Read Online Loot the Moon by Mark Arsenault - Free Book Online

the ring, and the device fell apart, dye tube intact.
    He laughed and tapped a few more dance steps, which sent happy vibrations down the fire escape. Freeing these garments from retail bondage would be easy.
    Back in the kitchen, he made sure the slacks were undamaged, then left them on the table and went to the bathroom to scrub the soot from his hands.
    He lost himself in the washing, thinking of profit. The retail tags on the suits said $575. Nobody ever paid retail; this kind of high-end garment was generally on sale for $499. He could unload them to a fence he knew, probably for no more than fifty bucks each. Or he could sell them himself, anonymously, over the Internet. Say he could
get $250 each, plus shipping … Shit, I can’t do math . No matter. He said aloud to the mirror, “Whatever price I get will be the square root of a great score—squared.” He blasted his own smile in the mirror with double-barreled finger guns, then cranked the water shut and half listened for the echo drip from the shower stall, a quirk of his inferior plumbing.
    What’s that?
    Huh.
    He turned the water back on, then off, and heard an odd crackling again, an unnatural noise in an apartment he would know in the dark.
    Scratch turned toward the shower as the curtain scraped open, gloved fingers sweeping it away.
    Impossible.
    Imfucking possible .
    A chill paralysis spread through him like a voodoo drug.
    I’m not seeing this. This is a movie I saw. I’m remembering this.
    Then he saw a head encased in a plastic bag with just a slit for the eyes and a wrinkle of brow pressing heavily. The black pupils were swollen huge, encircled by a delicate gray ring of iris no thicker than a wedding band. A man’s eyes , Scratch thought.
    A water droplet raced down the plastic face, recoiled ever slightly at the chin, as if gathering itself for a leap, and then cast off.
    The figure’s right hand had been moving at him all this time, Scratch finally realized.
    By instinct, Scratch’s hips jerked to the side, to matador away from the clumsy thrust.
    He would pretend the man was real, just until he figured out why he was seeing this.
    As if in slow motion, he watched the stranger push a thin shank— Holy Christ, an ice pick —through the empty space Scratch had just
abandoned. The man was out of the shower stall. He wore a black sweater, tight black pants. Momentum carried him across the tiny bathroom. He was growling.
    This cannot be happening.
    At the violent stab of the ice pick, the bottom half of the mirror shattered. For an instant as they dropped, each shard reflected a chaotic fragment of the scene in a tiny moving picture.
    The crash of glass obliterated the hope this might be imagination. Scratch set his feet and drove his palm at the man’s shoulder. A glancing blow.
    He’s real, all right. But why?
    The attacker regrouped. Scratch turned his right side to him, to keep his heart as far from the shank as possible, as he had learned during a four-month bid in state prison. He had never been stabbed, but had once seen an inmate take a shank to the shoulder, wrestle it away, and jam it back from where it had come. His eyes locked on the pick, on the bright white point at the end of it, on which his twenty-six years of life, plus nine months in the womb, delicately balanced. His brain flooded his body with fight-or-flight chemicals, racing his heart, tightening his testicles, rerouting blood to the big muscles that could save him.
    The figure swung the weapon in a wide arc. Scratch ducked, felt the drag of a forearm across his hair, and shot a frantic uppercut to the man’s rib cage. Bang. Fist on ribs, but without much leverage. A grunt, nothing more. Scratch threw an off-balanced hand toward the bagged head, and missed.
    The pick flashed up. Scratch shrank from it.
    Suddenly from the left a fist crashed into Scratch’s cheekbone. He knew instantly he was hurt, though he felt no