The Killing Moon: A Novel

Bucky's grin widened. He looked over at the others, including them in this, then checked back once more as though Maddox might be putting him on. "Hey, boys?" said Bucky, speaking through his grin. "Maddox here is shutting us down."

"You put me on parade security," Maddox said. "This is disturbing the peace. It's time to move along."

"Disturbing the peace?"

"You're scaring kids."

"Scaring kids?" said Bucky, gesturing at the bandaged statue with his musket. "This here's a history lesson." Bucky turned back in such a way that the long, thin barrel of the musket was directed right at Maddox's gut. "This pop gun right here is a genuine Indian killer."

Maddox grabbed the muzzle and shoved it backward so that the butt of the weapon jabbed Bucky in the ribs, then pointed the muzzle skyward.

Bucky's eyes flared a moment behind his glasses—as shocked by Maddox's impudence as he was by the speed of his reflexes—lips curling to reveal the savage lurking inside the grin.

Maddox saw how far he had overstepped then. Bucky shook his grinning head, barely able to contain himself, overwhelmed by this great gift. The chance to belittle and demean Maddox in public. To humble him in the crossroads of Black Falls.

The others spread out around him, Maddox having nowhere to go. His neck burned, not because he would lose this confrontation, but because he had allowed himself to be drawn into it in the first place. All the station house tensions came bubbling to the surface. He had crossed a line, and things would only get more difficult from here on in.

"If I got this straight," said Bucky, "you're saying if we don't move our Injun friend here in a timely and forthright manner, you gonna cuff us all and take us in?" His half-clever smile fell away. "All by yourself?"

Maddox could not back down, and anyway, he wanted this too, more than anyone. He went cap brim to cap brim with Bucky, ready to jeopardize everything just to throw down with these goons.

A shadow fell across him. Maddox heard the prodding of the walking stick on pavement, and his heart simultaneously rose and fell.

"Hot one today, isn't it, boys?" said Pinty, appearing at Maddox's right shoulder.

Behind Bucky, Eddie Pail eased back. Even Bucky's eyes flickered a little, the way a candle does when a door is opened.

Maddox said, still staring hard at Bucky, "This is nothing, Pinty."

"Good," said Pinty. "Because it just wouldn't do to have Black Falls' own sworn peacekeepers brawling in the center of town on its two-hundred-fiftieth birthday."

Bucky pulled off his sunglasses, trying to turn his deep-eyed stare on Pinty, but it got him nowhere. As an elder statesman, Pinty still wielded a bit of moral authority.

"Now how about showing a little respect for the town and for yourselves," said Pinty, crowbarring Maddox and Bucky apart with his walking stick, "and let's everyone go on his merry way."

Bucky backed off but his eyes would not let go of Maddox. His look said that someday Pinty wouldn't be around to bail Maddox out.

Maddox banked that look, and the feeling it left him with, then turned away, part of him charging up like a battery, filling with new resolve. The other part of him remained pissed off, at himself, at the town, and even, he realized, at Pinty. Not for intervening. He was pissed off at Pinty for sticking with this backward town, for being the devoted captain who had to go down with this flooding ship.

The parade was breaking up now, a sad affair, more funereal than celebratory. Maddox cared little for the future of the town, but he cared about Pinty, who, to his mind, was the town. The aging Greek, seventy-one now, was a physical contradiction: barrel-chested on top and slender on the bottom, his waist and legs too small for the rest of him, carrying his weight like a vest of old muscle. As chief of police and town selectman, he had all but ruled Black Falls for the past quarter century. A benevolent dictator, the kind of man who mattered as much to a place as the place mattered to him. The decay of the police department haunted Pinty, his life's second-greatest disappointment after the early death of his only son. A proud man, and tired, leaning heavily on his oak walking stick, Pinty's last great gambit was to right the course of the police department before it was too late, to take the poison out of the well before it wiped out the entire town.

With that in mind, the vacancy of the balcony at the corner of Main and Number 8 bothered Maddox like a premonition. "Scarecrow" was the nickname the cops had given to Sinclair, for his thin, unstuffed frame and his ever-present watchfulness over the center of town, looking down from his balcony like a mannequin of rags and straw. Maddox was turning away from the sight of it when he walked right into Ripsbaugh.

"Kane," said Maddox, startled backward.

"Went back for your deer this morning," Ripsbaugh said.

"Oh, right," said Maddox. He saw again the deer's head crack open beneath his boot. "Thanks."