Loot the Moon
Page 23
Billy found his father on the hospital floor in a puddle of his own bad blood.
“Pop!”
He bulled past the overturned wheelchair and threw himself to the floor. He stopped suddenly as he was about to grab him; an old first-aid postulate screamed in his mind: Don’t move an injured person! The old man grimaced and held a hand over a bloody gash on his chest, near the armpit on the left side. Billy pulled off his sweatshirt and pressed it to the wound.
His father turned sad blue eyes on him. “He was trying to smother Stu,” he said, in a whispery voice, like a draft through an old mine shaft. “You just missed him. Not five minutes ago.”
Stu Tracy lay limp in the bed; his breathing sounded ragged. “Billy,” he wheezed. “It was him—Adam Rackers. He’s alive!”
“Not exactly, Stu.”
Billy ran to the door and screamed down the hall, “Help us! Help! Help!” His tone was not to be questioned; people in white came running.
Billy dashed back to his father and laid a hand on his chest. “Easy now, Pa,” he said. He chuckled against the tension. “If you’re going to get hurt, it might as well be in a hospital.”
“He’s got a knife, son. I tried to grab him but he cut me. I couldn’t hang on. He’s wearing a mask.”
“I know who it is, Pop.”
“Which one of your assumptions was wrong?”
“All of ’em. The truth was in my face the whole time. Breathe easy.”
The old man closed his eyes and shivered against a tremor of pain. His face blurred in Billy’s tears.
Billy informed him, “If you fucking die before we have our talk, I swear to Christ that Charlie Metts will lay you ass-up for the wake.”
“He’s gonna kill somebody,” the old man said, nodding in agreement with himself. “I saw it in his eyes.”
White shirts and voices flooded the room.
“Go stop him,” the old man said. “Don’t let him hurt nobody else.” He pushed Billy gently away. “Do it.”
Twenty yards from the hospital’s exit, a hand clapped him over the shoulder.
“Hey, nice to see you! What’s the rush?”
He whirled. There stood Martin Smothers, a dopey smile on his face. His beard was tied with two rubber bands into twin ponytails. He looked like the world’s wimpiest Viking.
“Hiya, Martin,” he said, and stuck out a hand to shake the lawyer’s sweaty palm. His other hand discreetly patted the knife under his shirt, in his waistband. His knee throbbed where that son of a bitch had rammed him with the wheelchair. He was desperate to run, but reason overruled those instincts. After ditching the mask and stumbling down the stairs on a bad knee, he was this close to getting away. And then, of all the luck, to run into Martin Smothers in the hospital lobby? Like a cosmic practical joke.
Be calm. I can act my way out of anything.
He seized control of the conversation before Martin could question him. “I came here to visit a buddy who had back surgery,” he said with a broad smile.
“How’s he doing?” asked Martin. “If he needs visitors, maybe I’ll drop in and say hello.”
“He’s not here, actually. I guess they sent him home a day early.” He shrugged. “So I thought I made a trip for nothing, until I had the good fortune to run into you.”
Martin stood back, put his hands on his hips, and beamed. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen you so chipper.”
“Well, circumstances haven’t been the best recently—”
Martin looked past him and waved down the hall. “Hey, Billy!” he called. “Look who I ran into.”
Great. There’s Billy Povich. Was there a convention here I didn’t know about?
He tightened the smile, adjusted the facade, turned to face him. “How are you, Billy?” he said. He extended a hand as Povich walked up.
“I’m great, Brock, just fuckin’ dandy. And you?”
Without breaking stride, Povich cocked back a fist and drove it so hard into Brock’s chin, he heard his jawbone crack before he hit the floor.
Barely conscious, he felt Povich’s hands tighten around his throat. Povich screamed hoarse into his ear:
“Rackers didn’t take you hostage, you took him hostage! You carjacked Stu Tracy, Brock! And if you’ve killed my father like you killed your own …”
He squeezed tighter.
“No, Billy, no!” Smothers shouted. Unseen voices screamed and hollered for the police.
The world grew dark around the edges, and then Brock blacked out.
thirty-one
The old man struggled with the details. “So nobody paid Adam Rackers to kill the judge?” he said.
Billy pulled the hospital blanket higher and tucked it under his father’s chin. He checked the IV drip running into his father’s arm. “Judge Harmony was dead before Rackers even broke into the house,” he explained. “Brock had already killed him.”
The old man let out a low whistle. “What could drive a boy to do that?”
