Loot the Moon

by Mark Arsenault

  “Your note said you wanted to talk outdoors, so I bought this coat at the mall today.”

  “My note?” Martin said, alarmed. “I thought this was your meeting. You sent a note by courier, to my office.”

  They both realized at the same moment they had been set up. Martin bolted up and scanned the crowd.

  A deep voice commanded, “Oh, sit down, Mr. Smothers! You’re going to pull a muscle.”

  Martin whirled.

  Lincoln Harmony walked gingerly from the restaurant with two martinis and a tumbler of whiskey on a tray. He closed the door with his foot and lamented, “Too cold for the waitstaff, apparently. Oh well. My physician says I could use the exercise.”

  He set one drink in front of Nelida, explaining, “It’s gin, vermouth, and blackberry brandy. It’s called a Desperate Martini. Fitting for you, wouldn’t you say? Hee-hah!”

  To Martin, he said: “Another whiskey for you, Mr. Smothers. And since this round is on my tab, I thank you for drinking the cheap stuff.” He set the glass in front of Martin with a heavy clink, and a tooth-filled sneer.

  “And for me, ah, something called a Fine and Dandy—the bartender recommended it,” Linc Harmony cooed. “Don’cha love places like this?” He put down his drink and cast the tray on an empty table. Then he dragged over another chair, sat clumsily, and waved Martin into his seat. He sipped his drink. “Mmmmm! Triple sec. Orange bitters.” He made the sign of the cross in the air over the drink, like a priest at the altar, and pronounced it “Lovely.”

  Nelida gaped at him.

  “We haven’t been introduced,” Harmony said to her, with a frown and a roll of his eyes toward Martin, “and Mr. Smothers is completely without manners. I’m Gil’s brother.”

  “Lincoln,” she said. She held out her hand to shake, though she kept it closer to her body than to his.

  Harmony pinched her fingers for a moment, and then mocked her with an exaggerated grin that involved his whole face. “Gil must have told you all about me,” he said. “Pillow talk can be endlessly enlightening. Hm?”

  Nelida looked at Martin. He reassured her with a little nod. This guy’s hosed but he ain’t dangerous. She turned discreetly to the crowd, lifted her chin, and subtly feathered her fingers in a tiny wave.

  Martin followed her eyes.

  Nelida’s son, Jerod, stood like a sentry on the riverwalk, hands on his hips, staring up at them. Either Nelida was afraid to walk the streets alone, or her son had an overprotective streak. Or, Martin conceded, maybe Jerod was right to be paranoid for his mother, considering that her lover had been shot through the eye.

  Martin grabbed the initiative. “So, Lincoln—your honor, I mean—to what do Nelida and I owe the pleasure of these invitations?”

  “Oh, just can the phony politeness, Marty,” he said, and then slurped his drink.

  “What the fuck do you want?” Martin asked.

  Harmony laughed out loud. It seemed Martin had sincerely delighted him. “That’s the way, my boy! We don’t all have to speak as my brother did—all stuffy and Elizabethan, like he had a hardened titanium rod pounded up his arse.”

  To Nelida, Harmony encouraged, “Drink up! Blackberry brandy is good for you. The inventors of that goddamn food pyramid recommend five servings of fruit a day.” He roared at his own wittiness.

  Martin’s brain wobbled inside his skull on a cushion of whiskey. He pushed his empty glass away, eyed the full one, and thought: What the hell? He sipped the booze Linc Harmony had bought for him. Nelida did not touch her drink. The way she frowned at it, it could have been chilled Drano with a splash of iodine.

  Linc Harmony downed the rest of his drink like a frat boy doing a liquor shot. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Then he leaned over the table and said, “I called you two lovebirds together—”

  “We’re not lovebirds,” Martin interrupted sharply.

  “You both loved my brother in your own ways, so don’t get all literalistic on me. This ain’t about you! This ain’t your party, Marty.” He snorted and laughed. “Marty party!”

  He gassed Martin with his breath. Martin thought for a moment of lifting the oil lamp, to ignite Linc Harmony’s fumes right in his goddamn face. Boom!

