The Fall Moon

by Blake Banner

  “What was your mother doing while this was going on?”

  “She was screaming at me to do what Daddy says, not to fight him. It was what she always did. I ran. I ran back to Charlie.”

  I turned to Charlie. “And you went and killed them?”

  He nodded. “I waited till they were asleep. Then, when I saw the lights go out, I went in…”

  “How?”

  “I waited till I saw a neighbor coming in. They all knew me and we went in together. When he’d gone upstairs, I used a screwdriver to dig away the wood around the lock and lever back the latch. When I got inside, he came out of the bedroom. He was still drunk and stoned. He asked me what the hell I was doing there. I said I’d come to see Amy. He told me she wasn’t there. He thought she was with me. Then he asked me if I wanted some coffee and asked me what time it was. I told him yeah, I’d have some coffee. I think I told him it was twelve or something—not as late as it was. I remember he was filling the kettle, telling me Amy was probably out fucking some guy, and I should slap her around a bit from time to time because women appreciated that in a man.

  “I was standing behind him. I reached over, took the large kitchen knife from the block and stabbed him in the kidney. The blade went all the way in. It was a very strange feeling.” He stared at me, frowning. “I didn’t enjoy it. I could feel his whole body go into spasm through the knife. I pulled it out again quickly. He turned to look at me, but he must have been hemorrhaging badly, because he was sliding down. I found his fifth intercostals and pushed the knife home. That was harder, but I think he was already dead by then.”

  I sat for a while, studying his face. There wasn’t a lot to study. Neither of them was very big on expressions. After a moment, I said, “Why Christen? Why the frenzy?”

  He stared down at the carpet for a while. “On one level, Mr. Stone, I told myself I wanted to make it look like a sex attack, as though somebody had targeted Mrs. Redfern and Karl had been the unfortunate who got in the way. But actually, I think, unconsciously, I was harboring deep resentment toward Mrs. Redfern, partly for the way she had betrayed Amy, but also I think maybe I was projecting my own frustration against my mother onto Amy’s mother.”

  I nodded. “You’ve been seeing a therapist?”

  “Yes.”

  I stared out at the garden. I could feel their eyes on me. My tea had grown tepid, but I could smell the ginger in my nostrils. I shook my head and sighed. “There are still a couple of things I don’t understand.”

  Amy said, “We have been more than cooperative, Mr. Stone.”

  I looked at her, smiled, then turned to Charlie. “Why did you kill Adolfo and Mateo?”

  He shrugged. “I hate violence, Mr. Stone. More, I detest it. But once you get involved in that world, it sucks you in and you have to fight to survive. After they had beaten up Karl, when he got out of hospital, they wanted to blackmail me. I realized that was why they hadn’t taken payment in the first place. I don’t think Felix knew about it. I don’t think he would have tolerated it. But I couldn’t be sure. My mother is worth quite a lot of money, so they thought they could get a nice regular income from us. I agreed, told them to meet me by the Fish Market, took my father’s 9 mm and shot them.”

  I frowned. “You did it like a pro. It was one of the details that put us on the wrong scent.”

  He made a face like he was trying to explain something to a person with only half a brain. “I am not emotional, Mr. Stone. I guess I process my emotions in a different way. I knew when I shot them, just as I knew when I stabbed Karl, that I had to see them as cardboard cutouts, targets.” He shrugged. “I’m a reasonably good shot, they were not far away.”

  “And you were the last person in the world anyone would suspect.”

  “I guess.”

  I sat and stared at my tea awhile.

  Amy smiled and said, “It’s not poisoned, Mr. Stone. We don’t need to kill you. What Charlie said is true, you would never be able to prove any of this. Besides, we promised ourselves when we got here and changed our names, we would never kill again. We have left all of that behind.”

  I gave a small laugh. “No, it’s not that, Amy. I have pretty much what I came for. I understand what happened, and why. I believe you’re right; even if the cops could bring a convincing, circumstantial case, I am not sure they could persuade a jury to convict. No, I guess I am done here.” I put the tea down on the coffee table and turned my head to look at Charlie. “There is just one last question I have, and then I’ll go and leave you in peace.”

