Dark of the Moon

by John Sandford

  Jesus, what a rush.

  End it. End it.

  HE’D ALMOST DONE IT.

  He’d been sure he had Flowers, if nothing else. Had seen the head in the window of the truck, from the back. Had come up just right, had hardly heard the boom of the shotgun, had felt the most intense joy at the impact in the glass, and started to run, and then somebody called his name and he finished turning and saw movement and fired the gun and realized he’d been had…

  “How stupid does he think I am?”

  THE REST of it all passed in a panic flash. He was on foot, he could hear the cop cars all around, then the lights came around a corner, and Carr was coming up the alley. He stepped into a hedge, simply pressed back into it, and when she came up…

  Boom/Flash.

  HE HAD the car; he could hear them screaming on Carr’s radio as he dumped her into the street, and then he was around the corner; and then more lights, and a flasher bar behind him. He hadn’t thought about where to go, but he happened to be going north. He heard more cars calling in, heard them calling out his location, felt the squeeze.

  He wouldn’t go far in the car.

  A last stand wasn’t his style.

  He turned without thinking down the county road that led to the park road, then up the park road to the Judd turnoff, radio blasting, lights behind him, more lights on the road below…and he turned down the crease in the hill that had taken his mother, and thought to follow her over, get it done with.

  No guts.

  Bailed at the last moment, grabbing the shotgun as he went.

  Found himself rolling across the rocks, in the dark, as Margo Carr’s vehicle rolled down the hill and over the bluff, like a GMC Buffalo.

  HE CRAWLED, got up, started to run. Fell, hurt himself. Take it slower.

  Slower. The car disappeared and he dropped into the knee-high prairie grass and began to crawl, the shotgun clattering over the surface rocks, and he crawled and shuffled and duckwalked and hopped, away from the lights, below the pit of the Judd house, along the bluff, to get away, to get anywhere…

  And he heard a rock rolling; a footstep. Froze.

  Lights down the hill, men shouting, but here, it was as black as a coal bin, and quiet.

  Another rock. He wasn’t alone. Buffalo? There was a fence, couldn’t be a buffalo. Could be a deer…

  Could be that fuckin’ Flowers.

  VIRGIL SAT at the corner of the hill, below a clump of plum trees, none more than about six feet high, and all of them armed with sharp spurs: not quite thorns, but they hurt like hell if you jabbed yourself.

  He was sitting on a crumbled pile of rock. He hadn’t had the eye to hit major-college pitching, but he had the arm to be a major-college third baseman. He sat and threw rocks into the dark, listening to them hit, listening for reaction.

  HEARD WHAT he thought might be a footfall, below, a hundred feet away. Threw a rock out in front of it: the quiet got quieter. Interesting. Threw another rock into the night, and picked up the rifle. Nothing. Threw another rock…

  WILLIAMSON HAD the movement figured. Somebody moving to his right, kicking an occasional rock. He focused: he had three shells left. Had to be Flowers…didn’t it? He thought about firing, but didn’t. Instead, amazed at himself, he called, “Virgil? You there?”

  VIRGIL HEARD HIM clearly, below, to the right of the place he’d been throwing rocks. Eased himself flat, pushed the rifle out in front of him.

  “Todd? You okay?”

  Williamson: “I’m pretty fuckin’ scared, man.”

  Virgil: “We know you’ve got that shotgun. Margo’s gonna be okay; she’s got glass but she’s not going to die. Give it up.”

  Williamson: “You won’t shoot me?”

  Virgil: “You must’ve heard about the time I shot at somebody fourteen times, and missed. Everybody else in town has. I don’t want any goddamn gunfight.”

  Williamson: “Judd killed my mom.”

  Virgil: “I know. I got the same opinion from a medical examiner. Judd beat her with a pool cue. She was already dying when she went over the edge. You really were a miracle baby.”

  WILLIAMSON HAD him spotted. Flowers was no more than thirty or forty feet away, he thought. He was invisible, but then, he must be invisible to Flowers, as well. He half stood, pointing the gun in the direction of the voice. “I quit,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

  Virgil said, “Toss the shotgun…”

  Williamson pointed the shotgun and fired and pumped and then…

  HE WAS on his back, the shotgun clattering away, and he was looking up at the moon, almost full, and he heard Flowers shouting and then a bright light cut his eyes and Flowers was kneeling next to him.

  The pain cut in: everything below his waist was on fire. He said to Flowers, “I guess that wasn’t too bright.”

  “NO, IT WASN’T,” Virgil said. He patted Williamson on the shoulder, not knowing what else to do. “Hang in there, we’ll have you on your way in a minute.” He stood up and circled the flash, “Over here, goddamnit, we need to carry him, we need a litter, something to carry him with. Let’s go, go…”

  People were running and Virgil sat down next to Williamson again. “That was you that shot at me and Joanie down in the dell?” Virgil said.