  “You’re June’s lawyer, so you probably already know that I’m challenging my brother’s will in probate court,” Harmony said. “That video Gil made was an embarrassment. I get his law books? Who gives a shit?” He jammed a meaty finger on the table. “I sacrificed growing up with that guy, and he owes me.”

  They should not be having this conversation outside of a courtroom, Martin thought. I should grab Nelida and walk away. But instead, he taunted Harmony: “Were you not loved enough as a boy? Did your brother get all the hugs from your daddy?”

  Harmony aimed his finger at Martin. The nail was healthy pink and buffed into a perfect arc. “You have no right, and no idea what it’s like to see your father’s love, which you have earned, go to somebody else!” He rose a few inches out of his chair, and for a moment seemed that he would challenge Martin to a fistfight, but instead he overtly picked a wedgie out of his ass and then dropped back to the seat. “All I want is what I deserve rightly, by blood!”

  Spit spray landed on Martin’s face. He closed his eyes until the desire to throttle Linc Harmony faded away.

  “Why bother Nelida with this?” Martin asked.

  Harmony turned to her. His eyes widened with surprise, as if he had forgotten that she sat with them at the table. He grinned at her untouched martini, whisked the glass away by the stem, and sampled the mix. “Oooo, you don’t know what you missed.” He took a long pull of the drink. “You see, Nelida, you’re going to be my star witness in court. My lawyer will question you at length, and in meticulous detail, about what you did with my brother. All the particulars. Where? How? And how often? See? I want to know if he preferred satin sheets to cotton. Strawberry body lotion or coconut? The little white woody pill, or the little purple one?”

  “What good would all that do?” Martin said. “You’re contesting your brother’s will, not divorcing him on grounds of adultery.”

  “Well, we have to ask these questions,” Harmony said in a breezy voice. “How else will we discern my brother’s state of mind and competence? Hmm?” His left eyebrow rose in an upside-down V. “Of course, if June would rather avoid all that nastiness under oath, much of which no doubt will be splashed in the press, then maybe we can reach a mutually agreeable arrangement, eh? I’m not looking for much, just the one-third share of Gil’s estate that I had expected.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Martin said.

  “You’re nothing like your brother,” said Nelida. She stared at him in wonder.

  “Oh, I beg to differ,” Harmony said to her. “Gil and I are exactly the same.” He leered, inspecting her body from the ankles to the chin. “When we see something we want—we take it, and to hell with the consequences on anyone else. Doesn’t that smell familiar?”

  “You’re still an asshole,” Martin reminded him.

  “One-third of the estate, and June can have his damned law books back.” Harmony downed the rest of the martini. “The postmortem revelations of Gil’s affair must have been terribly hard on June. Why not suggest to her a way to end the pain? Look at the cost-benefit, man! This deal is a bargain.”

  “She already knew about the affair,” Nelida blurted.

  Both men stared at her. She looked away and cupped a hand over her mouth. Too late. The words were in the atmosphere.

  She sighed and then helped herself to a sip of Martin’s whiskey. “June figured it out,” she said. “She’s not a foolish woman. She confronted Gil about a month before he was killed. He told her he loved me and Jerod, and that he would be leaving her. June’s as tough as rocks. She handled it. The hard part was Brock. Gil wanted to stay in the house until he and Brock could work things out. The weekend Gil died, he had planned a father-son getaway at the beach house in Charlestown, so that Brock and he could fish togeth
er like they used to, and talk like men.”

  She stared into the glass. Silence fell over the table.

  Lincoln Harmony broke the quiet with a soft belch. He tapped a fist on his chest. “Well, a fascinating story I cannot wait to record under oath.” He stood. To Martin he said, “You take my offer back to your client.”

  Martin watched Harmony ramble unsteadily away.

  “That bastard … ,” Martin began, but Nelida was not listening.

