The Killing Moon: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  Donny, alone in his kitchen, turned and raised a "there you are" smile.

  "Sorry," he said. "I didn't know he was coming by."

  She shrugged. "That's okay."

  "I'm not used to mixing work with my private life. Not really used to having a private life at all."

  "Okay," she said again.

  "He's from the Mitchum County District Attorney's office. I don't know how much you heard ."

  "Was I supposed to be listening?"

  He shrugged like it was all right if she had been.

  "Most of it," she admitted.

  He nodded. "I never, ever lied to you. To everyone else but you."

  "You never told me much truth either."

  "I know. But I'm about to."

  Tracy stood against the dishwasher to steady herself. This buildup was too much. She folded her arms protectively, to stop herself from trembling. "Okay."

  "This isn't my first job in law enforcement. I've been with the state police for just over ten years."

  Tracy had guessed as much, listening from the foot of his bed upstairs. But hearing him say it now blew holes in her ears. "You're a state trooper?"

  "Never actually wore the uniform. Not for one day on the job."

  Tracy stared, trying to picture him in the shirt, the hat, the boots.

  "Issued me a gun too, but I never carried it. Both have been in storage since the academy. They pulled me out right before graduation to work undercover. Which I've done continuously ever since."

  "Undercover?" she said, a term she thought she knew from the movies, but which, when applied to Donny Maddox, had no meaning for her at all.

  "Narc work, mostly. I think it started off as an experiment. They wanted someone with a clean background, who could walk around with a real name and a real social security number with real mileage on it. So I kept no personnel file with the state police. Only one captain and one major within the organization knew my cover. My police salary was always paid out into an account under my mother's name so that I never drew a paycheck. It wasn't very much anyway. Unlike uniform troopers, I couldn't pad my take-home with detail work."

  He shook his head like he was rambling.

  "I kept what I earned working my cover jobs, lived off that. That was the life. All real jobs, lots of bars, day labor, some under-the-table stuff. Building up visibility and street cred. Every step of the way, I was wheeling and squealing. And always managing to be somewhere else when the cops came knocking.

  "Most undercovers go four, five years max. It's a fast track to promotion. But with me, it wasn't something I dipped in and out of. I was always in it. Birthdays would come and go, and I'd think, This year, this is the last. Only to see another one come around again. I used to blame the SP, but it was me just as much. Fact was, I liked it. It was what I knew, and it came easy to me. Until the job before this one."

  He cleared his throat. He was telling her everything and it was too much at once. Tracy prepared herself for the worst.

  "An OxyContin ring operating out of Haverhill. You know what Oxy is, right? Pharmaceutical painkiller. Heroin users love it because it's control-released. A sustained high over time. These were bad boys, taking off pharmacies at gunpoint. Ran down a Haverhill cop once on a getaway, the guy died of a heart attack. I worked them through this girl I had conspired to meet, a roommate of one of their sisters. A good girl, basically, with a good heart, but kind of tragically naive and gullible. Perfect for me. I contrived to get myself kicked out of my own apartment, knowing she would take me in. That was how I was trying to break in with her friend's brother. But it was slow going. I would hit up this girl for information, things she'd heard. These guys were all Latins, and 'roid ragers, paranoiacs. When things started to go bad for them, when they had to shade off some jobs because they picked up on stakeout heat at the scene, they went on a witch hunt. One night I came home and she was gone. No word, nothing. Turned out they had fingered her for the leak instead of me. Her body was found underneath a bridge. They'd force-fed her a couple of crushed-up Oxy, which, outside of its control-release capsule, delivers a twelve-hour high in one bolt. They took turns urinating on her as she was dying."

  Tracy's arms were crossed so tightly she could hardly breathe.

  "Yeah." Donny cleared his throat again. "I knew how it happened, I knew who did it, but had no proof. So I poured myself into it that much harder, breaking in with them in order to seal this murder rap. But to get there, to run with these scumbags and earn their trust, I had to do some things. Things I wouldn't ordinarily do. The rules of the game that are meant to be bent? Well, I really bent them. Tied them in knots. But as far as I was concerned, the end more than justified the means."

  He was nodding hard. He looked sick.

  Tracy felt paralyzed.

  "The other side of it was, I knew my mother was ill. She would tell me she was okay, and I let myself believe her because I couldn't get out to see her anyway. I was living with these guys by then, this hyper-paranoid bunch—totally insular was how they rolled, you never mixed with anyone outside the crew—and everything was coming to a head. So I put off seeing her, and put it off, and fucking put it off. It was right after I got these guys picked up in the act of knocking over a CVS in Salem, New Hampshire, that she had her fall.

