Butcher's Moon

Twenty-two

Paul Dunstan got up at nine, a little earlier than usual for a Sunday. A couple of the guys from the shop were coming around to pick him up at ten to spend the day out at the beach. He got up early enough to have time to spare, padded around his three-room apartment taking care of minor clean-up details, and generally coasted the hour away. It was a relaxed and pleasant interval, spoiled only briefly when he glanced at the table by the front door and saw the retirement check there, still in its envelope. It had come yesterday, and he’d cash it tomorrow.

He hated those checks; they were his only reminder of his years on the police force in Tyler, three hundred miles from here. He’d thrown one away once, but that was even worse; a barrage of letters from the office of the Tyler City Clerk, wanting to know if he’d received the check, what had he done with it, when would he cash it. One reminder a month was bad enough, so now he cashed the check each month when it came in, pocketed the seven dollars and tried to think no more about it.

Dunstan was twenty-nine years old, and seven dollars a month was the pension his four years on the Tyler police force had entitled him to, an entitlement he’d rather have done without. He had a new job now, a new life in a new city, and all he wanted was for the past to stay quietly and permanently in the past.

At one time he had thought he would spend his entire lifetime in police work, even though he’d mostly just drifted into it. The Army had made him an MP during his three-year enlistment, after first training him as a refrigeration engineer, the field of his choice. After the Army he’d had a number of unsatisfying jobs before going with the Tyler force, and had found police work congenial and easy. Most of the time. And profitable, too, in a smallish way.

He and Joe O’Hara had been radio-car partners for over two years when the mess happened at the Fun Island Amusement Park. Before then, Dunstan had been in on the take in a minor way, not called upon to actually do anything other than close his eyes from time to time, but the mess at the amusement park had changed all that. He’d been in on attempted murder, he’d seen people killed, he’d wound up with the robber holding him captive at gunpoint, and when it was all over, he’d had it. Not because O’Hara had been so enraged at him, full of yelled charges of cowardice; that had been nothing but O’Hara blustering away his own fear and incompetence. And not because of the cold contempt he had seen in that old man Lozini’s eyes; what did he care about the contempt of a creature like Lozini? It was his own attitude toward himself that had made the change. He had suddenly known he couldn’t live that way any more, a living contradiction, straddling the fence of the law, a hypocrite in every breath he took.

So he’d quit the force, and moved away from the city of Tyler completely, and had found a job here with a firm that maintained central air-conditioning units in office buildings, the kind of work the Army had originally trained him for. He had a good job, good friends, a good life, a few girl friends in the last couple of years. If it weren’t for the absurdity of the seven-dollar-a-month pension check, he wouldn’t ever have to think about Tyler again.

What could he do about the checks? Nothing. Move, leaving no forwarding address? Almost impossible in this organized world, not without disrupting his life entirely. It was easier, finally, just to cash the check each month, spend the seven dollars, try not to think about it.

At nine-forty he went and got dressed. He wrapped his bathing suit in a towel, and was just putting the rolled towel on the table by the front door, next to the pension check, when the apartment doorbell rang. He frowned at his watch: ten to ten. Harry was never early. He pulled open the door, and it wasn’t Harry at all. It was a smiling self-assured guy holding a paper bag in front of himself, holding it by the bottom with just one hand. “Paul Dunstan?” he said.

It was a vaguely familiar face. Was he really somebody from Tyler, or was it just that Dunstan had been looking at the pension check that made him think this guy had something to do with that city? He said, “Yes?”

“I’m sorry about this,” the guy said, smiling, sounding truly sorry about it, “but I don’t know how much O’Hara told you.” And he reached into the paper bag.

Dunstan’s reactions were slower than when he’d been on the force. He didn’t move until the gun with the silencer screwed on the end of it started coming out of the paper bag, and by then it was too late.