The Killing Moon: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  Donny blinked, getting quiet, looking at his hands on the blue armrests.

  Form. Function. Simplicity. A chair, a bed, a window. Old man, younger man. Weak and strong.

  Pinty went on. "I never begrudged you that, by the way. I always held out the hope, maybe even the knowledge, that you'd find a way to make good on your pledge. And now look. Years overdue, but you've given Black Falls a new start. Given it a fighting chance. That scholarship turned out to be worth every penny we raised."

  Donny was squinting into his lap now, like he was working over some puzzle Pinty could not see. "Righting a wrong is the closest thing we have to going back in time."

  Pinty agreed. "That's as good a way to put it as any."

  Donny looked up as though he'd been poked. He shifted in the big chair and slipped a device out of his back pocket, that pager he carried around with him everywhere. Pinty heard it buzzing.

  Donny read the display and looked charged. He got to his feet.

  "What?" said Pinty.

  "Sinclair," Donny said, reaching for the telephone on the bedside tray. "Wants me to meet him on Hell Road."

  59

  HESS

  THE RAIN CONTINUED in earnest after the thunder and lightning had moved off, drumming on the roof of the Hummer. The windows stayed cracked because they couldn't run the defrost, because they couldn't run the engine, because they were hiding in a turnout a thousand yards from the Borderlands trailhead. The Special Tactics and Operations team leader sat beside Hess in the wide backseat, his head tipped back, eyes closed but nowhere near sleep. Hess kept swiping water off his own face from the drops smacking the top edge of his window and spitting into his eyes.

  The wire in Hess's ear sizzled. "He's walking out."

  The STOP team leader lowered his chin and opened his eyes. "What do you mean? Just walking out? Alone?"

  "That's a roger. What do we do, advise?"

  The leader looked at Hess. Hess frowned, shook his head.

  "Bring it in," said the STOP leader. He reached forward and patted his driver's shoulder, the Hummer's engine roaring to life.

  They were the first ones back to the trailhead, pulling in next to Maddox's parked patrol car. Hess got out in the rain, watching a man in a poncho exit the fire road entrance, walking determinedly toward him through the puddles. Maddox stopped in front of Hess, shrugging back his glistening hood.

  Hess said, "What gives you the authority to pull the plug on this thing yourself?"

  "I stood in there for an hour and a half," said Maddox. "He's not coming. Not going to let himself be trapped like that."

  Light beams came bobbing out of the trees as the mud-soaked STOP team emerged from the fire road behind Maddox, faces camo-painted, assault rifles outlined beneath their vented ponchos.

  "He's playing with us," said Hess. "Seeing how high we'll jump."

  The STOP leader came over, his driver holding a black umbrella. "Air Wing's still on standby, on the ground," he reported. "Rainfall messes with heat imaging anyway."

  "He was never here," declared Maddox, stripping off the assault vest beneath his poncho.

  Hess said, "It's time we sent him a return message. Give me an hour to huddle, think about what to say."

  "Here," Maddox said, handing over the pager. "I'm done. Knock yourself out."

  Hess watched Maddox climb into his car and pull out. Maddox's headlights briefly illuminated Bryson crossing the lot, looking ridiculous in galoshes and a rain hat knotted under his chin, as though his mother had dressed him.

  "Another missing-person report," Bryson said. "A young woman this time."

  The sixth such alert of the day. The first five had each ended happily, products of miscommunication and town hysteria. But the MSP would respond as they always did, quickly and conscientiously.

  Hess started toward Bryson's car through the thumping rain. "Who made the call?"

  "No call," said Bryson. "Woman came straight to the station." He tapped his ear. "She's deaf."

  60

  MADDOX

  MADDOX PULLED INTO his driveway, hitting the button on the visor-clipped remote control and watching the door go up on Tracy's Ford truck parked inside.

  He had completely forgotten about inviting her over. He tipped his head back against the headrest, cursing himself, then jumped out and ran through the rain into the garage. His peace offering had turned into an insult. Now he had to salvage this somehow. He shook out his soaked legs but didn't even take time to remove his wet boots, walking through the door into the first-floor hallway.

  "Tracy?"

  The house was dark. He hit a light switch and continued down the hall toward the closet.

  "Tracy?" he called out, louder. "Trace?"

  Must be upstairs. He slid his holster off his belt and was reaching to store it up on the top shelf when something made him stop. The silence in the house, certainly. Also, a smell now, one he had been in too much of a rush to notice before. An odor deeper than the coppery smell of the rain. Earthy, like that of the llama farm, but less pleasant, more stinging.

  Maddox stopped calling her name. He went quiet, sliding his revolver out of the holster and moving to the intersecting end of the hallway. He looked to the locked front door, rain spilling off the gutter outside.

  He went to the bottom of the stairs and stood there looking up.

  He did not turn on the light.

