Shoot the Moon by James Mullaney

Author:James Mullaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: humor detective crime hardboiled satire parody werewolf
Publisher: James Mullaney

Accompanying the story was a photograph taken at night of the former D.A. standing out in the mud remains of his front yard. Floodlights lit up the scene, revealing the sort of tax-subsidized opulence that would have made Caligula blush even if he was in the middle of diddling his horse. The caption read: Lawn Gone Before Dawn.

“This says it happened after two in the morning,” Victorina Flapchack said.

I had once more taken full control of my stolen newspaper, and as we walked toward the side door of the cathedral I shook open the Gazette and took a quick scan of the rest of the article.

“It does indeed say that,” I replied. “In fact, it repeats the time twice on page three. Two o’clock. Confirmed by some neighbors who were awakened by violent mooing.”

I folded up the paper and tucked it up under my arm as I shoved open the huge cathedral door. Victorina Flapchack tailed me out into the sunlight.

We exited on the side of the cathedral opposite naked Igor Stradivarius and the luckless ambulance attendants who were stuck with the odious job of saving his worthless, nude life. My timing was, for a change, not horrible, since I at long last heard the sound of police sirens closing in on the opposite side of the building. I’d be long gone before the cops found their way over to where I soon would not be.

I led the Gypsy dame through a busted old gate and out onto the sidewalk. We jaywalked quickly and, lucky for that particular morning, without getting flattened by a newspaper delivery truck across the main drag and up a side street. The siren sounds grew muffled and died behind us, swallowed up by the hubbub of Little Australia, the ethnic enclave north of the cathedral through which we were strolling. A Vegemite truck was making early morning deliveries, and we had to duck to avoid several zinging boomerangs coming home from a night over the town.

The shadows of the cathedral’s spires stretched across the low tenements that packed the neighborhood around the old church. Wild wallabies dug around in overturned trash barrels, knocking around bottles of Fosters and gnawing on damp Weet-Bix boxes. Sunlight glinted in stabs of fire off the high windows of the office buildings that rose above the tenements opposite the side of the street down which we walked.

Victorina Flapchack had dummied up at the noise of the sirens, her Gypsy instinct to run from the law asserting itself over all else. Once we were both safely out of any danger of observing our civic responsibility to report what we’d seen to the proper legal authorities, her one-track mind was back on message, as if we hadn’t just spent the previous four minutes hustling our asses in a direction away from the cops.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Well, what?” I asked. “If you expect me to dig you one, there’s no way in hell. If you’re inquiring about my health, it’s excellent because I don’t wear myself out digging wells.

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