The Killing Moon: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  And yet, Bucky did. He had. One time only. Or rather, nine times over the course of one bullet-fast three-day weekend. One seventy-two-hour run. Nine smoked foils. No sleep. No food. No need.

  Most of the rush of the first day he had spent working on his cars. Pure gear-head heaven, twenty-four hours straight through without a break, compulsively immersed in the hobby of all hobbies. Mind and hand and wrench and engine: one. Connected. It was all-American nirvana. It was bliss.

  Nothing would ever be anything like that first blaze. When eventually he got horny, he'd called Wanda and smoked a foil with her and she went off like a comet. They fucked for hours, a fuckfest beyond human capability, superhuman sex, orgasm upon orgasm, each exploding with intensity. Universe-creating orgasms. Big motherfucking bangs.

  That were so good, so right, so complete, so out there, that he couldn't be bothered now to fuck without it. They had tried a couple of times, Wanda tweaking up alone and then begging him, pleading for his dick. But meth turned him from the ultimate pussy hound into what he thought of as a meth monk. It just wasn't there for him anymore. You go to the moon, you visit the fucking stars: What was left in Black Falls that could please him? He didn't need it now, not the way he used to. Or rarely, anyway. Certainly not from bony Wanda. Meth had messed with the switchboard in his head. He was getting off on something else besides sex now. Something—the Idea—had taken its place.

  The Idea was what he had caught on to that third day. What the meth had showed him. What it revealed.

  A clarity.

  Everyday people, he had realized, would kill to feel the way he did. Would slaughter their own parents for a taste of this. Would trade away their kids.

  That was when he saw his future. That was when he knew.

  Knew immediately that he had found the thing he had been looking for all his life. Not a drug to get high on—no. Every drug that had come through town, that had found its way into lockup, he had test-driven like an impounded car. Even regular speed—nothing was like this shit. Nothing came close. Nothing had this cosmic giddyup.

  What he had found here, without searching for it, without even knowing it existed, was a tool. What in other hands was a toy, was in his hands a sharp knife. A cunning weapon.

  A low-priced alternative to cocaine, even cheaper than heroin. A high that lasts longer and burns hotter than 'shrooms or acid or anything else out there. A drug that doesn't take you out of the world but, like a great fuck, plunges you deeper into it. That makes you invincible, immortal, and that's better to screw on even than coke.

  Meth is a blow job for the brain, a hand job for the ego. It writhes naked and moaning in the swelling lap of your soul, bouncing on your hard-on, squeezing your balls, making you come and come and beg for more.

  That first high, anyway.

  The virgin ride of pure intensity, which Ibbits said you never quite get back to again, but which many people devote the rest of their lives to chasing. Ibbits told him about the effects of the drug on people out west, where he was from: men walking away from their jobs, women from their children, losing houses and cars and selling off everything, including themselves. Religion promises you something glorious just around the corner? Meth actually lets you glimpse it. Lets you hear the angels sing.

  Bucky still felt tempted all the time. Especially working these long hours cooking up the stuff. But he saw now another thing the meth had showed him: this was what life is. Chasing your virginities. Chasing your infant satisfactions. That pure bliss of first love (mother). The bewildering, earth-shuddering majesty of your first orgasm. You want it all back. You want to be born again. Life as pure nostalgia.

  Everybody everywhere is looking for transcendence, for deliverance, something to devote themselves to. And meth gives you that. At first. Then it starts to reduce you. Bucky had already seen it here in Black Falls. Meth turning men into monkeys. Part of the drug's joy is that it peels you back to your animal instincts; it strips out higher, more complex emotions such as regret and anxiety. Your needs become meth and sex, in that order. And then eventually just meth. You want nothing else. You know no future, you feel no past. Shame loses its drag on you. Your body doesn't matter anymore. Only what you put in it. You are a zombie.

  Bucky pulled out his toasted bologna and laid it sizzling on a paper towel. He squirted mustard on it, and while it cooled, he wiped his greasy hands on his shorts and changed up the record, laying in his old Kiss Alive II album. Track two: "King of the Night Time World."

  After the revelation, Bucky had gone back to the station lockup to see Ibbits, held there over the long weekend, waiting for a trip out to the county judge on Tuesday. Bucky was all fired up on the confiscated meth, and Ibbits saw this. Bucky let him out and brought him back to his home to pick the man's brain. He offered him freedom in exchange for information, and, after a liberal hit off his own stash, Ibbits was only too willing. He wrote out recipes and supply lists. Everyday stuff—hydrogen peroxide, acetone, Heet, Pyrex bowls, coffee filters, denatured alcohol, hot plates, cold medicine—much of which Bucky already had around the house and garage, except for the iodine. Against the cost of this, he priced out the product at $100 per gram to start, $1,200 per ounce, $15,000 per pound. He even drew up a business model, a pyramid design, declaring the New England states to be virgin territory, and growing more and more animated at the prospect of the two men going into business together.

