Loot the Moon

by Mark Arsenault

  “Hold it!” the man screamed.

  Uh-uh.

  “We gotta talk to you!”

  Busy, sorry. No time to be executed. Call my agent.

  He dashed to the bedroom, the way he had entered. The window to the fire escape was open and he scrambled through it. A hand grabbed his foot. Scratch slammed his feet together and caught fingers between the heels of his shoes.

  The man yelped and Scratch pulled free.

  He dragged himself on his elbows, then rose to crawl on hands and knees, then triumphantly gained his feet, like a swamp fish evolving from water to land in the space of two seconds. Down the iron ladder he toe-tapped. The man thundered down behind him, laboring heavily. His clip-clop limp was no match for a cat burglar.

  And once I hit earth … whoosh!

  Scratch dropped to the porch roof, then to the ground, and glanced up. The intruder was still between the first and second floors; he might as well have been a mile away.

  Good-bye, Mr. Slow Motion. Tallyho!

  Scratch turned to run and saw the woman sprint out the front door. What comedy! She was trying to run him down. Scratch aimed his feet toward Asia and made like Man o’War down the home stretch. Running was easy for Scratch. In every scam he ever pulled, running was Plan B. He had employed this secret backup plan more frequently than he liked to admit. But he had never needed Plan C, because nobody had ever caught him.

  I’m singing in my brain …

  Just singin’ in my brain …

  The woman jumped his back from behind and Scratch went down.

  Bang. Forehead to pavement.

  Brief hiatus from reality.

  He thought he blacked out for a split second, but he must have been away longer than that. By the time he remembered there was no Plan C, the man was there, and the guy’s knee had found Scratch’s throat.

  “We’re going to talk,” he informed Scratch. He was panting, and Scratch took pleasure in knowing he had made the guy work for it.

  “I got nothing to say to you.”

  The woman pleaded, “You have to help us.”

  “Guess again, Miss Speedy McFly,” Scratch taunted. He still could not comprehend how the hell she had caught him.

  The man sighed. He ground his knee in a painful little circle, and looked off into the starless night for a moment. Then in a calm voice suitable for a lecture on monetary policy or greenhouse gas emissions, the intruder told Scratch:

  “Over my life I have made many bad wagers based on some wild hunches. The National League and the money line in several World Series, for instance.” He passed fingers through his hair, and seemed to relive a painful memory. “On occasion I have lacked sufficient funds to finance these mistakes of judgment. Whenever that happened, I would be visited by some of the most sadistic and creative debt collectors in New England. These men have massive, mutant fists, propelled by chemically enhanced muscles—steroids, human growth hormone, EPO—whatever. They have been schooled inside the state’s finest correctional facilities in the arts of damaging somebody else’s body. They are men of pain. The Picassos of torture. Men who think you’ll shit silver if they squeeze your skull hard enough. Over the years they have taken turns brutalizing me in ever more clever and original ways. Take it from me, these are experiences you never forget.”

  The guy interrupted himself with an ironic chuckle. He offered a sad smile to the woman.

  Then darkness gathered on his face.

  He turned hard to Scratch and informed him: “I have learned a lot from these men. And now you and I are going to talk.”

  twenty

  Billy learned quickly that Gary Gleason was afraid to be called his real name, and that the Q&A would go more smoothly if Kit and Billy just called him Scratch.

  “I had nothing to do with the judge,” Scratch claimed for the third time. He dabbed a damp washcloth on the scrape on his forehead.

  He had decided to talk.

  Funny thing about threats—they often worked, even a bluff with no true violence backing it up. Though Billy might have brought himself to slam Scratch around a bit to make the threat more realistic, he’d never have damaged him.

  But Scratch didn’t know that.

  The three of them had walked together to the bloodstained apartment, for privacy. Billy had forced Scratch onto the sofa in the hallway. Billy stood in the bathroom doorway; Kit guarded the route to the kitchen. Scratch seemed vaguely intimidated by Kit; he shot puzzled glances her way.

  Kit unnerved Billy, too. He could not have tortured Scratch into talking, but he suspected Kit might have.

