Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

Lowering his gaze to his brown cap, which he turned around and around.in his brown hands, Crawford said, "I appreciate that."

They were both silent awhile.

Jack was remembering Luther. He figured Crawford was too.

Finally Crawford looked up from his cap and said, "Now for the bad news."

"Always has to be some."

"Not actively bad, just irritating. You hear about the Anson Oliver movie?"

"Which one? There were three."

"So you haven't heard. His parents and his pregnant fiancee made a deal with Warner Brothers."

"Deal?"

"Sold the rights to Anson Oliver's life story for one million dollars?"

Jack was speechless.

Crawford said, "The way they tell it, they made the deal for two reasons.

First, they want to provide for Oliver's unborn son, make sure the kid's future is secure."

"What about my kid's future?" Jack asked angrily.

Crawford cocked his head. "You really pissed?"

"Yes!"

"Hell, Jack, since when did our kids ever matter to people like them?"

"Since never."

"Exactly. You and me and our kids, we're here to applaud them when they do something artistic or high minded-and clean up after them when they make a mess."

"It isn't fair," Jack said. He laughed at his own words, as if any experienced cop could still expect life to be fair, virtue to be rewarded, and villainy to be punished. "Ah, hell."

"You can't hate them for that. It's just the way they are, the way they think.

They'll never change. Might as well hate lightning, hate ice being cold and fire being hot.".Jack sighed, still angry but only smoldering. "You said they had two reasons for making the deal. What's number two?"

"To make a movie that will be a monument to the genius of Anson Oliver,"

" Crawford said. "That's how the father put it. A monument to the genius of Anson Oliver."

"

"For the love of God."

Crawford laughed softly. "Yeah, for the love of God. And the fiancee, mother of the heir-to-be, she says this movie's going to put Anson Oliver's controversial career and his death in historical perspective."

"What historical perspective? He made movies, he wasn't the leader of the Western world-he just made movies."

Crawford shrugged. "Well, by the time they're done building him up, I suspect he'll have been an antidrug crusader, a tireless advocate for the homeless-" Jack picked it up: "A devout Christian who once considered dedicating his life to missionary work-" until Mother Teresa told him to make movies instead-"

"— and because of his effective efforts on behalf of justice, he was killed by a conspiracy involving the CIA, the FBI-"

"— the British royal family, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers and Pipe Fitters-"

"— the late Joseph Stalin-"

"— Kermit the Frog-"

"— and a cabal of pill-popping rabbis in New Jersey," Jack finished.

They laughed because the situation was too ridiculous to respond to with anything but laughter-and because, if they didn't laugh at it, they were admitting the power of these people to hurt them.

"They better not put me in this damn movie of theirs," Jack said after his laughter had devolved into a fit of coughing. "I'll sue their asses."

"They'll change your name, make you an Asian cop named Wong, ten years older and six inches shorter, married to a redhead named Bertha, and you won't be able to sue for spit."

"People are still gonna know it was me in real life."

"Real life? What's that? This is Lala Land."."Jesus, how can they make a hero out of this guy?"

Crawford said, "They made heroes out of Bonnie and Clyde."

"Antiheroes."

"Okay, then, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

"Still." i "They made heroes out of Jimmy Hoffa and Bugsy Siegel.

Anson Oliver's a snap."

That night, long after Lyle Crawford had gone, when Jack tried to ignore his thousand discomforts and get some sleep, he couldn't stop thinking about the movie, the million dollars, the harassment Toby had taken at school, the vile graffiti with which their house had been covered, the inadequacy of their savings, his disability checks, Luther in the grave, Alma alone with her arsenal, and Anson Oliver portrayed on-screen by some young actor with chiseled features and melancholy eyes, radiating an aura of saintly compassion and noble purpose exceeded only by his sex appeal.

Jack was overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness far worse than anything he had felt before. The cause of it was only partly the claustrophobic confinement of the body cast and the bed. It arose, as well, from the fact that he was tied to this City of Angels by a house that had declined in value and was currently hard to sell in a recessionary market, from the fact that he was a good cop in an age when the heroes were gangsters, and from the fact that he was unable to imagine either earning a living or finding meaning in life as anything but a cop. He was as trapped as a rat in a giant laboratory maze. Unlike the rat, he didn't even have the illusion of freedom.

On June sixth the body cast came off. The spinal fracture was entirely healed.

He had full feeling in both legs. Undoubtedly he would learn to walk again.

Initially, however, he couldn't stand without the assistance of either two nurses or one nurse and a wheeled walker. His thighs had withered.

Though his calf muscles had received some passive exercise, they were atrophied to a degree. For the first time in his life, he was sore and flabby in the middle, which was the only place he'd gained weight.

A single trip around the room, assisted by nurses and a walker, broke him out in a sweat and made his stomach muscles flutter as if he had attempted to benchpress five hundred pounds. Nevertheless, it was a day of celebration. Life went on. He felt reborn.

He paused by the window that framed the crown of the tall palm tree, and as if by the grace of an aware and benign universe, a trio of sea gulls appeared in the sky, having strayed inland from the Santa Monica.shoreline. They hovered on rising thermals for half a minute or so, like three white kites. Suddenly the birds wheeled across the blue in an aerial ballet of freedom and disappeared to the west. Jack watched them until they were gone, his vision blurring, and he turned away from the window without once lowering his gaze to the city beyond and below him.

Heather and Toby visited that evening and brought Baskin-Robbins peanut-butter-and-chocolate ice cream. In spite of the flab around his waist, Jack ate his share.

That night he dreamed of sea gulls. Three. With gloriously wide wingspans. As white and luminous as angels. They flew steadily westward, soaring and diving, spiraling and looping spiritedly, but always westward, and he ran through fields below, trying to keep pace with them. He was a boy again, spreading his arms as if they were wings, zooming up hills, down grassy slopes, wildflowers lashing his legs, easily imagining himself taking to the air at any moment, free of the bonds of gravity, high in the company of the gulls. Then the fields ended while he was gazing up at the gulls, and he found himself pumping his legs in thin air, over the edge of a bluff, with pointed and bladed rocks a few hundred feet below, powerful waves exploding among them, white spray cast high into the air, and he was falling, falling. He knew, then, that it was only a dream, but he couldn't wake up when he tried. Falling and falling, always closer to death but never quite there, falling and falling toward the jagged black maw of the rocks, toward the cold deep gullet of the hungry sea, falling, falling.

After four days of increasingly arduous therapy at Westside General, Jack was transferred to Phoenix Rehabilitation Hospital on the eleventh of June.

Although the spinal fracture had healed, he had sustained some nerve damage.