Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

Bucky backed off but his eyes would not let go of Maddox. His look said that someday Pinty wouldn’t be around to bail Maddox out.

Maddox banked that look, and the feeling it left him with, then turned away, part of him charging up like a battery, filling with new resolve. The other part of him remained pissed off, at himself, at the town, and even, he realized, at Pinty. Not for intervening. He was pissed off at Pinty for sticking with this backward town, for being the devoted captain who had to go down with this flooding ship.

The parade was breaking up now, a sad affair, more funereal than celebratory. Maddox cared little for the future of the town, but he cared about Pinty, who, to his mind, was the town. The aging Greek, seventy-one now, was a physical contradiction: barrel-chested on top and slender on the bottom, his waist and legs too small for the rest of him, carrying his weight like a vest of old muscle. As chief of police and town selectman, he had all but ruled Black Falls for the past quarter century. A benevolent dictator, the kind of man who mattered as much to a place as the place mattered to him. The decay of the police department haunted Pinty, his life’s second-greatest disappointment after the early death of his only son. A proud man, and tired, leaning heavily on his oak walking stick, Pinty’s last great gambit was to right the course of the police department before it was too late, to take the poison out of the well before it wiped out the entire town.

With that in mind, the vacancy of the balcony at the corner of Main and Number 8 bothered Maddox like a premonition. “Scarecrow” was the nickname the cops had given to Sinclair, for his thin, unstuffed frame and his ever-present watchfulness over the center of town, looking down from his balcony like a mannequin of rags and straw. Maddox was turning away from the sight of it when he walked right into Ripsbaugh.

“Kane,” said Maddox, startled backward.

“Went back for your deer this morning,” Ripsbaugh said.

“Oh, right,” said Maddox. He saw again the deer’s head crack open beneath his boot. “Thanks.”

“Wasn’t much left. A hoof, patches of fur and hide. A chunk of leg. The rest was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Coyotes. Must have gotten to it overnight. They’re all over town this year. Got no fear. Keep chewing holes through the dump fence.”

Maddox guessed that there was a Kane Ripsbaugh in every small town in the country. A man indivisible from the landscape, someone you see all the time but never really look at, who would fade away altogether were it not for the rake or shovel in his dirt-browned hands. A constant. A man everybody waves to and nobody knows.

Ripsbaugh stood at about Maddox’s height, in a no-brand brown T-shirt, knee-length bleach-spotted beige shorts, and crusted gray work boots with wiry laces untied. His eyes looked less silvery in sunlight, more gray against his dark eyebrows, his mossy hair shaved short like a prisoner’s, his hands mittlike and dark with work-toughened nails.

Maddox was also getting the familiar smell of shit, low-grade but pungent enough, that was part of Ripsbaugh’s peculiar charm. In addition to running the town’s highway department, Ripsbaugh also owned and operated Cold River Septic out of a garage next to his home.

Ripsbaugh nodded, lingering, as though he wanted to say something more. “Heard what you said to those others.”

Maddox shrugged. “Just running off my mouth.”

“Somebody had to.”

“What good it will do.”

“You need any help, anything, you know where I am. Town needs reviving.”

“That it does, Kane. That it does.” Maddox started away, then remembered something. “Hey. Last night when you were driving around, you didn’t hear a gunshot, did you?”

“Before yours, you mean?”

Maddox nodded.

“No,” said Ripsbaugh, thinking back. “Why?”

Maddox shook his head like it was no big deal. Inside he was frowning at the mystery. “No reason.”

Wanda was wearing a tank shirt, blue pastel. Used to fit her better, drooping too much under her arms now, giving the boys a piece of profile whenever she leaned the right way. The teasing wink of her cup crease. She looked down to see what else, and on her skinny hips were beige terry-cloth shorts with white racing stripes.

She thought she saw movement in one of his upstairs windows as she came to his driveway. She had wanted to surprise him. That was the whole point of walking all this way. Playing out different seduction scenarios on the walk over. She didn’t know why she was fixated. It wasn’t even him, probably, if she had to be honest. It was her idea of him.

The good cop. The incorruptible.

She turned in past the FOR SALE sign. The surface of his driveway was hot as a cookie sheet, so she tread the grass lane next to it, feeling slinky in her bare feet. She followed the flagstones past a big planter in front, where the face of his house angled toward the quiet street. It was pretty isolated, bordering a quarter acre of buggy, high-weed wetlands.

There he was, sitting on the front step. He had seen her coming from the window. She couldn’t even sneak up on this guy.

She spread out ta-da hands. “Trick-or-treat.”

Maddox said, “I think you’re a couple of months early.”

“This is how I do it. Start early, avoid the Halloween crowds.” She liked what her mouth was saying. “Surprised?”

“You could say.”

“ Pleasantly surprised?”

“Surprised.”

“What if I told you I’m here to open my heart to you? To bare my everlasting soul.”

He had on a great-looking, soft green cotton tank shirt, hanging off his thick shoulders and chest. His shorts were knee-length, his calves hairy but not furry. He sat half in and half out of shadow, leaning back against one of the narrow pillars. Almost guarding his house from her. She felt powerful and feared, and it made her smile.

“You’re drenched,” he said.

“I looked a lot better when I started out.”

“What’s with the wristbands?”

She wore two big ones together on her left arm. No pain today, at least not right now. “It’s a look,” she said. She was proud of her skinny limbs. “I think I burned some new freckles into my shoulders.” She moved the straps to check, giving him a little peek inside.

“Your feet okay?” he said.

She wiggled her toes. They were filthy, and worse inside the cracks. She saw a little blood around her left heel, nothing to get excited about. “I walked a long way,” she said, working a smirk. “You should be flattered. I started out in these flip-flops, but the thong thing was cutting into my toe cleavage, killing me.”

“Toe cleavage?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what that is. I passed this yard, and there was this little bike, pink with tassels? The kind I always wanted as a girl. Though maybe I shouldn’t be telling this to a cop.”

“You shouldn’t be telling it to anyone. You stole a little girl’s bicycle?”

“I borrowed it, who do you think I am? Not my fault if the chain snapped.” She chewed on a cuticle, what was left of her fingernail. “I was going to bring it back.”

“You walked barefoot all the way here from Bucky’s house?”

She put her hand on her hip. “Didn’t take long for him to come up. Jesus. Like talking to a guy who only wants to talk about your best friend or your sister or something. Except in this case, it’s my guy he’s obsessed with.”

“You don’t stay over at Bucky’s?”

“You know I don’t.”

“I must have forgot.”

“No, you didn’t. You wanted to make your point that he doesn’t treat me right.”