Bad Moon Rising

by John Galligan

  Watching her through safety goggles and over a germ mask, the doctor asked, “Is his wound healing up OK?”

  So he meant Dylan. One week ago, Taylor, for reasons unknown, had chopped Dylan on the arm with a hoe to the tune of eighteen stitches.

  “Oh.” She sighed with relief. “The little goofball is looking forward to a nice big scar. He thinks it’s going to look awesome.”

  Dr. Kleekamp said, “Hmmm.” He stripped the yellow custody tape and began to unzip the body bag. “I referred you folks to our in-system child psychologist. Any progress there?”

  Now he meant Taylor, Dylan’s assailant.

  “Well, no, not yet, because my husband…”

  Kleekamp stopped the zipper on its first curve and waited for what she had to say about her husband. She and Harley agreed that compared to Taylor, Dylan was somehow developing more quickly, was bigger and stronger, was reading and writing at a higher level. The other threat to Taylor’s psyche, they agreed, was that meanwhile, Ophelia, Opie, Taylor’s natal big sister, was at a summer camp for gender-nonconforming kids, possibly becoming an even bigger and smarter brother than the one Taylor already failed to keep up with.

  The sheriff caught herself touching her stomach and visualizing her uterus beneath her duty belt, scanning it. Three days to zygote… Eight days to embryo…

  But Harley resisted seeing a child psychologist. By end of summer, he had been arguing, maybe Taylor has a growth spurt, maybe Opie becomes a sister again, maybe Barry Rickreiner gets exposed, quits the race, stops picking on the Kick family. All this crazy weather and stress would break eventually, her husband believed, and they would coast into a cooler, calmer fall.

  She told Dr. Kleekamp, “It’s just that Harley knows all about small-town stigma and he’s protective of Taylor.”

  “Ah, yes. Well.”

  “I am too,” she said.

  Kleekamp resumed unzipping. “We’re all protective of Taylor,” he reminded her, working around the victim’s booted right foot. “It’s just a question of the best way to take care of him. Your whole family needs to get together on this. No mixed signals.”

  And now he meant Belle Kick, Grammy Belle, who believed that all Taylor needed was a mommy who paid attention to him and showed how much she loved him by whupping him good whenever he acted out.

  “Right.” The sheriff gritted her teeth. What was Belle’s problem lately? “Same page. Yes, I know.”

  Now the corpse was fully exposed. Kleekamp leaned in. He was new at this. He mostly looked at living people. As for violent death, she knew that lately he had been collecting road-killed deer, conducting autopsies and finding evidence of some new disease—not the well-documented prion infection, chronic wasting disease, but something bacterial and gnat-borne that made the deer stagger onto the roads and get killed in collisions. On the table was Dr. Kleekamp’s first murder victim, and Sheriff Kick felt his apprehension.

  “Well, shot twice in the back,” he said, beginning with the obvious. “Dirty exit wounds. Looks like mud and blood mixed.”

  He peered more closely at a pattern of small red welts across the dead man’s chest, neck, and cheek.

  “What’s this rash, I wonder?”

  “We found him in wild parsnip.”

  “Ah. No clothes on?”

  “We found him just like that.”

  Kleekamp began to circle the table, prodding the victim’s torso, lifting his limbs, looking beneath his filthy underpants.

  “He’s about thirty. Uncut hair and nails, bad teeth, needle tracks, emaciated and malnourished, scabies all over his groin… I’m going to guess that he was homeless.”

  The sheriff nodded grimly. She thought so too. She remembered the priest: Five homeless men missing, picked off the streets of La Crosse…

  “Urban homeless, I mean,” Kleekamp continued, “not from around here, probably.”

  She knew what he meant. Poverty existed in the Bad Axe—deep, and plenty of it—but no one panhandled or pushed a shopping cart or slept on the sidewalk. Her phone buzzed beneath her badge. “Excuse me,” she told Kleekamp. “This is Dispatch.” She answered with a finger tap. “Go ahead.”

  “You’re in town, right?” Denise began. “Because everybody else is out on Liberty Hill Road or busy on a welfare visit.”

