Dean Koontz: Winter Moon

Looking at Jack over Arkadian's head, Luther smiled and said, "I think I'll have a steak and baked potato. What about you?"

"Just a salad," Jack said. "I'm trying to lose a few pounds."

Even if he had been listening to them, Mr. Arkadian couldn't have been joked out of his bleak mood. He jangled a ring of keys.

"I keep them locked, give the keys only to customers. City inspector stops around, he tells me a new rule says these are public facilities, so you've got to let them open for the public, whether they buy anything at your place or not."

He jangled the keys again, harder, more angrily, then harder still.

Neither Jack nor Luther tried to comment above the strident ring and raffle… "Let them fine me. I'll pay the fine. When these are unlocked, the drunks and junkie bums who live in alleys and parks, they use my bathrooms, urinate on the floor, vomit in the sinks. You wouldn't believe the mess they make, disgusting, things I'd be embarrassed to talk about."

Arkadian was actually blushing at the thought of what he could have told them.

He waved the jangling keys in the air in front of each open door, and he reminded Jack of nothing so much as a voodoo priest casting a spell-in this case, to ward off the riffraff who would despoil his rest rooms. His face was as mottled and turbulent as the stormy sky.

"Let me tell you something. Hassam Arkadian works sixty and seventy hours a week, Hassam Arkadian employs eight people full time, and Hassam Arkadian pays half of what he earns in taxes, but Hassam Arkadian is not going to spend his life cleaning up vomit because a bunch of stupid bureaucrats have more compassion for some lazy-drunken-psychojunkie bums than they have for people who are trying their damnedest to lead decent lives."

He finished his speech in a rush, breathless. Stopped jangling the keys.

Sighed. He closed the doors and locked them.

Jack felt useless. He could see that Luther was uncomfortable too.

Sometimes a cop couldn't do much more for a victim than nod in sympathy and shake his head in sorry amazement at the depths into which the city was sinking. That was one of the worst things about the job.

Mr. Arkadian went around the corner to the front of the station again.

He wasn't walking as fast as before.

His shoulders were slumped, and for the first time he looked more dejected than angry, as if he had decided, perhaps on a subconscious level, to give up the fight.

Jack hoped that wasn't the case. In his daily life, Hassam was struggling to realize a dream of a better future, a better world. He was one of a dwindling number who still had enough guts to resist entropy. Civilization's soldiers, warring on the side of hope, were already too few to make a satisfactory army.

Adjusting their gun belts, Jack and Luther followed Arkadian past the soft-drink dispensers.

The man in the Armani suit was standing at the second vending machine, studying the selections. He was about Jack's age, tall, blond, clean-shaven, with a golden-bronze complexion that could have been gotten locally at that time of year only from a tanning bed. As they walked by him, he pulled a handful of change from one pocket of his.baggy trousers and picked through the coins.

Out at the pumps, the attendant was washing the windshield of the Lexus, though it had looked freshly washed when the car first pulled in from the street.

Arkadian stopped at the plate-glass window that occupied half the front wall of the station office. "Street art," he said softly, sadly, as Jack and Luther joined him. "Only a fool would call it anything but vandalism. Barbarians are loose."

Lately, some vandals had traded spray cans for stencils and acid paste.

They etched their symbols and slogans on the glass of parked cars and the windows of businesses that were unprotected by security shutters at night.

Arkadian's front window was permanently marred by half a dozen different personal marks made by members of the same gang, some of them repeated two and three times. In four-inch-high letters, they had also etched the words THE BLOODBATH IS COMING.

These antisocial acts often reminded Jack of an event in Nazi Germany about which he'd once read: Before the war had even begun, psychopathic thugs had roamed the streets during one long night, Kristallnacht, defacing walls with hateful words, smashing windows of homes and stores owned by Jews until the streets glittered as if paved with crystal.

Sometimes it seemed to him that the barbarians to which Arkadian referred were the new fascists, from both ends of the political spectrum this time, hating not just Jews but anyone with a stake in social order and civility. Their vandalism was a slow-motion Kristallnacht, conducted over years instead of hours.

"It's worse on the next window," Arkadian said, leading them around the corner to the north side of the station.

That wall of the office featured another large sheet of glass, on which, in addition to gang symbols, etched block letters proclaimed Armenian SHITHEAD.

Even the sight of the racial slur couldn't rekindle Hassam Arkadian's anger.

He stared sad-eyed at the offensive words and said, "I've always tried to treat people well. I'm not perfect, not without sin. Who is? But I've done my best to be a good man, fair, honest-and now this."

"Won't make you feel any better," Luther said, "but if it was up to me, the law would let us take the creeps who do this and stencil that second word right above their eyes. Shithead. Etch it into their skin with acid just like they did to your glass. Make em walk around like that for a couple of years and see how their attitude improves before maybe we give them some plastic surgery."

"You think you can find who did it?" Arkadian asked, though he surely.knew the answer.

Luther shook his head, and Jack said, "Not a chance. We'll file a report, of course, but there's no manpower to work on small crime like this. Best thing you can do is install roll-down metal shutters the same day you replace the windows, so they're covered at night."

"Otherwise, you'll be putting in new glass every week," Luther said,

"and pretty soon your insurance company will drop you."

"They already dropped my vandalism coverage after one claim," Hassam Arkadian said. "About the only thing they'll cover me for now is earthquake, flood, and fire. Not even fire if it happens in a riot."

They stood in silence, staring at the window, brooding about their powerlessness.

A cool March wind sprang up. In the nearby planter, the queen palms rustled, and soft creaking noises arose from where the stems of the big fronds joined the trunks.

"Well," Jack said at last, "it could be worse, Mr. Arkadian. I mean, at least you're in a pretty good part of the city here on the West Side."

"Yeah, and doesn't it break your heart," Arkadian said, "this is a good neighborhood."

Jack didn't even want to think about that.

Luther started to speak but was interrupted by a loud crash and a shout of anger from the front of the station. As the three of them hurried around the corner, a violent gust of wind made the plate-glass windows thrum.

Fifty feet away, the man in the Armani suit kicked the vending machine again.

A foaming can of Pepsi lay behind him, contents spreading across the blacktop.

"Poison," he shouted at the machine, "poison, damn it, damn you, damn you, poison!"

Arkadian rushed toward the customer, "Sir, please, I'm sorry, if the machine gave you the wrong selection-"

"Hey, wait right there," Luther said, speaking as much to the station owner as to the infuriated stranger.

In front of the office door, Jack caught up with Arkadian, put a hand on his shoulder, stopped him, and said, "Better let us handle this."

"Damn poison," the customer said furiously, and he made a fist as if he wanted to punch the vending machine.