The Killing Moon: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  The Killing Moon

  A Novel

  Chuck Hogan

  SCRIBNER

  New York London Toronto Sydney

  Also by Chuck Hogan

  Prince of Thieves

  The Blood Artists

  The Standoff

  SCRIBNER

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  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright Š 2007 by Multimedia Threat, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006045080

  ISBN: 0-7432-9907-8

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  To my partner in crime, and our three unindicted co-conspirators

  PART I

  BLACK FALLS

  1

  HELL ROAD

  A CRACK, A SPRAY OF FLAME, and he dropped onto his back on the side of the dirt road.

  Nothing made sense at first. Not the trees overhead, nor the dark sky. The gasping that would not fill his lungs.

  He heard hissing and felt a great pressure easing in the center of his chest, a sensation like deflating, like shrinking back into boyhood.

  His fight-or-flight response failed him, blunted by years of false alarms. In the end, his brain was unable to differentiate between legitimate trauma and the fire drill of another cheap high.

  The forest was fleeing him on all sides. Light came up in his face that he did not realize was a flashlight; a bright, beaming presence he thought might be divine.

  * * *

  TEN MINUTES EARLIER, he had been so fully alive. Pushing his way through the snagging branches of the Borderlands State Forest, jogging at times, giddy as he followed the full and smiling moon through the treetops. Intensely alive, every part of him, as he had not felt in weeks or even months.

  He was two full days beyond sleep, yet his thoughts remained hyperfocused and particular, his mind blazing pure blue flame (no flickers of orange tonight, no air in the line). The thrill of risk, of danger, was his spark and his fuel.

  He knew these haunted woods so well because it was he who had once haunted them.

  Running the Borderlands had been, back in high school, a weekend dare for popular seniors with new driver's licenses: speeding their parents' cars along the ungated fire road that sliced through the state forest like a nasty scar. A midnight rite of passage, marquee entertainment in a town full of nothing-to-do, this tiny rural map-smudge in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, a fading and forsaken hamlet named Black Falls.

  He had longed to participate, to be included as a passenger among a carload of screaming teenagers tearing through the forest. Stopping short on the access road, cutting the headlights, soaking in total blackness for an extra thrill. The stuff of roller coasters and horror movies.

  But he was a strange young boy who had grown still stranger in adolescence. An outcast. One whom the others would never, repeat, never invite.

  And indeed, he was different. More than any of them knew.

  That was how he got the idea.

  He still had loads of makeup left over from Halloween. He knew a thing or two about theatricality, about costumes, about the importance of performance. The mask and the reveal.

  Word of the black-haired ghoul on the fire road blazed through school that week. Darting out of the trees with screaming eyes and a gaping black smile. The thrill seekers who returned the following weekend were disappointed by a no-show, until the creature's notoriety exploded full force the weekend after that, with a dramatic reappearance said to have fouled the undergarments of a varsity running back.

  The next week, no apparition, only the discovery of a blood-soaked shirt dripping from a low tree branch. Two more weeks passed, kids racing their fears with no payoff, until the demonic ghoul appeared yet again, this time hurling a severed human head (a hollowed-out cantaloupe larded with a mixture of Karo syrup and red food coloring) into a passing windshield, where it exploded with gore.

  The legend of Hell Road had been born.

  He camped there on weekend nights when the Thing in the Woods materialized, and even some nights when It didn't: watching the headlights shoot through the Borderlands, his classmates alive to the danger, begging for some appalling shock to jolt them out of their tedious small-town existence. But they were merely flirting with death, whereas he was downright smitten.

  Never once had he been afraid in these woods. He found only calm here. A haunted teenager sleeping in a haunted forest, he felt consoled.

  That was how he navigated this night without flashlight or fear, following one of his old tree paths to the impending rendezvous on Hell Road. He had suffered all day in anticipation of this moment, opening himself to the forest now, to whatever this night would bring. The secret of the mystery man about to be exposed.

  He had even worn his costume, updated through the years, including his hair. The night heat was oppressive, but he had no choice in the matter. It was not a disguise he wore, but a manifestation.

  Not a mask, but a reveal.

  Secrets were a thing he fed upon. A blood meal to him, a thing he craved. That sustained him.

  But to Maddox he had made certain promises, some of which he might even keep. He was trying to be good. He actually was.

  Illicit, not illegal, the midnight encounter of two like-minded souls of consensual age in the deep, dark forest. Adventurous, yes, and mysterious, and spectacularly dangerous—but perfectly legal.