  “I’m with the medical examiner. Go ahead.”

  “ADT alarm is calling in an incident at the newspaper office. There’s been a break-in. Can you get there?”

  “I can leave right now.”

  “Ron Bellweather says he just sold Leroy Fanta a crowbar.”

  “Got it.”

  “Maybe you can beat Empress Rickreiner to the scene?”

  “I will.”

  “And Heidi?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “That priest from La Crosse is on my other line. His scanner is programmable by zip code. He heard our call and wants to talk to you. I said, ‘She’s kinda busy, Father.’ I took his number.”

  “Thanks, Denise.”

  She slipped her phone back behind her badge. Kleekamp had turned the body over. Powder burns around the entry wounds meant the two gunshots had been at point-blank range.

  “I need a headshot and fingerprints,” she told him. “How soon until we have a cause of death?”

  Kleekamp pushed the victim’s matted hair aside and used a penlight to look inside his ear. “Hmmm.” He shone the light up both nostrils. “Hmmm,” he said again. He straightened up and blinked through his goggles. His mask puffed out.

  “A fair while, I think. From what I’m seeing here, I’m pretty sure I’m going to have get the saw and the scissors out—”

  He swallowed hard. This was no dead deer.

  “—and open up his lungs.”

  * * *

  “We meet again,” Grape Fanta managed to tell her over loud orchestral rock music, something she vaguely recognized. He had limped coughing to the glass front door of the newspaper office—it had been repainted: HAPPY VALLEY SHOPPER—and let the sheriff in. She saw that he had gathered his thin silver ponytail and zipped his cargo shorts since she had seen him an hour ago. The music fizzed from a dusty silver boom box that would have looked retro even when she was in grade school.

  “We got an alarm call. Was there a break-in?”

  “Sure was. Back door. I shut off the noise.”

  “Anything missing?”

  He collapsed into his antique wooden desk chair, coughed some more, and spat into a tissue. He turned his music down.

  “One laptop computer. Some fool’s personal effects.”

  She unflapped her breast pocket, took out her notebook, clicked her pen, and began to look around.

  “I see they left a crowbar behind.”

  One leaned against Fanta’s desk. Beside it sat a battered cardboard box jammed with framed photos, coffee mugs, award plaques, pens and pencils, inhalers, and a cone-shaped lump of foam.

  “It looks brand-new,” she observed of the crowbar. “This could be easy. It’s still got a bright new FARMSTEAD HOME AND AG sticker, so it came from across the street. Whoever broke in might be close by.”

  The ruined editor cleared his throat. His spotted hands shook. He had barked several knuckles. “Bastards,” he rumbled.

  “Any idea which bastards? Or should I ask at Home and Ag?”

  “Hey, you wanna hear something?”

  “Babette and Barry are on their way, I’m sure, to supervise my work. It’s only about twenty minutes from Blooming Hill.”

  “Screw ’em. You gotta hear this.”

  She realized he had been listening to a message. He reached across his desk and restarted his answering machine. An angry old man’s voice continued.

  “ ‘… turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.’ ”

  Fant
a raised his shrubby eyebrows at her. The voice went on, tremulous with seeming rage.

  “ ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Meanwhile, the complete assholes print ads for gas-guzzling Ford trucks and thirty-six-packs of Coca-Cola—”

  Fanta paused the rant.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  He creaked back in his wooden chair, knit his bent hands behind his ponytail, showing her his wet armpits. He hadn’t bothered to brush away the wood splinters that clung to his shirt.

  “William Butler Yeats,” he said. “The great Irish poet, 1865 to 1939.”

  He hesitated and she said, “Oh.”

  “Except for that last part about assholes.”

  “Oh,” she said again.

  “My mother was a Donovan, Irish all the way. Same as your father, yes? Rest his soul. And your mother’s.”

  He seemed a little drunk. Maybe the dead body had knocked him off balance too.

  “I meant the caller.”

