Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

He talked it through, still trying to piece together what had happened, the memory of the incident and its impact as fresh to him as an echo.

“I slam on the brakes finally, stopping down there. Red smoke everywhere, but it was just road grit swirling up in my brake lights. I get out. I hear this sound like scraping, a sound I can’t understand. The dust settled... and here it is.”

Ripsbaugh looked into the trees. Edge Road was so named because it traced the treeline of the Borderlands State Forest. “How’s your unit look?”

“Rear right passenger door’s pushed in.” He was starting to shake off the shock. “I never heard of that. A deer broadsiding a moving car?”

“Better that than getting up into your windshield.”

Maddox nodded, realizing how close he had come to death. His turn to look into the trees. “Something must have spooked it.”

Ripsbaugh looked him over, his blue jeans and hiking boots. The town couldn’t afford regular uniforms anymore, so the six-man force wore white knit jerseys with POLICE embroidered in blue over their hearts, and black “BFPD” ball caps, making them look more like security guards than sworn lawmen. Snapped to Maddox’s belt were a chapped leather holster and a recycled badge. He held an old .38 in his hand.

The deer resumed its scratching, bucking its head against the asphalt. “Aw, Christ,” Maddox said, knowing what he had to do.

Maddox had grown up in Black Falls but he was no farm boy. He’d left to go to college some fifteen years ago and never returned until his mother passed away. That was six months ago now. No one had expected him to stay more than a day or two beyond the funeral, but here he was, a part-time auxiliary patrolman, a rookie at age thirty-three. That was about as much as anybody knew about him.

“All right,” Maddox said to the gun in his hand, and to the deer in the street.

Sometimes the mercy part of the kill shot is less for the suffering animal than for the man who can’t stand to watch it suffer.

“In the ear,” Ripsbaugh advised.

The animal flailed, sensing its impending execution, trying to get away. Maddox had to brace its strong neck with the tread of his hiking boot. He extended his gun arm with his palm open behind it.

The shot echoed.

The deer shuddered and lay still.

Maddox lurched back like a man losing his balance coming off the bottom rung of a ladder. He holstered his gun as though it were burning him, the piece still smoking at his hip. His hand wasn’t shaking, but he rubbed it as though it were.

Ripsbaugh walked to the deer. Maddox’s patrol car blues flashed deep within its dead round eye. “That was a good stance you had.”

Maddox breathed hard and deep. “What’s that?”

“Your stance. A good cop stance.”

“Yeah?” he said. He wasn’t quite present in the moment yet. “I guess.”

“They teach you that here?”

Maddox shook his head like he didn’t understand. “You a shooter?”

“Just going by what I see on TV.”

“Must be we watch the same shows, then.”

Ripsbaugh eyed him a little more closely now. “Must be.”

He gave Maddox a minute to get used to the idea of grabbing the deer’s hooves with his bare hands, then together they dragged the carcass off into the first row of trees, leaving a blood trail across the road.

“I’ll come back in the morning with my town truck,” said Ripsbaugh, “take him to the dump.”

Maddox eyed Ripsbaugh’s company rig. “You working late?”

“Fight with the wife. Came out to drive around, cool off.”

Maddox nodded, about the only way to respond to that. He was wiping his hands on his jeans, coming back more fully into himself now. “Well,” he said, “just another night in Black Falls.”

Ripsbaugh watched the amateur cop head back to his patrol car, silhouetted in flashing blue. He returned to his own truck, checked the bundle rolled tightly in the tarp in the rear bed, and started for home.

Bucky Pail — at sergeant, the highest-ranking member of the Black Falls Police Department — leaned forward against the counter, stretching his back as he looked out through the front windows of the station, past the people gathering on Main Street to the coursing blue stripe of the wide-running Cold River. The sun sparkled off its surface as though the waterway were a vein of blue blood conveying shards of broken crystal through the county. As though anyone going wading in it would shred their legs of flesh. Would find themselves standing on shins of pure bone.

This was what Bucky was grinning about when Walter Heavey walked in.

Heavey looked surprised to see Bucky up at the front desk. He hesitated a stutter-step before continuing forward, the man’s skin fishy white, his hair clown orange. He wore the same red jersey he always wore, bearing the three-oval State Farm Insurance symbol of his employer.

“What’s up, Walt?” said Bucky, not bothering to straighten.

“I’m here to report something.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

Heavey had wanted someone else to be there, anyone else. Knowing this, seeing the dread on Heavey’s face, gave Bucky a little lift.

Heavey said, “I heard a gunshot overnight.”

“Okay.” This was going to be good. “When-abouts and where?”

“It was last night. Late. Out in the Borderlands, behind my place.”

“Borderlands, huh? Woke you up?”

“It did wake me up, yes. But I wasn’t dreaming.”

“Mrs. Heavey had a bout of the gas, maybe?”

Bucky took Heavey’s shocked stare and savored it, anger blushing the man’s ridiculously fair face, further whitening his white eyebrows. Appearances alone, Bucky had zero respect for this guy.

“Okay,” said Bucky, Heavey too flustered to respond. “So. A gunshot.”

“I got kids in my house, Sergeant Pail. Three boys. I’m not... this isn’t fooling around. What’s it got to take for you to look into these things?”

Bucky nodded and kept up his grin. Kids. Kids weaken people. Not that Heavey had all that far to fall in the first place, but now the entire world was a white-hot threat to his precious offspring, all broken glass and sharp edges. Three tubby eight-year-old boys, identical triplets, all clown-heads like him. Piling out of the circus ambulance minivan with their Fat Lady mother huffing after them.

A comedy. A sideshow. And when something strikes you as funny, you smile.

Bucky said, “Is it that witch back sniffing around your boys again?”

Heavey was stewing and stammering now. “I never said it was a witch. I said she looked like a witch.”

Kids are a sex-change operation. Turn a man right into a woman.

“Maybe,” Heavey went on, “what I need to do is call the state police.”

Bucky grinned again, harder this time, curling it a bit. Relishing Heavey’s attempt at moxie. “See, it don’t work like that, Walt. We don’t answer to the staties, they’re not our bosses. Completely different thing. I bet they couldn’t even find Black Falls on a map.” Bucky straightened, using the step-up height advantage of the front counter. “But you go ahead and call them if you want, with your complaints about gunshots and witches trying to steal your kids—”

“Complaints?” Heavey looked around like he was on a hidden camera. “Shoe prints in my yard? Gunfire in the woods? These aren’t complaints. These are reports. ”

Eddie wandered out of the back hallway behind Bucky, chewing on an apple. “What’s up?”

Eddie was two inches taller and two years older than his brother, but it was Bucky who was in charge, and had been ever since they were kids. Eddie’s hair was straw blond to Bucky’s dirty brown, but facially, especially in the tight eyes, there was no mistaking the Pail brand. Eddie ate green apples one after another like a horse, in big, choking bites — core, seeds, stem, and all.