Dark of the Moon

by John Sandford

  Joan shouted, “Virgil, he’s shooting, Virgil!”

  Not hit, he thought. Everything still working. He looked back at the wall and could see the pockmark where the slug had hit: two feet above where his head had been. Not that close, but close enough to scare him.

  He shouted back to Joan, “I’m okay. You stay there.” He started counting. One minute, one minute thirty seconds. Joan made a questioning gesture, and he put up a finger: wait. Two minutes…

  WHEN HE’D HUNT deer up north, and he’d see a buck threading through the trees, he could focus on any given shot for a minute or two. After that, he’d lose precise focus. He’d trained himself to wait until the deer was right down a shooting lane before he even started to focus, because two minutes were a long time to concentrate on a shot. Two minutes, twenty seconds, and he coiled himself against the wall, spotted his pistol, said to himself, go, go, go: and he went.

  Six feet out, half a second, get the gun, six feet back. The incoming slug was just that fraction of a second too slow, slapping off the rock a yard wide and again, too high.

  He had the gun. He stood, popped his head out for a half second, pulled back. Dropped to his knees, popped his head out again, saw movement: like a bear, somebody in dark clothes near the crest, running toward the crest, away from them. He pulled back, stood, turned around the corner, braced himself on the rock, aimed the pistol five or six feet high and started pulling the trigger, counting out seven shots. He had no idea how much elevation he needed at four hundred yards, but it’d be a lot—the pistol shot almost five inches low at a hundred yards.

  If he hit something, the chances of which were vanishingly small, that was all to the good. Mostly he wanted a bunch of slugs flying around the guy like bees.

  Because, he thought, the guy couldn’t take the slightest chance of getting hit. If he was hit, or even seen, he was done…

  SO: A STALEMATE. Virgil was down in the pool, without any way of going after the guy. But Virgil was also armed and wary, down among the jumble of rocks, and would be hard to get at.

  Virgil stood next to the wall, ready to take cover, and watched, and watched, and saw nothing more. Finally, he shouted at Joan, “Underwater, just like I did, into that groove. He’s not there anymore, but don’t take any chances. Get out of there quick.”

  She nodded, pushed herself under, and a few seconds later, surfaced and crawled into the groove, across the rock, and then stood up next to him.

  “Now what?” She shivered. She’d been in the cool water too long.

  “Now I do this for a couple more minutes, and then I grab the clothes.”

  “Virgil…”

  “I’m about ninety-nine percent sure he’s gone. He can’t be seen. You can hear that rifle for a mile or more, and it’s not hunting season…He’s got to move. He’s got to get out of here.”

  “Probably go straight north on Holman. There’s nothing there, before you hit Highway Seven. Once he’s on Seven, he’s just another car.”

  “Then that’s probably it,” Virgil said, and he thrust himself away from the wall, grabbed the clothes, and was back. He handed her her bra and blouse, then pushed her back against the wall and kissed her and said, “Getting shot at makes me horny.”

  “And your penis is about a half-inch long. Cold water does it every time. It’s sort of a tragedy, isn’t it?”

  Virgil looked down at himself and said, “That wasn’t the cold water, sweetheart. That was fear, pure and simple.” He stepped back, looking up the hill. “If he’d been cool about it, he could have slipped up close, we’d be playing in the pool and bang! He could have done both of us.”

  She leaned out from the wall and asked, “I wonder why he didn’t?”

  “He might have been planning to, but he stopped to look things over with the scope. That’s when I saw him. I think he wanted to wait until we were out of the water so he could get a full body shot, but he got impatient and stopped to look us over…”

  They were dressing as they talked; when they were done, Virgil said, “I’ll get the stuff.”

  “Fuck the stuff,” she said.

  “He’s gone,” Virgil said. “He’s gone…but we stay close to the wall anyway. If there’s any other place he’d wait, it’d be while we’re coming out of the mouth of the canyon.”

