Loot the Moon

by Mark Arsenault

Your answer to lost pets!

  The F.I.D.O. Global Positioning System device attaches easily

  to your dog’s collar.

  Shock tested and water resistant.

  The F.I.D.O. unit sends out a silent signal detected by GPS

  satellites anywhere in America.

  The system allows you to easily pinpoint the location

  of your lost pet through our Web site.

  Accurate to 30 feet!

  No more calls to the pound. No more “lost dog” posters.

  Get F.I.D.O. for your pet and sleep soundly tonight!

  Scratch read the advertising again. He grabbed the device. What the hell … ?

  A GPS locator beacon?

  And it already had the batteries … .

  A chill combed over his skin.

  “Oh, no.”

  It’s … goddamn … turned … on.

  “Fuck!” he cried.

  He threw down the device like a hot hunk of charcoal, grabbed the pipe, and bashed F.I.D.O. to S.H.I.T.

  He hit it five more times than necessary, and then dropped the weapon and crushed his fists into his eyes. They were onto him! How could Scratch have let this happen? He slapped his open hand on his forehead.

  Slap. Slap. Slap.

  “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” he berated himself.

  Okay, stop hitting your own head and fucking THINK!

  No time to waste. This motor lodge would be his tomb.

  Gotta go!

  He stripped a pillowcase and dashed around the room, ransacking the place, stuffing his valuables in the bag in a panic, as if he were robbing himself. As he gathered his essentials, he thought ahead.

  Time for Plan B.

  Drive!

  One-half tank of gas in the car. Not a problem. Can always gas up on the interstate. With the seasons growing colder and winter on the way, he would head south.

  No! That’s what they’d be expecting.

  Haaaa-ha-ha! Scratch would drive north.

  Not so far as Canada—no sense trying to cross an international border in a junkyard car with bogus plates.

  How ’bout Maine! What’s that rhyme? The rain in Maine is wetter than Spain. Or something like that. Whatever! He would go to Maine, way up there, near the Arctic Circle for Christ’s sake, past Bar Harbor, to the frozen tundra where the tourists rarely trod.

  That’s untamed land, where a man could find a fresh start, shoplifting from department stores and selling shit on the Internet.

  Scratch heaved the dresser out of the way, threw open the locks, and ran out with a Santa sack of his own stuff over his back.

  The Ford’s door opened with a meow and Scratch heaved the pillowcase to the passenger’s side. Remember to drive the speed limit, he reminded himself. Don’t get pulled over for bad plates. The keys jingled. His hands would not stop shaking. He pumped the gas and stabbed the key at the ignition.

  The rope was a blur.

  It came from behind, slipped quickly before his eyes, then clamped tight above his Adam’s apple.

  He didn’t have time to scream. The rope tightened around his throat and choked his scream back down.

  Scratch pulled and writhed against the rope that strangled. He kicked his feet and flailed his arms, bashed his elbow against the window, tried to twist away, but the rope just cinched tighter around his neck. He picked desperately at the rope with his fingernails and ravaged his own skin. The man choking him from the backseat breathed heavily in his ear. The gurgle Scratch heard was from his own throat. In the mirror he saw the eyes of his attacker, those dead gray eyes from the shower.

  How goddamn stupid. Always check the backseat.

  Scratch smelled rubber, asphalt, and oil. His cheek rested on a tire. A spare tire? He was in blackness, folded up in the trunk of a car.

  My car, by the sound of it.

  The engine wound dangerously high. They were going fast.

  His chest made a wet whistling as he inhaled. His damaged windpipe seared with pain. His hand explored the damage, found his throat, burned raw, and the rope coiled around it. He fingered the cord around his neck. Nothing but nylon clothesline rope. Probably cost twenty cents a yard. Something you’d hang your wet knickers on.

  He knew there would be no negotiating when the car stopped. He could not speak, nor fight, nor hope for escape. He could not even lift his head from the tire. Why had he even woken up? These extra moments of consciousness were unnecessary, he thought, even cruel. Only by accident did Scratch still live, and not for long. The attacker had one reason to be driving the car.

  To dump the body.

  Scratch faded out again.

