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Authors: Mark Arsenault

BOOK: Loot the Moon
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The young guy in the picture looked lean and rugged. He was shirtless; the characters of a dark tattoo on his shoulder were too blurred to be legible. His triangular-shaped head pointed down through a sharp chin, to which clung a tuft of black goatee. His dark hair was long, unwashed, and stringy. He had obviously taken a beating: his nose and lip were swollen; the smear of a shiner glowered like a thumbprint under one eye.
“They say that the night this picture was taken, he had resisted arrest,” Martin said.
The man's expression was grim and hollow in the picture, as if he had just witnessed something he'd prefer never to see again. Like maybe an extreme close-up of a police nightstick. Billy flipped over the picture. The name printed on the back read:
RACKERS, Adam A.
“The guy who shot the judge?” Billy asked.
Martin nodded, as if he didn't want to acknowledge the fact out loud. “That police mug was taken five years ago, after the cops grabbed Rackers in an electronics store, several hours after closing
time. He was helping himself to a crate of iPods, and apparently never noticed that this store also sold silent alarms.”
“So he was no genius.”
“He pled out to robbery, did twenty months in medium security.”
“Hmm—stiff time. Not a first offense, I assume.”
Martin snorted with an ironic laugh. “His police record is longer than ‘Freebird.'”
“The news reports on the shooting were sketchy. Do the cops know what happened to Judge Harmony?”
Martin looked away for a moment, as if organizing the narrative in his mind. He explained, “The judge and his son, Brock, were spending the weekend at the family beach house, a big clapboard Mc-Mansion on a salt pond in South County.” He grinned. “I got invited there once, Gil barbecued two rabbits he and Brock had shot, and I thought my wife was going to divorce me—that woman won't eat animal
crackers
.”
A crumpled betting slip bounced off Martin's scalp. He watched it land in the aisle, then continued as if nothing had happened.
“Two weeks before the shooting, Rackers had cased the place,” Martin said. “A local cop ran his ID and warned him about loitering.”
“This cop remembers Rackers? After that much time?”
“An ex-con with six B&Es on his record? Hanging around the pricey beach houses? Yeah, they remembered him. Rackers got into Gil's house through an unlocked window in the garage—his fingerprints were all over it. From there, he forced his way into a crawl space above the ceiling that led into the main house, between the rafters, above a little mudroom. The space he wiggled through is rough, unfinished, nails sticking out everywhere. He left a tiny wedge of his skin and a few hairs on the point of a tar-paper tack where he scraped over it.”
“What was this supposed to be?” Billy asked. “A robbery?”
“If you agree with the police investigation.”
“Would we be talking if you did?”
Martin ignored the question. He said, “The judge owned two dozen firearms, but they're all accounted for, so Rackers must have brought his own gun, a forty-caliber semi. Cops found it near the wrecked car in the woods, one shot discharged.”
“Where was June Harmony?” Billy asked.
“Home—their condo on the East Side in Providence, a five-minute walk from superior court, where Gil sat on the bench. She had left the boys alone for a father-son weekend.” He sighed and hunted for a bright side. “Though it's probably better that she wasn't there.” He gave Billy a sad smile, not needing to explain any more. Then he rubbed the back of his own neck and seemed to lose energy, like a wind-up toy at the end of its spring. He closed his eyes and slumped. “I have an image in my head,” he said, a hand waving lazily before his face, where this image might have hovered. “It's Gil. He's surprised in his study by a punk with a gun. I can see him slowly rise from behind his mahogany desk, like a thin column of steam. He sets a bookmark carefully into whatever law text he was studying for the classes he teaches, then tugs down the bottom of his suit vest, and thrusts his big chin toward the gunman. Gil would have called him a ruffian or maybe a scoundrel. In my vision, Gil knows he's about to die, yet
demands
to know at once, in the name of God and the Constitution, what is the meaning of
this
.” Martin smiled, opened his eyes, looked off to the track. Billy said nothing. Martin turned to him and shrugged. “How do you fuckin' shoot a man like Gil Harmony in cold blood?”
