Thin Ice by Mark Ammons

Author:Mark Ammons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: crime, mystery, anthology, short stories, flash fiction, new england, mystery fiction, fiction mystery, bev vincent, edgar allan poe, edgar award nominee, derringer, crime stories, new england mystery, edgar award finalist, mystery short stories, edgar award, agatha award nominee, derringer award, mark ammons, kathy chencharik, john r clark, sheila connolly, ray daniel, sa daynard, kat fast, kate flora, judith green, ben hanstein, ja hennrikus, steve liskow, cheryl marceau, edith m maxwell, ruth m mccarty, alan d mcwhirter, michael nethercott, susan oleksiw, jow ricker, barbara ross, mary e stibal, mo walsh, leslie wheeler, virginia young, anthology mystery, anthology crime, level best books, level best, new england stories, new england crime stories, new england crime, al blanchard award, al blanchard, new england crime bake, thin ice, multiauthor, agatha, new england writers, new england mystery stories
Publisher: Mark Ammons

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AUSA Laura Bower was too thin, too blonde, and looked too sweet to be the mean-assed SOB that she was. Maybe that’s how she got away with it. Anyone else acting like she did would be decked twice before noon. At least, that’s what Gracie thought. She didn’t know what Postman thought. He’d never deigned to enlighten her. And Billy, her poor, departed Billy, had thought Bower had nice legs and liked to imagine them—well, never mind, Gracie wasn’t going there. Billy said that was what men were always thinking when they said a woman had nice legs.

Bower should have known better than to put temptation in Billy’s path. Bank robbers were like snapping turtles. They had this one synaptic reaction when they saw vulnerable banks. Not that Gracie really held it against Bower. Not much, anyway. Bower’s job was to catch bad guys and put them away. When she got a bad guy—or bad gal—she thought she could turn, she tried to do that. And it was just, in Bower’s words, “an unfortunate accident” that Billy went into that bank to scope it out so he and Gracie could help Bower catch a more seriously bad bank robber, and got a little carried away with play acting.

Only then, a teller had gotten carried away, a security guard had gotten carried away, a cop had gotten carried away, and after the gun party ended and the smoke cleared, Billy got carried away in a black, zipped-up body bag. And now, to do penance for her role in things which mostly consisted of a failure to read minds or the future, and some overconfidence about handling Billy, Gracie was stuck in the middle of freakin’ nowhere, trying to get the goods on a bunch of toothless, inbred meth cookers who might have blown up their last neighbors, and she was too depressed to even wash her hair.

But a chance to get out of Tinville, however briefly, energized her. She washed and conditioned her Pre-Raphaelite hair into a russet glory, put on a nice black pencil skirt and an ivory silk top, pulled a candy pink muumuu on over it, tucked her Bruno Magli’s into a canvas bag and scuffed out to her rusty jeep in pink flip flops. Her nearest neighbor Randy, who had more teeth than brains, and only a handful of those, was out at the mailboxes, holding his elastic-sprung track pants with one hand and a cigarette in the other. He waved her down and leaned into the Jeep, blasting her with leftover beer breath.

“See you had you a visitor, Gracie,” he said.

God, she couldn’t wait to get back to big city anonymity. Around here, they practically counted how many times she flushed.

“The Suit? Yeah, Randy. Some a-hole from the IRS, would you believe it? Looking for my cousin’s husband, the one that ran off with his company’s payroll? I think I told you about him? I dunno why he’d be coming to me, the way I live.

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