The Killing Moon: A Novel

"I'd say Revolutionary War people are optimists. Birth of a nation and all that. Brightly colored uniforms, fireworks in the sky—right? World War Two people, they seem sort of downbeat. Drab and tough and dirty. We won, but at what cost? Realists. But Civil War people—I would say we are humanists. You know, brother against brother, a nation divided. People interested in people, in their fellow countrymen."

"And slow readers."

"That too. Did you bring lunch? Since we never actually ate, I thought maybe I could—"

"I did bring something, yeah."

She shook her head in the darkness of the room, pushing past his reluctance. "Well, do you want some company when you take your forty? A midnight lunch, like the first time—"

"I can't. Not tonight."

She lay very still in order that he wouldn't hear the pillow crunching or the mattress creaking or any other sounds of distress. "You have to be somewhere later?"

"I do."

"Okay," she said. She moved her head a little, just to clue him in. "And I'm not going to take that the wrong way. I'm not going to overreact."

"Good."

"I'm definitely not going to think you're meeting Wanda."

"You know I'm not."

"Of course I do." She let some silence play. "Of course."

"The badge and the gun, they mean something in a town full of nothing. To some people. That's all that is."

Not me, she thought. She wished he would take them both off, and for good. She pictured him there at the station with his book open on his lap, wondering why he bothered with her at all. "Is this humiliating call going to be saved forever on tape?"

"I switched off the recorder when the Sam Lake address came up."

"You're lucky she's so gross, you know. I mean—lucky."

"I do know it."

"I can tell by your voice, you're smiling."

"I can tell by yours, you're lying down. In bed?"

"I was worried you were going to try and hand me some bullshit. Like that she was in trouble or something. Like you were 'helping' her."

"What are you wearing?"

"Uh-uh," she said. "No way."

"I can tell by your voice," he said, "you're smiling."

"Just tell me that all this sneaking around is really necessary."

"All this sneaking around is really necessary."

"I don't know how cops' wives do it. I really can't imagine."

"You can't?"

She couldn't believe he had just said that. "Don't play with me. Mr. 'I'll-never-lie-to-you.' Mr. 'I'll-be-brutally-honest-when-it's-time-to-break-your-heart.'"

Across the silence of the phone line, she broadcast her thoughts: Ask me to go away with you. See how fast I can pack.

Yet the shame of this secret desire, her guilty ambition, reddened her cheeks. She thought of the barn, the llamas sleeping under the summer moon, and everything she had to do after dawn. But especially her mother, in her bed in the room across the hall. How profoundly the deaf sleep.

13

CULLEN

"SUMMER MORNINGS," said Cullen. "The air, before it heats up? Nothing like it. A gift. This is the only time of year when I don't question what the hell are we doing still living here."

Maddox, taciturn Maddox, sat over his food across from Cullen in the red vinyl booth.

"Must be nice for you these days," said Cullen, pursuing him, "seeing the sun come up. I don't imagine that happened much in your previous incarnations."

Maddox picked apart his omelet with the precision of a laboratory scientist, exposing and extracting cubes of Canadian bacon, chunks of green pepper and mushroom, inspecting each before allowing them into his mouth. "Not really."

Cullen surveyed his own lumberjack special, which had seemed like such a good idea when he ordered it. Now he'd be knocked out all morning, bloated and yawning.

Cullen sponged up some blueberry syrup, washed it down with a gulp of coffee. He looked out the window of the pancake house, cars curling around the rotary and up the highway ramps. Rainfield was a midsized town of strip malls, fast food, and on-the-go convenience massed like plaque at the arterial interchange of a north-south interstate and an east-west route. Not much to look at, and even less to visit, but with its Best Buy, Kohl's, chain restaurants, and a six-screen movie theater, to the scratch towns of northern Mitchum County it was a metropolis. The region's Las Vegas.