  VIRGIL POPPED OUT AGAIN, grabbed the food, and jumped back. Then out again, snagged Joan’s duffel, and hopped back. Never exposed for more than a second. Time enough for a snap shot, but not a good one, not if the shooter couldn’t anticipate the move.

  When they were ready, Virgil said, “Squeeze in close to the wall, and when we have to show ourselves, move fast. One at a time. You first.”

  Fifty feet back into the canyon, they were protected. They stopped and Joan used the quilt to wash the blood off Virgil’s face. “You’ve got five small cuts.” She traced them with her index finger, on his temple and cheek. “I don’t think stitches, but you could use some Band-Aids.”

  “Got some in the truck.”

  At the mouth of the canyon, an obvious ambush spot, they sat, watched, and finally made the move, running one at a time past the stock tank, crouched through the weeds, behind the barn.

  Breathing hard, Joan said, “That’s a heck of a fourth date. I don’t think you’ve got a reasonable encore.”

  THE BARN was going dark as the sun went down. Virgil got a box of shells from the truck and reloaded the magazine for the pistol, the shells clicking into place. When he was finished, he opened the back hatch, lifted the concealment cover, took out a shotgun and a box of shells, loaded the shotgun.

  Joan said, “It was you he wanted.”

  “I think so. He’s getting tired of my act.”

  “That’s a relief,” she said. “At least I’m safe.”

  He laughed. “Yeah. Listen, about that short penis thing…”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “It’s not that; I just wish you’d use some word other than penis, you know? Sounds too much like peanut.” He finished loading the shotgun and pumped a shell into the chamber and put it between the front truck seats. “Why don’t you say…dick. That’d be good.”

  “Seems crude.”

  “Whatever.” He stepped away from the truck and looked up at the overhead light. “Does that light come on when the barn door goes up?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll silhouette us. I’ll get it.” He took off his shoes and climbed up on the hood of the truck, and then on the roof, reached up and unscrewed the lightbulb, left it hanging by a thread. “Punch the door lift, just enough to turn on the light.”

  She punched the lift button, and the lightbulb remained dark.

  “When I say to lift the door, lift it; then climb in the backseat, get down low, and hang on. I’m getting out of here.”

  He climbed into the truck, started the engine, and braced the shotgun, muzzle down, between the passenger-side floor and seat. “Punch the button; get in.”

  She did, and he watched the door going up, seeming to take an eternity; then he hit the gas and the truck blew through the opening, backward, and he kept it moving, backward, in a circle, around the parking circle, jabbed the brake, jammed the shift into Drive, and tore down the short driveway to the county road, skidded onto the road with a quick brake and another pulse of acceleration, and they were gone.

  “We okay?” Joan asked.

  “Yeah. He’s long gone; but we’re so far away from help that we didn’t dare take the chance…”

  He drove past the hill, away from town. “Where’re we going?” Joan asked.

  “Got some people to talk to.” He slowed, pulled over, and said, “Let me get rid of the shotgun, and you can ride up front.”

  THEY STOPPED at five farms along Highway 7, and spoke to one guy mowing a ditch: Who had they seen on the highway?

  Shrugs and shaken heads: nobody in particular.

  On the way back to town, Virgil said, “I thought everybody knew everybody else
’s car.”

  “Not out here. In town. If it’d been something unusual, like a Toyota or a Mercedes, somebody might have noticed. But a Ford or a Chevy, unless there’s a sign on it…”

  VIRGIL DIDN’T WRITE much that night: he was stuck on story development.

  Homer was pissed off and scared. The killer was coming after him: time to let somebody know about that, file a report.

  But: the man in the moon. He spent some time considering it—thought about Jesse Laymon’s moon earrings. Those had a man in the moon, but Homer didn’t think Betsy would be talking about a symbol. She was talking about a man.

  And Homer thought about the new moon coming up as he was driving into the thunderstorm, on the way to Bluestem, the crescent moon in his rearview mirror. Could the moon be triggering this guy? A new moon? Huh. The moon came up in the east, just like the sun did. Were Gleason and Schmidt propped up facing to the east, because that was where the moon came from? Facing the moon, but not allowed to see it?