Billy sat silently and felt the slow osmosis of hurt spreading from Martin's heart into his own. He could see why Martin loved the judge. Gil Harmony was a father figure to Martin; in his memory a flawless giant with brains, wisdom, and guts. Billy's thoughts drifted to his own father, sick and shrunken, betrayed by his kidneys, being
poisoned by his own blood.
Rancid on the inside.
He shook the image from his head and brought his mind back to the moment.
“Here's another oddity for you,” Martin said. “Three days before the police spotted Rackers casing the judge's beach house, somebody broke into the Harmony family's condo in Providence. A real Spider-man, came in through the balcony around two o'clock in the morning. Brock Harmony was staying there alone that night. According to the police report, Brock heard a noise, grabbed one of his old man's pistols from the gun locker, and ran into the hall. The intruder fled empty-handed.”
“Good.”
“But Brock couldn't identify him. He only saw his shadow.”
“Do you think this break-in was a failed attempt to kill the judge?”
“Or a recon mission, to gather information for a strike in the future. It's a hell of a coincidence, ain't it?”
“Have you seen Brock?” Billy asked.
Martin pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment and grimaced as if the spot were tender. “Can't bear it yet,” he said. “What would I say?” His eyes widened with dread. “The cops interviewed Brock in the emergency room after the crash. I saw their report. The night of the shooting, Brock was asleep upstairs. The bang of the gun woke him. He thought his old man might have fired the shot by accident, and he rushed down to see if Gil was all right. He ran into Rackers in the hall. That punk mumbled something about a wall safe, which I'm reliably told the beach house doesn't have. The Gil Harmony I knew kept his valuables in a bank. Except for June Harmony's diamond earrings, which were in plain sight in a jewelry dish in the dining room. Four carats total. Insured for a hundred and fifty thousand, and Rackers left them right where they were.”
“Jesus, did Rackers take
anything
?”
“Just Brock,” Martin said. “He marched the kid out at the point
of a gun, through the woods, to the road. Rackers carjacked the first Good Samaritan to drive along, a kid named Stu Tracy, some small-time musician—a philosopher-poet, the type who writes lyrics so obscure nobody gets them. Brock doesn't remember the crash. The car rolled over nine times, all three were ejected. Rackers got the worst of it; he was pronounced dead at the scene.
“Stu Tracy is still in the hospital,” Martin continued. “He's out of intensive care, and expected to make it. But he's rebuilt in stainless steel and needs three or four more surgeries to walk properly, as he gets stronger. This crash could cost him two years of his life, to heal and rehabilitate.”
“And Brock?”
“Thrown clear of the wreck. Grade-two concussion, lost consciousness. Somewhere around sixty stitches all over. Nothing broken. He's lucky.” Martin paused, then corrected himself. “Lucky that he lived, though now he has to bury his father.”
The dogs blew out of the gates for the next race, heads bobbing in high-speed unison. “Ooo,” Billy said, pointing. “I got half a nickel on this race. It's my lock of the day.”
Billy watched his dog fight to break out from a box-in on the first turn. But his pup tangled legs with another dog and went down in a rolling heap as the pack ran on after the rabbit. Martin gasped. Billy stared, mouth open, saying nothing. His dog righted itself, paused, violently shook the dust from its speckled white coat, and then trotted, unhurried, the wrong way around the track. “That probably just cost me a year of my life,” Billy said, finally.
Martin chuckled and stroked his beard. “How much is half a nickel?”
“Two hundred fifty.” Billy said absentmindedly. His attention was on the picture of Rackers. The photo was no longer accurate, of course; Rackers was in the morgue. His hard-scrubbed, wind-burned face would have been blue in the freezer.
“I still don't see the point,” Billy said. “It's a tragedy that the judge is gone, and a crime that Stu Tracy got mangled. But the killer is dead. Not much else we can do to him.”
Martin leaned in close. The intensity in his eyes pushed Billy backward as surely as a hand against his chest. “The break-in at the judge's place was not a robbery that got out of hand,” Martin said in a low voice. “This was an
execution
.”
Billy looked away. “You got proof?”
