John M. Floyd is the author of more than a thousand short stories in publications like Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Best Mystery Stories of the Year. A former Air Force captain and IBM systems engineer, Floyd is also an Edgar finalist, a Shamus Award winner, a five-time Derringer Award winner, and the 2018 recipient of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s lifetime achievement award.
Elsie Williams was always in a bad mood when she was working, and since she was almost always working, she was almost always in a bad mood.
Except for today.
Elsie had been employed at the Jackrabbit Diner for the past two years, and although she was usually running the place alone, while her worthless boss was at home drunk, he had made it clear many times that her job description and pay grade was and would always be “waitress.” Well, not for much longer. At eight o’clock tonight—five hours from now—Elsie planned to take her final day’s pay out of the cash register, turn off the lights and lock up, slide the key and a farewell note to her boss (his name actually was Jack) under the front door, jump in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s blue Camry, and put the Jackrabbit Diner in her rearview mirror forever. She had very little money—the proceeds from yesterday’s sale of her twenty-year-old car were laughable—but thanks to recent events, her boyfriend did have money, which was her ticket out of here. It was a good feeling.
In the back of her mind, Elsie knew she should leave right now, and to hell with her boss. But despite believing she had a rebellious nature, her work ethic remained stubbornly intact. She would stay and finish the day before starting her new life.
It was right about that point in her thoughts—as she came back from refilling her only two customers’ coffee cups while humming a little tune under her breath—that Vito Corleone walked through the front door.
Sixty or so, balding, Italian, jowly, sleepy eyes, deep frown, tiny mustache. He was dressed in brown pants and a tan shirt with the sleeves rolled up—not exactly mafia attire—but that only strengthened the image in her head. He looked like Brando in the tomato-garden scene with his grandson, near the end of the movie.
Elsie had once heard that waiters and bartenders are among the best judges of character, and over time she had come to believe that. And right now, all her instincts were telling her this man was dangerous.
He sat down on a stool at the counter, looked over at her, and mumbled in a raspy voice, “I’m looking for somebody—guy named Mike McCann.”
One of her other customers—a man four stools down—rose and began counting change onto the countertop beside his cup.
Elsie studied the guy who looked like Vito a moment before replying. “Sorry. I don’t know the name.”
He turned to the other two patrons and called out. “Either of you know him? Mike McCann?”
The man who’d stood up shook his head. “Just passing through. But I wish you luck.” He paid his bill, walked out, and a minute later she heard a car start up and pull out of the parking lot.
“How about you?” Vito asked the other customer, a tall blond fellow seated at the table in the corner booth.
“Don’t know him. Sorry,” the man answered, and went back to his coffee and sweet roll.
Vito seemed about to say something more, but before he could, his cell phone rang. The too-loud ringtone was the first eleven notes of The Sound of Music, and as weirdly out-of-place as anything Elsie could’ve imagined. He fished the phone from his pocket, listened a few moments, said, “Calm down. I’m working on it,” and disconnected. He frowned at both Elsie and the man in the booth before putting the phone away.
“You up here from the city?” Elsie said.
He gave her a dark look. “Yeah. Why?”
“Just askin’.” She was still holding her coffeepot. “You want a cup?”
“Yeah, I guess. And a ham sandwich.”
“We only got coffee and pastry,” she said, pouring.
He studied her a moment. “What kinda diner don’t serve ham sandwiches?”
“The kind that doesn’t have a cook. We’re not really a diner, we’re a coffee shop.” She saw him examining the name painted on the wall behind the counter and added, “Don’t believe everything you read.”
Vito was still squinting at the name of the café. “‘Jackrabbit’? How’d that happen?”
“The owner’s name. Jack Hopper.”
“You’re kiddin’ me,” he said.
“Wish I was.”
He shook his head. Both of them stayed quiet while he sipped his coffee and took a long look around. His gaze lingered, she noticed, on the patron in the corner booth, who was now staring absently out the window.
