The Best American Noir of the Century

Brendan DuBois (1959-) was born in New Hampshire and has lived there his entire life. A former newspaper reporter, he has written a variety of novels and has been a prolific short story writer, with more than one hundred published stories to his credit.

His mystery novels, set around the New Hampshire seacoast, often feature Lewis Cole, a magazine writer who was once a research analyst for the Department of Defense. The first book in the series is Dead Sand (1994), followed by Black Tide (1995), Shattered Shell (1999), Killer Waves (2002), Buried Dreams (2004), and Primary Storm (2006). He has had even greater success with international thrillers, notably Resurrection Day (1999), an alternative-history novel set in 1972, a decade after the Cuban missile crisis had provoked an atomic war between the Soviet Union and the United States. It received the Sidewise Award for Best Alternative History Novel at the World Science Fiction Convention. Other thrillers include Twilight (2007), about the aftermath of a successful terrorist attack on the U.S.; Final Winter (2006), a nail biter about a planned terrorist attack on the U.S.; Betrayed (2003), which delves into the real-life mystery of the two thousand servicemen missing in action during the Vietnam War; and Six Days (2001), about a plot to overthrow the U.S. government. His short stories have received numerous awards, including two Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America. “The Dark Snow” was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century.

“A Ticket Out” was first published in the January 1987 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Then there are the nights when I can’t sleep, when the blankets seem wrapped around me too tight, when the room is so stuffy that I imagine the air is full of dust and age, and when my wife Carols sighs and breathing are enough to make me tremble with tension. On these nights I slip out of bed and put on my heavy flannel bathrobe, and in bare feet I pad down the hallway —past the twins’ bedroom — and go downstairs to the kitchen. I’m smart enough to know that drinking at night will eventually ‘cause problems, but I ignore what my doctor tells me and I mix a ginger and Jameson’s in a tall glass and go to the living room and look out the large bay window at the stars and the woods and the hills. Remembering what we had planned, what we had stolen, the blood that had been spilled, the tears and the anguish, I sip at my drink and think, well, it wasn’t what we wanted to do. We weren’t stealing for drugs or clothes or to impress the chunky, giggly girls Brad and I went to high school with. We were stealing for a ticket, for a way out. In the end, only one of us got out. That thought doesn’t help me sleep at all.

* * *

It began on an August day in 1976, about a month before Brad Leary and I were going in as seniors to our high school. That summer we worked at one of the shoe mills in Boston Falls, keeping a tradition going in each of our families. Brad’s father worked in one of the stitching rooms at Devon Shoe, while my dad and two older brothers worked on the other side of the Squamscott River at Parker Shoe. My dad was an assistant bookkeeper, which meant he wore a shirt and tie and earned fifty cents more an hour than the “blue-collar boys” that worked among the grinding and dirty machinery.