  “Ahh,” Williamson said. Pain and agreement. But of course, it had been. That’s why he hadn’t known about a better place to park, and a better approach to the dell: Williamson wasn’t a Bluestem native, had never taken his girl up to swim in the dell.

  “One more question, before everybody gets here…”

  Williamson was fading but he answered the question and then Jensen stumbled up, Stryker was there, and more people were yelling and they started moving Williamson.

  Too late.

  The hornet’s nest of .30-caliber slugs had taken out a chunk of his femoral artery, a chunk no bigger than a corn kernel. That was enough.

  Halfway down the hill, Todd Williamson bled out and died.

  26

  VIRGIL AND JOAN took a picnic basket up to the top of the hill above Stryker’s Dell, spread a blanket, ate pastrami sandwiches, and found faces in the clouds. Virgil was disturbed. He’d never killed anyone before, though he’d once shot a woman in the foot.

  Joan knew that, and prattled on about other things, trying to pry his mind away from it. He knew what she was doing, and it wasn’t working.

  And she said, “…definitely in love. When Jim was married the first time, it was like, you know, they were obliged to get married. They dated in high school, and everybody else got taken, so they got married. But they never clicked. There wasn’t any heat.”

  “I hope it works out,” Virgil said. “Jesse’s a handful. I saw them this morning, and they seemed pretty happy.”

  “Well, at least Todd…it’s all done with,” Joan said. “Being scared, being worried, being lonely. A lot of things changed in the past couple of weeks.” She looked up at him: “You’re brooding.”

  “Sorry.”

  DAVENPORT HAD CALLED the morning after the shooting and the first thing he’d asked was, “How are you?”

  “He never touched me,” Virgil said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Davenport said. “I meant, ‘How’s your head?’”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Keep me up on it,” Davenport said. “You’ve always been the sensitive type. It worries me.”

  “Okay.”

  Davenport pushed: “Virgil: the guy was like a drunk driver, and you were the wall. It’s not the wall’s fault when the drunk gets killed.”

  “Okay.”

  “When are you coming back? No rush, you’re on leave until we have the board.”

  “I’ll be back. Couple of things to pick up here,” Virgil said.

  “Take it easy. If it really gets on top of you, there are pills,” Davenport said. “Believe me: they can help. I know.”

  “Thanks, man. Talk to ya.”

  SO VIRGIL AND JOAN loo
ked at the clouds and picked out an elephant and a burning bush and a fat man’s ass, complete with a tiny blue anus with a streak of sunshine showing through it, and Joan asked, “How did you get so focused on Todd?”

  “The Revelation,” Virgil said. “The book of Revelation at the Gleason’s. It was planted. It was not in the crime-scene photos. There are at least a couple of hundred photographs inside the Gleason place, and there was no Revelation. The house was sealed up tight—not even family was allowed inside. So it had to be a cop or somebody with a cop. When Big Curly confessed that he’d taken Williamson through, that did it. Although…I still considered the possibility that it was one of the Curlys. Or another cop.”

  After a minute, he added, “Ah, man.”

  Joan said, “I know you’re upset, but I say, thank God it’s over.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, look: the alternative would have been a heck of a lot worse—if it’d been you who got shot.”

  “On the other hand, Margo Carr did get shot,” Virgil said. “She’s gonna have six different surgeries before she’s back. Hospital for a month, physical therapy, gonna have to take some skin off her thigh to make her neck right, never gonna be right…”

  SHE LOOKED HIM over carefully: “You’re really frozen up, Virgil. The guy was crazy.”

  Virgil, lying on his back, his head cupped in the palms of his hands, said, “I had a chance to talk with him before he died. Isn’t that just like a cop? Interrogating a dying man?”

  “You didn’t know he was dying,” she said.

  “I knew I’d shot him with a .30-06, which wouldn’t do him a hell of a lot of good.”

  “Well…”

  THEY PICKED OUT a watermelon, which was just an oval cloud, and a three-legged dog, or maybe a three-legged chicken, after the wind blew a beak on it, and Joan asked, “What’d you ask him?”

  Virgil wiggled his butt around on the blanket, and said, “I asked him about the woman who called and told him that he was Bill Judd’s son. Asked whether it was an old woman or a young woman.”

  Long silence. Then, “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah. He said young.”

  They sat in another cloud of silence, until finally she said, “Who was the other candidate?”

  “Your mom. Amy Sweet said she mentioned at her bridge club, three, four years back, that Judd was getting into the ethanol business. I asked her who the members of the club were. Your mom was one of them.”

  “So how did that…?”