Martin took the photo of Rackers and shook it gently in Billy's face. “This cretin left behind June's jewelry, the family silverware, the hundred bucks in Gil's wallet—all he did was shoot my friend. And think about Rackers's police record—no prior gun charges, not one! This guy didn't go from unarmed burglar to point-blank assassin by chance. Somebody
hired
him for the job, to exterminate the judge.” He let the point sink in. Then he said, “Which means the killer, the one who really made it happen, is still free.”
Yellow dots reflected from the ceiling lights swirled in Martin's eyes. Billy messaged his temples.
A theory built of one part conjecture and ten parts faith.
Reluctantly, he said, “It's a decent hunch, but, like I said, Marty, do you have any proof?”
The patron saint of hopeless causes broke into a wide smile. “More proof than you had that Runnin' for Bob would win that race.”
Billy grinned. He had walked into that line. He said, “I'll fish around and see what I can find out. I'll do my best, but no guarantees.”
“That's the line I give my clients.”
T
he hospital smelled like disintegrating people and the chemicals invented to clean up after them. These were two odors, really, the primitive pong of unhealthy gases and flakes shed by bodies being cremated alive by disease, and the high-tech tang of cleaning compounds and lethal drugs prescribed to kill infection before the medicine poisoned the patient to death.
“I hate this place,” the old man grumbled.
“It's keeping you alive,” Billy replied.
“As I said …” The old man trailed off into mumbles. He melted, dejected, deeper into his wheelchair.
They passed a humming red Coke machine, the only color along a long bone white hallway lit by fluorescent ceiling tubes. Bo pointed and said, “I want a Sprite.”
“Let's get Grandpa to his appointment first,” said Billy. “Do you want me to push?”
“I'm driving,” Bo said. He clutched harder on the pistol-gripped handles at the back of the wheelchair and pushed a little faster. He
could barely see over the back of his grandfather's head. “Who's got Albert?”
The old man held up the kid's Albert Einstein action figure, a soft doll about fifteen inches long, in a tiny white lab coat, with a shock of white hair and a bushy mustache. “Al's riding up front with me,” the old man said.
“He wants me to hold him,” Bo said.
“What's that, Mr. Einstein?” The old man pressed the doll's face to his wrinkled ear. “He says it's all relative to him.”
“Hardy-har,” said Billy.
“Get the boy a Sprite,” the old man said. “We got time.”
“Once you're hooked up,” Billy said.
No detours until you're hooked up.
The old man huffed. “You got time,” he said. He touched a quivering hand to his temple. Then he turned his time-ravaged face to Billy. The old man's skin had a yellow tint, dotted with tiny blue bruises. He had not shaved in ten days and dry white whiskers lay flat along his cheeks like wheat stalks felled by a wind. His shoulders heaved and he said, “I'm tired.”
“You'll nap in the chair,” Billy said. He absentmindedly picked a cat hair off the old man's sweater and flicked it away. Then he met the old man's eyes; they were the same bright living blue as Bo's peepers. Billy wondered,
How could the old man and the boy, so near the opposite ends of life, have the same eyes?
“You don't understand—I'm
tired
,” the old man repeated.
Billy understood. He looked away and retreated to humor. “Push him a little faster, Bo, but don't crash him. There's a five-hundred-dollar deductible on the wheelchair.”
“That's five hundred Sprites!” the boy cried.
Billy massaged his chest over his heart, rubbing a spot of soreness he imagined was there. Though William Povich Sr. had never said it
aloud, Billy had come to understand that his father wanted to stop dialysis.
The old man was tired of being old.
A grotesque, involuntary smile spread over Billy's face.