  She dabbed a tear with the tip of her finger and met eyes with Jerod, who stood unmovable and stone-faced on the riverwalk. People strolling the cobblestone path parted around him, the way a river yields to a boulder.

  twenty-three

  The battered Ford Contour sedan that Scratch bought off the back lot of an auto-body shop in Cranston had cost four hundred in cash, twenty for a half tank of gas, a hundred for a fudged inspection sticker, and one boosted Nintendo Game Boy for the borrowed license plates. A man on the lam inside his own state cannot be registering cars: the DMV would want proof of address, and Scratch intended to remain a moving target until he discovered who had tried to kill him. That was Plan A. He would switch motels every few weeks, so he would establish no utility accounts and no permanent phone number. His mail would be forwarded among shifting addresses, so unless his attacker worked for the U.S. Postal Service, Scratch should be untraceable through government records.

  The car was Plan B.

  The Ford was such a shitbox: no radio, dinged all over, and the engine coughed like a chain smoker. The front passenger’s window had fallen inside the door, and had been replaced by a transparent plastic sheet and some silver duct tape, which had proven, sadly, more waterproof than the actual window on the driver’s side. The plastic flapped in the wind and reminded Scratch of the bag the attacker had worn on his head.

  But at least the car ran.

  Damn thing was reliable; started every time. If Scratch needed to put miles between him and a bag-headed man with an ice pick, he was confident the car would get him at least to New Jersey, despite the expired tags.

  The gas mileage on his four-door sled was passable, but trips were expensive because Scratch took crazy circuitous routes everywhere he went. He was terrified of being followed.

  Already today he had logged fourteen miles on a six-mile trip to the post office, to ship some boosted loot to his satisfied Internet customers.

  He idled at a red light on a four-lane suburban highway near the airport. A lumbering 737 rolled away from him. The jet got smaller and smaller, then suddenly pulled a wheelie and lifted off. Going to someplace safer than here.

  The streetlight turned green but Scratch did not move. The car behind him beeped after about two seconds. What took him so long to honk? This being Rhode Island.

  Still, Scratch stayed put. More honking. Cars streamed by him in the right-hand lane. Drivers trapped behind Scratch jerked their cars around him and roared their engines to punish him for costing them precious seconds on their way to Hooters.

  His light went yellow, then red.

  Scratch pounded the gas, spun the wheel, and made a squealing U-turn in the intersection. He floored the pedal and screamed down the street, watching his mirrors for a tail.

  Nope. Nobody back there.

  He meandered down back roads along Narragansett Bay, generally heading south, enjoying brief vistas of the bay between waterfront homes and stands of shedding hardwoods. He turned north onto a commercial strip, tucked his car behind an appliance shop, got out, and raced around the building on foot.

  Nothing unusual. Nobody seemed in a hurry to get him, or to get away from him.

  Back on the road, he pulled his red-light U-turn again before zigzagging back to his motel near the airport, confident that no attacker could have followed him in a fricking helicopter.

  He parked in front of his unit—why not? Nobody knew he had bought a car.

  The late-afternoon sun melted into the roof of an apartment house across the street. Another jet banked overhead, turning a graceful circle. For reasons Scratch had long forgotten, jets in the air reminded him of Benjamin Franklin.

  Franklin was perhaps the smartest Founding Father. What if Ben Franklin were suddenly transported in time to the present? How would Scratch explain thirty tons of flying metal with no apparent moving parts?

  Well, Ben, it has to do with the shape of the wing, and the way the air molecules move around it.

  By george, Master Scratch ! What in heaven’s name is a molecule?

  All those years watching jets and Scratch still wasn’t prepared to meet Ben Franklin.

  He scooped up his mail inside the storm door and let himself into his dreary brown flat. The one-room apartment smelled oppressively like cigarettes. Scratch had even tried burning Adam’s pine-scented candle, which had done nothing to clear the air.

  He could have scraped nicotine off the walls with a spatula, pressed the brown goo into squares, and sold it as smoker’s gum.

  He tossed the keys on the dresser and sorted his mail. Grocery store flyers and solicitations addressed to “Resident” went to the trash.

  Hmm, somebody had used the post office’s overnight service to send Scratch a thick five-by-seven-inch envelope with some bulky object inside.