“Why you looking for this McCann guy?” she said. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
Vito turned and focused on her. “Business,” he said. “I went to the address I was given, but I musta wrote it down wrong. I was headed back when I saw the sign for your place. Figured I’d stop and ask.”
Elsie nodded. “What business are you in?”
This time he took so long she thought he wasn’t going to reply. At last he said, “I’m an exterminator.”
The word hung there in the air. “You mean, like, pest control?”
He took another slow swallow from his cup. “Yeah. That’s what I mean.”
But she didn’t think so.
From the corner of her eye, Elsie saw the man in the booth watching them both. A deep silence dragged by. It was so quiet she could hear birds singing outside, the hum of the refrigerator in the back, the thudding of her heart in her chest. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked.
“Excuse me a second,” she said, and walked through the old-fashioned swinging door to the diner’s back room.
Less than a minute later she returned, wearing a long plastic apron. When she reached the counter across from him, she took a small revolver from behind her back and shot Vito Corleone right between his two sleepy eyes. He froze for a moment, his mouth wide open in surprise, and then fell slowly backward off his stool.
Mike McCann, already scared stiff, sat there in the corner booth and gaped. Finally, on legs that felt like chunks of firewood, he rose and stumbled over to join Elsie at the counter.
“What have you done?” he whispered, looking down at the body.
Elsie had tucked the smoking revolver into the pocket of her waitress uniform and shrugged out of the apron. McCann could see why she had put it on, but it turned out to be unneeded; there was very little blood.
“What choice did I have?” she asked. “We figured they’d come for you. I just didn’t think it’d be this soon.”
McCann had hoped they wouldn’t come for him at all. But she was right. You can’t steal a hundred grand from the mob and get away with it, even if you hadn’t known that’s who you were stealing it from. McCann had been told it was just a high-stakes poker game between big shots at the local casino, and had popped into the smoky room with his mask and gun and taken all the cash from the table and from the seven players’ pockets as well. And got away clean. But not as clean as he and Elsie had hoped. Turned out there were cameras outside, and far too late he’d started wondering if they’d seen his car and his tag number. And now here they were, in broad daylight. McCann tried to control his trembling arm long enough to look at his watch: half past three. What kind of crooks did their killing in the daytime? Couldn’t they have waited till nine o’clock or so? For that matter, couldn’t Elsie have agreed to leave with him today like he’d planned, and not insist on waiting till tonight?
“What do we do now?” he asked. He hated to be in a position like this, hated to have to ask his girlfriend—girlfriend sounded better than mistress—for guidance, but Elsie was smarter than he was, and they both knew it.
“We get rid of the body, that’s what, and his ride too.” Elsie hurried around to McCann’s side of the counter, dug a moment in the dead man’s pants pockets, and came out with a set of keys. “Here. Take these, drive his car around back, then come in and help me drag him out too. We’ll put him in the trunk and then roll him and his car into the bog down by the creek.”
“What if a customer drives up, while we’re getting ready to do all this?”
“We’ll lock the place, put the CLOSED sign on the door, and move your car around behind the building with his, until we’re done.” She pointed. “Go. I’ll clean this up.”
But McCann didn’t get far. When he opened the front door he stopped in his tracks, staring at the parking lot.
Elsie must’ve seen him looking because he heard her cross the room to stand there beside him in the doorway.
The only vehicle in the diner’s lot except for McCann’s was a white commercial van—with the words BRUMUCCI PEST CONTROL printed on the side.
He stood frozen and heard Elsie gulp aloud. When his heart started beating again, he heard her say, “It could be a cover. Maybe it’s a cover.” And she was right; it could’ve been. Except for what happened next.
McCann felt his cell phone buzz in his pocket. When he took it out, he saw the word SUSAN on the display. Dazedly he said into the phone, “What is it, honey?”
“I got a problem,” Susan McCann said. “I heard a rat in the attic again and called a guy Judy Caldwell told me about to come take care of ’em.” She paused. “Where are you, anyway?”
“What guy?”
“I don’t know, a funny name. Brenouli, Baruzzi, something like that. The problem is, he said he’d come right away, and he’s still not h—”
McCann disconnected. He felt all the blood drain from his face.
Elsie frowned and said, “What?”
He turned to look at her. “You shot the wrong kind of killer.”
Elsie Williams had never believed she could be this calm in the face of disaster. But she had to be. Mike was about to freak out, she could see that, so somebody had to stay cool. After hearing about his wife’s call to the bug man and realizing this was the bug man, Elsie swallowed hard and took careful stock of the situation.
Okay, she’d shot an innocent bystander. That was really too bad and she was sorry about it. But nobody else knew. They could still make it out of this.
“Listen to me,” she said to McCann. “Listen and do what I say. Okay?”
He didn’t answer, but he did look at her.
“Back to the plan,” she said. They were still standing in the doorway. “Go pull his van around back and I’ll—”
She stopped midsentence. She heard a car approaching. “Inside, quick, till it passes.”
Both of them ducked back into the coffeeshop and waited. Elsie peeked through the crack in the door.
The car didn’t pass. It slowed down, pulled into the lot, and stopped. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
“It’s the sheriff,” she said, closing the door. “Personal car, not his cruiser—but it’s him.”
McCann looked ready to pass out. She shook him, hard, and put her nose in his face.
“Come on, Mike. We got time, barely, before he comes in.”
“Time for what?” Then he blinked, and his eyes widened. “Let’s do what you said—lock the door, put up the CLOSED sign. He’ll think nobody’s here—”
“Won’t work. He knows your car. It’s sitting right there. And this guy’s van is too.” She turned and looked at the body, thinking hard. “Help me get him into the closet there.”
“The closet?”
“There’s no room in the back. We can stash him here in the closet till the sheriff leaves.”
“What about the van?”
“Leave that to me. Come on!”
And somehow they did it. Moving fast, the two of them dragged Brumucci’s wide body into the closet just past the end of the counter, grabbed his coffee cup and wiped up what little blood was around—thank God it had only been a .22 slug—and stashed the plastic apron and his cup in there with him. Elsie pushed the closet door shut two seconds before the front door opened and a man in a cowboy hat, khaki pants and an untucked golf shirt sauntered in.
“Afternoon, Sheriff,” she said, strolling back behind the counter. “Got the day off?”
Mike McCann, still pale, had only just settled onto one of the barstools.
“Hey Elsie. Mike. Yep, five days off.” The sheriff spread his hands. “No patrol car, no uniform, no radio.”
“Joe Average,” Elsie said. “You fit right in.”
Actually, he didn’t. Sheriff Joe Sargent was about Elsie’s and McCann’s age, early forties, but looked ten years older, probably because he’d spent a long stretch on the police force in the city before coming to his senses and moving here. Maybe also because of that, he had a military bearing in both his dress and his posture, with every hair in place, every button buttoned, every crease straight and sharp. Elsie was also aware, although not many people here were, that he had reached the rank of sergeant in his previous job, which had made him Sergeant Sargent. At least he was now shed of that awkward title. Sometimes a career change, even for less pay, helped in more ways than one.
He chose a stool next to McCann and said to Elsie, “You running the place again?”
“Jack called in sick.”
“Right.” The sheriff and everyone else around here knew what kind of sick Jack Hopper was. He took off his hat and set it crown-down on the countertop. “How fresh is the coffee?”
“Brand new.” She took an almost full pot off the burner behind the counter, poured him a steaming cup, and put it back. “What brings you here today?”
“Killing time. Nancy and the kids are at her sister’s, I’m supposed to pick ’em up at five.” He paused and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the door. “What’s the deal with the van out there?”
Elsie looked in that direction, as if she could see through walls. Casually she said, “Guy came in this morning, asked if he could leave it there awhile so he could ride with one of his coworkers to a job. Said he’d come back and pick it up after dark. Fella named Brumucci.”
