Loot the Moon

by Mark Arsenault

  He tried the bathroom.

  What a tiny space! To the right, a cheap wood-grained vanity held a small oval sink. On the vanity, a toothbrush stood in a pint glass with crud in its bottom, next to a new cake of soap with the word Ivory still legible on it.

  There was no medicine cabinet, just a mirror on the wall, about two feet wide and three high, speckled with toothpaste spatter, and streaked from where a hand had once wiped it clean of fog.

  Opposite the mirror and sink, a night blue shower curtain decorated with twinkly gold stars stretched on a rod across a shower stall.

  The toilet was tucked in the corner next to the shower, a stack of ten wrinkled magazines piled on the tank. The top one was American Cycle. The ceiling was barely seven feet; his head felt heat from the bright halogen light fixture, which must have been left on for hours.

  He pushed past the shower curtain and stepped into the stall, letting the curtain close behind him. The bottom of the stall was wet. A clump of brown hair had settled with soap scum over the drain. Streaks from a drippy showerhead had stained the wall. The space was no bigger than a coffin. An uncomfortable pressure built inside his head, filling his sinuses with a sense of fear just short of tangible, like a heavy, odorless gas that was slowly suffocating him.

  The shower was the best place to hide. He wiped his nose on the back of his rubber glove.

  In an hour, he reminded himself, he would be done here.

  But first, practice. He took a dry run in slow motion. The right hand drew the pick from his belt, left hand reached across his body to sweep the curtain aside. His weight shifted nimbly from back foot to front.

  One quick upstroke …

  He burst from the stall, saw himself in the mirror, and froze.

  Such a familiar face, warped by tension that pulled his mouth into a grimace and bunched the flesh at the hinges of his jaw, as if he had the mumps. How odd to see that face, so ordinary to him, in this strange apartment. He felt like he was looking at something other than his own reflection. Like he was looking at a bad twin, an ugly copy of himself.

  Time seemed to stretch, until the reflection seemed more like a snapshot from long ago, on some forgotten night when his ugly twin had done something terrible. His eyes went to the ice pick in the mirror, and he gasped. The sight of the pick attached to his hand—the tool meant to puncture another man’s lung—knocked the breath from him. He stood there, as still as a picture, and watched shiny sweat gather on his forehead and the bumps of his cheekbones. Some odd compulsion drove him from the bathroom.

  There must be another place to hide.

  He leaned against the wall in the hall and pinched the bridge of his nose. With that goddamn mirror, he’d have to watch himself do it, like seeing real-time video of his darkest thoughts. He must not watch himself. Sticking a man between two ribs was something he would do, but it was not who he was.

  Seeing the act would make it too real.

  Of course he knew intellectually that the distinction was crazy—if murder you do, a murderer you are, and forever—but he had struck a mental barrier he could not cross.

  He fought an irrational fear that his reflection would be able to identify him as the killer.

  Or that he would identify it.

  He stalked the apartment, the gleaming steel pick in his hand. Behind the sofa? Inside a closet with no door? No, there was no place else to hide. No goddamn place. The clock had raced to 1:23. There was not much time.

  He ran to the kitchen, rummaged through the cabinets beneath the sink, and found a dark plastic grocery bag, the name of a supermarket on the side. In a nearby drawer, he found scissors and clear plastic tape.

  He cut one thin, horizontal rectangle from the bag for his eyes, then a single vertical slit for air. He pulled the bag over his head, wound the tape three times around his neck to secure the hood, and then left the kitchen as he had found it.

  Back in the shower, he peeked from behind the curtain, saw some unknown killer in a mask, and was calm.