  The envelope had originally been addressed to his former apartment, to which he would never return, especially after being waylaid there by Billy Povich and that creepy fast chick with the short temper. The post office had slapped a yellow sticker on the package with his current address, which would be changing in another few days.

  He tore open the envelope and dumped into his hand an object carefully bound in plastic tape and bubble wrap. He removed the padding, but still didn’t know what it was.

  “Huh.”

  Some little electronic device, made of hard plastic, about the size of a cellular phone, but not as heavy. What the hell was this thing? A small compartment in the back held two alkaline AAA batteries. A plastic clip on the object was meant to attach to something, though it was too narrow to snap onto a belt.

  The front of the device—if he assumed the batteries were in the back—showed a small silhouette of a dog stamped above four letters:

  F.I.D.O.

  “Cute,” Scratch said aloud.

  He repacked the item in bubble wrap and checked the envelope for a return address—none.

  “Huh.”

  Somebody must have sent Scratch the wrong item from an Internet auction. He opened his laptop to check his recent auction bids, then changed his mind. No, what probably had happened, he decided, was that some seller Scratch had patronized in the past had crisscrossed his records, and had sent Scratch an item meant for another customer. And the poor buyer had paid for express shipping, too.

  “What a bummah!” he said.

  Scratch put the doohickey aside—maybe he could resell it later.

  He realized he had forgotten to search the apartment.

  Gripping a twenty-inch hunk of steel muffler pipe as a club, Scratch poked in the closest, peered under the bed, and—oh God, yes!—peeked behind the damn shower curtain. For good measure, he looked inside the dresser. Not that anyone could fit in his underwear drawer, but, in theory, a person could cut out the drawers with a power saw, and then conceal himself inside the empty shell.

  Nope, just underwear in there.

  He was alone.

  He left the club on the nightstand, then locked the dead bolt, engaged the chain lock, and shoved the dresser against the door.

  He fell backward onto the bed and exhaled a deep breath polluted with fear. That calmed him.

  Finally, for this evening, peace.

  The pressing sense of doom hit Scratch around 4 a.m. The feeling was not like somebody had dumped a load of bricks on his chest, more like someone had piled the bricks on him one at a time, until he could not sleep, and hardly could breathe. He stared at the clock until 4:16, then got out of bed and pulled on his jeans. He hated these ambiguous bouts of p
aranoia but had learned to listen to them. He knew that if he did not get up and be sure he was safe, he would not sleep again this morning.

  With the muffler pipe in hand, he repeated his in-house intruder check: closet, under the bed, shower stall, dresser. Other than a cockroach under the bed, which he whacked dead with the pipe and left there as an example for the others, he was alone.

  He slid the frilly window curtain aside and looked out to the parking lot. Nothing unusual. His car was where he had parked it. He saw nobody in the predawn gray. Muffled truck traffic had already begun to hum around the airport.

  Everything seemed normal. Everything seemed exactly like the day before, and the day before that.

  Well, not everything.

  He dumped the little doohickey out of the envelope in which it had arrived. This was the only thing different from the day before.

  He read the letters on the device. “Fido, eh? What the hell are you, fido?”

  Scratch flipped open his laptop and powered it on. He plugged the modem cable into the wall and dialed into the Internet. He had no accounts with a service provider, but he had bought a dozen log-in names and passwords from a guy in a bar, and they had proven useful. As long as the rightful owner of the account was not currently logged in, Scratch usually could get online for free.

  Using a dial-up Internet connection was breathtakingly slow compared to the broadband line at the public library. Scratch tried to be patient, but using the outdated technology was like crossing the country in a covered wagon. The anticipation increased the pressure on his chest. He massaged his breastbone. Finally, the machine gave him a solid connection and a search site.

  Scratch typed the keywords: “F.I.D.O.” and “dog” and “batteries.”

  Click.

  After another minute of waiting, he had his answer: F.I.D.O. Inc. was the name of a high-tech company in Massachusetts. Its logo was the silhouette of a German shepherd. The acronym stood for Find Intrepid Dogs Online. The company Web page gave a sales pitch: