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  Shoot The Moon (and more)

  Max Allan Collins

  Shoot The Moon (and more)

  © Copyright 2021 (As Revised) Max Allan Collins

  Wolfpack Publishing

  6032 Wheat Penny Avenue

  Las Vegas, NV 89122

  wolfpackpublishing.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.

  Kindle ISBN 978-1-64734-248-7

  Paperback IBSN 978-1-64734-249-4

  Cover Design by J Caleb Design

  For David Gilfoyle –

  the real Wheaty,

  with apologies.

  Contents

  Shoot the Moon: An Introduction by Max Allan Collins

  I. Shoot The Moon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Public Servant

  The Love Rack

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  About The Author

  Shoot The Moon (and more)

  Shoot the Moon: An Introduction by Max Allan Collins

  Shoot the Moon (my alternate title was Wynning Streak), was written in the first phase of my career. When I wrote the novel, I had already sold Bait Money, No Cure for Death, Quarry, Blood Money, and The Baby Blue Rip-off.

  Between contracts, I decided to try something different. I was very much in the sway of Donald E. Westlake at the time, and my first novel (Bait Money, and its sequels as well) might be fairly termed “Richard Stark” pastiches. Before I knew that Westlake and Stark were the same writer, they were my two favorite contemporary crime fiction writers – indeed, they were the last two crime fiction writers to influence me in any major way. Their works sat on the same shelf, with a bookend separating them. When I learned Westlake was Stark, I simply removed the bookend. (Don loved that story.)

  On its most basic level, Shoot the Moon was an attempt to do the kind of comic crime caper Don was known for, under his own name. He was mentoring me at the time, and I now wonder if he was irritated that I had chosen to imitate him yet again, in another fashion. When he read Shoot the Moon, he was not enthusiastic, and suggested I had gone overboard with the discursive approach. The version in this collection reflects a cutting and revision based on Don’s generous notes (the original doesn’t seem to exist).

  Incidentally, the book was written in 1974 at the tail-end (sorry) of the streaking fad. The direct inspiration was a streaking incident at my cousin’s wedding.

  Strange as it may seem, I’d pretty much forgotten about the novel until I was sent some materials from the files of my former agent, Knox Burger, upon his passing in 2010. Knox represented me till around 1982, when he had a lackluster response to my novel True Detective, and I – frankly – fired him. Since that time I’ve been with agent Dominick Abel, who believed in that novel, which went on to win the Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” for Best Hardcover Novel of 1983.

  True Detective wasn’t the first book of mine that Knox rejected – Shoot the Moon was. I didn’t even know agents could reject a client’s manuscript, but there it was. That was when I sent the book to Don Westlake, who gave me his typically helpful notes. The revision went to Burger (and I have a hunch Don called Knox and rattled his cage for me), who finally consented to handle the thing.

  As I indicated, the manuscript of “the thing” was returned to me, with a few other odds and ends, in 2010. It did not appear to have been sent out anywhere, and I never received a report from Knox on any history of rejections (much less acceptance). But my career had heated up about then, with more Nolans, Mallorys and Quarrys to write, and Shoot the Moon became a low priority that was soon to become a faded memory.

  Reading it now, many decades later, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s clearly my work and rather fun. What’s most surprising to me is that I see myself doing James M. Cain in it more than Donald E. Westlake. Cain was a huge influence on my first-person style and, despite the lack of cuckolded husbands getting bumped off in the book, the approach is very much his.

  As sort of bonus features, this volume collects two short stories of mine, from the early years of my career.

  The two stories were written in a writing class at Muscatine (Iowa) Community College, though I’m not sure exactly when – some time in the 1966 - ‘68 period. Neither story was submitted anywhere, as there really wasn’t much of a market then for hardboiled fiction. I had started sending novels out in the mail as early as the ninth grade, and wasn’t shy about collecting rejection slips. But these stories just didn’t seem to have a logical home. They were part of my self-schooling in the craft of hardboiled crime fiction-writing, and they were discussed in class, and went into a drawer.

  They emerged in the mid-‘80s when mystery writer Wayne Dundee began Hardboiled, a prozine that was still in existence the last time I looked, albeit not under Wayne’s stewardship. Wayne, a fellow Midwesterner, was (and is) a friend whose work I admired. He wondered if I would write something for his new magazine. Not surprisingly, I didn’t have time, due to various deadlines, but said I’d be willing to show him two early stories of mine that might be publishable. He published them both, with “Public Servant” appearing in Hardboiled’s first issue (Lawrence Block later re-published it in Opening Shots, 2000). Eventually Wayne also serialized the first Nolan novel, Mourn the Living, before its various book publications (it will be gathered with Spree as Mad Money by Hard Case Crime in a year or so), written in 1968 around the same time as the two short stories here.