“The police who interrogated him say Brock doesn’t really have a good answer. He found out that his dad, who acted like Mr. Perfect, had a second family, and another son. Gil was leaving June and Brock, and moving to New York—that’s a potent betrayal. Gil was taking most of his money with him too. You looking for a motive? Greed, or revenge?”
“Name your poison.”
“Rackers was the key to the murder plan, but he didn’t know it,” Billy said. “Two weeks before the killing, Brock got the drop on Rackers when the little thief broke into the judge’s town house in Providence. Brock pulled a gun on him. But instead of calling the police, he hired Rackers to rob the Charlestown house and steal June’s diamonds, supposedly as part of an insurance scam.
“We bought Brock’s story from the beginning—that Adam Rackers broke in and then took him hostage. The first part was true—Rackers did break in, as they had planned—but then he fell right into Brock’s trap. The rest of Brock’s story was a lie. It was Brock who marched Rackers through the woods at gunpoint. Then Brock carjacked Stu Tracy, and forced Rackers to drive the car.”
“Probably was going to kill them both later,” the old man offered. His quivering hand pressed the oxygen tube under his nose. “So he could make it look like he had escaped from his kidnapper.”
“Brock’s plan went off the road, literally, when Adam Rackers panicked at the wheel and drove into a tree,” Billy said. “But Rackers was killed, and Stu was incapacitated, so he couldn’t contradict Brock’s story. They never used their names in the car, so Stu didn’t know which guy was which. That’s why Brock faked a crying jag in Stu’s hospital room before he had said a word. He couldn’t have Stu recognizing his voice.”
“And that’s why Brock couldn’t let Stu live long enough to get back his sight,” the old man said. “Boy, he had everybody fooled.”
“Brock was a great drama student—his school said he was the best actor they had ever seen. Could have had a career. And so could Martin Smothers, I think. Martin staked out the lobby while I went up to check on Stu Tracy. He was clever enough to hold Brock there until I came back.”
The old man licked his lips and turned approving eyes on Billy. “Being an investigator suits you,” he said.
“I nearly got buried alive.”
“You haven’t been to the dog track once since this case began.”
Billy thought back. “You’re right,” he said, surprised that he hadn’t noticed. He shrugged. “I haven’t felt the impulse … . Maybe I finally caught the rabbit.”
The old man smiled. When the grin faded, he asked, “How’s Stu?”
“You saved his life. And risked your own to do it.”
“Eh, not much to risk.”
“In a few days, we’ll get you transferred to a better room. Something with a view of the highway, so you can feel better about not being stuck in traffic. In two weeks, you’ll be home. Bo’s painting some get-well pictures for the walls.”
The old man looked away. His blue eyes
scanned the ceiling. “Might have been a better way to go, you think? Bleeding out after trying to help a friend.” He turned suddenly to Billy and barked with surprising strength, “I’m jealous of you and Bo, and I’m sick of hiding it.”
Billy fiddled again with the blanket. “I’ve seen the jealousy in your eyes. Though I don’t know why. Bo loves his grandpa.”
The old man frowned and grew impatient. “Not jealous that way. Are you really as thick as that?” He huffed and seemed about to cry. He confessed, “I’m jealous of you, Billy, because you have a son who adores you … and I don’t.”
For the rest of his life, Billy Povich would marvel at how suddenly forgiveness had filled him, that moment beside his father’s hospital bed. The old man’s cheating, his selfishness, the way he had dropped his family like a day-old newspaper—those wounds vanished that instant, as if they had never been, a weight he had dragged three decades, suddenly cut free.
He laid his ear on the old man’s stomach and quietly cried. Trembling hands cradled his head.
“I finished your obituary last night,” Billy said, finally. “My best work. I have a copy, if you’d like to read it.”
The old man sputtered, “Don’t have my glasses.”
“I could read it to you, Father.”
The old man grinned and playfully pushed his son away. “Not yet. I want to make it a little longer, before it goes in the paper.”
Also by Mark Arsenault
Gravewriter
Spiked
Speak. Ill of the Living
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LOOT THE MOON. Copyright © 2009 by Mark Arsenault. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com
eISBN 9781429985192
First eBook Edition : February 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Arsenault, Mark.
Loot the moon / Mark Arsenault.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Thomas Dunne book for Minotaur Books”—T.p. verso.
ISBN 978-0-312-55576-4
1. Judges—Crimes against—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3601.R75L66 2009
813’.6—dc22
2009012736
First Edition: October 2009