Goddamn it …
He could not suppress the grin. The smile was a lifelong curse, he had come to think, which hijacked his lips whenever death made a near pass. Self-defense from deep within his psyche, he thought, a smile to ward off the cloaked figure of death should it come too close to Billy Povich. It first appeared after high school, when the girl voted most likely to succeed shot herself through the forehead three months into their college freshman year. He had poisoned the smile with vodka that night, in a cold autumn drizzle, around a smoky campfire made with gasoline and wet pine, with ten other teenagers feeling death for the first time. He had fought the smile again when his mother, who never smoked or touched a drink, silently handed Billy an X-ray with an egg-shaped shadow over the lung. She had not removed her necklace for the X-ray; the silver crucifix had glowed white over her heart. The smile appeared again last year, when the police sergeant had rung his bell, and Billy had padded downstairs in moth-bitten boxers and bare feet to find the man in a crisp blue uniform holding Bo's hand and speaking nonsense about a crash and a motherless little boy who would be moving in with his divorced father.
His fingers pulled the smile from his lips and pressed it out of existence.
They wheeled into a waiting room recently renovated to look like an insurance office, with beige floors and walls and a receptionist penned within a single office cube. Unlike the rest of the hospital, the waiting room smelled like new carpet.
Billy gave Bo a dollar for the soda machine. The kid grabbed Einstein and sprinted off for sugar.
A door opened and a young tech in a sea green hospital smock appeared, holding a clipboard and a tiny pencil that looked like he had taken it from a golf course. The tech was midtwenties, tall, with a five o'clock shadow over his shaved scalp, and an ear pierced with a big brass hoop, like a pirate. He brightened when he saw Billy and the old man. “Perfect timing, Mr. Povich,” he gushed. “I'm Matthew. Do you remember me?”
Billy watched the old man's face sour. “Why wouldn't I remember?” the old man said. “I got bad blood—I wasn't hit on the head.”
Checking his clipboard, the tech asked, “On a scale of one to five, with five being the best, how are you feeling today?”
“Shitty.”
The tech didn't flinch. “Call it a one,” he said merrily, scratching a note. “And again, on a scale of one to five, how have you been sleeping?”
“Shittily.”
He frowned in sympathy. “A one—well, that's no good.” He sighed dramatically and said to Billy, “Maybe the doctor will want to increase him to three treatments a week.”
“I'm down here,” the old man said. “Why are you talking to him? Did you get hit on the head or something?”
The tech took a half step backward. “Oh, Mr. Povich, it's just that—”
“Would you
like
to get hit on the head?”
“Pa,” Billy said, cutting off the old man before he took on a six-footer one-third his age. To the tech, Billy nodded and mouthed,
We'll talk later
.
 
 
The contraption that cleaned the old man's blood reminded Billy of a robot from a 1950s science-fiction movie. The dialysis machine was boxy but roughly human-shaped, with a flat-screen
monitor for a head, which showed statistics that meant something to the doctors, but nothing to Billy or the old man. Plastic tubes snaked through the robot's chest, and when these tubes surged with blood the machine took on a lifelike quality.
The old man had moved from the wheelchair to a medical lounge made of squishy memory foam; even Billy's father had to admit the chair was comfortable. The old man's left forearm, brown and spotted like an overdone chicken, lay flat on the armrest. The first needle, angling through his skin about midway on his forearm, took the blood out. The dirty blood passed through a skinny tube that lay across the old man's lap, and then flowed into the machine. There, it squeezed through the filters. The cleaned blood flowed the other way through another tube across his lap, and reentered his system through a second needle set just six inches from the first.
The room held six dialysis machines. They were all busy—always were. Billy noted that kidney disease did not discriminate, neither by class nor by race nor even by age; young people waited here, too, for their blood to be scrubbed. The patients read magazines, watched TV on screens at each station, napped, whispered into cell phones, stared at the sprinkler heads in the ceiling.
“I got two movies,” Billy said, fanning the DVDs in his fingers like two-fifths of a poker hand. “The library was a little low on variety, but I found
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
.”
The old man squinted, as if into a bright light. His heavy black-framed eyeglasses magnified the disgust in his eyes. “Say who?” His bottom lip puffed out. “I wanted a relationship movie, like from the olden days.”
“And that's exactly what this is. It's about the
relationship
between a boy and his mom and the robot sent backward in time to kill them.” Billy frowned at the disc. “But I think this is the Spanish version.”
“I don't know Spanish!” the old man cried.
“Okay—the dialogue is English,” Billy said. “Only the subtitles are Spanish.”
