Books : The Killing Moon : Excerpts

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RIPSBAUGH

It was the blue lights that drew him.

Kane Ripsbaugh didn't go around seeking out beauty in life. He had no poetry in his heart, no language for pretty things. He owned a septic service company and ran the town highway department and was loyal to his difficult wife. But police blues pulsing against the dark night: he doubted there was ever a more beautiful sight than that.

Ripsbaugh stopped his truck and killed the engine. He left the headlights on and looked out at the road in a squinting way that had nothing to do with the strange scene his lamps revealed. This was the way he looked at the world.

The cop out there, the new hire, Maddox, had his revolver drawn. He glanced into the headlights, then backed off from the big deer dying in the road.

Ripsbaugh climbed out and down, his boots hitting the pavement. As the head of Black Falls' highway department, a hurt deer blocking the road was as much his business as anyone else's.

"You all right?" he asked Maddox, walking up on him slow.

"Yeah," said Maddox, looking anything but. "Fine."

Ripsbaugh watched the deer try to lift its head. Its hooves scraped at the pavement, blood glistening on its muzzle and ears. The stick casting a jagged shadow near its head was not a stick at all but a broken antler.

Some fifty yards down the road, Maddox's patrol car was pulled over onto the shoulder. The driver's side door was open.

Maddox started to talk. "I was driving past the falls. The spray washed over my car, so I hit the wipers. The road ahead was clear. All of a sudden, bam! Car jerks left -- not a swerve like I was losing control, but like the car had been shoved. I realized I hadn't hit anything. Something hit me."

He talked it through, still trying to piece together what had happened, the memory of the incident and its impact as fresh to him as an echo.

"I slam on the brakes finally, stopping down there. Red smoke everywhere, but it was just road grit swirling up in my brake lights. I get out. I hear this sound like scraping, a sound I can't understand. The dust settled...and here it is."

Ripsbaugh looked into the trees. Edge Road was so named because it traced the treeline of the Borderlands State Forest. "How's your unit look?"

"Rear right passenger door's pushed in." He was starting to shake off the shock. "I never heard of that. A deer broadsiding a moving car?"

"Better that than getting up into your windshield."

Maddox nodded, realizing how close he had come to death. His turn to look into the trees. "Something must have spooked it."

Ripsbaugh looked him over, his blue jeans and hiking boots. The town couldn't afford regular uniforms anymore, so the six-man force wore white knit jerseys with police embroidered in blue over their hearts, and black "BFPD" ball caps, making them look more like security guards than sworn lawmen. Snapped to Maddox's belt were a chapped leather holster and a recycled badge. He held an old .38 in his hand.

The deer resumed its scratching, bucking its head against the asphalt. "Aw, Christ," Maddox said, knowing what he had to do.

Maddox had grown up in Black Falls but he was no farm boy. He'd left to go to college some fifteen years ago and never returned until his mother passed away. That was six months ago now. No one had expected him to stay more than a day or two beyond the funeral, but here he was, a part-time auxiliary patrolman, a rookie at age thirty-three. That was about as much as anybody knew about him.

"All right," Maddox said to the gun in his hand, and to the deer in the street.

Sometimes the mercy part of the kill shot is less for the suffering animal than for the man who can't stand to watch it suffer.

"In the ear," Ripsbaugh advised.

The animal flailed, sensing its impending execution, trying to get away. Maddox had to brace its strong neck with the tread of his hiking boot. He extended his gun arm with his palm open behind it.

The shot echoed.

The deer shuddered and lay still.

Maddox lurched back like a man losing his balance coming off the bottom rung of a ladder. He holstered his gun as though it were burning him, the piece still smoking at his hip. His hand wasn't shaking, but he rubbed it as though it were.

Ripsbaugh walked to the deer. Maddox's patrol car blues flashed deep within its dead round eye. "That was a good stance you had."

Maddox breathed hard and deep. "What's that?"

"Your stance. A good cop stance."

"Yeah?" he said. He wasn't quite present in the moment yet. "I guess."

"They teach you that here?"

Maddox shook his head like he didn't understand. "You a shooter?"

"Just going by what I see on TV."

"Must be we watch the same shows, then."

Ripsbaugh eyed him a little more closely now. "Must be."

He gave Maddox a minute to get used to the idea of grabbing the deer's hooves with his bare hands, then together they dragged the carcass off into the first row of trees, leaving a blood trail across the road.

"I'll come back in the morning with my town truck," said Ripsbaugh, "take him to the dump."

Maddox eyed Ripsbaugh's company rig. "You working late?"

"Fight with the wife. Came out to drive around, cool off."

Maddox nodded, about the only way to respond to that. He was wiping his hands on his jeans, coming back more fully into himself now. "Well," he said, "just another night in Black Falls."

Ripsbaugh watched the amateur cop head back to his patrol car, silhouetted in flashing blue. He returned to his own truck, checked the bundle rolled tightly in the tarp in the rear bed, and started for home.