  Crazy talk.

  Before going to sleep, Homer thought about the shooting that afternoon. Scary, but the guy had missed. Could have gotten a lot closer…

  Did the shooter intend to kill, or only to frighten? If only to frighten, why?

  Virgil went to sleep hoping that Homer would come up with an idea; because at this point, Virgil himself had none at all.

  Went to sleep dreaming of Joanie Stryker on the rock at the dell…

  12

  VIRGIL OPENED his eyes: daylight.

  He felt good, but a little stiff from sleeping on the floor.

  Worried about the gunman, he’d taken the cushions off the couch, and had thrown them on the floor behind the bed, and put the pistol under the bed next to his hand. He didn’t like the idea of sleeping through the night next to a sliding glass door. Joan was at her mother’s. No point in taking a chance.

  But he did feel good. Things were happening, and he was still alive.

  Part of it was the absence of sex after the long naked interval in the pool. He’d tried to talk Joan into sneaking through the glass door into the Holiday Inn, but she turned him down: “Everybody in town would know before you got the curtain pulled. It’s all right to sneak around and have sex, but it has to be creditably sneaky.”

  “Ah.”

  “My place,” she said. “You could walk over in half an hour.”

  “I don’t want you going to your place tonight. I was thinking…your mother’s. You’d be close, but not where you’d have a target on you; he could be waiting for us to get back to your place…”

  “Well, we’re not doing anything at Mom’s…”

  So, they called it off.

  Hands all over each other, parked three blocks from Mom’s, like a couple of teenagers; and he dropped her.

  And woke up feeling good. Maybe he could take a break from the hook-and-bullet magazines, and write a piece for Vanity Fair: “Violence: The New Aphrodisiac.” But that wouldn’t be right—it’d always been an aphrodisiac, as far as he could tell. Something primitive there…

  Maybe, he thought, they should have stayed in the barn for a while, up in the hayloft.

  When he was a teenager, there were locker-room fantasy stories—maybe one or two were true—of guys getting the farmer’s daughter up in the hayloft. His best friend, Otis Ericson, had claimed to have nailed one of his girl cousins, Shirley, who was in their high school class, and even in eighth grade, had tits out to here.

  In what Virgil assumed was nothing more than an effort at verisimilitude, the alleged fuckee warned Virgil against hay cuts, or hay rash: “And you sure as shit don’t want to get any hay in her crack. She’ll be bitching and moaning for a week. Take a blanket.”

  The thought that Otis Ericson might have actually gotten Shirley Ericson naked, in a hayloft, had, at the time, seriously turned him on; still did, a little, though the last time he saw Shirley, she’d sort of spread out.

  LYING ON THE FLOOR, he looked at his watch: eight o’clock. Threw the cushions back on the couch, yawned, stretched, did his sit-ups and push-ups, cleaned up, and called Davenport.

  “Still too early,” Davenport said.

  “I was shot at last night,” Virgil said.

  “Virgil! You okay?”

  “Nothing but scared,” Virgil said. “The shooter wasn’t that good. Scoped rifle, I was up on a friend’s farm, missed me by a couple of feet and I wasn’t moving that fast.”

  “Tell me you had your gun,” Davenport said.

  “I had the gun. Saw him running, fired seven shots at maybe four hundred yards, chances of hitting him were zero…but…thought I should let you know. I’m pushing something here. I’m going to write some notes and e-mail them to you. Just in case.”

  “Goddamnit, Virgil, you take care,” Davenport said. “You want help?”

  “Just get me that paper that Sandy put together.”

  ON THE WAY to breakfast, the desk clerk said, “You’ve got mail,” fished an envelope out of a desk drawer, and handed it to him. The address was typed; no return address. Mailed yesterday from Bluestem. He went on to the dining room, holding the envelope by its edges, slit it open with a butter knife, and slid the letter out.

  You’re barking up the wrong tree. Look at Bill Judd Jr.’s debt and think “estate tax.” Look at Florence Mills, Inc.