  “Is that your blood all over the kitchen?” Billy asked.

  Scratch pulled up his sleeve to reveal a forearm wrapped in cloth tape. “Sore but getting better,” he said. “A clean wound.”

  “Who attacked you?”

  “I thought that you did.” Scratch looked past Billy into the bathroom. “And that you had come back tonight to finish the job. How did you find me?”

  “We found the apartment,” Kit said. “Why was Adam Rackers getting his mail here?”

  “He had moved in. Adam had some problem with his old landlady.”

  “What problem?” Billy wanted to know.

  “He didn’t want to pay her the rent.” He grimaced as he gently squeezed his wounded arm.

  “So how did you guys make your livings?” Billy asked. Scratch’s eyes suddenly shot toward the bedroom, as if he were contemplating a second run for freedom. Billy cut off the thought: “Look, Gary—Scratch, I mean, whatever—we’re not cops.”

  “Just tell us,” Kit demanded.

  “We know you two weren’t trading international stocks down on the exchange, or selling real estate on Ocean Drive, so where did the money come from?” Billy asked.

  Scratch looked from Billy to Kit, and then back to Billy. He cleared his throat. “None of this would be admissible in a court of law,” he said, “because you’re holding me as your prisoner. It’s not a confession by free will. Case law is very clear on this point.”

  “Oh, fuck you and start talking,” Kit said sharply. “This ain’t a deposition.”

  Scratch refused to look at her. He frowned and wiped sand off a wet spot on his knee, where he had rolled over in the street after Kit had tackled him. Then he explained, “Adam was my wingman when we pulled our street hustles. I dealt the cards, so to speak, and Adam set up the marks. He was so good at it, pretending to be excited when I let him win. Even people who assumed it was a scam were taken in by Adam. He was a great, great fucking actor.”

  “Rackers played the stranger in the crowd,” Billy said, “who won money from you at three-card monty?”

  Scratch nodded. “Something like that. Most scams need two elements—somebody to set the terms and a second person to drive up the price. It’s about creating demand. Making people believe they’re getting a good deal.” He smiled, reliving old victories.

  “Rackers had a lot of burglaries on his record too,” Billy said.

  “He was great in tight spaces, and could slip through a window faster than most people can run through a door,” Scratch said. His little testimonial sounded like a eulogy. “I’ve seen him slide up old drainpipes that a squirrel wouldn’t have trusted. He was an urban cliff climber, like maybe he was raised by mountain goats.”

  “Then why was his police record so long?” Kit said. “How’d he get caught so often?”

  “Sometimes he was as smart as a goat too.”

  Scratch pulled his legs up and rested his heels on the sofa. For an instant, some fatherly instinct in Billy wanted to order those dirty shoes off the furniture, but Billy reminded himself that this was not his house, and Scratch Gleason was not Bo Povich.

  Scratch continued, “Adam was a stupid fuck sometimes, no common sense. He always assumed things would work out for the best. He couldn’t see the hazards of a particular job, and didn’t plan for contingencies. You can’t just assume that everybody keeps their best silverware in a sui
tcase in the curio cabinet, right? You can’t just assume that a middle-class house won’t have a silent alarm—things like that.” He clicked his tongue. “But managing risk is something I understand, so the partnership worked … mostly.”

  “You’ve been in jail too, haven’t you?” Kit asked.

  “Aw shit,” he said, “nothing but a few months of shock time from some hard-ass judge who thought he’d scare me straight. What he did was scare the recklessness out of me. Did me a favor. Made me a better crook than I ever was.” He flashed a yellow-toothed smile at Kit. “That’s why I insisted we unload as much merchandise as possible over the Internet. It’s slow and labor-intensive for us, but anonymous and safe so long as you space out the items.” He made a chewing motion, as if he had gum, and suddenly seemed to be enjoying himself. People do love to boast about what they’re good at.

  Billy snapped his fingers twice to get Scratch’s attention, as he would to a dog. Scratch glared at him for breaking the mood. Billy demanded, “Tell us about Rackers’s connection to Judge Harmony.”

