Butcher's Moon

Forty-nine

Wiss carried the bomb, one he’d made in an empty soft-drink bottle out of materials from his safe-cracking bag. Elkins did the driving, and when they reached the electric company substation he merely slowed down, looping up onto the sidewalk while Wiss leaned out of the car window and tossed the bottle underhand. It arched up over the fence as Elkins accelerated away, landing in the middle of the high-voltage relay equipment, and exploding on contact. It wasn’t a very big explosion, nor very loud, but it cut off all electric service in that section of the city. Driving along in a world suddenly without streetlights or traffic lights, with utter darkness on all sides of them, Wiss and Elkins headed back again toward the center of the city; they had one more job to do tonight.

When the lights went out, the darkness was more complete than city dwellers ever know. High thin stars defined the moonless sky, but the earth was black wool, across which men stumbled, blinking, moving their arms out in front of them like ant feelers. The defenders in the Buenadella house stared out windows at nothingness, clutching guns, squinting, trying to see with their ears but hearing nothing more than their own breathing and faint creaking noises from the man at the next window. “Shut up!” they whispered at one another. “I think I hear something.” A couple of them, seeing light flecks before their eyes, fired aimlessly into the dark, the muzzle flashes a quick red light that they didn’t know to look away from, making them more blind than ever.

The two men inside the TV repair truck across the street, surveillance specialists from the state CID, didn’t know at first there was anything wrong. They had their own electric power inside the truck, and the camera through which they looked at the world outside was equipped with infrared. But then, just as they were realizing something had happened, the rear doors of the truck opened, a flashlight shone in at them, and a voice said, “Don’t reach for any guns.”

They might have reached for guns anyway, despite the fact that they couldn’t see past the hard brightness of the flashlight, if they hadn’t simultaneously heard the sound of shooting flare up over at the Buenadella house, reminding them that they were after all only technicians. Bewildered, but understanding instinctively that this wasn’t a mess they wanted to involve themselves in, they both raised their hands.

Tom Hurley held the flashlight, while Ed Mackey with his hood over his face climbed into the truck, disarmed the two men, and tied them together back to back with their belts and shoelaces. Hurley said, “Make sure that camera isn’t working.”

Mackey looked at the camera, then hit it three times with a gun butt. “It isn’t working,” he said, and he and Hurley left the truck and went over to the house.

Stan Devers had gone up a telephone pole half a block away shortly before the lights went out. He was equipped with insulated gloves and a pair of heavy wire cutters, and while there was still light to see by, he made sure he had the group of lines leading to the area of the Buenadella house. When the lights went out he worked by feel, scissoring through the lines, hearing the musical notes when they snapped. Finished, he dropped the wire cutters into the oceanic darkness below him, and went slowly backward down the pole, feeling for the metal rails. He had no sense of height in this blackness, and it soon seemed to him it was taking too long to get down the pole. Leg down, hand down, leg down, hand down; surely he should have reached the ground by now. A stupid panic tried to rise up in his chest, and he felt the idiotic urge to just jump out from the pole into the black, drop the rest of the distance, however long it was, get this damn thing over with. And still he kept inching and inching and inching his way down the rough wood surface; and when his foot did finally thud against the ground, it came as a surprise.

The three drivers, Mike Carlow and Philly Webb and Nick Dalesia, had been waiting in three cars parked a block away. When the darkness hit, they drove forward, using parking lights only. Ahead of them they saw the spot of light where Mackey and Hurley were dealing with the men in the TV repair truck. They drove on by that, and made the turn onto Buenadella’s property; as they turned, they switched on their headlights, high beams, four bright lights per car.

Men upstairs in the front windows had seen the faint outline of automobiles coming, defined by the yellow glow of parking lights, the dim red luster of taillights. They’d readied themselves to fire, but the sudden blinding glare of headlights left them with no targets to shoot at.

The three cars ignored the circular driveway. Spreading out across the lawn, evading the crooked sundial, they came to a stop about twenty feet from the house, in a widely separated row, all pointed directly at the front door. In all the surrounding blackness, the facade of the Buenadella house showed up like a painted bas-relief on a velvet wall.

The three drivers got out of their cars and moved quickly around behind them. They had pistols in their hands, and they used the cars as shields as they scanned the front windows of the house. Anyone intending to shoot out the headlights would have to show himself in a window; at the first sign of any movement in one of those windows, all three drivers would open fire. The headlights would stay on.

At the rear of the house, Parker and Handy McKay and Dan Wycza and Fred Ducasse had waited for the darkness, crouching in the shrubbery at the far end of the lawn. In the lighted windows inside the house they could see men moving back and forth, in conversation together or watching, and each of them chose an indoor target. Parker, on one knee with his gun hand supported on the other knee, sighted on the figure in the French doors in Buenadella’s den. That was Calesian there, and it was right to kill him this way, with their roles reversed.

When the lights went out, Parker squeezed off two shots. He heard the other three around him firing, and when they stopped, there was a ragged response of gunfire from the house. “Wait it out,” he said, speaking into the darkness.

Dan Wycza’s voice sounded from his left, saying, “I wonder did I get mine.”

That was all any of them said until they saw the sudden blare of headlights from the other side of the house. The house was silhouetted by the lights; it was like an eclipse of the moon.

Parker got to his feet. “All right,” he said, and he and the three others walked forward across the lawn to the house.