Эд Горман - Blood Moon

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek and said, “I meant what I said. About liking you a lot.”

“Good-bye, Robert,” she said, and quietly closed the door, leaving me, in more ways than one, in the darkness.

I felt banished, cast out. I’d started thinking about Jane more seriously than I’d ever intended. Maybe it was her freckles or that stupid little nose of hers; more likely it was her wonderful combination of competence and tenderness I found so alluring.

A faint mist was in the air. The night smelled of the rain that had just quit falling. The parking lot was half-full and lonely-looking in the mercury vapor lights.

I was thinking about Jane and about how I might square things, so I didn’t see him until I was a few feet away. In his cheap brown leatherette jacket and dirty jeans, I didn’t recognize him at first.

He leaned against the trunk of my car, smoking a cigarette, watching me walk toward him.

He was a lone figure in the rolling midwestern night, just like the apartment house itself, which was surrounded by woods on three sides.

“I need to talk to you.”

“You should talk to your wife first, McNally. Give her a little peace of mind. She’s a good woman.”

“You don’t need to tell me that.”

“You ever lay a hand on her again, I’ll break your arms, and that’s a promise.”

“You supposed to be a tough guy?”

“No. Just a guy who doesn’t think men should beat up women.”

His eyes were animal bright and animal quick.

“I want to get my daughter back,” he said, anger gone suddenly. He sounded weary, scared. “Me and Sam Lodge — we got in way over our heads.”

“Tell me everything. Maybe I can help you figure something out.”

“I’m scared for her — for Melissa, I mean.”

He brought his cigarette to his mouth. His entire hand was shaking. “I really went and messed things up this time.”

“Just tell me what you know, McNally. You can beat up on yourself later.”

He pushed away from the car, and was just starting to stand up straight as he flipped his cigarette somewhere on the lawn, when I heard the report of a rifle — then two, three reports.

The odd thing was, McNally didn’t jerk when the bullets hit him, not at first. He only slumped back against the trunk as if he were weary beyond measure.

Then he crumpled, and it was quick and bloody and there was the frantic cry of a man who learns in a single instant that life is leaving him, that cold rushing eternal darkness is about to take him forever.

I caught him just as his cap was tumbling from his head, just before his head cracked the pavement.

As I laid him out on the cold driveway, he fouled himself, the stench hot and sour.

And then the apartment house door was bursting open. And Jane was coming quickly down the stairs, having obviously heard the rifle shots, and she was saying, “Are you hurt, Payne? Are you hurt?”

“Over here!”

By the time she reached me, McNally was gripping my hand and sobbing. He was saying things but they were the incoherent rush and jumble of last words.

When she knelt down next to me, she shook her head sadly, seeing at once that McNally would soon be dead.

And before she could object, I slipped my hand from McNally’s, got quickly to my feet and started running in the direction from where the rifle shots had come.

By the time I was twenty feet on the wet grass, I had my Ruger in my hand.

On the far side of the woods, I could see headlights from the two-lane highway leading out of town. The woods were no more than a quarter-mile deep and maybe the same across. But they gave a person plenty of places to hide.

The trail through the woods was all slippery mud and splashing puddle. I slipped and fell several times, skinning my knee once, cracking my head against a rather unyielding birch tree another time. The soggy brown leaves of autumns past covered trail and forest like a grimy parasite with a shiny wet shell.

I heard him ahead of me. He had deserted the trail and was crashing through the undergrowth that lay westward. He was the same man who’d shot at me earlier, I knew. And I also knew who he was.

I plunged into the undergrowth, keeping my Ruger held high above the brambles that snapped at my hand like an angry serpent, and the rocks that seemed to jump at my feet in order to trip me.

I was in brambles so deep I had to keep shifting my hips left and right to stop them from clinging to me. The trees changed abruptly from birch to pine, the boughs slapping my face with their scratchy fingers and high sweet perfume.

Horns sounded from the road to the east. Angry horns chastising somebody for nearly causing an accident.

He’d escaped, down the hill from the woods, straight across the highway where he likely kept his car.

I stood on the edge of the highway inside the glaze of my own chilly sweat, breath coming in hot rushing gasps, as I watched cars and trucks resume their normal course into and out of town.

He was nowhere to be seen, the man I’d been chasing. Nowhere.

The ambulance siren was still a few blocks away by the time I got back to the parking lot. The night was dark and windy with drops of rain being blown on the breeze. The exterior lights of the brick apartment house gave it the stark imposing qualities of a prison.

A small crowd encircled McNally’s now-dead body. A few of the less-optimistic ones had brought umbrellas, apparently planning to stay here for some time. As usual with people who show up for murders, they seemed both somber and excited, and maybe just a little bit ashamed of the latter.

Jane was talking on a portable phone, giving orders to her troops about how to handle murder scenes. At least they’d had enough practice lately.

I went up to her and said, “He got away.”

She snapped down the antenna on the black portable phone. “Did he tell you anything before he died?”

“He was going to. But he was shot before he could get it out.”

I looked down at McNally. Jane had draped her jacket over his face and the upper part of his chest.

“You didn’t get a look at the person who shot him?”

“Not really.”

She frowned. “Even if you did, I’m sure you wouldn’t tell me, anyway.”

I wasn’t sure how I was going to sneak away from here and go out to the church.

But then Jane went and made it easy for me.

“Why don’t you get out of here, Payne? I don’t need any more aggravation.”

I wanted to argue with her but what was the use?

“If that’s the way you want it,” I said.

Just then the ambulance, full of wailing grief, pulled into the parking lot, a hero too late to matter.

By the time I reached the church, the rain started again in earnest, cold and drab and relentless.

I parked in the U-shaped gravel drive, then ran up to the front door. I heard guitar music. Except it wasn’t of the churchly sort, those “born-again” ditties that seem to be about romantic love but are really about Jesus (“He’s the greatest lover the world has ever known/The only lover who will never leave you on your own” ran a song I’d heard while dialing around on the radio one day) — no, this was bayou blues crossed with some high fine rock licks.

I went inside, stood in the back.

Kenny Deihl didn’t see me or hear me, apparently. He just sat up on a folding chair on the empty altar, pausing now to tune his guitar. The church was dark except for the lone narrow beam of a small spotlight that highlighted Kenny’s blond hair.

I listened to the rain, hard and cold, and had a moment of simple animal appreciation for my shelter, even if it had been built by a hypocrite minister.