, a darker color than the material. He tucked the flashlight under his arm again, pulled at the stitches until they were loose. The back of the doll came apart at the seam, revealing more tissue paper packed around a metal cigar tube. He unscrewed the top of the tube and pulled out a tightly rolled plastic bag. He poked a finger in, teased out part of the clear bag. Inside was a thick off-white powder, caked and compressed.
He pushed it back into the tube, screwed on the top. He put the tube in his pants pocket and tossed the doll out into the water.
He picked up the holstered gun, walked back up the slope to the Volvo, the road still empty in both directions. The yellow light blinked in the distance. The Volvo’s hazards clicked, insects flittering in the headlights. A breeze came through, moved the sugarcane on the other side of the road.
He opened the Volvo’s tailgate, pushed aside the sample boxes to get at the spare-tire compartment. He lifted the panel, pried up the spare, and put the tube and gun under it, then let the tire drop back into place. He closed the panel, shut the tailgate.
Back behind the wheel, he put away the flashlight, shut the glove box, gave a last look at the cell phone.
He reversed onto the road, swung a U-turn, headed back the way he’d come. He was calm inside, centered, for the first time that night. At the intersection, he turned the radio back on.
After a while he began to feel sleepy again, a pleasant drifting. He looked at his watch. If he kept going, he could push through to New Smyrna by three-thirty or so, find a motel, get five or six hours’ sleep before the meeting. It would be enough. Maybe he’d ask Lois out to dinner that night, divorce or no.
He had two free days after that. He could stay down there, figure out what exactly was in that tube, what it might be worth. There didn’t seem to be much of it, whatever it was. Maybe it was just a sample for some larger deal to be made later.
Rain began to spot the windshield, thick heavy drops. He turned on the wipers. They thumped slowly, and on their second arc, he saw that the chip in the windshield was gone. He touched a thumb to where it had been. Nothing there now, the glass unblemished. One less thing to take care of, at least.
He was humming along to the music by the time he reached the on-ramp for 95. What had happened had happened. There was no going back. Not now, not ever. The road and the night were his.
Contributors’ Notes
The author of 11 novels and more than 120 short stories, Doug Allyn has been published internationally in English, German, French, and Japanese. More than two dozen of his tales have been optioned for development as feature films and television. Allyn studied creative writing and criminal psychology at the University of Michigan while moonlighting as a guitarist in the rock group Devil’s Triangle and reviewing books for the Flint Journal. His background includes Chinese language studies at Indiana University and extended duty with USAF Intelligence in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Career highlights? Sipping champagne with Mickey Spillane, waltzing with Mary Higgins Clark, and co-writing a novel with James Patterson.
• A few years ago, on a flight from New York, my seat-mate was a former heavyweight contender from a famous Flint, Michigan, boxing family. For a lifelong fight fan, it was like sitting next to Elvis. We chatted the whole trip away. He’d suffered an injury similar to the one depicted in “Puncher’s Chance” and continued to fight for several years afterward. Consider that a moment. This man stepped into the ring with skilled fighters, two hundred pounds and up, who were trying to knock him into next week, knowing that his chances to win, or even to defend himself effectively, were limited by his injury. Why would anyone do this? “I was trying to salvage my career,” he said. “And hell, I always had a puncher’s chance.” And he was dead serious. Awed by his courage and commitment, I couldn’t wait to get to my desk to start weaving it into a story. Sometimes writing is work. Not this time.
Jim Allyn is a graduate of Alpena Community College and the University of Michigan, where he earned a master’s degree in journalism. While at Michigan he won a Hopwood Creative Writing Award, Major Novel Division, and also won the Detroit Press Club Foundation Student Grand Award for the best writing in a college newspaper or periodical. Upon graduation he pursued a career in health-care marketing and communications, working at major hospitals in three states. He recently retired as vice president of marketing and community relations at Elkhart General Healthcare System in Elkhart, Indiana. His first short story, “The Tree Hugger,” appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and was selected by Marvin Lachman as one of the Best Mystery Short Stories of 1993. Six other stories have been published by EQMM since then, including “Princess Anne,” which was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014. Allyn is a U.S. Naval Air Force veteran, having served in a helicopter squadron aboard the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid.
• I found “The Master of Negwegon” very difficult to write. It began as a novel about five years ago and kept morphing and morphing so that I wound up with a couple of banker’s boxes full of rough copy and nothing that resembled a coherent plot or story. I realize now that I made the classic mistake of “If you warm up too long, you miss the race.” In an attempt to stay timely and relevant, I was continuously adding fodder about the war in Iraq, ecological problems such as the emerald ash borer, the utterly amazing lack of accountability among politicians, and developments in our understanding of TBI/PTSD. I got distracted and buried. So after walking away for a while, I decided to try it as a short story. Reduce it to bare essentials. That worked, but it was tough to extract and refine a short story from the morass that was to be a novel. The novel remains a target. Negwegon, at least, is stationary. Dynamic, but stationary. This beautiful wilderness park is located just a mile or so from my home in Black River and allows me to step back in time at will. When you emerge from the forest path to the broad, dune-swept horseshoe beach that fronts the bounding waters of Lake Huron, however far you’ve had to travel to get there will be worth it.
Dan Bevacqua’s stories have appeared in Electric Literature’s “Recommended Reading,” the New Orleans Review Online, Tweed’s Magazine of Literature & Art, and The Literary Review, among others. A chapbook, “Security and Exchange,” was published in 2015. Bevacqua is the fiction editor at Jerry Magazine. A visiting assistant professor in English and creative writing at Western New England University, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
• For lots of reasons I won’t get into, “The Human Variable” started in my mind with the image of a man driving through the night toward a marijuana farm. For weeks I didn’t know why, until my friend and neighbor Krzysiek, a Polish engineer and climate scientist, told me about an app he was developing that would more accurately predict horrible weather events, like tornados and hurricanes. Somehow these two ideas, marijuana farming and climate change, got all mixed together, and then everything in the story started to click and work toward its violent end.
C. J. Box is the number-one New York Times best-selling author of twenty-one novels, including the Joe Pickett series. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel (Blue Heaven, 2009) as well as the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 (France), Macavity Award, Gumshoe Award, two Barry Awards, and the 2010 Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Award for fiction. He was recently awarded the 2016 Western Heritage Award for Western Novel by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. The novels have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Open Season, Blue Heaven, Nowhere to Run, and The Highway have been optioned for film and television. Millions of copies of his novels have been sold in the United States and around the world. In 2016, Off the Grid debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list in March. Box is a Wyoming native and has worked as a ranch hand, surveyor, fishing guide, and small‑town newspaper reporter and editor, and he owned an international tourism marketing firm with his wife, Laurie. In 2008, Box was awarded the “BIG WYO” Award from the state tourism industry. An avid outdoorsman, he has hunted, fished, hiked, ridden, and skied throughout Wyoming and the mountain West. He served on the board of directors for the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo and currently serves on the Wyoming Office of Tourism board. He and his wife have three daughters and one (so far) grandchild. They split their time between their home and their ranch in Wyoming.