“I said I don't know Spanish!”
Bo chugged Sprite and then pulled the can away with an exaggerated,
Ahhhh!
“Let's watch the robot movie!” The boy had not been allowed to see sci-fi when his mother was alive; now he wanted to watch nothing else. For an instant Billy tried to recall the moment when his eight-year-old had graduated from love of dinosaurs to this obsession with robots and Albert Einstein, the world's greatest scientist; it seemed like some kind of boyhood milestone. Soldiers would be next, probably.
G.I. Joe with the kung fu grip
. Then the kid would fall for Marcia Brady.
“Any soft core?” the old man deadpanned.
“I got these at the library, Pa.”
“That's why I asked for
soft
.” He dropped his head back and sighed hard at the ceiling, his thoughts someplace else.
“I also got
The Third Man
, an Orson Welles movie. He's from your era, Pa. It's about a guy who might be dead, might be alive. Seen it?”
The old man's blue eyes, the part of him that seemed the most alive, shot for a moment to the boy, then back to Billy. “I'm in that movie right now, Billy,” he said. “I'm like the star, but I don't like the script.” He grinned. Old age had inserted stripes of darkness between his teeth and turned a once perfect smile into a mockery of itself.
He wants to quit. He wants to die.
A bulge of fear squeezed down Billy's throat. He casually pinched his Adam's apple.
Bo held the soda can to his lips but did not drink. He watched them. It seemed the boy had caught the scent of some grown-up thoughts passing overhead.
Billy wanted to protect the boy. He would speak in code. Holding up the two movies but staring at his father, Billy said, “You have a
decision to make. Not one you ought to make on impulse, or when you're feeling low. We should talk it out.”
“Albert and I say the robot movie,” Bo offered tentatively. He rubbed a hand through the jungle of golden cowlicks on his head, and then brushed Einstein's hair with a finger.
“Will you support what I choose?” the old man said. He glanced to Bo with a pained look—the old man wanted to protect the kid, too. “Or will you force me to … ah, ah … watch the movie that
you
want me to watch?”
Billy licked his dry lips. “This isn't something I can force, Pa.”
“You can.” The old man tilted his head slightly, almost imperceptibly, toward Bo. “By guilt and by pity.”
They stared at each other.
The old man's right
, Billy thought. He could force his father to stay on dialysis by using the old man's grandson against him. Just tell Bo:
Grandpa will die without his treatment
. The old man would suffer anything to stop the child's tears. By guilt and by pity, Billy could force his father to live.
“I can count to eight in Spanish,” Bo said. He no longer sounded tentative. The adult conversation had grown too abstract for him, and he had given up on learning its meaning.
Billy glanced from his father to his son, noticing how alike they looked. Mostly in the striking blue eyes, serious and sad and with a mythical quality, like the eyes of a wizened old leprechaun.
“Okay, Bo, it's the robot movie.” Billy poked the buttons of the DVD machine, slid the disc inside, and started the film on the twelve-inch screen.
The subtitle said:
Terminator 2: Día del Juicio.
“I can't read Spanish!” the old man cried.
“Don't read it,” Billy said. “Just listen to the dialogue in English.”
“But the words will keep popping up when somebody says something! How do I not read them?”
“You can't read Spanish,” Billy reminded him.
There was no answer to that. The old man wrinkled his brow and shoved his thick-framed glasses higher up his nose. The corners of his mouth drooped in defeat.
“I gotta run an errand on the other side of the building,” Billy said. “You two keep an eye on each other, okay?”
The old man gathered himself and huffed. Billy expected a wisecrack. But William R. Povich Sr. just said in a hollow voice, “I'm tired, Billy.”
 
 
“He hardly looks like our son,” the woman said in a gasp. Her shoulders heaved and she cried into her hands, outside a hospital room. Billy looked her up and down. He noticed the cheap tin cross around her neck, her unpainted fingernails, the frayed laces of her white tennis shoes. She did not notice Billy, who was in plain sight but in something of a disguise. “Will he ever
see
again?” the woman cried. “Oh, goodness, Michael, will he ever
walk
?”

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