  “What question?”

  “Why did you lie about killing Christen Redfern?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  There was a deathly silence in the house. Far away, a car accelerated and was lost in the silence. A bird chattered, but the sounds seemed to belong somewhere else, to another reality, and simply slipped over the face of the silence that inhabited the room, without disturbing it.

  Finally, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think it’s time you left.”

  I didn’t move, but after a moment, I said, “The lock was picked after the murders, Charlie.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because if you had had a screwdriver in your hand, you would not have needed a knife to stab Karl in the kidney. You forced the lock to make it look as though somebody had broken in, because you had a key. You didn’t bust the outer lock because it was too risky, but you picked the inner one so the cops would think Amy had been abducted and possibly killed. But above all, so they would not suspect she had been present at the killing.”

  He sat up straight and all the color drained from his face. “No!” He shook his head. “No, no! You’re wrong. You’re right about the lock. She gave me her key. I was going to kill them both in their bed while they were unconscious. But Amy was not there.”

  I turned to Amy. She wouldn’t meet my eye.

  “You both went along,” I said. “Your intention from the start was to kill both of them, take the Impala and disappear. You’d already set up the new identities, the bank account… it was all perfect, except that Charlie’s clinical style of killing was never going to satisfy you, was it? Not all that rage that you had inside you, all those years of hell, all the betrayals, all the beatings you took while she looked on and did nothing. And above all, like you said, the way she forgave him and called him baby, after what he had done to you. That deserved a knife in the heart. In fact, it deserved between fifteen and twenty knives to the heart, for all the knives in the heart that you had received since you were a baby.”

  She was silent, looking into her mug, tipping it this way and that. Finally, she said, “So now you know. What are you going to do with this knowledge?”

  I put my hands on my knees and made to stand. “Nothing. You will never see me or hear from me again.”

  I stood. They stood with me and followed me to the door. There I hesitated and turned back to Charlie. “Who were the two unfortunates in the Impala?”

  He almost smiled. “You may not believe it, but it is God’s own truth. We bought them from a hospital morgue in Chicago. You’d be amazed what some people will do for a thousand bucks. Especially if a pretty girl asks them to do it.”

  “You did what?”

  “We were desperate, Mr. Stone. We needed to die and disappear. We needed those bodies to be found in the Impala.”

  “Why’d you shoot them in the eye? What was the point in that?”

  He sighed. “It was a small caliber pistol. We needed a through and through so we could take the slugs away. I didn’t want to risk it being traced. We didn’t realize they would melt in the heat.” He shrugged. “As it was, even through the eye, there was no exit wound and they stayed in the brain.”

  Amy said, “I have a question for you. How did you find us?”

  I smiled. “It was remarkably easy when everything fell into place and I realized Karl had been beating you. I asked the sheriff of Benton County if any cars
had been stolen at the time the Impala was burned. Of course there had been, a Jeep. The rest was a bit of a hunch, but Pam had told me you were always talking about Antioch. So I had the sheriff contact California DMV and see if the Jeep had been reregistered there. And it had, six years ago, in Antioch.”

  She nodded. “Clever.”

  Charlie looked me in the eye. “Karl had to be stopped, Mr. Stone, and after Amy had killed Christen, she had to be taken somewhere safe. I would do it all again today if I had to. You do whatever you have to do for the person you love. I believe that as firmly today as I did when I was a kid and met her.”

  “May you always believe it, Charlie.”

  I opened the door and stepped out into the late afternoon and made my way to my car. There I sat on the hood and stared down the green, leafy street and felt the gentle touch of the sea air. I told myself it was not for me to judge if they were right or wrong. No man, no woman, no human had the capacity to judge a situation like that. Charlie was right. He loved, and he had done what he had to do to help the woman he loved. If there was a god, let Him or Her or It judge. If there wasn’t, so much the better. Let them live out their lives in whatever peace they could find.