  He started up. At the top landing, he just listened and let his eyes adjust.

  He heard breathing.

  Someone was standing at the far end of the hallway. Not hiding there. Just standing. Waiting.

  It wasn't Tracy. Maddox held his gun ahead of him, trying to see.

  The figure moved, shifted its weight. Maddox made out long hair. The wig.

  "Dill?" Maddox said.

  He lowered his gun and took an angry step forward.

  Dill started toward him. With the darkness throwing off Maddox's depth perception, he did not until too late see how fast Dill was coming. He was further distracted by the shovel that Dill held in his hands.

  As Dill closed the distance between them, Maddox got his gun up and fired two quick shots. Both rounds rang off the back of the shovel, ricocheting into the ceiling and the wall.

  Dill's body crashed into him, the shovel headfirst batting back the revolver, then swinging up to crack him near the temple.

  Maddox fell hard. A warm feeling spread inside him from his head and neck through his back, relaxing him against his will. The house tipped as Dill stood over him, wild hair swaying. Then everything closed up and went dark.

  * * *

  IN THE DREAM THAT wasn't a dream, Maddox stood in the trees beyond his backyard, the spot from where Sinclair had snapped the photograph. He saw his house exactly as in the picture, except for the presence of his mother, sitting alone on the back deck in her housecoat. Maddox yelled to her but she could not hear him. Then Tracy appeared in a second-floor window, banging on the glass with both arms, screaming, but Maddox heard nothing. A twig cracked and he turned and saw Sinclair next to him, drawn and dopesick, wearing his wig and a Black Falls patrolman's outfit, the camera glowing around his neck like an amulet.

  * * *

  MADDOX AWOKE MOANING. He could not hold his throbbing head straight, a pulsing pressure on his skull. He was dizzy and on the edge of nausea.

  He could not move. He thought he was still in the dream.

  His mother's kitchen was set before him like a still life, a picture in a frame he could step into. He expected her to walk in, smile, say hello.

  He was shivering. Wet clothes.

  Someone moved in the room behind him. Someone not his mother.

  He was tied to one of the kitchen chairs with blue nylon line from the garage. His hands were numb behind him, his ankles knotted tight to each front leg of the chair. He could turn his head, but not enough to see behind him.

  "Dill!" he yelled, the word accompanied by a bloom of pain.

  On the c
ounter he saw his keys and coins and beeper. His pockets had been turned out. There was his holster also, but empty.

  In the near corner stood a spade with a long wooden handle.

  Maddox picked up movement reflected in the sink window. He saw him. The black wig. His face blurred, standing back, watching Maddox from behind.

  A hand gripped his right shoulder. Not a normal hand, as his eyes strained to see it. The fingers and palm were glazed over somehow, inhumanly smooth. Not gloved, but coated. Mannequin-like.

  The hand left his shoulder and Dill came around to stand before him. He wore the rumpled black sweat suit that had shed fibers at Frond's and at Pail's.

  But Maddox realized that his build was all wrong. The sweatshirt was stretched tight across his shoulders and chest. He saw the black Chuck Taylor All-Stars, but the sneakers had been sliced up the top, the canvas stitched back together again underneath the laces in order to fit larger feet.

  Then the face below the wig. Just like the hands, it bore the smoothed-out finish of a man of pure wax.

  But with eyebrows. Or something like eyebrows, taped down underneath the mask, or whatever it was he had over him.

  This was not Sinclair at all. The blurred face.

  Maddox got the smell now. All at once, the clinging sewer odor. He was still trying to make out what was over the face—skintight but with holes for his eyes, nostrils, and mouth—not masking its appearance as much as as

  Kane Ripsbaugh said, "You figured it out pretty good."

  Heart pounding, brain screaming, Maddox focused on Ripsbaugh's coated face beneath the black wig.

  Ripsbaugh examined his hands as though they were someone else's, not his own. "Liquid latex. Dries fast and solid, like a thin rubber. Seals me in. So I don't leave any of me behind. Only him."

  The Scarecrow. Ripsbaugh's costume looked like clothes overstuffed with a man instead of straw. "Where is he? Where's Sinclair?"

  "He's right here."

  Either the latex deadened Ripsbaugh's already flat expression, or it was some kind of calm insanity. All of Maddox's breath caught in his throat.

  With two bald fingers, Ripsbaugh extracted a pager from his pocket, laying it on the counter next to Maddox's. "Identical to yours. I noticed that. But I had to call you to the old pulp mill to be sure." He swept some hair off his shoulder, a horridly casual gesture that only showed how much time he had spent wearing the wig. "Frond told me the state police had promised to send someone. Sinclair was your informant, wasn't he?"

  Maddox did not answer, seeing, in the center of the sweatshirt stretched out over Ripsbaugh's chest, a small tear about the size of a bullet hole. "You shot him."

