Butcher's Moon

Fifty-two

The power substation went out at three twenty-two. An emergency relay system had been set up in Tyler five years before, after a summer of blackouts caused by power overloads, that would bring power in from other parts of the national grid if this substation were to go out. But the emergency system used the same distribution equipment from the same substation, and that equipment was now out of operation. It would take nearly six hours to rig up a temporary alternate distribution structure and return electric power to the west side of Tyler.

When the electricity went off, the Police and Fire Departments in the affected area went immediately into a standard emergency procedure; stand-by men were called in, extra telephone answerers were assigned, more patrol cars were readied to be put on the street, and selected radio-equipped fire engines went out to patrol the area. Two shopping streets were within the affected zone, so the principal concentration of police and fire attention remained there. Residential sections remained mostly unpatrolled, except in response to direct telephone complaints.

When the shooting started at the Buenadella house, the neighbors within a block radius were startled out of sleep. Nine families were awakened, and for all of them it was a terrifying and bewildering experience, with thoughts of invasion and revolution running through their heads. First there was the gunfire, and very quickly after that the discovery that the electricity wasn’t working. And when they tried to call the police, as practically all of them did, the phones weren’t working either. One man took his family and a shotgun out to the half-forgotten fallout shelter he’d installed behind the house way back in 1953; feeling an exultant sense of vindication, he bundled everybody inside, switched on the emergency generator, checked the load of his shotgun, and prepared to shoot any neighbor who tried to get in. Two other men armed themselves with rifles and stationed themselves by their front doors. Most other families sat around flashlights or kerosene lamps or the blue light of gas stoves and talked together in frightened undertones; nobody seemed to know what was the right thing to do. It was twenty-five minutes before one man finally got himself dressed and went out to his car and drove away from the neighborhood to find the police or a working phone or at least some explanation of what was going on; and by then the shooting had mostly died down.

At the Buenadella house, Handy McKay and Dan Wycza and Fred Ducasse moved room by room through the first floor, clearing Dulare’s men as they went, making sure that nobody alive was behind them. Parker stayed upstairs in the doorway of Grofield’s room, waiting and listening. Mike Carlow and Philly Webb were out front, using their cars as shields and peppering anybody who showed in a front window. Two of the headlights had been shot out, but that left ten still shining. Nick Dalesia had joined Stan Devers on the right side of the house; in the dim light-spill from the front they made sure nobody came out any of the side windows, to get around behind the people inside. Ed Mackey and Tom Hurley were doing the same thing on the left.

Dulare’s people were bewildered and leaderless. Half of them were dead or badly wounded, and the rest had no idea what they were supposed to be doing. Dulare and Quittner kept trying to organize a defense, but in the darkness and confusion there was no way to maintain any kind of general communication. The defenders were like steers in a pen, being shot down by men sitting around them on the fence rails.

Six men up on the second floor clustered in the blackness of the central hallway and whispered together, trying to decide what to do. A couple of them were in favor of going down the front stairs and joining the fight, but the rest would have nothing to do with it. One suggested they try jumping out windows onto the lawn, but another one said, “There’s guys out on the sides of the house. They’ll blow your head off, you stick it out there.”

“For Christ’s sake, how many of them are there?”

“I think there’s a hundred.”

They talked about it some more. They were the full complement of Dulare’s men up here now, and they didn’t like being stuck on the second floor. A couple of them suggested they simply go down the back stairs and out the kitchen door and get the hell away from here, but the others decided that wouldn’t work either; any man who ran away would sooner or later have to answer to Ernie Dulare. One said, “So we go down the back stairs and get these bastards from behind. Do the same thing to them they’re doing to us.”

Parker, standing in Grofield’s doorway, listened to the entire conversation. If they’d decided to run away, he would have let them go, but in the end they chose to go down to the kitchen and try attacking the invaders from behind, so that was that. Parker took the flashlight from his pocket as he followed them to the stairs, waited until he was sure they were all in the narrow walled staircase, then stood in the doorway at the top, switched the light on, and began firing into them.

Downstairs, in the main parlor off the front staircase, Dulare and Quittner sat on the floor away from the windows, and in the reflected headlight glare tried to put together some kind of sensible defense. Dulare’s man Rigno was out roaming around the house, calling in the rest of the remaining men, gathering them all here in this room. Quittner was saying, “They don’t have much time. They know they have to hit and run, before the police get here.”

Dulare grunted. “They are hitting, goddammit,” he said. “I picked the wrong side in this fight.”

“No,” Quittner said. “You had to side with Buenadella. So does Frank, that’s why I’m here. No matter how much destruction this man Parker causes here tonight, he’s still only a transient, he’ll come and go. The organization has to stay together.”

“We’re goddam falling apart right now,” Dulare said.

Across the main front hall, Fred Ducasse slowly entered the formal dining room. Everything was clear ahead of him, but he didn’t know about the man lying on the floor to his right, over by the archway to the front hall. For just a second Ducasse was framed against a window behind him and to his left; a bullet hit him in the right side of the head, knocking him into a hutch filled with pewter and memorial plates.

More men crawled into the front parlor, staying below the level of the windows. Rigno was in last, and reported to Dulare: “That’s all there is. I shouted upstairs, but there’s nobody up there.”

Dulare did a fast head-count, and there were seventeen men in the room, counting Quittner and himself. “We’ve got to sit tight,” he told them. “We’ll get cops here pretty soon, these people will have to take off. All we do for now is sit here and wait them out.”

That’s when Handy McKay rolled the bomb through the doorway.