  “A whole list of things. I couldn’t figure out how Williamson knew he was Judd’s son. I talked to Maggie Lane’s mother, and she didn’t know. She said Maggie might not have known for sure…though I suspect she did. That might have been what she and Judd were arguing about the night of the man-on-the-moon party: the pregnancy.”

  Virgil yanked a long grass stem out of its envelope, nibbled on the sweet end. “Anyway, if nobody in the Cities knew, then it had to come from here. And who would put Todd Williamson in with the Judds? Had to be somebody with a hard grudge against Judd. Who was that? The Strykers.

  “It seemed too subtle to be Jim. And then you told me directly that you’d been too young to be much affected by your father’s death—but your mother told me the exact opposite, a couple of times. Said your father’s death really tore you up.

  “And you’ve been all those years out here on the farm, trying to pick up the pieces.

  “And you got close to me the very first day I was in town, and suggested Williamson as a target…

  “Then I got that note out of nowhere. That got me looking for a typewriter, and I never found one—but then you had those federal farm crop insurance papers, in several copies, and they were filled out with a typewriter.”

  “Shit, shit, shit…” More silence. “When Williamson showed up and shot the dummy in your car, did you expect it to be Williamson? Or Big Curly? Or me or Jim?”

  He shook his head: “Didn’t think it was you. We had the evidence of Roman Schmidt’s dick to say so.”

  He had to explain that.

  “HOW’D YOU TRACK him down?” Virgil asked finally. “How’d you find out he was crazy?”

  “I didn’t know he was crazy.” She sat up and pulled her legs against her chest, wrapped her arms around them. “I knew Junior was in financial trouble and that Senior had bad health problems. When I heard about the ethanol thing from my mother…well, we both thought it was another scam, the whole Jerusalem artichoke deal all over again, with a bunch of farmers getting screwed.

  “I didn’t know what to do about it,” she said. “Then, I was thinking, there’d always been rumors about Lane, that the baby was Judd’s, that Judd had killed her. So I wondered, what if another heir showed up? What if the whole Judd fortune had to be taken to court? If the details of the ethanol plant came out? What if somebody sued Senior for wrongful death? All kinds of things could have happened—maybe we’d even find out where the money went from the Jerusalem artichoke business…That’s what I thought.

  “About that time, the Internet was really getting going and they had all these groups that were set up to help adopted kids track their natural parents. I got hooked up, found out how it was done. Ended up with Todd Williamson. Gave him a call. Told him he was heir to a fortune.”

  “And then?”

  “Nothing. For quite a while. Then he just showed up. Never made any claims: just showed up as the editor of the Record.” She frowned, tossed her hair. “I don’t know how he did that, but it freaked me out. And nothing happened. I knew he knew, but I couldn’t say anything. I figured he was waiting for the old man to die; or maybe he’d already talked to the old man, and had made a deal.”

  “You waited.”

  “Three years. When the Gleasons got killed, it never crossed my mind that it was Todd. Honest to God. Then old man Judd was murdered, and Jim thought—and you thought—that the two things went together. That worried me.”

  “You should have said something.”

  “I should have—I sorta did, to you—but I felt like…people would blame me,” she said. “And I wasn’t sure that it was related. I just wasn’t sure.”

  “So you sent me a note…”

  “Because nobody was doing anything about the Judds. And it seemed to me that the Judds were right at the center of all of this. If they were running another scam, then wouldn’t that say something about the murders? When you and Jim checked it out, you found Feur—I didn’t know he was in the ethanol plant; I just knew that Judd was. And then, Jim was sure that the murders were Feur, or Feur’s people. So I kept letting it go, the thing about Todd. You found out pretty quick anyway…”

  “But you sorta killed the Schmidts, Joanie.”

  “OH, HORSESHIT,” she said. “I thought about that, I really did. And the Gleasons. But you know what? The Gleasons killed the Gleasons. And the Schmidts killed the Schmidts. And the Johnstones would have killed the Johnstones, if they’d been killed. They’d all covered up that awful murder and what they got back was Todd Williamson. That was the return on the investment.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He would probably disapprove.”

  AFTER A WHILE, Joan asked, “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “Nothing,” Virgil said. “Go home.”

  “That’s it?” She seemed a little surprised.

  “I think you fucked up, Joanie. But I’m not sure you’ve committed a crime,” Virgil said. “If you have, I sure couldn’t prove it.”

  She sighed, and lay back on the blanket. “Ah, gosh, Virgil.”

  “Yeah.”

  They picked out more clouds: an atomic-bomb explosion, a semierect and uncircumcised penis, and the hat of the quaker guy on the Quaker Oats label.

  Eventually, Joan sat up and stretched and said, “Listen. If you ever come by this way again…”

  Virgil pulled out another blade of grass, chewed for a second, getting the sweet out, then said, “Bite me.”

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  John Sandford, Dark of the Moon