  The fleet feet of the bartender everybody called Scratch had extra bounce that night. He felt like dancing down the streetscape like Gene Kelly in Adidas racing flats. He hummed “Singin’ in the Rain.” With seventy-two dollars of tax-free tips in his pocket, and carrying two bags of stolen treasure from the mall, the part-time bartender/part-time crook had enjoyed a profitable day. He felt like a superhero, except in reverse. Scratch’s secret identity was his night job, as the mild-mannered mixer of watered-down highballs in a dive bar in the Jewelry District. During the day, he was Shoplifter Man, faster than a speeding mall cop, who could boost a seersucker suit right off your back and leave you nothing but the wrinkles. He tapped a few happy dance steps on the concrete, hummed louder, and added silent lyrics in his thoughts.

  I’m singing in my brain

  Just singin’ in my brain

  Da’doo da’doo da’doo-do

  Gonna buy me some champagne

  Scratch’s apartment building was a wooden triple-decker in a renters’ neighborhood that was noisy 24/7 with car alarms and police sirens, fireworks and occasional gunshots, roaring engines from unsanctioned drag races, and heavy metal and rap music pounding from car stereos worth more than the cars.

  The buildings were similar old Victorians, packed as tight as teeth. On either side of Scratch’s place, vacant lots of knee-high weeds cut two gaps in the smile. For a hundred years, a twelve-room Victorian had occupied the space on the left, and it took twenty years of neglect from absentee landlords, and two weeks of attention from a grumbling bulldozer, to clear the lot.

  A budding arsonist had flattened the house on the other side in barely half an hour. Beginner’s luck, the insurance guy had said.

  What you saw when you walked or drove the neighborhood depended on your perspective. If you were financially comfortable and just selfish enough to feel guilty around poverty, well, you’d see the gang graffiti and the broken windows and the greasy stray dogs trotting in packs and leaving shits on the sidewalks that would stay there until the next thunderstorm. Someone more like Scratch, a lover of cheap rent and anonymity who chose to live here, saw different touchstones around the neighborhood. He noticed the hopscotch boxes drawn in chalk. He saw the six-year-olds fluent in two languages, who translated effortlessly for parents who didn’t know ten words of English. And he noticed the circular economy of immigrant markets selling food from the old country to homesick adventurers experimenting with the American dream. He would not steal from those kind of people … well, unless they were dumb enough to leave their doors unlocked. He was as sentimental as anybody, but a man’s gotta eat, and if you left your cash drawer open or your payroll lying around willy-nilly, you got what you deserved.

  The neighborhood ruthlessly punished fools.

  He bounced up four concrete steps with tiny seashells embedded in them, and let himself into his building. The vestibule had four mail slots, though two of the building’s apartments were empty. One of those empty places held several grand worth of Scratch’s boosted loot.

  With a small key, he opened the mailbox labeled Gary Gleason.

  God, how he hated seeing his real name on so many credit card and utility bills. The building superintendent kept a small ash can in the vestibule for junk mail. Any envelope with the words “Open immediately” or “Do not discard” or “Check enclosed,” or any other hoax the junk mailers had invented to get people to open their spam, went right in the can. One letter said, “Do not fold or mishandle.” Scratch creased it down the middle before he slam-dunked it.

  There were two credit card offers addressed to his former roommate in the mailbox. If only these card companies had known how crazy his roommate had been—crazier than Scratch had ever imagined.

  Crazy, and now dead.

  With a shudder, he pushed the letters back in the box, slammed and locked the door. Putting his old roommate out of his mind, he hummed some more on his way up two flights of stairs.

  I’m singin
g in my brain …

  Inside his apartment, Scratch flicked on the light, slapped his baseball cap over the head of his pet mannequin, then dumped the shopping bags on the table. He had scored six women’s business suits, jackets and slacks. Each was navy blue, made from fine summer-weight wool. He had four suits of size 6 and two of size 4. Each had a security tag on it, of course. The tags were never much of a problem. He held a pair of slacks to the light and examined the device—a simple dye bomb, essentially a thin glass tube of permanent red dye, partially encased in plastic. The fragile glass was designed to break and ruin the garment with ink if anybody tried to remove it without a special machine. The dye bomb was pinned to the pant leg with a heavy needle embedded in a hard plastic disc. Scratch had defeated plenty of similar security devices, but none of this specific brand.

