Winter Moon

that maybe, just maybe, their year of tumult was not yet at an end.

The Micro Uzi had two magazines welded at right angles, giving it a

forty-round capacity. The heft of it was reassuring. More than two

kilos of death waiting to be dispensed. He couldn't imagine any

enemy--wild creature or man--that the Uzi couldn't handle. He put the

Korth in the top right-hand desk drawer, toward the back. He closed

the drawer and left the study with the other two weapons. Before

slipping past the living room, Jack waited until he heard Toby

laughing, then glanced around the corner of the archway. The boy was

focused on the TV, Falstaff at his side. Jack hurried to the kitchen

at the end of the hall, where he put the Uzi in the pantry, behind

extra boxes of cornflakes, Cheerios, and shredded wheat that wouldn't

be opened for at least a week.

Upstairs in the master bedroom, breezy music played behind the closed

door to the adjoining bathroom. Soaking in the tub, Heather had turned

the radio to a goldenoldies station. "Dreamin' " by Johnny Burnette

was just winding down. Jack pushed the Mossberg under the bed, far

enough back so she wouldn't notice it when they made the bed in the

morning but not so far back that he couldn't get hold of it in a

hurry.

"Poetry in Motion." Johnny Tillotson. Music from an innocent age.

Jack hadn't even been born yet when that record had been made. He sat

on the edge of the bed, listening to the music, feeling mildly guilty

about not sharing his fears with Heather. But he just didn't want to

upset her needlessly.

She'd been through so much. In some ways, his being wounded and

hospitalized had been harder on her than him. because she'd been

required to bear alone the pressures of day-to-day existence while he'd

recuperated. She needed a reprieve from tension. Probably nothing to

worry about, anyway. few sick raccoons. A bold little crow. A

strange experience in a cemetery which was suitably creepy itial for

some television show like Unsolved Mysteries but hadn't been as

threatening to life and limb as of a hundred things that could happen

in the average police officer's workday.

Loading and secreting the guns would most likely prove to have been an

overreaction. .. Well, he'd done what a cop should do. Prepared

himself to serve and protect.

On the radio in the bathroom, Bobby Vee was singing

"The Night Has a

Thousand Eyes."

Beyond the bedroom windows, snow was falling harder than before. The

flakes, previously fluffy and wet, were now small, more numerous, and

dry. The ..wind had accelerated again. Sheer curtains of snow rippkd

and billowed across the black night. After his mom warned him against

allowing Falstaff to sleep on the bed, after good-nigh kisses, after

his dad told him to keep the dog on the floor, after the lights were

turned out--except for the red night-light-- after his mom warned him

again about Falstaff, after the hall door was pulled half shut, after

enough time had passed to be sure neither his mom nor his dad was going

to sneak back to check on the retriever, Toby sat up in his alcove bed,

patted the mattress invitingly, and whispered, "Here, Falstaff. Come

on, fella."

The dog was busily sniffing along the base of the door at the head of

the back stairs. He whined softly, unhappily. "Falstaff," Toby said,

louder than before.

"Here, boy, come here, hurry." Falstaff glanced at him, then put his

snout to the doorsill again, snuffling and whimpering at the same

time.

"Come here--we'll play covered wagon or spaceship or anything you

want," Toby wheedled. Suddenly getting a whiff of something that

displeased him, the dog sneezed twice, shook his head so hard that his

long ears flapped loudly, and backed away from the door.

"Falstaff!" Toby hissed. Finally the dog padded to him through the

red light-which was the same kind of light you'd find in the engine

room of a starship, or around a campfire out on a lonely prairie where

the wagon train had stopped for the night, or in a freaky temple in

India where you and Indiana Jones were sneaking around and trying to

avoid a bunch of weird guys who worshiped Kali, Goddess of Death.

With a little encouragement, Falstaff jumped onto the bed. "Good

dog."

Toby hugged him. Then in hushed, conspiratorial tones: "Okay, see,

we're in a rebel starfighter on the edge of the Crab Nebula. I'm the

captain and ace Inner You're a super-superintelligent alien from a

lanet that circles the Dog Star, plus you're psychic, you can read the

thoughts of the bad aliens in their starfighters, trying to blow us

apart, which they I don't know. They don't know.

They're crabs with sort of hands instead of just claws, see, like this,

crab hands, rack-scrick-scrack-scrick, and they're mean, really really

vicious. Like after their mother gives birth to eight or ten of them

at once, they turn on her and eat her alive! You know? Crunch her

up.

Feed on her. Mean as it, these guys. You know what I'm saying?"

Falstaff regarded him face-to-face throughout the briefing and then

licked him from chin to nose when he finished. "All right, you know!