Loot the Moon (14 page)

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Authors: Mark Arsenault

BOOK: Loot the Moon
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T
he close-up photos of a dead man's body were like a morbid Frankenstein puzzle. A bicep, part of a shoulder, left pectoral above the nipple, right shoulder blade. The autopsy photos had been printed in black and white, and Billy knew the dark spots on the colorless skin were bloodstains. The pictures of Adam Rackers on a slab in the morgue purported to show identifying marks such as moles and scars, but only the inscrutable tattoo seemed to have belonged to an individual. The Old English letters spelled
dismas23
in a curved frown on Rackers's shoulder. What the hell did that mean? Some kind of gang name?
Billy laid out six pictures before him, roughly re-creating Rackers's dead body on the kitchen table. He sat on his father's foam doughnut to protect a bruise on his tailbone. His wrists were loosely wrapped in gauze. Six ibuprofens had drawn a thin cushion over the pain throughout his body. He felt like an abused tackling dummy at the end of Patriots training camp. Worse than the physical pain, he felt a pressing anxiety. He had done no better than the police in tracing Rackers's movements the weeks before he shot the judge. The cops
had been thorough. They had checked Rackers's last known address, a Pawtucket duplex on an island of residential streets jammed among industrial buildings, in a neighborhood no outsider could find without a map. Rackers had skipped out on his lease three months before he died in the wreck. Nobody in the old neighborhood had ever seen him again. Rackers's residential fingerprints stopped there. No change of address through a cell provider, no credit applications in the Internet databases, no contact with government or the utilities, other than the cop who spotted Rackers casing the judge's neighborhood shortly before the killing.
Where the hell had he been hiding?
Billy's street contacts had reported rumors that Rackers and a partner had been feeding discount loot to local fences, but nothing specific. And nobody could provide an address for Billy to track down.
A low murmur floated down the hall.
Billy stared toward the source and listened. That was his father's voice, though Billy couldn't make out what he was saying. The old man was talking to himself again. And not just a stray thought subconsciously expressed by the lips—his father was having monologues in his bedroom. This was not the first time. He tried to remember when the old man started giving speeches to himself. Maybe a few weeks ago? Two months?
Need to ask him about that …
The laptop computer on the table suddenly shouted: “Missed it by THAT much!”
Billy had no clue how Bo programmed the computer to quote
Get Smart
whenever e-mail arrived. He glanced at the clock: 2:45 a.m. Who the hell was e-mailing at this hour? He turned the volume down so not to wake Bo.
The old man's wheelchair glided into the kitchen. Mr. Einstein lay across his lap. “That's my e-mail,” he said.
“You better give that doll back to Bo,” Billy said. “If he wakes up without Einstein, he'll be scared. What were you doing with that thing?”
“Talking with him,” the old man said dismissively. “Open that e-mail! It's a reminder to bid on my world's fair item.”
“Don't you have enough useless trinkets?”
“Not nearly. Lemme at that machine. Just takes a second.” He held up a palsied hand and waved for Billy to get out of the way.
“Can you do this without Bo?” Billy asked. “This is a computer, not a butter churn. Never mind. I'll do it for you. Why do you always wait till the last possible second to bid?”
“So nobody can come in after me and steal my items. Quicker!”
Billy followed a link to an online auction site. He scoffed, “Is this what you're buying? What the hell is this thing? A piece of paper? You're bidding on old paper?”
“It's an invitation,” the old man said, sounding anxious. “There's three minutes left! We gotta bid!”
“An invitation to what?”
“To the opening ceremonies of the world's fair. An original invitation! FDR was there, you know. He spoke to a huge crowd about the world of tomorrow—that was the theme for the fair.” His fingers slashed the air for emphasis. “April thirtieth, nineteen thirty-nine. That was also the anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington. One hundred fifty years to the day, General Washington took the first presidential oath of office in front of a huuuuuge crowd.”
“Did you have good seats for the inauguration, old man?”
“What—? Seats to who?”
“How was George's speech?”
“Eh?” The old man's mouth dropped open and he squinted at his son from behind thick eyeglasses.
Billy sighed. Sarcasm was completely wasted on his father. “How much are you bidding?”
“Thirty dollars. No, thirty-five!”
“For a piece of paper?”
“We're gonna lose it!”
“Fine then, thirty-five dollars.”
“Log me in,” the old man commanded. “The log-in name is g-r-o-v-e-r-w-h-a-l-e-n. Uh-huh. And then two. Uh-huh. No, the number two, don't spell it out. Jesus on a skateboard! Where'd you learn to type? Okay, okay. The password is Ziggs.”
“What the hell kind of log-in is that?” Billy asked as he typed a bid of thirty-five dollars and clicked to confirm. “Okay, you're the high bidder.”
The old man relaxed. He wiped his palms on his long flannel nightshirt and explained, “I named myself for Grover Whalen. He was the New York City police commissioner who said, ‘There's plenty of law at the end of a nightstick.' Heh-heh. They don't talk like that today. Then he was president of the world's fair of thirty-nine. I'm saluting him for what he did for the fair. Don't you understand how these auction places work? Nobody uses their real name. It's like a nickname. Christ, I shouldn't have to explain this … ain't you younger than me?”
“Not feeling that way right now,” Billy said. He refreshed the Web page. “Hey, you won. Congratulations on your new piece of paper.”
The old man smiled. His wrinkles looked like contour lines for a very bumpy life. Then suddenly he wheezed and grimaced in pain and Billy instinctively reached for him. The old man waved him back, banged a fist on his own chest, coughed three times, sputtered weakly as if he were about to die in the chair. Then he pulled himself clear of the cough and took a loud, deep breath. He moaned, grumbled about the indignities of old age, spat into his hand, inspected the clear foam, and then wiped the mess on the tail of his nightshirt.
“Copy down the seller's address,” the old man commanded, sounding hoarse. “So I can send him a money order.”
Billy wrote down the address. “Why do you buy all this crap?” he asked.
“I'm leaving it to Bo,” the old man said.
“You're leaving the kid this invitation? And the ashtrays, and the dinner plates you won't let anybody use, and the salt and pepper shakers—”
“Those shakers are in the
original
box,” the old man interrupted. “And they're only going up in value. The giant world's fair mechanical pencil writes perfectly fine, and the jackknife has a mother-of-pearl handle.”
“What's the kid supposed to do with this junk?”
The old man paused. “Bo's going to remember me,” he said. He frowned and looked away, then scraped a fingernail over some crusty stain on the arm of his wheelchair. “The more stuff I have to give him, the more he'll have to remind him. I don't believe in hell, and if there's a heaven I can't be sure I'm going. But I'll have my immortality through that kid. He knows me through the world's fair, see? It's my only hobby, the only passion I got left, and the only thing I know more about than his father, okay?”
Billy confirmed gently, “You're the encyclopedia of this fair, Pa.”
“You're goddamned right I am. Did you know that the centerpiece of the fair, the Trylon and the Perisphere exhibits, inspired the magic castle in Disneyland? See, someday when Bo takes
your
grandkids to Disney, no matter how old he's gonna be, he'll think of the fair, and he'll think of me. Might even tell his kids a story or two they can pass along to
their
kids.” He looked at Billy. “This invitation is the last piece of the collection. We end with the beginning … . You wanna have that discussion about my treatment now?”
A python flexed around Billy's throat. He gestured vaguely to the spread of pictures and notes on the table. “Pa, I gotta work … . This case I'm on is, ah, a real bitch.”
The old man slowly spun 180 degrees in the chair. As he rolled out,
he warned without looking back, “Don't put me off till it's too late. Never think of the future—it comes soon enough.”
Billy gave him a double take.
The old man read his mind. He shook the doll and said, “Yeah, I'm quotin' Einstein.”
 
