Read The Joy of Killing for Free Online Page B

and reached inside his coat pocket and withdrew a small leather wallet and flipped it open to show a bright gold badge. He said his name, put it back in his jacket, and settled his elbows on his knees. His hands were wide and heavy.
    â€œYou smoke?” he said. “You’re twelve?”
    I lay the butt in the ashtray. My mother began to say something; he lifted a hand to silence her. A few months earlier, my best friend—the one whose name I had heard from the seconddetective’s mouth—and I had almost set the house on fire smoking in a crawl space in the basement; after which my parents gave me permission, begged me, to smoke in the house, in front of them. They even occasionally put a few Luckies in the silver box. The detective’s gray eyes were serious. The thing with Judy Pauling in the basement, I thought. The three of us had taken our clothes off, and she had lain on the couch, on her stomach, and my friend and I took turns lying on top of her. Nothing happened. No one talked her into anything. In fact, we set up a date to do it again the next week, at her house, when her folks would be out of town.
    I let his question pass. My parents were standing a few feet behind the seated detectives.
    â€œSon, we want to ask you a few questions about your friend David and a man named Willie Benson.”
    W HERE WAS I?
    My nose was sore.
    â€œOh, dear,” the girl said, playfully. She reached in her coat pocket and pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed my nose. Red splotches showed on it.
    â€œSorry,” she said.
    â€œAll in the line of duty,” I responded. She continued dabbing at my nose.
    â€œThere,” she said, pleased.
    Well, that’s that, I thought. You’ve got a story, not the story, but still a story, with a bloody nose to top it off. Meanwhile, my pants were still unzipped.
    A few stars had surfaced. Lights in a small community shone in the distance. A pickup raced us along the highway. There was not a sound in the car except the clickety-clack of the wheels. Her hand found my dick, now a shadow of its former self. I just wanted to hold her.
    â€œIt’s all right,” I said.
    â€œYou think so?” She looked at me, and I saw a glimmer of lust in her eye. She wanted to finish it. She wanted to feel me come. That thought—that me coming turned her on—roused me instantly. She took over, and I lay my head back on the seat in surrender.
    A DARK FORM catches my attention. Something flitted in front of the window. Bats. I’d forgotten; they’d been a problem every summer, living in the attic. My mother shrieked and chased them around the house with a broom, always knocking one or two to the floor, which our dog jumped on and tried to eat. I’d thought the bats would have headed south, to Mexico or wherever they went, by now. A couple of them flew across the face of the moon. One bat after another sliced through the reddening streak, leaving the crimson drops to slide down the cut and into the sky. The difference between it happening and me seeing it happen was so slight as to often be irrelevant, except as now when I was trying to sort out myth from truth, to obtain a little peace. The myth could say that the blood of the moon fell into a pool, and the pool had great powers for those who drank of it. Where was the pool? was the enduring question. Men searched their whole lives for it, dying unquenched. Those who found it swore an oath not to revealits whereabouts, for they would be turned to dust if they did. It wouldn’t matter if no one ever saw the moon actually bleed, the crimson drops blacken as they hit the sky, for people wanted to believe in such things. I could write the myth out and not long after it would be accepted not as casual ravings but as archetypal insight by some, the truth by others. And I might come to believe it, as well, for reasons that should be becoming obvious by now. I turn all the stories of my life over and