  At some point around the fourth or fifth time Ibbits was repeating himself, Bucky unwound the AM antenna from his stereo receiver and strangled him with it. He lay Ibbits out on the floor by the fireplace, then returned to poring over the lists, refining the plans in his own mind. Bucky never listened to AM radio anyway. Later he had Eddie drive him back to the station, where he picked up Ibbits's Escort. The crash, he arranged himself, as he did the fire.

  Another big reason for Bucky not to dabble. His taking meth was like pouring napalm on a grease fire. Of all the things the drug had shown him that weekend, the most revealing was Bucky Pail himself. He found out that he had been living behind a secret identity all these years: that of Bucky Pail, Black Falls police sergeant, son of Cecil and Verna, brother of Eddie. But what he was inside, the real deal within the hollow shell he wore, was something beyond extraordinary.

  The proof of this was that he had never lost focus since that long weekend. Not once. Every step since then, every move he had made, only brought him closer to his goal. Buying fuel, tubing, and glassware to outfit the old curing shack in back, then later the camper. He started off buying up Sudafed for the pseudoephedrine, and he still had Wanda clear out the Gulp whenever they got in a new shipment. But his search for a reliable, local source of iodine had led him to the fruity vet Dr. Bolt and a genius solution. He ordered road flares by the case for the red phosphorous they contained, and then it was on to the cook.

  Cold medicine and household poisons cooked to a powder. That's all it was. Easy to bake as chocolate chip cookies, Ibbits told him. Problem was, Bucky had never baked chocolate chip cookies in his life.

  But he learned. How to vent the shed so that the fumes didn't get to him. How to dip the flares in acetone, loosening up the phosphorous for scraping. How to tube out the dope. How gourmet coffee filters worked better than the cheaper, no-name brand.

  Internet recipes are all bunk, Ibbits had declared. The Man had gotten to them somehow. The cook sites that turned up at the top of the big search engines directed you straight to the Drug Enforcement Agency and registered your computer number. Lots of disinformation out there. And even if you did stumble upon a good recipe, it would be like trying to follow a chef on one of those TV cooking shows where they have all the time-consuming stuff prepared ahead of the taping. Sometimes, in the boredom of a cook, Bucky imagined he was before a TV camera, taking viewers through the process. Showing them his hot plate and mason jars and Pyrex bowls all set up on the counter. Gallon jugs of muriatic acid and Coleman's fuel, cans of Red Devil lye. Him donning his mask and gloves, an
d, as he boiled and filtered, the studio audience pruning up their noses at the bitter smell.

  He tested his batches on Wanda. She was his willing lab bunny. Through her he introduced it into the margins of this marginal town—teenagers, mostly, some rats she had met at the Gulp—test-marketing the product, rolling it out slowly. It was everything Ibbits said it would be and more. Bucky's stockpile grew as he awaited the right moment to release his stores full bore to the public. Then he would watch meth spread like a contagion, consuming its consumers, his own personal army of zombies marching forth, the drug spreading, spreading, and the money riding up the pyramid to the source at the top.

  Other opportunists would soon vie for the attention of this new class of customers he was creating—and let them. Let them take over the risk and the blame. Because by then he would have made his wad. Already, he was sitting on about $100,000 worth of product. He would play it out until the moment felt right, and then ditch this used-up town for good. Turn it over to Eddie, let him pick his ass in that run-down station, in a town full of the undead. Let him preside over the final throes of Meth Falls, Massachusetts. Bucky would be down in Daytona, retired at age twenty-six in the land of spring break and NASCAR, wet-T-shirt nights and fat-boy Harleys and fun in the fuckin' sun. College honeys, not the country bush he saw here. Party girls looking for a man with money to spend and maybe a little meth to get them off. Why not dabble, set up a little lab behind his mansion pool house, keep his hand in? This magic dust was his ticket to the world.

  This was all part of his pregame ritual, how he got himself fired up to head back out and cook up another hot batch. He was minting money out there, and soon, very soon, he would be able to start throwing some of it around.

  He was already at the back door when the front bell went off. Wanda knew he didn't like her coming up here uninvited. She was getting more and more strung out, but he couldn't cut her off now. A sixteenth of a gram was all it took to keep her happy. If only she knew how valuable she was to him. If only she knew how much bank he was going to make off her skinny ass.

  He was grinning to himself and chewing the last bit of bologna toast when he opened the door.

  43

  MADDOX

  PINTY IS DEAD.

  That was Maddox's first thought as he approached the central station on Pinty's floor, seeing the duty nurse waiting to intercept him.

  Instead, she said, "He's been asking for you."

  Inside Pinty's room, the dying plant the town had sent over had been moved to the windowsill in a last-ditch effort to revive it. Pinty was asleep, his mouth tube gone, the oxygen line still under his nose. Maddox reached for his left hand where it lay curled across his chest.

  Muscles tugged at Pinty's cheeks. His lifting eyebrows signaled a tectonic shift, and his eyes rolled open.

  Maddox waited for Pinty to find him there.

  "Greggy," Pinty said. He was hoarse and stiff-jawed from sleep and the tube.

  "Pinty," said Maddox. "It's me. It's Donny."

  Pinty stared, trying to make him real. Trying to make him his son. "Greggy."