  If he dreamt, he did not remember. A car door slammed and the vibrations woke him. The engine was off. He heard the crash of waves. Gulls squawked. They were at the beach.

  Footsteps circled the car. They sounded hollow. Like a man walking on a dock.

  Scratch heard a grunt and a low “Eeeeee!” Someone strained himself against a heavy load.

  He felt slight movement and heard the wheels grind forward. The footsteps followed behind the car. They got faster and faster, until they became the sound of running. Why was he pushing the sedan? Had they run out of gas?

  And then the footsteps stopped.

  Scratch was thrown against the trunk lid when the car hit the water. The Ford bobbed once, and then the bay poured inside. Frigid. Salty.

  I’m singing in my brain.

  Just singin’ in my brain.

  He was not worried for his soul. Heck, he was a swell guy. He had robbed the middle class to give to himself, but never hurt anybody. If the decision were left to Scratch, he would have enough compassion to forgive himself, and open up those platinum gates.

  Is God any less compassionate than I?

  He said a funny little prayer for justice, not through the cops or the courts; he never trusted either.

  He prayed for Povich.

  twenty-four

  Billy slept with his hands folded on his chest like a dead person. Bo twirled the flashlight beam over his father’s eyes until he was sure that Billy was asleep. Then he turned out his light, and he and Albert Einstein went on their mission. With Mr. Einstein held tightly to his chest, Bo did not feel alone. He did not have to wear a mask, as he once did, in order to have the courage to complete his mission.

  He listened to Grandpa mumbling inside his room. Grandpa was making another tape for Bo for when Grandpa was dead. The mumbling scared Bo. It sounded like witches.

  He padded silently along the hall and stepped down to Mr. Metts’s funeral home, one stair at a time. The new red carpet felt good on his bare feet.

  Six white couches lined the walls in the waiting room. That was where Mr. Metts kept his telescope, which Bo liked to play with, but not right now. Mr. Metts had set up three rows of folding chairs in the center of the room. That meant a dead person was there. Bo hurried past the brown coffin. “Be right back,” he promised. The flowers stank and his nose itched. The carpet in this room was not as soft as the stairs but it still felt good.

  The coffin in the next room was black and silver. It lay flat on a low table. The bundles of roses beside the coffin were black too. Bo was afraid of them. They bloomed big and healthy and they smelled good, but they looked dead. He hurried through the room.

  In a hallway, he stopped at a white door marked with a gold sign that said PRIVATE. He dug a key out from under the carpet, as Mr. Metts had showed him, and unlocked the door to visit his friend Sal.

  Inside the closet, Sal’s coffin stood on one end. Bo got a little scared and crushed Mr. Einstein in his armpit. He peered up to the glass window set in the coffin, and to the gray face with black witch’s hair in the window.

  “Hello, Sal,” he said. “It’s me.”

  Bo knew Sal’s story by heart. Sal was part of the traveling circus in 1929. Maybe he had been a clown, but Bo did not know. When the circus came to Providence, Sal died. Mr. Metts’s grandfather was supposed to bury Sal
, but he did not get paid. So he made Sal a special coffin with a window and put him on display, until Sal’s family would give him the $125 they owed for the burial. The family never paid.

  Bo saved all his money, every nickel he got from Billy and his grandpa, to bury Sal.

  “We’re up to fifty-three dollars,” Bo said. “I thought you’d be happy.” He looked at the corpse, saw the stitches through the lips, and looked away. “I’m not wearing my mask, because I have Mr. Einstein. Grandpa gave me a paper tube to roll my dimes.” He laid a hand on the shiny brown wood. “When you get buried you’ll see my mom. She won’t be alone anymore.” He felt he might cry and he shut the door. He moved Mr. Einstein to his other arm. Then he cracked the door and whispered inside. “I have to go, Sal. I want to say good night to the others.”

  Bo locked the door and returned the key.

  He went to the room with the black coffin. He stood beside the casket for a minute. Then he reached out with Mr. Einstein and lightly brushed the doll’s long white hair on the black wood. Nothing bad happened. He let Einstein rest on a chair, and then went to the coffin again. He held his flashlight in one hand. The coffin had two doors, a big one and a small one. He pressed his palms under the small door and pushed.