  "There was real static coming my way after the case, the rules I broke, and I was at a point where I just didn't care. So I quit. The day after my mother's funeral, in fact. Tried to, anyway. Then they came to me about Sinclair, who had been beaten up by Bucky Pail during a DUI stop. He had made some narco allegations against the Black Falls police, and Pinty had already been to the DA's office about corruption in the department he once ran. It was my hometown, it was a good fit, so they offered me this probationary rehab assignment, a straightforward fact-finding case of possible rogue cops running amok. I didn't really care about making good myself. It was for Pinty I did it. Aside from my mother, he was the only one who knew what I was—knew that this was the reason I never came back after graduation, never served my scholarship time. He got me hired on to the force here, and I've been working this case ever since."

  "Sinclair?" Tracy said, trying hard to understand. "You were his ?"

  "He was my informant, yeah. I had that distinct privilege. He was just starting to figure out that this thing was bigger than even he had originally thought when he disappeared. Now, somehow, my small-town criminal conspiracy case has dovetailed into a double-murder investigation."

  She was breathing hard like she had been running the entire time he was speaking. Running away from what he was saying and at the same time racing to keep up with him. "So then, Wanda "

  "She was the only one close to Bucky Pail. That's what that was all about. But she stayed loyal to him. Or rather, she stayed loyal to his drugs."

  Tracy said, "In the movies, undercover drug agents, sometimes they have to take drugs themselves. To prove they're not police."

  "Yeah."

  She waited. "That's all you're going to say?"

  Donny said, "Yeah."

  She felt weird, her hands and legs tingling. Drugs. Donny. She looked at him standing across the kitchen, suddenly realizing that she might not know this man at all. "Did you wear wigs, disguises?"

  "No."

  "You used your real name?"

  "Mostly. Twice I got loaned out to DEA short-term, they tagged me with a phony background. But predominantly, it was just me."

  "And you've put away a lot of people?"

  "A good few, yeah."

  "Don't you worry about them coming back to find you?"

  "Not really," he said.

  This was his first lie to her, she realized with a chill. "These people you would live with them, gain their friendship, trust? Knowing you were going to turn on them in the end?"

  "It's the second-dirtiest game out there, right after the drug trade itself. But there is no other way. The only way to fight street crime is with street presence." She watched him try to come
up with some way of illustrating it so that she would understand. "There are people who are good at doing drugs. That may sound strange to you, but there just are. They can handle it somehow, they can manage their life. What I was good at was this. Undercover. I tried not to question it beyond that. And generally I had success. Until Haverhill." He could see that he was having trouble getting through to her. "Can you see now why it was so important to me that no one knew about us?"

  Tracy felt cold. And scared, and suddenly heartsick. She felt squeezed. "What was her name?" she asked.

  Donny didn't understand at first. Then he looked down at the floor. He was thinking about that girl, remembering her. "Her name was Casey."

  She watched him so closely, needing to read his face for the answer to this question. "Were you in love with her?"

  "No," he said. "I wasn't. But isn't that worse?"

  This was like trying to wound him by ripping out chunks of herself and throwing them at his head. "You were playing a role."

  "That's right."

  "Are you playing a role now?"

  A weird buzzing ended the charged stillness. Tracy looked at the corner of the counter where he routinely dumped his wallet and keys. His pager was creeping sideways, vibrating.

  Donny picked it up, checking the message screen. He looked confused at first, then alarmed. He pressed a button, read something more. "It's him," he said.

  He started moving, past her and around the corner to the hall closet.

  "Who him?" she said, following.

  From the top shelf he brought down his leather holster, unsnapping it and pulling loose his gun. "Sinclair."

  "What?" She took the pager from him to see for herself.

  The sender's SkyTel address was displayed along with the header and the current time. Meet at pulp mill. Urgent. ALONE.

  "How do you know it's him?"

  Donny used a key from his ring to undo the trigger lock on his gun. "Three people have that pager number. No—four. The assistant district attorney, who just left here. You. Wanda, who's in lockup. And Sinclair." He took the pager out of her numb hands, and, before slipping it into his back pocket, showed her. "That's his account number. This was sent from his pager."

  The two halves of the lock spilled onto the counter. He popped open the barrel to check the load, then closed the gun back up again and tucked it into his holster. He undid his belt strap to his right hip, threading the holster onto it, fixing the belt and buckling it tight.

  Tracy said, "You're not going there alone. He's already killed one policeman."

  Donny grabbed his wallet and pocketed his keys. "It's nothing like that."

  "How do you know?" She looked to the window, the night outside. "Call your state police."

  "They would scare him off. You read the message. Look—it's just not like that. I don't have time to explain right now."

  He started away, then came back fast.

  "Stay here. Wait for me, okay? Please. And don't open the door for anyone but me."

  "Don't open the—Wait! What if you don't come back?"

  He hurried down the hallway. "I'm coming back."