  Let’s try one.

  He carried a pair of slacks down the hall, past the bathroom and the battered plaid sofa that had been his roommate’s bed, which Scratch had unofficially inherited. The dresser clock in the bedroom said 1:37 a.m. He walked across his squishy bed to the window, eased it up, and climbed gracefully onto his balcony herb garden.

  The match method of removing a dye bomb, his favorite tactic for this type of device, required lots of ventilation. He lit his cigarette lighter and held the bulbous side of the dye bomb in the heat. The plastic caught fire in a few seconds, and then burned with a low smear of flame that sent up a thread of deep black smoke, which gently waved in the still night air like the world’s skinniest charmed snake. The gases were loaded with cancer-causing dioxins, and Scratch turned his head from the fire. He let it burn for thirty seconds or so. Then he blew out the flame and used a pottery shard to scrape away the softened plastic. That exposed the interior locking ring. A few jabs with a ballpoint pen dislodged a tiny BB under the ring, and the device fell apart, dye tube intact.

  He laughed and tapped a few more dance steps, which sent happy vibrations down the fire escape. Freeing these garments from retail bondage would be easy.

  Back in the kitchen, he made sure the slacks were undamaged, then left them on the table and went to the bathroom to scrub the soot from his hands.

  He lost himself in the washing, thinking of profit. The retail tags on the suits said $575. Nobody ever paid retail; this kind of high-end garment was generally on sale for $499. He could unload them to a fence he knew, probably for no more than fifty bucks each. Or he could sell them himself, anonymously, over the Internet. Say he could get $250 each, plus shipping … Shit, I can’t do math. No matter. He said aloud to the mirror, “Whatever price I get will be the square root of a great score—squared.” He blasted his own smile in the mirror with double-barreled finger guns, then cranked the water shut and half listened for the echo drip from the shower stall, a quirk of his inferior plumbing.

  What’s that?

  Huh.

  He turned the water back on, then off, and heard an odd crackling again, an unnatural noise in an apartment he would know in the dark.

  Scratch turned toward the shower as the curtain scraped open, gloved fingers sweeping it away.

  Impossible.

  Imfucking possible.

  A chill paralysis spread through him like a voodoo drug.

  I’m not seeing this. This is a movie I saw. I’m remembering this.

  Then he saw a head encased in a plastic bag with just a slit for the eyes and a wrinkle of brow pressing heavily. The black pupils were swollen huge, encircled by a delicate gray ring of iris no thicker than a wedding band. A man’s eyes, Scratch thought.

  A water droplet raced down the plastic face, recoiled ever slightly at the chin, as if gathering itself for a leap, and then cast off.

  The figure’s right hand had been moving at him all this time, Scratch finally realized.

  By instinct, Scratch’s hips jerked to the side, to matador away from the clumsy thrust.

  He would pretend the man was real, just until he figured out why he was seeing this.

  As if in slow motion, he watched the stranger push a thin shank—Holy Christ, an ice pick—through the empty space Scratch had just abandoned. The man was out of the shower stall. He wore a black sweater, tight black pants. Momentum carried him across the tiny bathroom. He was growling.

  This cannot be happening.

  At the violent stab of the ice pick, the bottom half of the mirror shattered. For an instant as they dropped, each shard reflected a chaotic fragment of the scene in a tiny moving picture.

  The crash of glass obliterated the hope this might be imagination. Scratch set his feet and drove his palm at the man’s shoulder. A glancing blow.

  He’s real, all right. But why?

  The attacker regrouped. Scratch turned his right side to him, to keep his heart as far from the shank as possible, as he had learned during a four-month bid in state prison. He had never been stabbed, but had once seen an inmate take a shank to the shoulder, wrestle it away, and jam it back from where it had come. His eyes locked on the pick, on the bright white point at the end of it, on which his twenty-six years of life, plus nine months in the womb, delicately balanced. His brain flooded his body with fight-or-flight chemicals, racing his heart, tightening his testicles, rerouting blood to the big muscles that could save him.