  Scratch turned his palms up at Billy, as if to push away any accusation. “I told you I had nothing to do with that. Adam never mentioned going back to Harmony’s place.”

  Going back … ?

  Billy and Kit exchanged urgent looks.

  Her eyes narrowed in rage. Her fists clenched, as if she were holding two imaginary ice picks.

  Scratch watched their faces in horror, realizing he must have slipped up, but not yet seeing how. His eyes wandered, looking backward over the past few seconds, until his eyelids slowly closed, his lips tightened, and understanding spread over his face. He lowered his head into his hands. “I never actually went into the judge’s condo,” he said, speaking in the general direction of Billy’s shoes. “And I never even saw the beach house, or even knew about it. That was all Adam.”

  They waited in silence for a few moments. There was no need to pepper Scratch with any more questions. Hiding behind his hands, he gave them what they had come for:

  “A couple weeks before Adam shot the judge, he had an idea to break into some pricey condos downtown, you know? Some corporate apartments and executive city homes, that kind of thing.”

  “Judge Harmony’s condo,” Kit said.

  “Adam ran the addresses through a real estate database,” Scratch explained. “The judge was on TV all the time—had written all them books. He had big dough. So yeah, his place was a good mark. I didn’t even know he had another house in Charlestown. And I didn’t know he had a wife or a kid, none of that. We cased the building a few nights. Not just Harmony’s apartment, the whole complex, but we noticed the judge’s schedule. He traveled a lot. Spent half his nights in some other bed, hmmm? Rich men like a change of scenery sometimes. They get bored easy.”

  Billy thought of Nelida and Jerod, the judge’s secret second family.

  Change of scenery, all right.

  He thought of his father, too, looking to see the scenery beyond this world. The old man was bored with who he was, and what he had to do to survive. Just like the old man’s marriage—when he got bored, he skipped. Billy’s mind played with the odd sight of his father at a hotel bar in a faraway city, milking a whiskey, flashing his blue eyes and testing pickup lines on the Grim Reaper.

  Miss Reaper, haven’t we met before?

  If we had, you’d know it.

  You have lovely bone structure.

  Call me Grim.

  “You listening, man?” Scratch asked. “’Cause I don’t wanna tell it all over.”

  Billy extinguished the daydream. “You watched the judge’s place. Fine. Saw a bunch of executives taking their comattas home for the evening. What happened the night of the break-in?”

  “Adam did the entry. A thing of beauty. Used the condo’s landscaping to his advantage. Shimmied a thirty-foot white birch. At the top, he leaned his weight toward the building, bent the tree, and rode it like a parachute to a second-story balcony. Once he let go, the tree snapped back—no ladder for us to hide. See? You’d be surprised how many paranoid people put three deadbolts on the front door but don’t lock the slider to the balcony.” He clapped a hand on his knee and marveled, “My God, Adam was fuckin’ talented. We were such a great team, man. We could steal anything. Adam once told me, ‘Together, we could loot the moon.’

  “On this night at the condos, I stayed below with a garbage bag. Adam went in and out of the apartments. The balconies are only about four feet apart, so he just stepped across the railings. About half the places were open. He’d duck in while I kept watch. He didn’t dare use a light, so he’d just grab what he could find in one or two minutes and send it down to me in a pillowcase on twenty feet of twine. Most of the stuff was crap, but this was like beachcombing. You dig up a dozen bottlecaps for every silver dollar.” He chuckled and sneaked a peak at Billy, who glared the grin right off Scratch’s face.

  “At Harmony’s apartment, he was inside a long time. Felt like five full minutes, but might have been less. He came out in a hurry. Jumped back down.”

  “He jumped?” Kit asked, incredulous. “From the second story? Don’t be bullshitting us, Gary.”

  Scratch cringed at the use of his real name. “It’s not such a hard jump,” he insisted. “The floor of the balcony is twenty feet off the ground. Adam was almost six feet tall, and closer to eight feet when he hung by his arms. That means when he was hanging from the bottom of the balcony, his shoes were twelve feet from the ground. Big whoopee. He landed on damp dirt and cedar chips. Adam made jumps better than that all the time. We both did. Anybody could. Just don’t forget to roll on impact.” He looked up to see if anybody challenged his math. Nobody did.