The sheriff nodded. “I know him. He sprayed my backyard for mosquitoes last month. Gave us sort of a package deal—treatments for termites, roaches, everything but horseflies. Kept him there most of a day. Nice enough guy, we thought, maybe a little grumpy. Big fan of musicals, always humming some show tune.”
“That was him all right.” Elsie threw a quick glance at McCann, whose color was still a little off. Thank God he hadn’t had to pull up a chair and play poker with the high rollers he’d robbed, she thought. The truth was, though, she was getting worried as well. Were they going to have to sit here and entertain the Law for another hour while an innocent and extremely unlucky pest-service owner who happened to look like a movie star lay dead in a closet twenty feet away? Elsie felt sweat trickling down the middle of her back.
Just as she was deciding the day couldn’t possibly get any worse, the door opened again, and it did.
The second thought to go through Elsie Williams’s exhausted brain after she’d found out the guy she’d shot wasn’t really a hit man sent by the mob to murder her boyfriend was that shooting him hadn’t accomplished a damn thing. A hit man was probably still coming to murder her boyfriend. Except that maybe it wouldn’t be today, and she and Mike would be long gone by tomorrow.
But then the door had opened once again, while she and McCann were chatting with the county sheriff about spraying for insects, and the two grim-faced men who walked into the café were (she discovered later) one Frank “Big Ears” Corelli and one Albert “The Mortician” Mortimer. Except for their business attire—black suits and ties and white shirts—they looked as different as night and day: Corelli was tall, dark, skinny, and calm and Mortimer was short, sandy haired, stocky, and nervous.
Neither man bothered to take a seat or otherwise waste time. They marched in, pulled a pair of heavy black automatics from their shoulder holsters, and stood side by side, facing their three victims-to-be. Elsie couldn’t help thinking of Pulp Fiction.
“Which one of you’s driving the blue Toyota?” Mortimer asked.
For a moment, no one spoke. Elsie stood frozen in place behind the counter; McCann sat stock-still on his stool looking away from the gunmen; the plain-clothed sheriff, seated also, had turned half to his left to watch them. When Elsie glanced at him, it occurred to her that something about Sheriff Sargent had looked off ever since he walked in. Something important. But she couldn’t pin it down.
“Who belongs to that car?” Frank Corelli asked, louder this time.
McCann, once again pale as a bedsheet, swiveled his stool toward the two men. He was positioned between the sheriff and the two strangers. Less than ten feet separated the good guys from the bad. McCann took a deep breath, rose from his stool, and said, “It’s mine.”
Elsie gasped. “Wait a minute—”
“So you’re Mike McCann?” Mortimer asked.
“Don’t do it!” she said. “Don’t tell them anyth—”
“It’s okay, Elsie,” McCann said. Then, to the two men: “Yes. I’m the one you want. And my friends here weren’t there that night. They aren’t a part of this.”
Clearly amused, Corelli said, “Too late. They are now.”
Both men raised their weapons.
In her peripheral vision Elsie, as scared as she was, noticed that Sheriff Joe Sargent seemed to have turned a bit farther toward the gunmen but was still keeping the right side of his body hidden from their sight. In that instant she knew what it was that had seemed different about him earlier. And she knew what she had to do.
“Didn’t you idiots see the van out front?” she blurted. As she spoke, she turned a bit also, to her right, to grip the handle of the almost-full coffeepot on the burner behind her.
Guns pointed and ready, both men hesitated. “What about the van?” Mortimer said.
Smiling, Elsie looked past them and called, “Come on in, boys!”
It was an old trick, but Corelli and Mortimer still turned, their heads swiveling to look behind them at the front door—and when they did, Elsie threw the coffeepot, as hard as she could, at Frank Corelli. It hit him solid, just behind the ear, broke, and spilled its blazing-hot contents all over both gunmen.
In the next two seconds, Corelli fell, scalded, to the floor, Albert Mortimer, burned also, turned and fired blindly at her, and the sheriff pulled his service pistol from beneath his shirttail and fired back. The gangster’s shot missed; the sheriff’s didn’t. Mort the Mortician fell face up on the wet floor beside his writhing partner, dead before he landed.
