Winter Moon

Each boy was holding cash in one hand, a wallet in the other, waiting

expectantly.

She almost didn't ask the next question, then decided she'd better:

"Any of you have credit cards?"

Incredibly, two of them did. High-school students with credit cards.

The boy she had driven backward into the wall had American Express and

Visa cards. The boy with the Rolex had a Mastercard.

Staring at them, meeting their troubled eyes in the moonlight, she took

solace from the certainty that most kids weren't like these three.

Most were struggling to deal with an immoral world in a moral fashion,

and they would finish growing up to be good people. Maybe even these

brats would be all right eventually, one or two of them, anyway. But

what was the percentage who'd lost their moral compass these days, not

merely among teenagers but in any age group? Ten percent? Surely

more. So much street crime and white-collar crime, so much lying and

cheating, greed and envy. Twenty percent? And what percentage could a

democracy tolerate before it collapsed?

"Throw your wallets on the sidewalk," she said, indicating a spot

beside her.

They did as instructed.

"Put the cash and credit cards in your pockets."

Looking perplexed, they did that too.

"I don't want your money. I'm no petty criminal like you."

Holding the revolver in her right hand, she gathered up the wallets

with her left. She stood and backed away from them, refusing to favor

her right foot, until she came up against the garage wall.

She didn't ask them any of the questions that had been running through

her mind. Their answers--if they had any answers--would be glib. She

was sick of glibness. The modern world creaked along on a lubricant of

facile lies, oily evasions, slick self-justifications.

"All I want is your identification," Heather said, raising the fist in

which she clenched the wallets. "This'll tell me who you are, where I

can find you. You ever give us any more grief, you so much as drive by

and spit on the front lawn, I'll come after all of you, take my time,

catch you at just the right moment." She cocked the hammer on the

Korth, and their gazes all dropped from her eyes to the gun. "Bigger

gun than this, higher-caliber ammunition, something with a hollow

point, shoot you in the leg and it shatters the bone so bad they have

to amputate. Shoot you in both legs, you're in a wheelchair the rest

of your life. Maybe one of you gets it in the balls, so you can't

bring any more like you into the world."

The moon slid behind clouds.

The night was deep.

From the backyard came the coarse singing of toads.

The three boys stared at her, not sure that she meant for them to go.

They had expected to be turned over to the police.

That, of course, was. out of the question. She had hurt two of

them.

Each of the injured still had a hand cupped tenderly over his crotch,

and both were grimacing with pain. Furthermore, she had threatened

them with a gun outside her home. The argument against her would be

that they had represented no real threat because they hadn't crossed

her threshold. Although they had spraypainted her house with hateful

and obscene graffiti on three separate occasions, though they had done

financial and emotional damage to her and her child, she knew that

being the wife of a heroic cop was no guarantee against prosecution on

a variety of charges that inevitably would result in her imprisonment

instead of theirs.

"Get out of here," she said.

They rose to their feet but then hesitated as if afraid she would shoot

them in the back.

"Go," she said. "Now."

At last they hurried past her, along the side of the house, and she

followed at a distance to be sure they actually cleared out. They kept

glancing back at her.

On the front lawn, standing in the dew-damp grass, she got a good look

at what they had done to at least two and possibly three sides of the

house. The red, yellow, and sour-apple-green paint seemed to glow in

the light of the streetlamps. They had scrawled their personal tagger

symbols everywhere, and they had favored the F-word with and without a

variety of suffixes, as noun and verb and adjective. But the central

message was as it had been the previous two times they'd struck: KILLER

COP.

The three boys--two of them limping--reached their car, which was

parked nearly a block to the north. A black Infinity. They took off

with a squeal of spinning tires, leaving clouds of blue smoke in their

wake.

KILLER COP.

WIDOWMAKER.

ORPHANMAKER.

Heather was more deeply disturbed by the irrationality of the graffiti

than by the confrontation with the three taggers. Jack had not been to

blame. He'd been doing his duty. How was he supposed to have taken a

machine gun from a homicidal maniac without resorting to lethal

force?

She was overcome with a feeling that civilization was sinking in a sea

of mindless hatred.

ANSON OLIVER LIVES!

Anson Oliver was the maniac with the Micro Uzi, a promising young film

director with three features released in the past four years. Not

surprisingly, he made angry movies about angry people. Since the