Cops & RobbersStephen Graham Jones
My wife’s glasses were driving her crazy, so
before too long she started killing people in quiet ways. She
was remarkably efficient. As a homicide detective, I had nothing
but respect for her manners. However, the fact remained that she
was breaking laws I was sworn to uphold. Over the next few
years, then, we did the dance we were supposed to do—hunter,
prey; prey; hunter; she almost but never quite falling for our
many baits, me slamming my badge down on my captain’s desk so
many times that it bent the clasp—but at the end of the song we
had to acknowledge that we were evenly matched. Any good
marriage counselor would have told us the same thing. Our dinner
talk and our pillow talk were formal, polite, model. We both
washed our hands after work, commented in our individual ways on
the bodies piling up in the newspaper, and kissed each other off
into the city the next morning. Soon enough, retirement was
looming before me, and she was the only active case I hadn’t
been able to close. At my farewell banquet she held my large
hand in her smaller one, and then, that night in the foyer, the
bulb overhead not yet warm, her mask slipped a bit, her killer’s
fingers reaching under my suit jacket, to my shoulder holster,
but after twenty-five years on the force I was expecting this
too. She came up from the formed leather not with my service
revolver, but a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses. They
matched my new watch. She inspected them from every angle then
lowered her face to them, looked up to me with them on—looked
out of them to me—and said nice, turning to face
object after object in the foyer, as if they were all new, and
in this way we walked together into what was supposed to be our
twilight years, but felt more like dawn.
Stephen Graham Jones has three novels published,
The Fast Red Road, The Bird is Gone, and All the
Beautiful Sinners, and a story collection out in March:
Bleed Into Me. He currently teaches fiction writing at Texas
Tech University. |