  “I pulled him up when he landed,” Scratch continued, adding a shrug to indicate this was where the story got fuzzy. “He told me he almost got caught, that somebody got the drop on him, and we had to bug outta there. Like I said, I’m the cautious one, so I started to run. Adam grabbed my shirt and told me to chill. ‘Let’s just walk and not attract attention,’ he said. He told me not to look back. Just keep walking. When we got back home, he wasn’t interested in going through the shit we stole. Told me to split it myself, because he trusted me.”

  “And was that unusual?” Billy asked.

  Scratch rolled his eyes. “We’re crooks, man.”

  “Forget I asked,” Billy said, feeling a little silly.

  “Adam and I didn’t work together much after that,” Scratch said.

  Billy smiled at his semantics. Didn’t work together. Since when was stealing and running street cons considered work? Hammering rivets or teaching sixth grade is work. Even typing obituaries in the middle of the night—as glamorous as peeling vegetables, and nearly as well paying—at least offered a firm claim on honest work.

  “We both always did solo jobs—nothing we ever talked about, you see? So I didn’t think much about it, until Adam got himself killed in that car wreck.” He leaned his head back and looked up to a ceiling stained with blotches of mildew, like a fading Jackson Pollock masterpiece in green, black, and brown.

  “I never could have imagined Adam doing something violent like that,” Scratch said. “That wasn’t his personality. Maybe the judge threatened him, and Adam wrestled the gun away, um … and then shot him accidentally, or in self-defense.”

  Kit mocked him with a snort and a laugh.

  “That’s the only explanation I can think of,” Scratch offered.

  “It’s bullshit,” Kit barked. “Think again.”

  Scratch seemed to tire of Kit’s acerbity. “I knew Adam,” he informed her with a jab of a pinkie in her direction. “My wingman wouldn’t have killed anybody. He was harmless … . At least the way I knew him he was.” Scratch spread his hands. “He slept right here on this sofa, for Christ’s sake. Would I have let a killer sleep in my pad? Adam was spiritual. He thought of himself as the good thief.”

  “Saint Dismas,” Billy said.

  “Hey … how did you know t
hat?”

  Billy ignored him. He took a step backward into the bathroom and looked over the sofa. What a strong spine Rackers must have had to sleep on that sagging thing. He imagined Rackers stretched out there, asleep with no sheet, under a threadbare cotton thermal blanket. Billy couldn’t help thinking that a legal giant such as Judge Gilbert Harmony should have been slain by somebody more impressive.

  Of course, Harmony had been killed by somebody bigger—whoever had hired the triggerman. Though Billy had doubted Martin’s theory in the beginning, he had come to believe it as strongly as his winning hunches. His eyes settled on the wooden storage trunk set like an end table at the side of the sofa.

  “Is that his?” Billy asked.

  “Nothing valuable left in there,” Scratch said. They stared at him, and he shrank defensively. “What was I supposed to do? He owed me his half of the rent. So I hocked his Harry Winston wristwatch. Do you think he’s squirming in the coffin, wondering what time it is?”

  Billy brushed a pile of T-shirts off the box and flipped open the lid. Shoes and papers, old receipts, compact discs, hardcover books, and a hundred other odds and ends filled the box halfway, like an oversized junk drawer. Billy plucked a stubby plastic cylinder from the mess and held it to his eye.

  “Is that it?” Kit asked.

  “Is what?” said Scratch.

  “A loupe,” Billy explained. He tossed it to Kit, who snatched it and studied the lines in her own palm. “It’s for examining precious stones—diamonds, for instance.”

  “We didn’t have any stones,” Scratch said, cautiously. He seemed to detect a trap in Billy’s tone. “Adam and me liked home electronics and high-end clothing … common household stuff. One-of-a-kind items, like family heirlooms, are too hard to sell. See? Internet auction sites have ten thousand identical digital music players for sale, and who knows which ones fell off the back of a truck? You guys sailing on my drift? I’m first mate on the good ship Anonymous.”