Free Bad Moon Rising by Ed Gorman

you.”
    I wanted to ask if that was a threat or a promise but I was too mature to do it.
    My early boyhood was spent in the section just past the city limits called the Hills. This was where the poor white people lived. Even sociologists would have had a hard time defining the Hills because there were degrees of poverty even here. Depending on where you lived in the Hills, your home was either lower-class livable or little more than a shack. If you lived in one of the shacks, which far outnumbered the tiny one- and two-bedroom homes, you saw a lot of the local gendarmes. A fair number of men dealt in stolen property; a fair number of men couldn’t seem to stay out of bloody fights; and a fair number of men let the bottle keep them from steady jobs. In the midst of all this the more reliable people like my parents and many others tried to carry on respectable lives. Kenny lived in one of the shacks but was saved and redeemed by his early interest in books. My mother and father were both readers, Dad with his pulps and paperbacks and Mom with her magazines (one of them, The American , carried Nero Wolfe stories frequently, introducing me to mystery fiction around age eight or so), and encouraged my brother and sister to be readers as well.
    The worst part of my early life was when my older brother Robert died of polio. He had been, no other word, my idol, all the things I could only hope to be. When I got old enough I drove his 1936 Plymouth. My sister Ruth was sure that Robert visited her at night in ghost form. And I remember hearing my father half whispering to my uncle Al that he was worried about my mother, that maybe she would never get over it and be herself again. We still went back to the Hills to lay fresh flowers on my brother’s grave in the cemetery where Hills people buried their dead. In the worst of my depression after losing the woman I was sure would be my wife, I found myself waking one birdsong morning next to his gravestone. I had drunkenly confided in my brother—for that matter I’m not quite sure I ever really got over his death either—hoping he’d bring me solace.
    Tommy Delaney lived in one of the small houses, this one isolated by the fact that it sat on a corner. Where there should have been neighbors on the west side of his place there were only three empty tracts. The city had made an effort to destroy the worst of the houses and shacks.
    I heard the voices before I’d quite closed my car door. Man and woman; husband and wife. The ugly noise of marriage gone bad. There had been a time after Robert’s death when my parents had gone at each other. As I later learned in my psych classes at the U of Iowa, this was not an uncommon reaction to the loss of a child. But their rages terrified my little sister and me. I’d take her to her tiny room and give her her doll and cover her with a blanket, anything to stop her sobbing. I’d sit on the bed till she went to sleep. They always promised, in whispers, that they’d never do it again. But they did of course. They were too aggrieved over the loss of their son not to.
    The Delaney home was the size of a large garage but not as tall. The once-white clapboard was stained so badly it resembled wounds. The eaves on one side dangled almost to the ground. The two cement steps had pulled a few inches away from the front door. In addition to the screaming, a dog inside started barking, explaining the dog shit on the sunburnt grass. But not even a dog could compete with the cutting words of the argument.
    There was a rusted doorbell. I tried it. Somewhere, faintly, it chimed. Not that this deterred the screamers. Either they hadn’t heard it or they didn’t care that they had company.
    The door opened and there Tommy Delaney stood, massive in his Black River Warriors black T-shirt with the familiar yellow logo. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes but he was too late. I could see he’d been crying,