  There was an American Airlines flight next morning at eight, which got me into JFK at four forty-eight. So I phoned the Best Western, booked a room for the night, and spent what was left of the afternoon strolling around Fisherman’s Wharf, riding trams and doing all the things tourists do in San Francisco. Eventually, I wound up at Pier 23 and had a cheeseburger and a couple of beers, staring out at the lights on the Bay, telling myself that everything was going to be fine when I got home; that everything would return to normal again.

  After that, I collected the rental car and made my way to the Best Western, where I spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling and replaying my last conversation with Dehan over and over in my head.

  * * *

  I sat on the hood of my Jag at JFK and switched on my phone. It told me I had a Whatsapp. It was from Dehan. It said, Where are you?

  I smiled, cautiously, and wrote, I’m at JFK. Just got back. Where are you?

  I saw the two blue ticks and after a moment, she started typing. @ home. U coming over?

  On my way.

  I crossed the Madison Avenue Bridge and burned rubber all the way along the Bruckner Expressway, weaving in and out of the traffic at well over the speed limit. What was the tone of her messages? Was it conciliatory? I had assumed it was and felt a pleasurable heat in my belly, but perhaps she was mad. Perhaps the tone was brief and curt, and she was going to tell me I had crossed a line, or worse. The thought made me feel vaguely sick.

  I eventually peeled off onto White Plains, made Morris Park in record time and next thing, I was rumbling down Haight Avenue toward our house. In the west, the sun was low over the trees. I looked for signs of her in the house. But it looked dead and quiet.

  I climbed the steps, pulled out my key and went to the door. It was open—just an inch. I frowned and smiled. Part of my mind told me that was out of character for Dehan. Part of it told me she was unpredictable and that was why I was crazy about her.

  I pushed open the door and stepped in. “Dehan?”

  The house was silent. I closed the door and looked around. Nothing was disturbed, except that her bag was on the sofa. I called out louder, “Dehan?”

  The silence was heavy. It was growing dark. I flipped on the lamps and my cell pinged. I pulled it out of my pocket. A Whatsapp from Dehan read Upstairs and a winking face.

  I frowned hard. Had I missed something? I thought about our last conversation, how mad and cool she had been, how she hadn’t contacted me since. I climbed the stairs to the dark landing. Our bedroom door was ajar. The last of the evening light lay in a thin strip across the wooden floor. I went to the door, placed my fingertips on it and pushed.

  Nausea turned my stomach. My skin went cold and prickled. Dehan was there. I could recognize her silhouette against the window. She was sitting on a straight-backed chair, staring at me with no expression at all on her face.

  “Dehan?”

  She spoke without inflection, like an automaton. “Go away.”

  “What the hell, Dehan?”

  “Go away. Get out of here.”

  Then I saw him. I saw his shadow, not him, leaning on the doorjamb of the en suite. He was small, slight. The failing light from the window caught his hands. They were delicate. One held a Glock 19, the other held a long, silver blade.

  I said: “You’re the Sicario.”

  He gave a small snort. When he spoke, I recognized the voice. “You were expecting a kung fu killing machine?” He wheezed a strange old-man laugh. “You thought El Indio was the Sicario? He looked like a killer, with that big scar. He was just an accountant, there to cook the books for the Bodega. You don’t need to be an athlete to kill, Mr. Stone. All you need is to be willing.”

  “You asked me for directions the night I got back.”

  “My job was here. Why would I be in Sonoita?”

  “And then… you told me you were our new neighbor. You were watching our house…”

  “Here is how we are going to do this, Mr. Stone. You both need to accept that you are going to die this evening. There is no way around that. You first, then her. The choice you have is this: she dies fast and relatively painless. Or she dies slow, in lots of pain.”

  He waited a beat to let the facts sink in. Dehan snarled, “Take him, for fuck’s sake, Stone! What are you waiting for?”