  That was it—no signature, of course, and the note was typed, not printed. Who’d still have a typewriter? Somebody old, like Gerald Johnstone, the funeral director. The stamp was self-sticking, so there’d be no DNA.

  Estate tax? Florence Mills? Sounded like something more for Sandy to do, when she got back.

  He finished breakfast, went back to his room for his briefcase, went out to the truck; went back to the room to get his gun, back to the truck; and headed out to the Stryker farm, past the farm, around behind the hill.

  The far side of the hill, opposite the dell, had once been pastureland, before the countryside had emptied out, with the red quartzite right on the surface. There were clumps of wild plum and scrubby shrubs, thistle and open spaces with knee-high grass.

  Virgil cruised the backside of the hill until he saw the truck tracks leading off-road. He turned off, bounced across a shallow ditch, and then ran parallel to the tracks, up the hill, to a copse of trees and bushes just below the crest of the hill. The tracks swerved around the copse, and ended. This was where the shooter had parked, out of sight from the road. He sat in the car for a minute, watching the road, and saw not another single vehicle; he was alone except for a red-tailed hawk, which circled the slope, looking for voles.

  The hawk dropped, hit the ground, out of sight: breakfast. Virgil stepped out of the truck and looked at the tracks made by the shooter’s vehicle. There were enough weeds and grass that any tread marks were hidden. He followed one of the tracks back down the hill, and never saw a clear print. Followed the other one back up, found nothing.

  From the car park, looking up the hill, with the sun still at his back, he could see disturbed grass where the shooter had been. He got the shotgun out of the back of the truck, loaded it alternately with buckshot and solid slugs, jacked a shell into the chamber, and followed the trail to the top of the hill. A hundred yards over the crest, he could see the front lip of the pool, and the farther down the hill he went, the more of the pool he could see. The trail wasn’t straight at this point. It moved between clumps of shrubs, which meant that he and Joan must’ve already been at the pool.

  Another hundred yards, and he found the shooter’s stand: a circle of crushed grass next to the broken-off and rotted stump of a small tree. If he’d rested the rifle on the stump, he’d have been able to see two-thirds of the pool. To see more, he would have had to go right up to the lip of the dell, without cover.

  He checked around the nest: no brass. The guy had cleaned up after himself.

  FROM VIRGIL’S VIEWPOINT, the dell, down below, didn’t look like much: a crack in the landscape, with a wider spot, and a pool, near the b
ottom. He walked down, and when he got right on top of it, the character changed. Down here, the ground seemed to have been hit with a mammoth cleaver, carving a sharp trench right through the quartzite down to the pool.

  If the shooter had been cooler, or braver, he could have waited until they were fooling around under the spring, out of sight, and then walked or crawled up to the back wall. From there he would have had them at sixty or seventy yards, and there would have been no place for Virgil and Joan to hide.

  On the other hand, if they’d seen him sneaking down, and had gotten back to Virgil’s gun and down the canyon, he’d have been screwed. In the folded, broken rocks of the canyon, a guy with a pistol could hold off a small army.

  On that thought, Virgil took out his cell phone: he had a signal. You might not down in the dell, but you wouldn’t know unless you were down there. Maybe the shooter had taken that into account. He could not allow somebody to see him, and walk away…

  LOT TO THINK ABOUT. The day would be hot again. Another good day for the pool, but he wouldn’t be swimming again until the killer was caught, or dead.

  Virgil went back to the truck, shucked the shells out of the shotgun and put it away, and headed back to Roman Schmidt’s place. Larry Jensen, Stryker’s investigator, was there, with the crime-scene people. Virgil took Jensen aside.

  “Where’s Jim?”

  “At the office. He said you’d probably show up and want to get in. We’re just about done. Let me go talk to Margo.”

  “Okay. I got a note in the mail today, I was wondering if you could check it for fingerprints.”

  He explained, and gave Jensen the note and envelope, folded into a piece of hotel writing paper. Jensen read it, frowned. “Shoot. That’s not a direction we’ve gone.”