  So Maddox just nodded, holding his hand until he went out again. Pinty's cold fingers were rigid, locked in a curl. Maddox realized they were palsied from the stroke.

  He stayed with him awhile, but Pinty remained asleep.

  Later, on his way back out through the emergency room lobby, he saw an ambulance unloading a woman on a stretcher, the accident victim clutching her handbag and trying to talk on her mobile phone with a bandage wrapped around her head.

  The EMTs wheeling her in were the same two who had reported to Black Falls the night of the teenagers' car wreck. Maddox watched them go, then followed them inside the ambulance entrance, getting an idea.

  He found a woman reading a fat paperback behind the service window. He showed her his badge—the jersey alone wouldn't do it—and asked for the release forms from that night, giving her the accident date and location. "Two minors," he explained. "We have some property we need to return to them."

  She clicked keys on her computer with long, jeweled nails, eyeing Maddox while the pages printed silently behind her. A Portuguese woman with dark eyes and a broad nose. Line-thin eyebrows and a faint scar beneath her left ear, riding over her jaw. She handed him the copies and said, "You don't remember me."

  Maddox went cold.

  She said, "You're wearing a uniform now."

  Lowell, he remembered. Eight years ago. Her name would come to him. Her hospital ID was on her belt, too low for him to read.

  She said, "I was Bobby Omar's girl."

  She was alone inside the window, and there was no one in the hallway within earshot. She seemed as interested in keeping this private as he was.

  Maddox said, "I didn't recognize you."

  "You haven't changed. Much."

  He had to be careful. So many different ways this could go. "I guess Bobby's upstate now?"

  "I guess so."

  "You don't visit?"

  She shook her head, earrings tinkling.

  "Glad to hear it," he said.

  "He trusted you, you know. He always said he was never sure about the others, never sure about anyone. Even me. Why he kept that wolf on a chain in our crib. But he was sure about you. Mad Dog Maddox."

  She seemed to mean this as a compliment. Maddox folded and refolded the pages in his hands, stopping once he realized he was doing so.

  "It was a lifetime ago," she said. "Who I was then. The anger I had for everything, for everyone. I was in so deep." She looked away, curling her tongue. "I'm out here with my sister and her husband now. I have this job. I'm dating one of the drivers."

  He sensed her eagerness, her need for his approval.

  Back outside, past the ambulance, he made his way to the reserved parking for police vehicles. Maddox would have to find another way into the hospital from now on. His life was like that, whole towns and city neighborhoods, entire regions of the state, walled off to him.

  Once he left the overhang and the bright sun hit him, he remembered the pages in his hand. He smoothed out the wrinkles and skimmed the forms. He noticed that the boys' addresses were identical: that of the Ansons, the foster family in town. The same family responsible for Frankie Sculp.

  Below that, the person who signed the boys out from the hospital had checked off "Guardian" next to her name. The signature was illegible, but the name typed next to it read, "Tedmond, Wanda."

  * * *

  THE ANSONS' RANCH house looked outwardly normal in the same way a shaken can of soda looks fine until you crack it open. The weedy land was once a thriving apple orchard and seasonal farm stand, now a remote foster farm for Department of Youth Services residential placements.

  It was late in the day when Maddox arrived. The school bus was gone from the driveway, meaning that Mrs. Anson was not at home. The man of the house finally responded to Maddox's knocking, Dan Anson seeing the uniform and looking for an accompanying social worker. He wore an oily T-shirt and sweatpants apparently without underwear. "Going camping?" Maddox said.

  "What's that?"

  "Are you planning a camping trip?"

  Anson blinked his blitzed eyes. "Not that I know of."

  "Because you already pitched a tent."

  Anson looked down at the lazy erection pressing against his gray cotton sweats as Maddox stepped past him into the house.

  Inside was no less humid than outside. "I spoke to your wife last time," said Maddox.

  "She said. You still looking for Frankie, right? We don't know where he is. Kid's a professional runaway."

  "I'm looking for two others now. Carlo and Nick. They went joyriding recently, cracked up a stolen car."

  Anson played at thinking. "No," he said, "I haven't seen them."

  Maddox walked into a living room of magazines and catalogs fluttered by window fans. A boy about eleven, one of the Ansons' two biological kids, stared at the TV, barely registering him. Maddox went to the kitchen, checked the co
ntents of the refrigerator. Predictably not much. He went back up the hallway opening doors.

  "Uh, excuse me, what is this?" said Anson, moving sideways, peering into each room after Maddox did. "I said they're not here."

  Maddox opened the door on what appeared to be the Ansons' bedroom, the sheets tossed, window shades drawn down. He saw a computer on a student-sized homework desk. The modem lights were working, but the monitor was off. Maddox switched it on.

  Anson stayed by the door, scratching at his unshaved neck. "You can't really do that."

  While the screen was warming up, Maddox noticed a lightbulb behind the monitor, its screw base, wires, and filament all removed.

  Anson said, "Yeah, that lightbulb burned out."

  The fat end was blackened inside. "Pretty spectacularly," said Maddox, picking it up and hazarding a waft. He did not see the accompanying straw.