Clown in the Moonlight

1

They think it's cute, talking about all the secret ways they can cut someone's throat.

Jenx keeps a razor blade in his mouth wedged between his lower lip and cheek. He wears a beard because he's fucked up a couple of times and slashed open the side of his face.

Kip has a butterfly knife hidden in a hidden pocket in his black trench coat. You can frisk him and you won't find it. But then, snap, he can whirl it out and stick it under your chin. He presses it hard but not too hard. Just hard enough to get a single bead of blood rolling.

Mercy wears a wreath of razor wire tying back her savage curls. She can reach up, draw the wire out, and unknot it a special way so it won't catch in her hair. It's a very slick move. She's practiced it for weeks, for months, for millennia. I watch as she gets a two-handed grip and whips the garrote around a mannequin's neck to show how she can tighten her hold and take off somebody's head in thirty seconds. She puts real muscle into it, the wire cutting deep into the plastic as she saws back and forth. I suspect the White Queen won't be happy that someone's ruined her dummy. Jenks and Kip urge Mercy on as chips fly through the air. When she's done she tosses the garroted dummy's head into my lap and they all giggle and yawp.

They call themselves the New Knights of the Black Circle.

A half hour goes by. In the living room the White Queen, in her white muumuu, with daffodils in her hair, now holds court with her coven, all thirteen of them sitting on divans and loveseats. In the den her husband, Grimm, shows videos of Japornimation to a group of nerdy fat asses. Grimm talks about side arms, rifles, and machine guns whenever the TV screen isn't filled with little Asian girls in school uniforms turning into cyborgs or getting raped by tentacles from another dimension. He pops one tape out of the VCR and slaps in another.

He's heavily tattooed. A ring of M-16 shells creep around his left calf. The kraken destroying an 18^th century three-mast shipping vessel covers over most of his right arm from elbow to wrist. He goes shirtless, showing off the autopsy scars and stitches tattooed on his chest.

I glance around wondering what I'm doing here.

It has something to do with Ricky. It has something to do with Mercy. I was standing at the fridge door at the back of the Shake-n-Shop on Old Country Road, checking prices on milk, when she appeared at my elbow, slick and dark with a wicked smile. She reminded me of Linda. She reminded me of Gwen. She didn't look like either of them, but that smile came from the same place.

Her hair is dyed so black that it had a faint blue tinge to it. A hint of a tattoo peeks from beneath the collar of her black leather trench coat. I can't make out what it is. I'm not supposed to. My gaze is hung up on it like a squirrel stuck in catclaw briar.

I see a trace of a lace top too, the shadowed bulge of her pert right breast. She wears short-short blue jeans, thigh-high boots, and the store lights flash on shining metal that might be chains or studs. She has pouty, bee-stung lips that she purses for my benefit, knowing they will kill me. My breathing hitches and my chest grows tight. I want her. I envy her. I hate her at first sight, the way I hated Ricky.

We're miles from Aztakea Woods but I can still feel that same heavy sense of fate in the air. It makes me grin. I twist the cap off the gallon of milk and take a long pull. I get a nasty look from the guy working the register, like he thinks I might make a run without paying.

I haven't thought about Gary Lowers for a long time. I hold the plastic bottle up in a kind of salute to him.

Mercy hits me with a black-lipped smile, amusement playing in her eyes. She strikes a pose, showing off her slim, well-muscled legs. She checks the kill spots on my body. My eyes, temple, throat, chest, groin.

She puts a hand to the pulse in my neck and says, "Your heart's racing."

"Yes it is," I admit.

"Are you nervous?"

"Always."

She reaches out and grips me by the chin and smooshes my lips together. She bends forward and kisses me hard, without heat, without hate, without desire, tasting me the way you'd check a piece of chicken to see if it was fully cooked yet. She pulls away and tightens her grip. It hurts. She tests me. She wants to know the limits of my pain. She wants to control me into taking a swing at her, or backing off. I do nothing but wait for her to kiss me again.

"I'm with two of my friends," she tells me. "We're wiccan. We're members of the New Knights of the Black Circle."

She waits for me to respond. I don't. Her eyes narrow. She leans forward and tries to read me. I hold my secrets tightly and allow her to see all the rest of me. She sees that my mother is dead, that my father is gone, that I work a bum job. She's met a hundred men like me, a thousand. She hunts men like me. She leaves them in the fields, she leaves them in the alleys.

I'm still waiting for another kiss. She eases to me and plants one.

This time I feel her wanting. She shoves hard, her tongue licks my teeth. She laughs into my mouth. I like the sweet flavor of it.

She breaks off with a final twisted giggle and asks, "Want to come to a party?"

Ricky's been in the ground for almost two years. On the anniversary of his death someone tried to dig up his body but they were scared off by patrolling cops. Somebody else tried to set fire to Aztakea Woods, but it poured that night. They settled for carving a commandment in the gazebo bench.

SAY YOU LOVE RICKY.

I say, "I do."