  51

  MADDOX

  MADDOX WAS ALMOST an hour in, and still no sign. He had gone through every desolate room on three long floors, painstakingly clearing the crumbling mill, not wanting any surprises. Every single window had been smashed, stones lying where they landed on the floor after having been launched by kids on the other side of the river.

  He went back outside via the same kicked-in door. A few decaying bales of paper stock remained in the adjoining lot, and he stood among them looking up at the big former polluter, an ominous industrial carcass looming over the river's edge. He had forgotten how much he used to dread these secret meetings with Dill Sinclair. How, after all the schemers and psychos who had crossed his path over the years, he had to come home to meet the one guy he literally could not stand to be around.

  He remembered their last meeting, farther north along the bank of this same river. Sinclair emerging from the trees at dusk, the hood of his black shirt pulled over his balding head despite the heat, pocketed hands tugging it down. "Shall we do the secret handshake?"

  Maddox, despising his dripping familiarity, said nothing in response. Behind him the river rushed to the small island that divided the flow at the edge, the twin cascades plummeting to the natural rock basin seventy feet below.

  "Ever come here as a kid?" asked Sinclair, moving to the edge. The right cuff of his loose black jeans was still tucked into his sock above his black-and-white Chuck Taylor All-Stars high-top, to keep the fabric from tangling in his bicycle chain. He looked out over the drop into the lower valley, the water cutting a path through the trees as it wound south. "I did. I used to look down on the town and wish I could hop in this river and ride it right out of here." He glanced back at Maddox with a smile. "Do I make you nervous, standing out here? Some say people have a natural aversion to heights, but I don't think that's true. I think people are actually drawn to heights. They're drawn to the edge, and I think that is the scary part. People keep back for fear they might be tempted to take the leap." He looked way down to the churning pit below. "The ease of it. One step. What would it feel like, falling? You never wonder?"

  Maddox stood his ground some twenty feet back. He could have rebutted that people with nothing to lose tend to find precipices just about anywhere they looked.

  "The water, the way it crashes down there, forms a whirlpool." Sinclair scooped up some loose stones, dropping them one by one over the edge. "You wouldn't have a chance to drown. The force of the water would destroy you first. Tear off your clothes, your skin. Mash you up against the rocks. Obliterate you, leaving no trace."

  Maddox said, "If you're waiting for me to talk you down from there "

  Sinclair snickered, tossing the rest of the stones and brushing dirt off his hands. "Nobody would cry, right? Nobody would shed one tear. They'd be happy. They'd be thrilled. It's almost funny. If the people in this town only knew."

  "You don't do this for them."

  "No? That's true, I guess." He turned back to Maddox. "But then again, neither do you. I wonder sometimes, who hates this place more—you or me?" He rolled his head to one side, rubbing his neck. "Who would ever have guessed that the two of us together would join up to save these hicks from themselves?"

  He seemed to be smiling. Remarkable how much the absence of eyebrows cut down one's range of expression.

  Maddox said, "You brought me out here for nothing, didn't you."

  "I'm trying to be good," Sinclair said. "I am. But it's so fucking lonely when there's nothing to do." He chewed his nail. "Except go crazy. Okay, so nobody wants me to be happy, right? So, fine. I can't even find anybody to be miserable with. How do you get by? You met anyone here?"

  Maddox didn't like Sinclair's look—didn't like it because he couldn't fully read it. Did he know about Tracy? Had he been watching Maddox?

  "Okay," Maddox said, and started walking off.

  Sinclair's voice sounded bewildered behind him. "Where are you going?"

  "I can do this myself. You think you're playing games with me? You give me nothing."

  "It's my life on the line here," Sinclair said. "We can't just talk? Have a goddamn conversation like normal people?"

  "I'm not your friend. You find out something I can use, you page me. And next time don't show up here tweaked."

  That silenced him. Until Maddox was almost to the trees.

  "I will have something," Sinclair said. His voice wasn't cracking, but it was strained. He hadn't moved from the edge of the falls. "You'll see."

  "Right," Maddox said. "Promises."

  "It's big. More than you know."

  Maddox kept right on walking.

  That had been the relationship. A rat-and-mouse confederacy, like the strategic alliances that form within a dysfunctional family. You and me against the others. And Maddox exploited that.

  Which was why acting disa
ppointed was sometimes enough to motivate him into action. In that respect, Sinclair was like Maddox's damaged twin. He wanted his better half 's approval. Wanting to do well, to succeed, to shine in someone's eyes for once: that was Sinclair's greatest secret.

  His greatest failure was his inability ever to do so.

  More minutes passed. A car drove by, Maddox watching it from the dark corner of the lot, crossing the bridge and turning onto Main Street, pulling away. Now he was getting pissed.

  Maddox brought out his pager. Nothing further. He checked the original message again. It had been sent from Sinclair's pager, there was no doubt. But the text. He reviewed it now that he had more time.