  He pointed at the bed. “Take your clothes off and get in the bed.”

  I looked at the bed, then back at him. My breathing was loud in my ears. Dehan half screamed at me, “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare, Stone!”

  “OK, Stone. Hesitate another couple of seconds and I giver her a Colombian necktie.”

  “No!”

  I took a step forward, holding out my hand.

  He went on, “You know what that is? I cut her throat under her chin, I pull out the tongue and I cut it off. That’s how we begin. It only gets worse after that.” He stepped over to her, slipped the Glock in his waistband and took hold of her hair in his left hand.

  Her teeth were clenched and her neck swollen. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Stone? Take the motherfucker!”

  “Bleeding out, if the blade is real sharp, can be a beautiful experience, real peaceful. You want her last hour on Earth to be hell? A hell of pain and grotesque, nightmarish amputations?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  He jerked his head at the bed. “Take off your clothes and get in the bed. You will die as lovers—jealous passion? Suicide pact? Who knows? You will kill each other, in each other’s arms. Nice.”

  I looked at Dehan. He had her head pulled back. Her eyes were wild. I knew I would not be able to put her through the nightmare of torture he was describing. I said, “I’m sorry,” and pulled off my jacket. I had no gun. I had not taken it to San Francisco. It was across the landing in the safe. To the Sicario, I spoke in a pleading voice, “Please don’t hurt her. I’ll do anything you say, just please don’t hurt her. What about my gun…?”

  He glanced at my body, looking for the holster. It was as good as it was going to get. In the fraction of a second he was distracted, I lashed my jacket like a whip around his arm, yanked savagely and jumped at the same time.

  He didn’t flinch. The knife came at me, slashing at my throat. I raised the jacket and it deflected the blade. In a single, fluid movement, he pulled back the knife for a lunge at my belly. I threw the jacket in his face and kicked hard. It caught him in the chest and threw him against the wall. I went after him, but he lashed at my ankles. I didn’t think. I grabbed the big duvet from the bed and threw it over him. Then I fell on him, pinning him down under it with my knees. I wrenched back bedding to expose his head and began pounding him savagely, right and left. His left eye was purple, his nose was bleeding and his lip was swollen.

  Dehan was sho
uting at me: “Stone! Stone! Stop! Don’t kill him! Stop!”

  My fist was raised. My heart was pounding high in my chest. There was a dark rage in my head. I looked at her face.

  She said, “He’s had enough. Put your fist down. Take his gun, and untie me.”

  She was right. I lowered my fist. I pulled back the duvet. The knife was on the floor by his side. I pushed it away into the bathroom, threw the duvet back on the bed, pulled his Glock from his belt and slipped it in my own. My fingers felt thick and my hands were trembling. He had bound her to the chair with a couple of my ties. I managed to undo them and release her.

  “Are you OK?”

  She nodded. “Call it in and help me get this son of a bitch downstairs. You got cuffs?”

  “Downstairs.”

  I dragged him to his feet while she made the call. He had trouble standing, but we maneuvered him across the landing and down the stairs with the Glock stuck in the back of his neck. Halfway down, he rolled his eyes. His pupils were very dilated and he muttered, “No, not like this, please…”

  Dehan sat him on the sofa and stared at me. “Cuffs?”

  My head was reeling. “In my jacket, where are yours?”

  “In the drawer.”

  I crossed to the dresser, opened the drawer and pulled out her cuffs. I handed them to her. She squinted at me. “Stone, get your goddamn piece, will you?”

  “I have his.”

  “That’s going into evidence. Get with the program, big guy. Get your .45.”

  I was struggling to stay focused. My stomach wound was hurting bad and I was suddenly feeling weak. I handed her the Glock and went back up the stairs, opened the safe and pulled out my Colt, made sure it was loaded and strapped on the holster.

  When I got back to the door, the Sicario was sitting with his head in his hands and his wrists cuffed. Dehan was covering him, though he didn’t look very dangerous. He said, “I need to be sick. I have bad concussion.”