Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

Ripsbaugh pretended not to notice them, in the same way he generally pretended not to notice anyone, work being a cloak of invisibility he pulled over himself. Ullard was drunk as usual, nodding off against the front tire, and Stokes drew a laugh by kicking him over. Bucky took a drag off a stubby cigarette and, with his patented Pail grin, pretended to launch the lit butt at Ripsbaugh and the fuel-sodden sand.

The others snickered hard. Ripsbaugh continued scraping his shovel like he hadn’t noticed.

“Hey, Buck,” said Eddie, sitting on the rear bumper of the rescue truck, looking to impress his younger brother. “Remember that high school janitor? The one with the crazy walleye?”

Bucky said, “The one I pulled the firecracker stunt on.”

“Every time some freshman girl coughed up her macaroni, he’d come in wheeling his bucket of slosh, sprinkle that odor-eating powder on the mess, and mop it up. Frigging thirty years he was there, mopping up kiddie spew once a week. What a life.”

Bucky said, “Seems to me that black folk, when they mop up, usually whistle a happy tune.”

The others laughed aggressively, Eddie harder than anyone. “Hey, Kane,” Eddie said, emboldened. “Know any tunes to pass the time?”

Ripsbaugh slowed the rhythm of his road scraping to a stop. With both hands resting comfortably on the handle of the shovel, he stood there, looking at them all. Nothing threatening in his manner. Nothing in his face. Just him leaning on his shovel, standing, staring.

Their chuckling petered out, the sneer draining from their smiles, faces going soft and empty. All except Bucky, who kept up his tomcat grin. He didn’t back down, but he didn’t say anything else either.

Ripsbaugh finished his shoveling and began hauling the heavy buckets back to his truck. Maddox was there and helped him load them in one at a time, the old truck’s springy suspension dipping a bit under the weight. Ripsbaugh pulled out a broom and a large paper bag and returned to the roadside by the gouged oak, sweeping up chunks of windshield.

Maddox followed. The cops were packing to leave, trying to rouse Ullard. Maddox said, “Val tell you I stopped by earlier?”

Ripsbaugh said, without looking up or breaking pace, “She did.”

“Seemed like I might have upset her. I hope not.”

“She upsets easily these days.”

“I was looking for Dill.”

“She said that. Building up probable cause, I suppose.”

Maddox paused. “Building up what?”

Ripsbaugh kept right on sweeping. “I figure you want to get inside his place. Legally, you can’t just walk in. Even a sex offender’s got rights. So you establish a threshold of suspicion. That’s how you build it.”

Maddox was interested. “Go on.”

“There was a case like this on Court TV a month or so back. You have to get a family member to say that he’s missed an appointment, or that someone’s worried about his health. Or a neighbor to say he hasn’t been cutting his lawn. Make it a public safety issue. That’s your in.”

“I see,” said Maddox. “Probable cause.”

“I figured maybe that was what you were going for.”

“You a crime buff?”

“I watch all those shows.”

The pumper and the rescue truck engines started, backing up beeping into the road, Maddox following the vehicles with his eyes until they pulled away. “Maybe you should have been made cop here, not me.”

Ripsbaugh regripped the handle of the broom and swept up the last of the shattered glass, now whistling a slow tune.

On the morning of Donald Christopher Maddox’s second birthday, February 4, 1974, Sergeant Pintopolumanos was patrolling the town with Officer Reginald Maddox. Black Falls’ finest rode in pairs back then, as with the logging industry still largely unregulated and the paper mill in full operation, the department was twenty men strong and still growing. Maddox’s father had come late to police work, having struggled for seven years at a career selling prefabricated office dividers: cork and wood partitions for the precubicle age. The last sale he made was to the Black Falls PD. During a tour of the premises, Sergeant Pinty picked up on the salesman’s interest in police work and invited him to apply for a position. Maddox’s mother, newly pregnant at the time, was won over by the bucolic setting of northern Mitchum County, and three months later the Maddoxes moved from a tiny apartment in the Boston neighborhood of Readville to a three-bedroom house in Black Falls.

At a little after ten on that February morning, Pintopolumanos and Maddox came upon a white Cadillac parked under a thin sheet of snow just off the shoulder at the eastern end of Main Street, less than one hundred yards from where the road crossed into neighboring Brattle. Snoring in the driver’s seat was a man named Jack Metters, a lower-echelon hoodlum from East Boston transporting a trunkful of life sentences in the form of two dozen stolen army machine guns.

Metters awoke to Officer Maddox’s window knock, emerging from his Caddy with a yawn and a smile. He asked the name of the town he was in, and before Maddox’s father could even answer, Metters fired a .38 Special five times with his right hand deep in the pocket of his pea jacket, dropping both policemen into the day-old snow.

Metters shed his burning coat, climbed back into his car, and continued on toward Boston, meeting his end less than one hour later in a roadblock shootout with state police.

Officer Maddox alligator-crawled back to his patrol car with two holes in his chest and one in his thigh, and died talking into the dash radio.

Pinty dragged himself off the road, where responding officers found him sitting against a young oak on a blanket of red snow, reporting no pain, only a low-voltage tingling in his toes.

Two rounds had shattered Pinty’s hips. The doctors who performed his surgeries told him he would never walk again. Pinty sought a second opinion — his own — and in the summer of 1975 returned to the same tree he had been found under, stepping from the car under his own power and chopping down that young oak with an ax. He milled the wood himself, fashioning his walking stick and topping it with a smooth, silver English grip ordered from a catalog.

Looking at the walking stick now, the nub of it tapping against the toe of Pinty’s boot as he sat deep in a big-armed, mission-style chair, Maddox was reminded of Pinty’s determination, of the man’s strength and pride. The police department was his life’s work, as was, by extension, Black Falls itself, and the prospect of bequeathing his legacy to a band of brigands was eating him up inside.

“Cancers,” Pinty said, after Maddox’s recap. “Got to carve them out with a knife. Cut them right out of our own goddamn belly.”

Maddox sat facing him on a skirted, powder blue sofa. Mrs. Pinty’s China dolls smiled from their display shelves in the formal living room, the collection untouched since her death. Maddox had stopped by after his shift, early enough to find Pinty with his breakfast napkin still tucked inside his collar, but not so early that he didn’t have his hairpiece in place. Pinty’s modest fluff of vanity was a decade old now, a shade or two darker than his existing silver fringe.

Pinty was in the process of converting his house for first-floor living. Maddox saw the folded wheelchair hidden behind the sofa.

“Ever heard the term ‘formication’?”

Pinty scowled. He was not in a learning mood. “That’s when a man and a woman...”

Maddox smiled. “It’s the sensation of insects creeping beneath your skin.”

“That’s something they need a name for?”

“Causes you to pick at your own flesh. People get obsessed, they wind up tearing apart their face, their arms.”