Winter Moon

her mood until-and unless-it became necessary.
        The incident in the graveyard had been frightening, however, although he'd felt threatened, no blow had actually been struck, no harm. He'd been afraid more for Toby than for himself, the boy was back, no worse for what had happened. And what had happened? He didn't relish having to explain what he had sensed rather than seen: a presence lrl and.enigmatic and no more solid than the wind.
        Hour by hour, the encounter seemed less like something he had actually experienced and more like a dream. He loaded the.38 and put it to one side of the desk. He could tell her about the raccoons, of course, although he himself had never seen them and although they had done no harm to anyone. He could tell her about the shotgun Eduardo Fernandez had been clutching fiercely when he'd died. But the old man hadn't been brought down by an enemy vulnerable to buck shot, a heart attack had felled him. A massive cardiac infarction was as scary as hell, yes, but it wasn't a killer that could be deterred with firearms.
        He fully loaded the Mossberg, pumped a shell into the breech, and then inserted one additional shell in the magazine tube. A bonus round.
        Eduardo had prepared his own gun in the same fashion shortly before he died. If he tried to explain all this to Heather now, he'd succeed in alarming hen- but to no purpose. Maybe there would be no trouble. He might never again come face-to-face with whatever presence he had been aware of in the cemetery. One such episode in a lifetime was more contact with the supernatural than most people ever experienced. Wait for developments. Hope there were none. But if there were, and if he obtained concrete proof of danger, then he would have to let her know that maybe, just maybe, their year of tumult was not yet at an end.
        The Micro Uzi had two magazines welded at right angles, giving it a forty-round capacity. The heft of it was reassuring. More than two kilos of death waiting to be dispensed. He couldn't imagine any enemy-wild creature or man-that the Uzi couldn't handle. He put the Korth in the top right-hand desk drawer, toward the back. He closed the drawer and left the study with the other two weapons. Before slipping past the living room, Jack waited until he heard Toby laughing, then glanced around the corner of the archway. The boy was focused on the TV, Falstaff at his side. Jack hurried to the kitchen at the end of the hall, where he put the Uzi in the pantry, behind extra boxes of cornflakes, Cheerios, and shredded wheat that wouldn't be opened for at least a week.
        Upstairs in the master bedroom, breezy music played behind the closed door to the adjoining bathroom. Soaking in the tub, Heather had turned the radio to a goldenoldies station. "Dreamin' " by Johnny Burnette was just winding down. Jack pushed the Mossberg under the bed, far enough back so she wouldn't notice it when they made the bed in the morning but not so far back that he couldn't get hold of it in a hurry.
        "Poetry in Motion." Johnny Tillotson. Music from an innocent age.
        Jack hadn't even been born yet when that record had been made. He sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the music, feeling mildly guilty about not sharing his fears with Heather. But he just didn't want to upset her needlessly.
        She'd been through so much. In some ways, his being wounded and hospitalized had been harder on her than him. because she'd been required to bear alone the pressures of day-to-day existence while he'd recuperated. She needed a reprieve from tension. Probably nothing to.worry about, anyway. few sick raccoons. A bold little crow. A strange experience in a cemetery which was suitably creepy itial for some television show like Unsolved Mysteries but hadn't been as threatening to life and limb as of a hundred things that could happen in the average police officer's workday.
        Loading and secreting the guns would most likely prove to have been an overreaction… Well, he'd done what a cop should do. Prepared himself to serve and protect.
        On the radio in the bathroom, Bobby Vee was singing "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes."
        Beyond the bedroom windows, snow was falling harder than before. The flakes, previously fluffy and wet, were now small, more numerous, and dry. The..wind had accelerated again. Sheer curtains of snow rippkd and billowed across the black night. After his mom warned him