Bad Men

“What can you give me?”

“Two hundred.”

“Two hundred?”

Karen slumped against the wall and said nothing for at least a minute.

“Give it to me,” she said at last.

Marianne went upstairs and retrieved the roll of bills from the only safe place she could find in which to keep it: the very center of a carton of tampons. It was a peculiarity of Moloch’s. He would not even sleep beside her when she had her period. She handed the roll of ones and fives to Karen.

“Do you want to count it?”

Karen weighed the roll of bills in her hand.

“I figure this is everything that you’ve hidden away, right?”

Marianne nodded, then said: “Well, I kept fifty back. That’s all.”

“Then that’ll be enough, for now.”

She moved to go.

“How long will it take?”

“They’ll be ready in two weeks. You can pick them up when you’re leaving, and I’ll take the rest of my money then.”

“Okay.”

Marianne opened the door. As she did so, the older woman reached out and brushed her cheek. Marianne didn’t flinch.

“You’d have done it too, wouldn’t you?” said Karen softly.

“Yes.”

Karen smiled.

“You need to work on your seduction technique,” she said.

“I’ve never had to use it before, under those circumstances.”

“I guess your heart just wasn’t in it.”

“I guess not.”

Karen shook her head sadly, walked to her car, and drove away.

Marianne never understood why Moloch had kept the licenses, the purses, the little personal items from the women. She suspected that they were souvenirs, or a means of recalling the women from whom they had come, a kind of aide-mémoire. Or perhaps it was simply vanity.

Moloch had never told her what he did for a living, exactly. He was, when she asked in those first days, a “businessman,” an “independent consultant,” a “salesman,” a “facilitator.” Marianne believed that the women, and what had happened to them, were only part of what he was. Now, when she read of raids on stores or banks, and saw her husband’s cash reserve increase; when she heard of a businessman being killed in his car for his briefcase, the contents later revealed to be $150,000 in under-the-counter earnings, and an amount just under that was briefly added to the bag in the shed; when a young woman disappeared in Altoona, the daughter of a moderately wealthy businessman, and her body was found in a ditch after the ransom was paid, she thought of Moloch. She thought of Moloch as she fingered the money; she thought of Moloch as she smelled the burnt powder in the gun among the nails; and she thought of Moloch as she spied the hardened dirt in the treads of his boots, carefully picking it away and placing it in a Ziploc bag that she bound tightly and squeezed into a tampon inserter.

In those last days, she became aware of an increase in the pitch of his activities. There were more calls to the home phone, the phone that she was not allowed to answer. There were more frequent, and longer, absences. The mileage on his car climbed steadily in increments of two hundred miles. He grew yet more distracted, now barely glancing at the receipts from the market and failing even to check the total spent against her allowance for the week.

There were three things that Marianne had learned about Moloch’s final operation, through careful listening and the maps and notes that he had locked away in the attic. The first was that it would take place in Cumberland, far to the north of the state and close to the borders of both Maryland and Pennsylvania. The second was that it would involve a bank.

The third was that it would take place on the last Thursday of the month.

She made her plans carefully. She called Karen from a pay phone and told her the exact time at which she would arrive to pick up the material. She contacted her sister, who lived only a few miles away, yet from whom she had become virtually estranged because of Moloch’s paranoia, and told her of her plan, and of the possibility that she and her sorry-ass husband might have to leave the state at some point in the future, but with money in their pockets. Surprisingly, Patricia seemed unconcerned by the prospect of uprooting herself. Bill had recently been let go from a plant job and she saw it as a chance for them both to start over again.

Marianne prepared three changes of clothing for Danny and herself, using what little cash she had left to buy them each a new set of clothes cheaply at Marshalls: no-name jeans, plain T-shirts, cotton sweaters from beneath the yellow, black, and red REDUCED sign. These she placed at the bottom of their respective piles of clothing, although she need not have worried, Moloch becoming ever more withdrawn as the day of the operation approached. This was to be his big score, she sensed.

What she could not have known was that Moloch’s recent actions were merely one of a number of scams and crimes that he had put into operation over the years, and that there were other men involved, committing insurance frauds, drug rip-offs, minor bank raids in small dusty towns.

Murders.