The Moonlight (21 page)

“Get up, Sal.”

As if, even now, in the extremity of his pain, he had no will to resist, Sal struggled painfully to get to his knees.

“Look at me, Sal.  Now say goodbye.”

There was another roar from the shotgun as Sal’s head, suddenly a blood mess, just came off at the neck.  He collapsed to the floor, his arms and legs jerking convulsively.

“And so endeth the saga.”

Charlie stood up and stretched, like a man who has just finished a long nap.  He reached down, took hold of Sal’s arm, and turned the lifeless, blood-smeared body over on its back.

“Yeah, I think now he’s really dead.”

The girls were whimpering with fear, their faces streaked by mascara-tainted tears.

“What about you?  You don’t want to live to be an old woman, now do you?”

One step brought him to the desk.  He reached out with the shotgun, which was like an extension of his arm, and pressed the muzzle into Mandy’s throat.

She could see his finger tightening on the trigger.

Click!

She wasn’t able to stop it.  The muscles in her neck were twitching as if with some will of their own.  She could hear herself moaning softly, but it sounded like someone else.  It wasn’t her.  She knew the shotgun had been empty, yet still she kept waiting for the explosion.

“How about that—you get to live.”

He lifted the shotgun up to about shoulder height and then dropped it.  It hit the desk with a bang, almost as loud as if it had gone off.

Mandy began sobbing, soundlessly.  She was trembling all over.  She had no will.  She couldn’t move.  She couldn’t even take her eyes off the shotgun.

“I’ll see you around, ladies.”

He laughed again—that terrible, inhuman sound—and then the bolt on the front door snapped open.  He turned to look at them, and she could see that the whole side if his face was soaked in black, lifeless blood.  The door opened, and he disappeared through it.

Mandy could hear the elevator open.  When it started its descent, she began to scream.

The first purchase Phil made with his recently acquired wealth was a new suit.  After a late breakfast Saturday morning, he and Beth had driven down to a poshy men’s store on Greenley Avenue and he had picked it out.  It had to be brown, he decided.  In his whole life he had never owned a brown suit, but this one had to be brown.  The one he finally settled on was rather rakish in cut and fit perfectly—all that needed doing were the trouser cuffs.

“I’d like you to have it ready by this afternoon,” he told the clerk, and tipped him twenty bucks.  He rather enjoyed the way Beth’s eyes widened.

There was no problem, Sir.  It would be ready anytime after three, Sir.  He would take it right back to the tailor, Sir.

Then they took the ferry out to an island in the Sound, about a mile off shore, and spend about two hours chasing each other around in the surf.  They picked up the suit precisely at three and went straight home, because Beth had to get ready for work.

“Do you like the suit?” he asked her.

“It’s fine.”

“But do you like it?”

She cocked her head a little to one side, as if annoyed at his persistence, and said, “It’s
okay
.  Jimmy Cagney would have loved it.”

“If you don’t like it, why didn’t you say something in the store?”

“Because it’s your suit.  It’s enough if you like it.  It’s fine.”

And then she kissed him and told him to shut up about the suit.

He drove her to work and then got on the freeway to Stamford.  The rest of the day was a blank until a quarter to eleven, when it was time to pick up Beth.

There were a lot of blank spots these days and he had learned to accept them as part of the new order of things, to which he found it easier simply to surrender himself.  His hands ached slightly, as if he had been working with tools, and he wondered what he had been doing.  He wasn’t really very curious, however, no more than it he were inquiring into how some stranger spent his time—it seemed to him almost as if the blank spots in his memory did belong to someone else.  It just wasn’t any of his business.  When he checked his wallet before going to bed, he noticed there were around four hundred dollars missing but he didn’t question that either.  It wasn’t really his money.

It belonged to . . .  Who?

Yesterday he had been happy to think that the house belonged to him.  Now it seemed that he belonged to the house, and that made him happier still.

“Come to bed, Hotshot.  It’s been a long day.”

But not so long that Beth minded making it a little longer.  They almost didn’t bother with the preliminaries anymore—he would crawl in beside her, and just the touch of her flesh against his own was enough to get him up and climbing between her legs.  He might come once and hardly even break stride, so they might be at it for twenty minutes at a time.

But when they were done, and she was sleeping peacefully beside him, her breathing deep and slow, he almost wished she weren’t there.  He loved her.  He craved her body, and it made him feel good just to be around her.  He couldn’t bear the idea of parting with her.  But there was a sense in which she was an intruder in his life.  He wanted to be alone with his house.

He hardly ever slept through the night anymore.  Perhaps it was a kind of compensation for the times during the day when he couldn’t remember where he’d been or what he’d done—perhaps they were a kind of sleep—but he would find himself broad awake now at three or four o’clock in the morning.  When that happened he would put on his bathrobe and slippers and pad downstairs to make himself a cup of coffee and have a cigarette.  Fortunately, Beth was a heavy sleeper and never stirred.

He didn’t mind.  He liked it.  He liked the sense of being alone inside the Moonlight’s stillness, a stillness that was full of memories no one was alive to remember.  He felt a sense of connection then, of perfect possession—although whether he was the possessor or the possessed he could not have said.  It didn’t really seem to matter.

Sometimes he would sit out on the patio and listen to the night sounds, and sometimes he would float from room to room like a ghost.  Was he looking for something?  He didn’t know.  Sometimes he would just sit in the kitchen and smoke.

Then, around six thirty or seven, he would go upstairs and crawl back into bed.  He might sleep for another hour then, until Beth woke up.  Sometimes, when the sunshine first poured in through their bedroom window and he watched Beth, naked as dawn, doing her morning stretches on the floor, he felt he was waking into a dream.  It was pleasant, but it had no reality.