  He was hopeful, always. Of meeting a true soul mate. Of finding one person out there who understood him. His whims and eccentricities. He did believe, from their chats, that this mystery man in fact knew who he was, and evidently was okay with that. Which was a start. It would save him from getting beat up at least. Mystery Man even referred to their rendezvous point as "Hell Road," so he had to be a local.

  Regardless, it had given him something to dream about. Something to look forward to. A reason to go tripping through the forest yet again.

  Night, bring me what you will.

  * * *

  THAT WAS WHAT he had been thinking as he emerged onto the hard dirt pack of the moonlit fire road. And what he thought now as the light flooded his eyes, and he expelled a final, gusty sigh, settling deeply and comfortably into the ground as though it were a child's soft mattress. He reverted to his best self, that innocent and unbroken young boy, exhausted at the end of another endless day of summer, surrendering to the moonlight and his secret dreams.

  2

  RIPSBAUGH

  IT WAS THE BLUE LIGHTS that drew him.

  Kane Ripsbaugh didn't go around seeking out beauty in life.

  He had no poetry in his heart, no language for pretty things. He owned a septic service company and ran the town highway department and was loyal to his difficult wife. But police blues pulsing against the dark night: he doubted there was ever a more beautiful sight than that.

  Ripsbaugh stopped his truck and killed the engine. He left the headlights on and looked out at the road in a squinting way that had nothing to do with the strange scene his lamps revealed. This was the way he looked at the world.

  The cop out there, the new hire, Maddox, had his revolver drawn. He glanced into the headlights, then backed off from the big deer dying in the road.
<
br />   Ripsbaugh climbed out and down, his boots hitting the pavement. As the head of Black Falls' highway department, a hurt deer blocking the road was as much his business as anyone else's.

  "You all right?" he asked Maddox, walking up on him slow.

  "Yeah," said Maddox, looking anything but. "Fine."

  Ripsbaugh watched the deer try to lift its head. Its hooves scraped at the pavement, blood glistening on its muzzle and ears. The stick casting a jagged shadow near its head was not a stick at all but a broken antler.

  Some fifty yards down the road, Maddox's patrol car was pulled over onto the shoulder. The driver's side door was open.

  Maddox started to talk. "I was driving past the falls. The spray washed over my car, so I hit the wipers. The road ahead was clear. All of a sudden, bam! Car jerks left—not a swerve like I was losing control, but like the car had been shoved. I realized I hadn't hit anything. Something hit me."

  He talked it through, still trying to piece together what had happened, the memory of the incident and its impact as fresh to him as an echo.

  "I slam on the brakes finally, stopping down there. Red smoke everywhere, but it was just road grit swirling up in my brake lights. I get out. I hear this sound like scraping, a sound I can't understand. The dust settled and here it is."

  Ripsbaugh looked into the trees. Edge Road was so named because it traced the treeline of the Borderlands State Forest. "How's your unit look?"

  "Rear right passenger door's pushed in." He was starting to shake off the shock. "I never heard of that. A deer broadsiding a moving car?"

  "Better that than getting up into your windshield."

  Maddox nodded, realizing how close he had come to death. His turn to look into the trees. "Something must have spooked it."

  Ripsbaugh looked him over, his blue jeans and hiking boots. The town couldn't afford regular uniforms anymore, so the six-man force wore white knit jerseys with POLICE embroidered in blue over their hearts, and black "BFPD" ball caps, making them look more like security guards than sworn lawmen. Snapped to Maddox's belt were a chapped leather holster and a recycled badge. He held an old .38 in his hand.

  The deer resumed its scratching, bucking its head against the asphalt. "Aw, Christ," Maddox said, knowing what he had to do.

  Maddox had grown up in Black Falls but he was no farm boy. He'd left to go to college some fifteen years ago and never returned until his mother passed away. That was six months ago now. No one had expected him to stay more than a day or two beyond the funeral, but here he was, a part-time auxiliary patrolman, a rookie at age thirty-three. That was about as much as anybody knew about him.

  "All right," Maddox said to the gun in his hand, and to the deer in the street.

  Sometimes the mercy part of the kill shot is less for the suffering animal than for the man who can't stand to watch it suffer.

  "In the ear," Ripsbaugh advised.

  The animal flailed, sensing its impending execution, trying to get away. Maddox had to brace its strong neck with the tread of his hiking boot. He extended his gun arm with his palm open behind it.

  The shot echoed.

  The deer shuddered and lay still.

  Maddox lurched back like a man losing his balance coming off the bottom rung of a ladder. He holstered his gun as though it were burning him, the piece still smoking at his hip. His hand wasn't shaking, but he rubbed it as though it were.

  Ripsbaugh walked to the deer. Maddox's patrol car blues flashed deep within its dead round eye. "That was a good stance you had."

