Voodoo Moon

EIGHT

Lonesome prairie night. That was the feeling I had when I saw the plastic lights of Brenner, the reds and blues and yellows of all the chain fast-food places and the video stores and convenience stores with the six-deep gas pumps and all the Harleys parked slantwise along the front of the walks.

Kids would be in bed all warm and dream-thrilled and parents would be in front of TVs or in bed early for a quick tumble with their mates and teenagers would be humping in cars or on park benches and cats would be dozing wherever it was warm, and dogs would be doggy-prowling through the night.

Somehow, I didn't feel as if I belonged to any of it, and I desperately wanted to. I wanted to be in the house where I'd lived with my wife and still lived in sometimes; or at the least in my apartment in Cedar Rapids, anywhere where I felt a sense of community, not a fucking motel room and a fucking motel room bed and Tandy all gone from me now with her power back and celebrity dazzling her eyes sure as jewels.

I would have settled for an animal to ride with, dog, cat, raccoon; hell, night crawler if I had to.

I was pulling into Brenner with a full load of dislocation and self-pity. I was not ready for prime time.

"Evening."

"Evening," I said.

"Help you?"

I hadn't seen him before. He looked like a retired gent, earning a little spare cash working the motel desk at night. He wore a ratty cardigan, thin flannel-style cotton shirt, and had some kind of serious-looking wart on the bottom of his lower lip. His HMO had probably convinced him it was nothing to worry about. His dentures clicked when he spoke. He was reading a Collector's magazine. BIG MONEY FOR "JUNK"! cried one headline.

"I went to Noah Chandler's room," I said, "but he didn't seem to be around. Just wondered if he'd told you where he was going?"

"They don't usually do that. Tell me anything, I mean. Hotels, they tell you where they went sometimes. But not motels. Not usually, anyway."

"Well, thanks."

The trucks on the highway, the trains on the prairie, provided the usual amount of roaring rumbling background noise. The night smelled of cigarettes and cold and exhaust fumes from a truck that had just pulled in. Half the lights above the various motel doors had burned out, lending the place a seedy quality it had plenty of already.

I decided to try Laura and Tandy's room. Maybe Noah was there. I hadn't checked because I didn't know if Laura knew what Noah wanted to tell me. Maybe, given her feelings about me, she wouldn't want him dealing with me.

I knocked and the door creaked open. Nice crisp horror-movie sound effect, that creaking.

Dark room. Tart smells.

I pushed the door open with a single finger.

I knew instinctively that this door would soon enough be dusted for prints. I didn't want to hinder the lab people any more than I had to.

I went back to my car and got the small penlight I use for reading maps.

I didn't go any deeper into the room than I had to. The lab would comb the carpet for prints, too.

She was naked and her throat had been cut. She had a very nice body. Her wild, red-blonde pubic hair gave me an erotic little charge. And, as you can imagine, I felt very proud of myself.

He'd died from a bullet to the left temple. The side of his head was a salad of blood and bone fragment and pus-like brain matter. Presumably, the damage had been done by the heavily blued.45 dangling from the tips of his fingers. The tabs were going to love it. He'd been too unimportant to cover since his cop drama had been canceled. Now he was back in the good graces of vampires everywhere.

I backed out of the room, leaving the door ajar, and pulled my cell phone from my back pocket.

I called the police station first and they patched me through to Susan Charles. I told her what had happened and she said, "Has this whole town gone crazy?"

"Sure seems like it," I said.