Ed Gorman
Blood Moon
To Matt Bialer
I would like to thank Marlys Brunsting for all her help with this manuscript, and Robert W. Walker for his assistance with the process of “profiling.”
Time is the fire in which we burn.
One
1
First day of incarceration, there’s a killing.
Big black guy named Blade gets stabbed thirty-seven times with his own knife.
According to the inmates, of course, nobody saw anything.
Blade got killed? Hmmm. Surprise to me.
Did I hear anything? You mean like screams or somethin’? Nah, man, I didn’t hear squat.
Did I see anything? Not a thing, man. Not one thing.
He realizes, after hearing about Blade’s death, that he is never going to make it out of this prison alive.
All the things that turned women on — the almost-pretty face, the almost-wasted poetic body, the air of suffering... these same things are going to get him killed in this place.
Very first thing another inmate said to him was, “Hey, white dude, they gonna love that ass of yours in this place.” Black guy giggling all over the place. Crazed animal eyes like so many in here.
But—
Is not gay. Does not want to be touched by another man under any circumstances. And certainly does not want to be harmed.
And—
Is not stupid, either.
First three days in the joint, all he does is watch and listen. (And try to get used to his cellmate sitting down on the john every hour or so, creating a kind of intimacy that is totally repugnant.)
Not hard in a jungle like this to figure out who has power and who doesn’t.
Four days in the joint, on the yard, decides to risk his life by going up to the inmate obviously in charge of this cell block. Servic, his name is. Big muscle-bound Bohunk from Milwaukee. Shaved head. Enough tattoos to start an art museum. Brown teeth.
Courtiers are in session, maybe eight guys standing around Servic brown-nosing him shamelessly.
His little army.
He goes right up to Servic. “Like to talk to you.”
“Yeah?” Smirks to the courtiers so that they know he knows what a little faggot this new guy really is.
“Yeah. Want to tell you how you can make two thousand dollars a month.”
Smile goes. “You wouldn’t be messin’ with me, would you, fairy boy?”
“One: I’m not a fairy boy. Two: I wouldn’t be stupid enough to mess with you.”
Servic looks around. His merry band looks every bit as confused as he does.
Maybe this fairy boy has gone nuts. That happens here, usually right off the top. Just can’t adjust, and so they go crazy.
But Servic has no reason to be afraid of him, crazy or not, so he says to his boys, “I’ll see you guys in a few minutes.”
“You want us to split?” says a con.
“No,” Servic says, “I want you to bake me a goddamn cake. Of course I want you to split.”
They split.
“You ain’t gonna last here very long, fairy boy,” Servic says. “Not pushin’ your luck like this.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. About lasting here. Surviving.”
“What about it?”
“I want to pay you two thousand dollars a month — deposited on the first of every month in any bank account you choose, anywhere in the world — to be my bodyguard.”
“You’re puttin’ me on.”
“Two thousand a month. Tax free.”
“I’ll be goddamned. You’re serious, aren’t you, fairy boy?”
“One other thing, Mr. Servic, quit calling me fairy boy. All right?”
Servic looks at him a long moment and then breaks into laughter that echoes off the steep walls surrounding the yard.
“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” Servic says finally. And then grins. “Kid, for two thousand bucks a month, you got yourself a bodyguard.”
Then Servic puts out his hand and they shake, and then Servic calls his boys over and introduces them to his first client.
His first two-thousand-dollar-a-month client.
Who said America ain’t the land of opportunity?
2
The day it all started, I’d spent most of the morning on the phone with the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC). As a former FBI man who’d worked fifteen years in the behavioral-science unit, I could still be a help on certain difficult cases — and they could help me on some of my own investigations as well. These days I was a consultant to various small-town police departments and to trial lawyers who wanted me to prove that their clients were men and women of unimpeachable integrity and unfaltering love for stray puppies.
The particular case my old friend Gif wanted help with concerned a serial killer operating in the area of Huntsville, Alabama. One of the local TV stations had begun receiving letters supposedly written by the killer. As a trained psychologist, I had spent most of my days in the unit working on the profiles of various killers. Gif wanted to know if a man who dismembered bodies and buried the various parts around the city would also be the type of man who would send letters about himself to TV stations. I said that I guessed not. The killer’s M.O. indicated a disorganized, secretive man, a man who killed out of passion rather than some grand scheme... one not likely to want this particular kind of attention. Gif thanked me; we talked a bit about the old days. He said he was sorry about my wife, and how was I doing these days, and was I still flying the biplane?
As indeed I was. Ten minutes after hanging up, I headed for the hangar.
There’s one particular problem with these old biplanes. When you’re running them too slow, they sometimes take you into a sudden descent that’s tough to get out of.
That’s what happened to Mac Thompson, the man who taught me how to fly my crate: he had a little trouble with his fuel valve and got caught in a spin. He met the beautiful green midwestern earth at maybe a hundred fifty miles per hour. Head-on.
I was the first one to reach him, and it’s not likely I’ll ever forget the crushed and broken look of him, the quick red gleam of blood, the blanch-white jut of bone through flesh.
That was a year ago.
This year the Civil Air Patrol of Charlesville, Iowa had a new daredevil, Robert Payne by name. That would be me.
I’d done forty-five minutes for the kids on this chilly but sunny April afternoon out in pastureland next to the airport. All the usual showboating you might expect, too, loops and rolls and flying far lower than I should have. But I enjoyed it even more than the kids did because all the time I was up there, I was one with wind and sky and cloud, the same kind of pilgrim the earliest aviators were, when flying was still a romance and not just another means of transportation. I was born too late to see the old barnstormers firsthand but my uncle had been one, and we had hours of scratchy old family film of him playing eagle — a rangy man I resembled, with shaggy blond hair and one of those small-town midwestern faces that look simple and happy and trusting till you look closely at the blue eyes and note the wariness that too many years of city life had put there.