For a moment, no one said a word. Steam rose from the tiled floor, and the smell of coffee and gun smoke filled the long, windowless room. The only sound was the heavy breathing of the three people still standing and Big Ears flopping around on the floor. Elsie realized that at some point she had drawn her little .22 and was aiming it needlessly at their attackers. The sheriff saw the revolver, took it from her gently, and went back to staring at the gunmen on the floor. Then he slid the hit men’s weapons out of reach across the room, holstered his automatic, took his phone from his pocket, and called an ambulance.
“So much for my day off,” he said.
The next hour was hectic, but by six o’clock everyone except Elsie, McCann, and the sheriff had left the scene, taking the dead body and the whimpering Corelli with them. Some time after that, as the sheriff and the waitress and her boyfriend sat at the corner table where McCann had been earlier in the afternoon, Sheriff Sargent handed Elsie her .22 and gave her a thin smile. “I’m not sure what would’ve happened,” he said, “if you hadn’t thrown that coffeepot.”
“I am,” McCann said. It was the first time he’d spoken since just before the shootout.
“Yeah, I guess I am too.” The sheriff let out a breath. “What I mean is … I was in street clothes, Elsie. How’d you know I had my gun?”
She smiled back. “Your shirttail was out, to cover it. Your shirttail’s never out.”
He thought that over and nodded. After another sigh, he rose from the booth and looked at McCann. “I don’t know why they were after you, Mike—whatever happened between you and them must’ve been pretty bad. Bad enough to almost get us all killed. It’s something I ought to ask you about, and you ought to tell me.”
The two of them studied each other a moment. “But?” McCann said.
“But whatever it was, it happened outside my county, and I don’t figure any of that bunch will be charging you with anything. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Not really.”
“I’m saying I don’t want these people coming back. And if their bosses really want you, they’ll try again.”
“So … I should get out of town.”
“I would if I were you.”
McCann nodded, and Elsie fought to keep from smiling. That’s just what we want to do, she thought. Free at last.
They stood also, and the three of them walked to the front door.
Sheriff Sargent paused there, his hand on the doorknob, and smiled again. “Busy place, the Jackrabbit,” he said.
He was opening the door when they all heard it. A phone was ringing. A phone with an odd ringtone: the beginning of The Sound of Music.
Everyone froze. The sheriff stared at the closet near the end of the counter, and Elsie and McCann stared at the sheriff. After a long wait and another burst of music, Sheriff Sargent took a careful step back, looking now at both of them. McCann was sweating, his face once again the color of wet chalk—Elsie saw it, and so did the sheriff. Slowly, for the second time that day, he drew his pistol.
He aimed it at a spot between Elsie and McCann and held out a palm. Without a word, she handed him her .22. He took it in his free hand, and this time he sniffed the barrel.
“Okay,” he said to both of them. “What’s in the closet?”
*One thing I’ve always enjoyed, for some reason, are crime stories set in a diner. Maybe it’s because of my memory of Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” or of the fact that a roadside café is such a good place to find all kinds of different people. Another thing I like is a strong female lead, no matter which side of the law she happens to be on. In the case of my story “Last Day at the Jackrabbit,” these two preferences come together when a tired waitress named Elsie finds herself in the middle of a deadly battle between a local off-duty sheriff, her amateur-thief boyfriend, and a pair of hit men who’ve been dispatched by their boss to track her lover down and deliver their kind of justice.
To this already-strange scenario I added another fictional element I’ve come to love: the mid-story plot reversal—several of them, in fact—that can take a supposedly normal storyline and, at the drop of a waitress’s cap, turn it in a completely different direction. Since I knew editor Andrew Gulli at Strand Magazine is fond of that kind of thing also, I submitted this twisty story to him, and—lucky for me—he published it.
I hope you’ll like it as much as I enjoyed writing it.