  “Ah, him.” Fanta shot his answering machine a wave of acknowledgment. “I think he’s this crank who used to write me letters to the editor—which, as you know, the Happy Valley Shopper won’t print anymore. That guy quoted Yeats too. T. S. Eliot as well. Sometimes Jimmy Buffet and KC and the Sunshine Band.”

  She tried again to inject urgency. “All those ADT alarms ring at the Rickreiner houses too. You can be sure they’re on the way. They might conclude that you’re involved.”

  He ignored the problem. “You find out anything?”

  “The medical examiner has the body. We’ll get fingerprints and send around a photo. I’ve got deputies searching the area. The Vernon County K-9 team is there too. But it’s hot already, and any minute now I’ll have to back my deputies off and start them on welfare visits.”

  Fanta slumped. He pulled both ends of his tobacco-stained mustache. “I heard we lost Joe Himmelsbach.”

  She nodded. Yesterday afternoon, Interim Chief Deputy Dick Bender had found the poor old man fighting for breath on the floor in front of his TV. It had been a hundred and ten degrees inside his house. If they had checked on him earlier, he might have made it.

  “Shit on rye,” Fanta said, his eyes red-rimmed. “And Bender’s gotta feel like the Grim Reaper by now. That’s three, right? He’s got the touch. Maybe that means he should retire and give you another chance to hire somebody new.”

  She declined to comment. Her Police and Fire Commission had grown increasingly antagonistic since she had busted a whole convoy of them for drunk-driving ORVs, off-road vehicles, on Memorial Day. When Chief Deputy David Morales had left, they had appointed Bender, a hostile party, as her interim chief deputy. The PFC was using Bender to harass her—and to stall, she felt, until Barry Rickreiner got himself elected in November.

  She swallowed her frustration and took a few steps to see better behind Fanta’s desk. One drawer was open exactly as far as the neck of a tall whiskey bottle. Against that drawer leaned a battered briefcase. Inside she could see a silver laptop, no doubt the “missing” one.

  “So is this caller threatening you?”

  Fanta shrugged. “He’s got a right to be upset.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “If it’s the fella I think it is, he always signed his letters ‘FROM HELL HOLLOW.’ ”

  She searched her mental map and frowned.

  “I can’t think of any place around here called Hell Hollow.”

  Fanta coughed for a few moments. Then he leaned forward and said stickily, “Given his interest in poetry, I gather he’s making a metaphor.”

  He restarted the message.

  “… big sale on strawberries, fresh off their three-thousand-mile jet trip from Argentina, cheap ground beef at only eighteen hundred gallons of water per pound, vanilla ice cream with listeria. We sleep beneath a prion moon, Fanta, a billion misfit molecules hunting each and every one of us. Awake, we can’t see even the biggest broken things. Meanwhile, noon is our new midnight. But hear me…”

  The voice choked and seemed about to fail.

  “… those who face the darkness are meant to shine the light. You will be saved by fire.”

  With a hard click the message ended. Sheriff Kick felt chilled and jittery.

  “Do you have his letters?”

  “If he’s ‘FROM HELL HOLLOW,’ yes, I do, on file. You know”—the editor sighed, going limp with weariness and frustration—“prehistoric records, cave paintings and such.”

  He raised a weak wave to indicate the cavernous room behind him, where in the shadows the sheriff could see several filing cabinets, and behind them big machines and trays of cast-metal type.

  Fanta sighed again. “ ‘Noon is our new midnight,’ ” he quoted. “That’s not bad. The thing about poets…”

  She stepped around his desk and past the cabinets and trays of type to inspect the back door. “I’m listening.” The jamb had been pried out and shredded on the lock side, the way a clumsy person in a fury might break-and-enter if he had no background in the craft.

  “Poets don’t just change the channel,” Fanta told her with his voice raised. “They put a foot through the TV. Poets drive on the wrong side of the road. That’s their job.”

  She returned. If the Rickreiners had left Town of Blooming Hill at the alarm, they were now about five minutes away. She took a latex glove from her hip pocket and put it on—just for show, she decided. She picked up the crowbar and faced Fanta, who fumbled with a pack of Winstons.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “They changed the locks on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right now, are you trespassing?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You’ve been let go?”