He had finished painting the house and was now starting work on the garage, which he was quite sure he could finish in two days.  He would leave the garage white, since there was nothing to suggest that it had ever been any other color.

That was how he spent Sunday morning, scraping off paint flakes and sanding down the rough spots.  Beth had taken the car to go do a little shopping so he was alone, with no company except the music from his old wooden radio.  He preferred to be alone when he worked.

He kept all his painting supplies in the same cabinet with his gardening tools.  There was a carpenter’s work bench in the garage, but he was not inclined that way and hardly ever went near it.  He wouldn’t have today if he hadn’t accidentally dropped a paint can on his scraper and bent the blade.  And, of course, he hadn’t thought to buy a spare.

There was a metal vice bolted to the work bench, and it had a little flat surface at one end like a miniature anvil, so Phil figured he could lay the scraper blade on that and use a hammer to pound it flat again.

It was then he discovered that that corner of the work bench, along with the floor around it, was covered was sawdust.

Only a couple of days before, as absolutely the last item in his house cleaning campaign, he had tidied up the garage.  So he knew the sawdust was fresh.  He picked up a little with thumb and forefinger and noticed there was something mixed in with it.  Something that looked and felt like iron filings.

“What has he been up to?” he murmured under his breath.  Several seconds passed before it occurred to him to notice what he had said—
he?

A search of the trash barrel produced the answer.

Phil’s father had been a duck hunter and, given that Mr. Owings senior was never very deeply committed to the paternal relationship, as an adolescent Phil had been obliged to spend a fair number of weekends during the season sitting in a reed blind up to his ankles in ice water.  It was almost the only way he ever got any time with his old man.

He hadn’t been any good at it, and pretty soon his dad had stopped taking him.  Once he graduated from high school, Phil never hunted again.  An M-15 during Navy boot camp was the last gun he had ever handled—the very idea of getting up before dawn to slog out to the rice paddies for the purpose of murdering a few teal was enough to make him shudder.  That sort of thing just wasn’t for him.

But he remembered enough from those uncomfortable, faintly anxious weekends to recognize a foot-long section from the barrel of a twelve gauge shotgun, complete with polychoke and little white-painted sight bead.  There was also a good piece of the stock, with the rubber shoulder pad at the broad end.

Somebody—and who could that somebody be if not Phil Owings, sole owner and proprietor?—had cut himself down a sawed-off shotgun.

Phil’s father had had an old twelve gauge pump he swore by, and the whole barrel and magazine assembly came off for cleaning.  It just broke apart, right in front of the loading chamber.  Hack a little off each end, and the two sections would easily fit in a briefcase or even a paper bag.  With a little practice, anyone could put the thing back together in about a second and a half.  Just a click and a snap, and you were open for business.

And what kind of business was pretty obvious.  A shotgun, cut down for easy concealment, wasn’t going to be used for anything the NRA would approve of.  It seemed the hunting season was about to start up again, only this time the ducks had nothing to worry about.

Was that where the four hundred dollars had gone?  A shotgun, some shells, and maybe something to carry them in?

And was that why his hands had ached last night, from spending his evening fashioning a murder weapon?

And where was all this stuff?

Phil knew, knew with a perfect certainty, that he could search for the rest of his life and he would never find the gun.  What the house wanted concealed, it concealed—who should know that better than he, the recipient of its long-hidden treasures?

“What the hell is going on?” he said out loud.

And the answer came in his mind, just as if someone had spoken:  “You’ll find out, when I need for you to know.”

And who the hell was this, who had taken possession of him like this, as if his soul were a vacant building—as empty as the Moonlight had been that first day?

“Don’t worry about a thing,” the voice in his head came back.  “I’ll look after you just fine.  There isn’t a thing to worry about.”

Like shit there wasn’t.

Phil stood beside the carpenter’s bench, holding the section of shotgun barrel in one hand and the chunk of stock in the other, and suddenly it occurred to him that at the very least he had to get rid of these things.  He couldn’t just put them out with the trash—if the garbage man found them he would probably have the police over here in about half an hour.  And he didn’t want another interview with that guy Spolino.

What had really happened to his car?  All at once he found he didn’t believe a word of that story about the Grand Union parking lot.

If he wasn’t careful, he was going to earn himself a lot of prison time for things he couldn’t even remember.

And the worst part of that—the absolute worst thing, he realized with a kind of wild panic—was that he would lose the Moonlight.  He would never be able to come back.

And that would be like death.

The shotgun stock was no problem.  Phil just took a chisel and pealed off the shoulder cushion, then a couple of cracks with a hatchet reduced it to unrecognizable fragments of wood.  The cushion would go into one of the town’s ubiquitous trash cans, and the wood pieces he would burn.

The barrel was not so easily disposed of.  He couldn’t destroy it—what was he supposed to do, melt it down?—so he had to get rid of it somewhere.

He would find himself a pond.  Greenley was full of ponds.  He would toss it out in the middle so it could settle down into the mud on the bottom, where probably no one would ever see it again.  When Beth got back from her errands he would hide it someplace in the car, and after he dropped her at work he would go in search of a nice big stretch of stagnant water.

It couldn’t be soon enough.

Beth came home about one thirty, and he helped her unload her groceries from the trunk of the Lincoln.

“How’s the garage coming?”

“Garage?”  It took him a second to remember what he was supposed to have been doing all this time.  “Oh, the painting.  I hit a snag.”

“All right, so we don’t make the cover of
House Beautiful
this month.”