  The dead person inside was a man. He was very old.

  He looked like he was sleeping but Bo knew he was dead.

  Fear shook Bo’s arms. He could barely speak. He whispered, “Hello, sir. Tomorrow you’ll be buried and then you won’t be alone. Good night.”

  He quickly lowered the lid. Then he snatched up Mr. Einstein and hugged him until he stopped trembling.

  Two more to go.

  The person in the next coffin was a woman. She was very old, like all the dead people he visited. She held pink rosary beads in her hands and looked like maybe she had been saying them when she died. Bo spoke to her as he had the man, and then let down the lid.

  The third coffin was deep inside the funeral home, down a long hallway that was very dark. Bo lit his flashlight. The shadows on the walls looked like monsters. He held up Mr. Einstein to lead the way, and followed the doll.

  The last coffin was white. He gasped when he saw it. It was very small.

  It was the size of a boy.

  Bo stepped slowly toward it. His feet did not want to go but he made them do it. They had to do what Bo wanted. The carpet in this room was scratchy. He wished he had his mask. This coffin had two doors like the others but the doors were the same size. He didn’t know which one to lift. Bo stroked the white wood with Mr. Einstein’s hair. Then he tucked the doll down his shirt so Mr. Einstein was hugging him.

  He pushed up one of the lids.

  Inside were a little boy’s legs and feet. The legs wore black pants and white sneakers, small enough to fit Bo.

  This dead person was not old. Bo’s arms quaked and the lid dropped. The noise startled him.

  He yelped and collapsed to the floor, in tears.

  He backed away, whimpering, clutching his doll, terrified of the dead boy in the tiny white casket. Bo and Mr. Einstein ran away from him.

  twenty-five

  Bo dozed over his oatmeal, head on his fist, elbow on the table. His other hand still gripped the spoon stuck in the bowl.

  “Look at that kid,” Billy whispered.

  “I told you oatmeal was boring,” said the old man.

  “And what’s with the outfit today?”

  Bo wore his school clothes: new blue jeans, a collared polo shirt, and fleece sweater with the Flying Elvis logo of the New England Patriots. But instead of his little white tennis sneakers, the kid had paired tube socks with the shiny leather dress shoes from his church out fit.

  “Bo?” Billy called.

  The kid woke with a startled look. His hand jerked and the spoon flung oatmeal like a catapult against the kitchen cabinet. The gob stuck there for several seconds, and the three Povich men watched in rapt fascination as the oatmeal slowly unglued itself from the cabinet door and hit the counter with a splat.

  Ziggs had seen enough; the cat jumped from the table and fled.

  “You should never wake a sleep-eater,” the old man scolded.

  “Why are you so tired this morning, Bo?” Billy asked.

  “I’m not tired.”

  “Did you not sleep well last night?”

  The kid shrugged and heaved a giant spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth. “Can’t talk wit’ my mou’ full,” he said.

  The old man chuckled at Billy. “He’s using your own rules against you.”

  “Where’s Mr. Einstein?” Billy asked.

  The boy looked away and chewed. “He’s busy. Has a new job. Top secret.”

  Billy’s son was still such a mystery to him. After Angie was killed, the boy seemed to handle the death of his mother better than Billy had survived the loss of an ex-wife. How someone so small could be so tough … Billy turned away and blinked the tears from his eyes. Mr. Einstein was “busy” in Bo-speak, which meant that the doll was gone. It had been replaced by some other coping system, the way the doll had replaced the Halloween masks the boy used to wear around the house to give him courage to face the pain little children were not meant to see. The timing could not have been worse. The child was terrified of being alone. And he had abandoned his crutch right as his grandfather had decided to let himself die.

  “Maybe you should stay home from school today,” Billy suggested.

  “Whaaaaat?” the old man whined. “He needs to learn.”

  “He can’t learn if he’s asleep in class.”

  “But he’s already missed too much school already, coming to the hospital for my treatments, visiting Stu Tracy. Do you want him to fail?”

  “I want him to be healthy.”

  The old man’s tone softened. He reached out his gray corpse hand and smoothed the boy’s hair. “I can’t watch him proper today,” he said. “I got dirty blood and I feel like hell.”