  He got his smoke lit, blew a gust toward the old building’s pressed-tin ceiling.

  “Babette thinks so. But I’ve filed a few lawsuits, so at least my right to be here is legally contested.”

  She sighed and put her notebook away. Her phone buzzed for attention again. She had to get back to Liberty Hill Road.

  “OK,” she said. “Your right to be here is tied up in the courts. I can go with that.”

  She raised the crowbar.

  “I’m gonna file this bad boy in my trunk and give it to my husband.”

  She kept her gaze on Fanta as he pulled on his Winston.

  “I’m going to move your car around the block, Grape, so the Rickreiners won’t know you’re here, and so I won’t have to bust you for driving under the influence. Then I’m going to call ATD and tell them it was a false alarm. Stay out of sight while I deal with Babette and Barry. As soon as they’re gone, you’re going to call someone to fix that back door. Then you’re going to collect your stuff and leave, and you’re not going to do this again. Do we have a deal?”

  * * *

  She waited outside her Charger on Second Street for the Rickreiners, mother and son, manager and candidate, feeling the approach of another scalding day delaminate her into layers of time. Three weeks exactly since she and Harley had made love. Seventeen days since she should have had started her period. Seven days since Taylor had stuck the hoe in Dylan’s arm. Only eighty-seven days until the election. One-eighth of a day—three busy hours—since Grammy Belle had caught her peeing in a jar, around the same time that she got the email from Oppo popping the question: So do you want my help?

  Before the sheriff could come further unglued, Babette Rickreiner’s custom-gold Silverado cornered at dangerous speed off Main Street onto Second Street and jerked to an angular stop ahead of the Charger. Something new: the big truck’s tailgate displayed a life-sized 3-D decal that made it look as if Babette had Kenny Rogers bound and gagged in her truck box. Good God, this woman. The horny widow. Candidate Barry followed his mommy in a vehicle perfectly unbecoming of a sheriff, or of any adult for that matter, a vintage El Camino, red, accessorized with a hot-green Yamaha dirt bike tethered upright in the box. Her opponent roared up to book
end the sheriff, who cringed and waited.

  First, pint-sized Babette tumbled out, birdy-legged and bazooka-chested, balancing on six-inch-tall wedged sandals. The woman was seventy, dressed twenty-four, and talked like a trucker. This early in the morning, her look wasn’t quite together: her unadorned earlobes sagged weirdly, and she had nicked her teeth with lipstick while driving.

  “So you’re just standing out here sunning your tits,” she began.

  Sheriff Kick waited for meaning.

  “Because you didn’t catch the cocksuckers.”

  Ah. And ick. “None to catch,” she answered, not untruthfully. “The building is secure. You haven’t been robbed. I called the service provider. They should have called you.”

  Babette rumbled her loose throat and spat a nighttime specimen. She might have rolled her eyes behind the rhinestone sunglasses before she said, “We came all this way…” She opened her complex dental work in a yawn. “Like we got nothing else to do but chase false alarms.”

  Your choice to chase, lady. Why not trust the sheriff’s department to handle alarm calls, like a normal business owner?

  But the sheriff held her tongue. Since her first day as a rookie—1,574 days and counting—every call at any Rickreiner property had worked its way through some variation of these two showing up to interfere. It seemed as if the Rickreiners always expected more than just a break-in, were always girding for bigger and more complicated trouble. The sheriff wondered if what Oppo wrote was true: Kim Maybee’s suicide was homicide. Barry was a lowlife, but was he capable of murder? The young woman had been a girlfriend of Barry Rickreiner’s in his days as a boozer and a user, and his casting-off of the wrong friends anchored his redemption story.

  Now the candidate exited his ride, hauling out a Big Gulp cup to spit into before saying something unfriendly into his phone. He had his mother’s exquisite body type—petite yet unbalanced—and lately, as if to get the Bad Axe ready for the sight of him in a sheriff’s uniform, he had begun dressing like a cable TV cowboy—but the runty one, she would like to tell him, trying to catch up on the short-legged horse.