 
“Missed it by THAT much!”
Billy woke with a start and lifted his head from the table.
I'm half blind!
He blinked his eyes. No, he wasn't blind—he had fallen asleep on his notes, and a photograph had stuck to his face. He peeled it off, then winced at the pain in his back, which sizzled down his hamstrings.
The photograph reminded him of his minor breakthrough in identifying Adam Rackers's tattoo:
dismas23
.
Not that the discovery had helped at all.
He tapped the computer's space bar and dispelled the screen saver. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he read the clock in the bottom corner of the display.
Oh, shit, 6:33 a.m.
He had slept the night at the kitchen table. No wonder his back hurt.
The Web page he had studied a few hours before was still on the screen. The page listed Catholic saints throughout history. It was there Billy had found Saint Dismas. He was the “good thief,” who had asked for a blessing while being crucified next to Christ. Dismas was the patron saint of criminals. Billy had never known criminals had their own saint. The numeral 23 he had not been able to decipher for sure. Maybe it had to do with the mention of the good thief in chapter 23 of the Gospel According to Luke, or maybe that was a coincidence.
He clicked the e-mail message that had woken him. It was for his father:
Dear groverwhalen2,
Congratulations on winning the bid for the World's Fair Opening Ceremonies invitation. I promise to ship the item within 24 hours of receiving payment.
Best—
cancanman036
What the hell was a cancanman036? Who would do business under a nickname like that? His father planned to send money to this unseen person on the West Coast. Who knew where cancanman036 even got this thirty-five-dollar invitation? He could have stolen it from a geriatric invalid at the nursing home next door.
Billy pushed himself from the chair, and gasped as his body tightened like a clamp. He heard his father's voice in his mind,
Welcome to my world. Feel good?
Clutching the back of his chair, he rolled his shoulders and gently forced his back to straighten. “Oh! Oh!” he cried quietly, in surprise. The pain was like having the nerves yanked from his legs, the way an electrician pulls wires through a pipe. He grew lightheaded and feared he might pass out, until the muscles loosened and the pain slowly diluted through his body. He found aspirin in the cabinet and chewed five tablets with no water. He kept the aspirin paste under his tongue for a minute before he swallowed, because he had heard it got into the bloodstream faster that way.
“Ain't you the picture of health,” said the old man. “Who did this to you? I thought you were paid up with the bookmakers.”
Billy turned to face him, felt a twinge in his lower lumbar, and froze. “Didn't hear you come in.” He rolled his upper body around his hips. “Hey, Pa, did I hear you talking to yourself again this morning?”
The old man bristled. “So what if you did? This apartment is in America, ain't it? I got my free speech rights, even in this second-story gulag with no elevator.”
Billy turned his hands up in surrender. “I bow to the First Amendment. Talk all you want.”
“I'm skipping treatment today,” the old man declared.
Oh, fuck, not now.
“We never had our discussion,” Billy said, not daring to look at him.
“That's your fault. I don't have forever to wait.”
Billy turned to his father. The old man wore a short housecoat over threadbare cotton pajamas. His knees were parted. His legs were so goddamn thin, just sticks and angles, like a grasshopper's legs. “Pop—”
“Any news on my world's fair item?”
Billy licked his lips and accepted the old man's detour around the discussion of his slow suicide. He said, “Just got an e-mail from someone named cancanman-zero-three-six—”

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