  “I’ll stick around and watch him.”

  “What about your investigation?”

  Billy sighed. “I’m at a dead end,” he confessed. “I’ve traced the shooter back to his last apartment, and proven, at least in my own mind, that somebody paid him to kill the judge. But I can’t make the leap to the next link in the chain.”

  Bo sipped milk. He watched Billy over the rim of the glass. Then he wiped his milk mustache on his sleeve, and announced: “I want to go to school today.”

  “The kid doesn’t want to be a ditchdigger, thank God,” grumbled the old man.

  “You sure, Bo?” Billy asked.

  The kid shrugged, sipped more milk, and then explained, “Mr. Metts will have three funerals downstairs today.”

  Huh … ? What was he saying? That he didn’t want to listen to three eulogies through the floor? That he was tired of living above a transfer station for human remains?

  “Do you want us to move, Bo?”

  The kid shrank from Billy. He grabbed the table. “I never want to leave. Ever.”

  He drove Billy speechless.

  The phone rang.

  “I got it,” Billy offered, and threw himself from the table.

  “You wanna wake up for school?” the old man asked. “Try some coffee. Makes you all tingly inside. Math is easy on coffee.”

  Billy sighed and carried the cordless down the hall. That was all the kid needed—drugs to make him more hyper. The phone chimed again in his hand.

  “Yeah, hello?”

  “Billy, man,” a low voice purred. “I’m glad I caught you home. Heh-heh. A man in my position don’t leave his voice on tape.”

  Garafino!

  Billy instinctively clutched his wallet, then covered his thrice-broken nose.

  Wait a sec … I’m all paid up with this guy. “You got me mixed up with some other client. I’m current with you.”

  The shark laughed. “Billy, man, you’re my favorite. When you need cash, you call me first.”

  “I’ll try the bank next time.”
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  “Fuck the banks, man! When you don’t pay them, they give you a lot worse than a punch in the mouth. How long does one punch hurt? A few days? The bankers kill your credit for the rest of your life.” He laughed again. Then his voice fell; he grew serious and sounded like he was talking out the corner of his mouth: “You, er, still looking to get to Rhubarb Glanz?”

  Billy switched the phone to his other ear. He watched Bo sip from the old man’s coffee mug and make a sour face.

  “You there, Billy?”

  “Yeah. How do I find him?”

  “That big Catholic cemetery, man, in Cranston? It’s like the only place he goes alone. Later this afternoon, four o’clock, when the cemetery kicks out all the cars and locks the gate. Officially, the place is closed at four, but they don’t mind if one old man walks around the gates. You’ll know him. He’ll be the dude dropping roses on his old lady’s grave. Sweet, ain’t he?”

  “What are my liabilities?”

  “Better than usual. No guns in the cemetery, and no goons. Glanz likes to keep these visits in the family. Just his fucked-up kid, Robbie, who’ll drive him to the gates, and then wait in the car on the street. But be careful. Robbie’s protective of his old man …”

  “I’ve noticed that.”

  “ … so you’ll have to neutralize the son if you wanna whack the papa.”

  Billy flushed with anger. “I don’t want to kill him, you goddamn maniac, I want to talk to him.”

  Garafino giggled, showing a sense of humor Billy never saw when he owed Garafino money. “Call it what you want,” the shark said. “Just leave my name out of it.”

  “You’re taking a chance telling me these things,” Billy said, suspicious all of a sudden. “Why help me?”

  “Oh, dude, ’cause you’re a good shit and I like you, man.”

  “That’s crap. Why are you helping me?”

  The shark paused. Billy heard the flick, flick of a cigarette lighter. And then a deep breath, and a long, slow exhale. Funny, the power of the mind—Billy swore he could smell smoke.

  “I’m helping you, Billy, because I’m into some things, okay? Things that are so fucked up you would not even believe it. Dangerous things. Heh-heh. Loan sharking ain’t half of it. I’m gonna need my friends. I built up a lot of favors over the years, but the people who owe me are all snakes, see? They’d shoot their own mothers for cab fare and doughnuts. I think it’s in my best interest to know at least one honest man who owes me a favor.”