  Maddox breathed hard and deep. "What's that?"

  "Your stance. A good cop stance."

  "Yeah?" he said. He wasn't quite present in the moment yet. "I guess."

  "They teach you that here?"

  Maddox shook his head like he didn't understand. "You a shooter?"

  "Just going by what I see on TV."

  "Must be we watch the same shows, then."

  Ripsbaugh eyed him a little more closely now. "Must be."

  He gave Maddox a minute to get used to the idea of grabbing the deer's hooves with his bare hands, then together they dragged the carcass off into the first row of trees, leaving a blood trail across the road.

  "I'll come back in the morning with my town truck," said Ripsbaugh, "take him to the dump."

  Maddox eyed Ripsbaugh's company rig. "You working late?"

  "Fight with the wife. Came out to drive around, cool off."

  Maddox nodded, about the only way to respond to that. He was wiping his hands on his jeans, coming back more fully into himself now. "Well," he said, "just another night in Black Falls."

  Ripsbaugh watched the amateur cop head back to his patrol car, silhouetted in flashing blue. He returned to his own truck, checked the bundle rolled tightly in the tarp in the rear bed, and started for home.

  3

  BUCKY

  BUCKY PAIL—AT SERGEANT, the highest-ranking member of the Black Falls Police Department—leaned forward against the counter, stretching his back as he looked out through the front windows of the station, past the people gathering on Main Street to the coursing blue stripe of the wide-running Cold River. The sun sparkled off its surface as though the waterway were a vein of blue blood conveying shards of broken crystal through the county. As though anyone going wading in it would shred their legs of flesh. Would find themselves standing on shins of pure bone.

  This was what Bucky was grinning about when Walter Heavey walked in.

  Heavey looked surprised to see Bucky up at the front desk. He hesitated a stutter-step before continuing forward, the man's skin fishy white, his hair clown orange. He wore the same red jersey he always wore, bearing the three-oval State Farm Insurance symbol of his employer.

  "What's up, Walt?" said Bucky, not bothering to straighten.

  "I'm here to report something."

  "Okay. Shoot."

  Heavey had wanted someone else to be there, anyone else. Knowing this, seeing the dread on Heavey's face, gave Bucky a little lift.

  Heavey said, "I heard a gunshot overnight."

  "Okay." This was going to be good. "When-abouts and where?"

  "It was last night. Late. Out in the Borderlands, behind my place."

  "Borderlands, huh? Woke you up?"

  "It did wake me up, yes. But I wasn't dreaming."

  "Mrs. Heavey had a bout of the gas, maybe?"

  Bucky took Heavey's shocked stare and savored it, anger blushing the man's ridiculously fair face, further whitening his white eyebrows. Appearances alone, Bucky had zero respect for this guy.

  "Okay," said Bucky, Heavey too flustered to respond. "So. A gunshot."

  "I got kids in my house, Sergeant Pail. Three boys. I'm not this isn't fooling around. What's it got to take for you to look into these things?"

  Bucky nodded and kept up his grin. Kids. Kids weaken people. Not that Heavey had all that far to fall in the first place, but now the entire world was a white-hot threat to his precious offspring, all broken glass and sharp edges. Three tubby eight-year-old boys, identical triplets, all clown-heads like him. Piling out of the circus ambulance minivan with their Fat Lady mother huffing after them.

  A comedy. A sideshow. And when something strikes you as funny, you smile.

  Bucky said, "Is it that witch back sniffing around your boys again?"

  Heavey was stewing and stammering now. "I never said it was a witch. I said she looked like a witch."

  Kids are a sex-change operation. Turn a man right into a woman.

  "Maybe," Heavey went on, "what I need to do is call the state police."

  Bucky grinned again, harder this time, curling it a bit. Relishing Heavey's attempt at moxie. "See, it don't work like that, Walt. We don't answer to the staties, they're not our bosses. Completely different thing. I bet they couldn't even find Black Falls on a map." Bucky straightened, using the step-up height advantage of the front counter. "But you go ahead and call them if you want, with your complaints about gunshots and witches tryi
ng to steal your kids—"

  "Complaints?" Heavey looked around like he was on a hidden camera. "Shoe prints in my yard? Gunfire in the woods? These aren't complaints. These are reports."

  Eddie wandered out of the back hallway behind Bucky, chewing on an apple. "What's up?"

  Eddie was two inches taller and two years older than his brother, but it was Bucky who was in charge, and had been ever since they were kids. Eddie's hair was straw blond to Bucky's dirty brown, but facially, especially in the tight eyes, there was no mistaking the Pail brand. Eddie ate green apples one after another like a horse, in big, choking bites—core, seeds, stem, and all.