Winter Moon

self-justifications.
        "All I want is your identification," Heather said, raising the fist in which she clenched the wallets. "This'll tell me who you are, where I can find you. You ever give us any more grief, you so much as drive by and spit on the front lawn, I'll come after all of you, take my time,.catch you at just the right moment." She cocked the hammer on the Korth, and their gazes all dropped from her eyes to the gun. "Bigger gun than this, higher-caliber ammunition, something with a hollow point, shoot you in the leg and it shatters the bone so bad they have to amputate. Shoot you in both legs, you're in a wheelchair the rest of your life. Maybe one of you gets it in the balls, so you can't bring any more like you into the world."
        The moon slid behind clouds.
        The night was deep.
        From the backyard came the coarse singing of toads.
        The three boys stared at her, not sure that she meant for them to go.
        They had expected to be turned over to the police.
        That, of course, was. out of the question. She had hurt two of them.
        Each of the injured still had a hand cupped tenderly over his crotch, and both were grimacing with pain. Furthermore, she had threatened them with a gun outside her home. The argument against her would be that they had represented no real threat because they hadn't crossed her threshold. Although they had spraypainted her house with hateful and obscene graffiti on three separate occasions, though they had done financial and emotional damage to her and her child, she knew that being the wife of a heroic cop was no guarantee against prosecution on a variety of charges that inevitably would result in her imprisonment instead of theirs.
        "Get out of here," she said.
        They rose to their feet but then hesitated as if afraid she would shoot them in the back.
        "Go," she said. "Now."
        At last they hurried past her, along the side of the house, and she followed at a distance to be sure they actually cleared out. They kept glancing back at her.
        On the front lawn, standing in the dew-damp grass, she got a good look at what they had done to at least two and possibly three sides of the house. The red, yellow, and sour-apple-green paint seemed to glow in the light of the streetlamps. They had scrawled their personal tagger symbols everywhere, and they had favored the F-word with and without a variety of suffixes, as noun and verb and adjective. But the central message was as it had been the previous two times they'd struck:
        KILLER COP.
        
        The three boys-two of them limping-reached their car, which was parked nearly a block to the north. A black Infinity. They took off with a squeal of spinning tires, leaving clouds of blue smoke in their wake..KILLER COP.
        
        WIDOWMAKER.
        
        ORPHANMAKER.
        
        Heather was more deeply disturbed by the irrationality of the graffiti than by the confrontation with the three taggers. Jack had not been to blame. He'd been doing his duty. How was he supposed to have taken a machine gun from a homicidal maniac without resorting to lethal force?
        She was overcome with a feeling that civilization was sinking in a sea of mindless hatred.
        
        ANSON OLIVER LIVES!
        
        Anson Oliver was the maniac with the Micro Uzi, a promising young film director with three features released in the past four years. Not surprisingly, he made angry movies about angry people. Since the shootout, Heather had seen all three films. Oliver had made excellent use of the camera and had had a powerful narrative style. Some of his scenes were dazzling. He might even have been a genius and, in time, might have been honored with Oscars and other awards. But there was a disquieting moral arrogance in his work, a smugness and bullying, that now appeared to have been an early sign of much deeper problems exacerbated by too many drugs.
        ASSASSIN.
        
        She wished that Toby didn't have to see his father labeled a murderer.
        Well, he'd seen it before. Twice before, all over his own house. He had heard it at school, as well, and had been in two fights because of it. He was a little guy, but he had guts. Though he'd lost both of the fights, he would no doubt disregard her advice to turn the other cheek and would wade into more battles.
        In the morning, after she drove him to