  Ripsbaugh looked down at the hole. "A clean kill."

  "In the Borderlands that night. You needed his clothes."

  "I needed him. A bogeyman. When I drove out of Hell Road, coming up on you standing over that deer, I knew right away something was up. Your shooting stance. You were no amateur. But it was too late. I had already taken that first step."

  Maddox thought back to Ripsbaugh's headlights coming up bright in his eyes. "You had him in the back of your truck?"

  "We've both been working undercover here, Don."

  Maddox shook his pounding head. "You pulled blood from him. You bled his corpse?"

  "It wasn't difficult."

  "Your wife's brother?" Maddox tried to think it through. "You knew how CSS worked. You knew they'd pull the sink traps. So you directed them there—wiping out the sink, making it look like someone had cleaned up. You gave them everything. Sneaker prints, wig hairs, fiber transfers from his clothes. Skin cells?"

  "Scraped his arms. Collected them in a paper bindle, just like they do."

  "You planted them in Bucky's fingernails. As though he got them from fighting with Sinclair."

  "Like laying out crumbs." The latex glaze over Ripsbaugh's face could not mask his triumph.

  "You sealed yourself away in this this "

  "The adult video store in Rainfield sells it by the quart. Clear or colored." He flexed his hands, the latex giving like a second skin. "No latents. No oils, no hairs. No transfers except from Sinclair's clothes, his wig, his sneakers."

  "And the talcum powder?"

  He touched his fingers together. "So the latex won't adhere to itself. A rip or a breach just wouldn't do."

  "That cut on your arm?"

  "Self-inflicted. Good insurance, as Walt Heavey would say. In case anything showed up linking Val to Frond. If not for those letters, they never would have suspected me."

  "So you cut yourself, just in case." Maddox saw it now. "If they did suspect you, you wanted to force their hand. Make them commit."

  "Make them eliminate me early. They got greedy with the DNA, like I knew they would. Because we're all just hicks out here, right? Too dumb to live anywhere else. Too stupid to cover our own asses."

  His latex fingers wiggled at his sides. Maddox tried flexing his leg and arm muscles against the rope, the nylon tied tight. Where was his gun?

  Don't ask him what he's going to do to you. Don't give him a reason.

  Keep talking.

  "Val was with Bucky too?"

  That soured Ripsbaugh. "Sometimes she gets stuck. She gets in a rut, because she's so smart and the rest of the world is not."

  "But Bucky Pail?"

  "She's vulnerable, and people take advantage of that. But you don't trade in your wife when she gives you trouble."

  Maddox said, "You fix it with murder instead?"

  "Killing is easy when someone hurts the one you love. The one person in the world you pledged to protect. Frond and Pail, they aren't where they are now because they wronged me. They're there because they wronged her. They took advantage. Using her. Like her father all over again. Taking whatever they could get, thinking there would be no consequences." His hands squeezed into smooth, seamless fists. "I am their consequences. I am a reckoning."

  Maddox strained against the ropes, trying to get loose without Ripsbaugh seeing him trying. "That include the pinecone?"

  Ripsbaugh straightened, looking freakishly proud in his long wig. "Sex offenders commit sex crimes."

  Humiliating the corpse, Hess had called it. Ripsbaugh was over the edge. "This is like trying to cure Val by going around killing off her symptoms. You can't kill away her depression."

  "She doesn't want to do these things with other men." He spoke with the conviction of the quietly unhinged. "She hates herself for it. So I do what I have to in order to make her clean. With these."

  His hands again.

  "She's sick, Kane. Toxic. And being around her, it's made you sick too."

  "What about you?" Ripsbaugh said. "You've been meeting her."

  "Meeting?" said Maddox, at first confused. "No. No, it was—"

  "She came to me. Told me everything. How you talked about going away together."

  Maddox's shivering stopped. For the moment, he gave up testing the rope. "Now hold on."

  Ripsbaugh's eyes were tight, knowing and bright. "Your high school sweetheart."

  "Kane. You've got it all wrong."

  "Together again after all these years."

  "Kane."

  He was a different man now, the wig and the latex coating giving outer expression to his psychosis. "I always liked you, Don. I did. But you should have left her alone. She can't help herself. Why she needs me. To help her. To make things right."

  Ripsbaugh considered his palms again. He was working himself up into a killing.

  "You don't know what it means," he went on, "to make someone a part of you—and then feel them suffer. Feel them trapped inside a hell they did not create, and do not deserve. And all you can do is watch." His voice became disturbingly calm. "You can't know what that's like, Don. Can you?"

  Something in his stare hooked Maddox. Something behind his smoothed face.

  Something indicating that this was not merely a rhetorical question.

  Maddox tuned into the emptiness of the
house. He remembered arriving home. Seeing the pickup in his garage. Walking down this very hallway, calling out to her.