Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud

Author:Nathan Ballingrud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

IV.

Charlie Duchamp

At forty-four years of age, Charlie Duchamp made his living breaking bones for Goodnight Maggie, matriarch of a low-rent crime outfit fighting for its share of scraps at the Brooklyn docks. He was good at the work and he enjoyed it. He’d been raised in violence, and to Charlie it functioned as a kind of language, one through which he could communicate the purest expressions of his heart. The world operated according to rules which were opaque to him; watching Maggie navigate the complexities of her criminal operation both awed him and reminded him of his own intellectual limitations. Sometimes this caused an accumulation of great, wrathful emotion. Hurting people made it better, at least for a little while. Doing it for Maggie meant he could do it often, and with license.

Charlie would have spent the rest of his life in this happy pursuit, pushing on until the inevitable day when someone would put a bullet through his head and spill his body into the harbor, except he’d lost control of himself the night he visited the Irishman in his home and killed him when he wasn’t supposed to. The one unsanctioned murder in itself might not have damned him, but the thrill of it gave him a red eye and he killed the Irishman’s wife and children, too, all five of them, and if that wasn’t bad enough he also killed Crying Joey, who Maggie had sent with him as backup, when Joey tried to stop him.

Sitting at the Irishman’s blood-spattered kitchen table afterward, Charlie allowed himself a few minutes to calm down and catch his breath, after which he placed a call to Maggie and told her what he’d done. Then he waited patiently for her men to arrive. When they got there—four of them, all armed—they found him sitting passively, staring at the wall, like a machine that had been turned off.

“Christ, Charlie. Maggie ain’t happy with you, and you know how she gets. Why didn’t you just run?”

“I’m no runner,” was all he said.

Two hours later he was standing before her desk in the little warehouse where she conducted her business, fully expecting to pay for his little frolic with his life.

But he’d seen Maggie angry—it wasn’t overt or theatrical; it was cold and quiet. More than one hapless fool had reckoned himself safe only moments before horror consumed his world. And she wasn’t angry. She was sad.

Grieving. And this scared him more than her wrath, because this he could not understand.

“Poor Charlie,” she said, touching his cheek. “It was always so hard for you.”

The touch of her hand to his face was like a burning mark. He felt it long after she took it away, was consumed by it as she dismissed the men who’d brought him in.

“What should I do with you?” she said.

He didn’t respond. He thought the answer was obvious.

“I knew your daddy. Did you know that?”

“No.” Mention of his father recalled to him what he’d done to the Irishman and his family.

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