Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

Though she had needed one to get pregnant.

Lightning flashed on the barnyard dirt outside, Rosalie emitting a throaty groan. Tracy worried that the storm might trigger her labor. No Dr. Bolt to check her over now. Tracy was going to have to see Rosalie through this one all by her lonesome.

Rosalie got to her feet, a warble rolling in her long throat. She shuffled back and forth in the stall, jutting her head over the door. Her hooves scraped the hay-strewn flooring, Rosalie growing agitated. The same way she had been a few nights before, when the coyotes ran out of the forest and the hills, loping through town.

Tracy reached out to pat her head but Rosalie bucked away, stomping the planks. “What is it, girl?” said Tracy, looking out the open door.

Another high, cloud-smothered ripple of lightning created a shadow that appeared to retreat from the wood ramp leading outside.

Rosalie warbled and hissed.

“Mom?” Tracy said. She was not in the habit of calling out to her deaf mother, but thunder and lightning will do that to you. She walked to the doorway where the old ramp was hinged and peered around the corner. Another pulse of suffused cloud lightning moved shadows under the trees, but there was no one in sight.

She saw the sink light on in the kitchen, the stained-glass sun she had made in fourth grade hanging from a suction cup inside the window. Tracy hopped down to the dirt, needing to see if her mother was indeed inside.

She was. Blond hair marbled with streaks of white she refused to dye. Rinsing vegetables in the sink. Tracy watched her mother catch sight of herself in the mirror the interior light made of the window. Staring, just a moment, her wet hand coming up to touch her softly wrinkled neck. Then returning to her vegetables, as though nothing had happened.

Those were the moments Tracy would find most difficult to endure. The reveries that led straight to regret.

Rosalie raised another cry, lightning rippling again, but brighter this time, putting Tracy’s shadow down on the dirt — and another shadow, this one rising behind her. She turned just in time to see the figure emerge from beneath the ramp, long dark hair whipping in the wind as it raised some sort of weapon.

Tracy never felt the blow. She tasted dirt, a pair of hands pulling at her back as she attempted to crawl toward her mother. Then something fell on the back of Tracy’s neck, and she went out.

Pinty sat up against the many hospital bed pillows. His toes under the sheet at the end of his dead legs seemed a mile away.

Another thunderboomer outside his window, rain falling fast and hard. He watched with fascination, part of the new regard he had for all things since waking up. The perfect yellow packets of sugar that came on his meal tray. The colored pushpins in the wall. The elegant sweep of the clock’s second hand. The whispering of the nurses’ shoes. Everything had a place and a function and a beautiful simplicity.

It was raining in Rainfield.

Donny sat in the padded chair pulled beside the bed. He looked all right. He had been passing himself off as Pinty’s son in order to gain family visiting privileges, a ruse Pinty was only too happy to support. Beautiful in its simplicity. Everything with a place and a function.

“Thank you for this,” Pinty said, his walking stick lying across his lap.

He wanted to touch the smooth silver grip with his right hand. Doing so was like trying his luck at a carnival game of chance, that one where a number of identical strings are hooked, threaded, and tangled around a spoked grid in such a way that you cannot determine by sight which one to pull in order to raise the door that releases the prize. You have to guess, and then proceed by a process of elimination. Sometimes Pinty got it on the second or third string. Sometimes the strings didn’t work at all.

When his hand moved, it came up quaking, fingers curled. “Twelve weeks of rehab,” he said. “Just to hold a pencil steady.”

Maddox said, “You’ll do it in eight,” and Pinty smiled at his faith. The smile came easily, without thought. First string.

Speaking was getting easier too. Like recovering from frostbite, his jaw thawing out a little more every day. It was raining in Rainfield. “What was that you were asking me about?”

“The scholarship,” said Donny. “I won it fair and square, right?”

“By one-tenth of one percent, as I recall. Skin of your teeth.” An odd question he was asking. “Why are you wondering about that now?”

“But it was fair. I mean, I won it.”

“Sure you did.”

“You didn’t pull any favors. Didn’t shake anybody’s hand too hard.”

“No, no, no.” Pinty didn’t know what he was after here. “I may have gone around to a few of your teachers, sure, just letting them know what you had riding on your midterms, how hard you were studying. That a full scholarship for the son of a police officer killed in the line of duty was at stake. Future of the town, and all that.”

Donny blinked, getting quiet, looking at his hands on the blue armrests.

Form. Function. Simplicity. A chair, a bed, a window. Old man, younger man. Weak and strong.

Pinty went on. “I never begrudged you that, by the way. I always held out the hope, maybe even the knowledge, that you’d find a way to make good on your pledge. And now look. Years overdue, but you’ve given Black Falls a new start. Given it a fighting chance. That scholarship turned out to be worth every penny we raised.”

Donny was squinting into his lap now, like he was working over some puzzle Pinty could not see. “Righting a wrong is the closest thing we have to going back in time.”

Pinty agreed. “That’s as good a way to put it as any.”

Donny looked up as though he’d been poked. He shifted in the big chair and slipped a device out of his back pocket, that pager he carried around with him everywhere. Pinty heard it buzzing.

Donny read the display and looked charged. He got to his feet.

“What?” said Pinty.

“Sinclair,” Donny said, reaching for the telephone on the bedside tray. “Wants me to meet him on Hell Road.”

The rain continued in earnest after the thunder and lightning had moved off, drumming on the roof of the Hummer. The windows stayed cracked because they couldn’t run the defrost, because they couldn’t run the engine, because they were hiding in a turnout a thousand yards from the Borderlands trailhead. The Special Tactics and Operations team leader sat beside Hess in the wide backseat, his head tipped back, eyes closed but nowhere near sleep. Hess kept swiping water off his own face from the drops smacking the top edge of his window and spitting into his eyes.

The wire in Hess’s ear sizzled. “ He’s walking out.”

The STOP team leader lowered his chin and opened his eyes. “What do you mean? Just walking out? Alone?”

“That’s a roger. What do we do, advise?”

The leader looked at Hess. Hess frowned, shook his head.

“Bring it in,” said the STOP leader. He reached forward and patted his driver’s shoulder, the Hummer’s engine roaring to life.

They were the first ones back to the trailhead, pulling in next to Maddox’s parked patrol car. Hess got out in the rain, watching a man in a poncho exit the fire road entrance, walking determinedly toward him through the puddles. Maddox stopped in front of Hess, shrugging back his glistening hood.

Hess said, “What gives you the authority to pull the plug on this thing yourself?”

“I stood in there for an hour and a half,” said Maddox. “He’s not coming. Not going to let himself be trapped like that.”