Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

The pumper truck came up behind them and Eddie hopped out, him and Mort taking the ice ladder down off its hooks in order to flip open the side compartments and pull out the medical cases. Bucky dropped out of the passenger-side door wearing old painter’s pants and a ribbed tank shirt, grinding his cigarette butt into the dirt shoulder and spitting into the trees. He reached for a fire extinguisher and a red ax and walked to the car as the other two jogged past him.

Maddox was at the Subaru, trying to talk to the driver and passenger inside. He stepped back as they arrived. “I called the ambulance,” he said.

Best-case scenario — nighttime, no traffic tie-ups, drivers who didn’t get lost more than once — it was a thirty-minute ambulance run from Rainfield into Black Falls. Leaving Bucky plenty of time.

He checked the hissing engine first, verifying that it was steam rising and not smoke. The windshield had shattered over the crumpled hood and the dash, so that when Bucky unclipped the small flashlight from his belt, its beam shone through an empty frame.

Both front air bags had deployed, hanging empty now, the driver and the passenger dusted in cornstarch from the bags, like mimes that had been in a car accident on their way to the circus. Oak leaves lay among the starch and chunks of glass.

The driver had flipped open the vanity mirror in his visor. His nose was busted, swollen and pulpy, but what bothered him was the glass. He was picking it out of his dusted skin with his fingertips, tenderly removing the shards and arranging them like a row of bloody diamonds on the dash over the radio.

Bucky knew his face but not his name. The passenger too. Wanda had pointed them out to him once. Foster kids, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. Bucky kept his beam on them so they couldn’t make him out, just in case. Glass sparkled in their scalps. He beamed the driver’s eyes and the kid’s pupils were eight-balled.

“Damn,” said the kid, wincing, but never stopping his digging. “Gotta clean it out. They still coming?”

“Who?” said Bucky.

“Them that’s chasing us.”

Pure paranoia. Bucky watched the kid pluck a large fragment out of his cheek, a layer or two deep inside the dermis, yet show no sign of pain. All this while the one in the passenger seat whimpered softly, mime tears streaking the powder on his cheeks from the corner of each eye.

Christ, thought Bucky. It was something to see firsthand. Everything they said about this stuff. Exactly as advertised. No shit.

He felt a surge of omnipotence that was difficult to contain. He pulled himself away, letting the others work as he backed off upwind from the fuel spill and sparked another Winston Gold.

Eddie and Stokes readied a c-collar and tried to get the driver to give up on the glass in his face. Ullard remained at the pumper, hanging on to the side mirror, still wearing sleep boxers and a zipped windbreaker, looking very happily shitfaced.

Maddox came up the road, Bucky speaking first to neutralize him. “Two drunk kids joyriding in a stolen car.”

“Drunk?” said Maddox. “You see that kid pulling glass out of his face?”

“Saw a guy once in a car pinned under a fence, insisted he was still inside his own garage. Wondered how I got in.”

“You see their eyes?”

Bucky talked smoke at him. “Yeah, I saw their eyes. What are you, a doctor? Snap some accident scene pictures and call in Ripsbaugh to mop up. Then take off.”

But Maddox didn’t leave right away. He lingered, looking kind of funny at Bucky, almost puzzled, like he was thinking something. Smelling something.

“The fuck are you doing?” said Bucky, his voice raised loud enough for the others to hear. He blew more smoke his way. “Are you fucking sniffing on me, you queer motherfuck? The fuck is your problem?”

Maddox stood steadfast in the dissipating haze, resetting himself. “I have a problem?”

“You do. I am your problem. Remember that.”

A school-yard stare, but nothing more. Never anything more, thought Bucky, Maddox always holding himself back. The brain inside was always working — but on what?

“Look at you here, pussyfooting around,” said Bucky. “Fucking college boy playing cop. You know what I think? I think you ought to be real careful on these shit-shift overnights. Accidents do happen.”

“That right?”

“That’s fucking right. Like that deer that hit you — you just never know. You’re out here all on your own. Long way from civilization. Think about who your lifeline is. Ain’t no ambulance.” Bucky peeled off a grin. “It’s us. It’s me. You think about that sometime.”

Bucky flicked his cigarette butt at Maddox’s boots and walked back to the wreck, where both boys were now out and being strapped to backboards. “Fucking homo,” Bucky said to the others. He tossed a look back at Maddox and yelled, “Pictures, camera, snap-snap, let’s go!” and stared him back to his patrol car.

“Fucking spook,” said Bucky, turning back to the strapped-down boys at his feet. He kneeled and went through their pockets quickly, finding nothing, no IDs. He looked into their faces and would have said something, would have warned them against talking, but their eyes were so far gone with shock and dope that any threat would have been wasted.

He leaned into the car and studied the seat with his flashlight beam, then cracked open the glove and emptied the contents onto the floor. Two small plastic zippered envelopes slid out. Bucky reached in and pocketed them quick, making sure there weren’t any more.

Maddox came up with the Polaroid as Bucky stepped back. Bucky watched him snap his pictures, making him feel his presence. Goading him into saying something, making a move. But Maddox worked silently until the ambulance arrived. Bucky caught up with one of the EMTs after they had loaded in the boys. He showed the guy his cop badge.

The EMT said, “It’ll be Rainfield Good Samaritan.”

“We found a bottle of vanilla schnapps in the backseat there,” lied Bucky. “Pretty cut-and-dried.”

“Vanilla?” snorted the EMT, not so long out of his teens himself. “Any flavor they don’t make that mouthwash in?”

“Kids like their poison sweet. No IDs yet, but we’ll track down the parents and phone in the particulars.”

“You got it. Have a good one.”

Bucky tucked his badge away. “I’ll sure try.”

Ripsbaugh pulled up on the scene just as Stoddard’s mechanic was driving off with the wreck. It looked bad but not fatal. The wound in the tree trunk oozed sap, but it too would survive, though with a good scar.

Maddox stood at his patrol car, arms folded, apart from the layabouts near the pumper and the rescue truck farther up the road. Ripsbaugh pulled around the road flares and angled in next to Maddox’s car, silencing the engine and stepping out of the cab. He walked to the back of his truck, his untied bootlaces flicking at his heels.

“Late call,” said Maddox, coming over.

Ripsbaugh dropped the rear door. “Usually is.”

“Couple of kids, nothing too serious.” Maddox glanced at the other cops. “Some glass in the road, along with the fuel.”

Ripsbaugh dragged out an open sack of sawdust. He lugged it over and emptied it onto the gasoline spill, then hauled out two buckets of cat litter and shook them on top of that. The blade of his long-handled shovel scraped the pickup bed as he slid it out.

The gas-soaked gravel scooped up like cornmeal and he shoveled it back into the plastic buckets. He kept his head down, working steadily but without haste, as was his manner. He remembered the last car accident he had to clean up — Ibbits, the escaped prisoner — and how Bucky had watched over him as though afraid Ripsbaugh would steal something from the burned wreck. This time Bucky was relaxed, all of them loitering by the pumper, prolonging the accident call into an extra hour’s pay.