  The figure swung the weapon in a wide arc. Scratch ducked, felt the drag of a forearm across his hair, and shot a frantic uppercut to the man’s rib cage. Bang. Fist on ribs, but without much leverage. A grunt, nothing more. Scratch threw an off-balanced hand toward the bagged head, and missed.

  The pick flashed up. Scratch shrank from it.

  Suddenly from the left a fist crashed into Scratch’s cheekbone. He knew instantly he was hurt, though he felt no pain, not yet. Just a high ringing in his ear.

  With a guttural growl, like from a beast, the man lunged. Scratch leapt blindly aside. He had a vision of his body spiked on the metal and abandoned in the bathroom, undiscovered, until the super came to collect the rent.

  The pick pierced the pale inside of Scratch’s left forearm, driving effortlessly through skin and fat cells and capillaries and muscle meat, sliding between the radius and the ulna, pushing a channel through flesh and fat on the other side, exiting the skin on the backside of his arm between little brown hairs standing on end, before stabbing the wall and burying into the wood.

  There was no pain, just a shocking sense of invasion; a rape. He gasped. The attacker’s body carried into him and knocked his head against the wall.

  Scratch smelled the man’s salty sweat.

  The scene seemed to slow down again, as the man in the plastic hood pulled at the pick, growling in frustration.

  The shank had stuck fast in the wall, pinning Scratch’s outstretched arm through a tiny bull’s eye of blood. Scratch shrieked at the sight, high and shrill, like a child surprised by a spider.

  I’m crucified.

  For a second, the man seemed to transfer his wrath to the ice pick that refused to budge. He fought it with a staccato roar, like a growl and a sob together.

  Scratch drove his right forearm up, catching the man just under the chin. His head snapped back, though he kept his grip on the pick, and gave the weapon a fierce yank.

  The tool’s old wooden handle splintered and came off in his hand; he tumbled backward against the vanity. His shoes skidded on chips of broken mirror and he went down.

  With no handle, the tool was just a spike, a long nail with no head. Scratch tore his arm from it, felt a hollow whoosh in his gut, and warm blood racing free. He tried to stomp the man’s leg as he thundered over him, out of the room. A hand slapped his shoe and Scratch staggered into the hall. He stumbled into the sofa, caught himself. The man was up, coming at him. Scratch lurched off toward the kitchen.

  The door, the goddamn blessed door, so close.

  A fist clubbed his shoulder. He crashed into the refrigerator, heard bottles of Bass ale tumbling inside. His wound spattered red on the door. An arm wrapped around his neck from behi
nd, catching him under the Adam’s apple. The attacker’s body pressed tight against him. Scratch leaned forward and lifted the man’s feet from the floor. The attacker rode his back as they slowly spun in the center of the room. The bagged head pushed on Scratch’s right shoulder. Swampy panting breath pulsed against the plastic. Scratch’s mannequin stood frozen, a witness to nothing, its eyes just shallow indentations.

  Was this bagged assassin really trying to suffocate a man of equal size and strength? With just his arm? Where’d this guy learn to fight? The movies? The attacker had surrendered leverage, the most valuable advantage in unarmed fighting. Scratch bent at the knees, tightened his midsection, reached back to grab two handfuls of sweater, and violently yanked the man over his head like he was whipping off a shirt. Now it was this clown’s turn to smash into the fridge. He slammed into it with a moan and rolled.

  From his ankle-high boot, the man drew a steak knife serrated like piranha teeth.

  Holy Jesus, gotta have a weapon. Anything!

  Scratch yanked the loose arm off the mannequin. The crude club was surprisingly well balanced, like a fairway driver with a slight kink in the shaft at the elbow. He swung a mighty uppercut as the man tried to rise.

  Fore!

  The plastic arm whacked above the man’s temple; he dropped like he had been shot. On the floor, he clutched his head and squirmed, still holding the knife.