The Killing Moon: A Novel

"Bullshit. I do need you. It has to be you. Can't you see that?"

The inflated smile was gone now, supplanted by something like panic and dying pride. He didn't want to be too sharp with her, afraid she might go off flying around his driveway like a stuck balloon. "No, I can't."

"Can you ignore the fact that you owe me?"

"Owe you?" It took him only a second. "The scholarship."

"Yes, the scholarship. Yes, that is what I'm still talking about. Poor me, right? Still clinging to this—right? Do you know what it was like? To have this whole entire town against me, for who my father was, and my freak brother? No one wanted to waste that scholarship on me. They wanted to give it to their favorite son. Somebody who'd make something of himself, who'd amount to something. Not an art student from a bad family. What's she going to bring back to Black Falls?"

"Val."

"But who wound up wasting it? Who was the one who squandered that opportunity—for the town, and yes, for himself? Only to bounce back here fifteen years later with nothing to show for it? That chance you burned, you let slip through your fingers? That was my life, Donny. That was mine. Do you deny that you could never have won that scholarship without Chief Pinty behind you? Without his hand on your shoulder? Can you deny that now?"

"It was one-tenth of a percentage point, Val."

"You don't understand. You should want this. You should want the chance to make this right. As a man. This is why you came back here in the first place—don't you know that? This is why you came here. Righting a wrong is the closest thing we have to going back in time."

Maddox thought of Ripsbaugh, what he had said about her needing a stone for her chain. "I'm sorry, Val. I am. But I don't think I'm responsible for whatever—"

"Is this about the farm girl?"

"What did you say?"

"You heard me." Her face was twisted now, as though a mask had been snatched away but the adhesive still stung. "I came by here last night, or tried to. Saw a truck leave your garage. Saw her behind the wheel. You don't think she's a little young?"

"Have you been watching me?"

"Are you going away with her? Going to have babies?"

"Val." The anger in her face chilled him. "Jesus."

She shoved hair off her face so that he would have an unfettered view of her contempt. "You owe me, Donny Maddox. You owe me a chance."

Maddox felt heat coming up his neck. How quickly compassion can turn to enmity when someone forces her mania on you. When someone assigns you responsibility for her own frustrations. This came to him in his driveway like a lesson.

Val said, "You could live with yourself? Leaving me here? The same way you left your mother?"

He nodded, not in answer to her question, but in acknowledgment of her audacity in throwing down the kicker: the Queen of Spades with his mother's face on it. "That's the way to hurt me, all right."

"Hurt you? Hurt you? How can you be hurt? You're skating through life. Hands behind your back, gliding along."

"Go home, Val."

"And talk to my husband, right? Discuss? You think Kane knows me?"

"I'm sure no one knows you."

"That's exactly right."

She looked at him with the pity of a madwoman, throwing open her car door and driving away.

PART V

AN INSTRUMENT OF VENGEANCE

56

MADDOX

NEXT MORNING, WHILE waiting for his toast to come up, Maddox heard a thump. A goodly weighted noise, followed by a lesser bump, coming from the rear of his house. An unnatural thump.

The mind takes unexpecteds such as these and tries to shape them into something understandable, tries to assign them meaning.

The mental image Maddox assigned to this noise was that of Dillon Sinclair stepping onto his back deck.

So powerful was the force of this image—the black wig and clothes, the eyebrowless eyes—that Maddox moved to his closet, getting down his holster from the top shelf. He undid the trigger lock in what seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, then moved to the sliding glass door off the serving area.

He stepped out into the wet heat, his revolver at his side. No one on the deck, the backyard empty. He scanned the trees around the yard and listened for movement. Then he saw the twisted black lump on the deck.

Closer, he made out the velvet fringe of wings. A dead crow, eyes and beak still open, its neck broken.

Maddox looked at the near trees, his mind still jumping with implications—Who threw a dead bird onto my deck?—until he realized that the thump, so solid and quick, had been this bird striking the window. The bump that followed was its dead body falling to the wood.

You want omens? he thought. We got omens. A town full of them. Deer running antler-first into your car. Crows flying full speed at your house. Nature dispatching its assassins.