  “Public Servant” is quite shamelessly a Jim Thompson pastiche. What is perhaps most interesting about it is that I was imitating Thompson when he was largely unknown in the mystery field. Anthony Boucher had praised him, and R.V. Cassil
l’s famous essay celebrating The Killer Inside Me in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties would appear in 1968, though I’m fairly sure I wrote “Public Servant” in ‘66 or ‘67.

  I read Thompson in high school. I have a vivid memory of reading Pop. 1280 (1964) in study hall. That book is very much the inspiration for my story, but I repaid Thompson putting together (with Ed Gorman) the first monograph on him, Jim Thompson: The Killers Inside Him (Fedora Press, 1983), which brought “This World and Then The Fireworks” into print for the first time.

  “The Love Rack” is a longer story, generously described as a novella. It was an attempt to combine what I’d learned from two of my favorite writers – Mickey Spillane and James M. Cain – into one tale. The title, as any Cain buff already knows, is a reference to the Vincent Lawrence definition of a certain kind of sex-driven story situation that was his gift to Cain. That it’s heavily Spillane-influenced is amusing, considering what Mickey once told me about why he didn’t care for Cain: “I don’t like stories written in jail cells.”

  I present these stories to you because the young writer I once was very desperately wanted to see his work published, and read, and I owe him that much. I hope more casual readers will find these tales lightly entertaining, and my more dedicated fans will view them as interesting, even instructive road signs on the path I would be taking.

  Max Allan Collins

  Part 1

  Shoot The Moon

  Chapter 1

  Of course it’s crazy on the face of it that I would run naked across the lobby of the Holiday Inn in DeKalb, Illinois, in the middle of June, after streaking had hit its peak and gone the way of swallowing goldfish and cramming into phone booths.

  Crazier still when you consider that I am a short-haired, painfully straight young man, who at the time was taking summer school at Northern Illinois University to get a diploma to go with the empty folder I’d been handed at graduation a few weeks before, and had no intention of taking off my clothes in public (or robbing a bank, either) or anything else except getting that damn degree so I could maybe work at a bank or Holiday Inn. I’m no rebel. I’m no criminal. My father is a Methodist minister, for Christ sake!

  It started one night, in mid-June, around eleven. I was sitting beside my friend Wheaty in a booth in Sambo’s, the chain pancake house across from the DeKalb Holiday Inn. Both of us were, each in his own way, trying to reason with Peter “The Shaker” Saltz, a massive guy who was All-Conference tackle and to whom we owed a total of $78 in poker losses, $48 of it mine, $30 of it Wheaty’s.

  Neither of us had summer jobs, as we were busy enough just going to school making up courses we’d flunked. Neither of us had anybody around to borrow money from, as most of our friends were as poor as we were, and anyway were mostly not around, having either graduated or split for the summer. Neither of us had rich parents. Neither of us had $48, or $30, or any part of the $78.

  “Awk,” Wheaty said.

  Wheaty is a six-foot-four, gangly guy who looks like an oversize, friendly, slightly goofy rabbit. His hair is wheat-color and won’t lay down. Shaker had just told Wheat he was going to do bad things to us if we didn’t pay up. He was not specific, but Wheat has a good imagination. So do I.

  “I tell you what,” the Shaker was saying, beady little black eyes glowing under Neanderthal forehead, fringe of prematurely thinning black hair emphasizing the slope. “Since I don’t want you guys feelin’ like I’m stickin’ it to you, I’m gonna be fair. Give me Wheat’s car and we’ll call it even.”

  “My car!” Wheat gleeped. His big hands started moving in the air, and it was like he was trying to bat mosquitoes, tread water and wave goodbye all at the same time. “Shaker, anything but the car, Shaker, that’s my mom’s car, it’s not even mine, she’s just letting me use it, I can’t give it to you, Shaker, my mom would kill me.”

  “Maybe,” I said, striving for a reasonable, calm tone, “maybe we could find some other way to pay you back. Some way besides money or Wheat’s mom’s car, I mean. Work the debt off, somehow.”

  Shaker shrugged. “I said I was gonna be fair, Kitchenette. What you got in mind?” (“Kitchenette,” by the way, is indicative of Shaker’s sense of humor: my name is Fred Kitchen.)

  “Oh, well,” I said, “there’s all sorts of ways we could work it off for you.”

  “Name one.”

  “Uh...”

  “Well?”

  “There’s, uh, so many ways I can’t narrow it down to just one.”

  “Keep tryin’, Kitchenette, and when you do come up with a way, make sure it’s something you can do for me before I climb on that bus tomorrow morning.”

  Shaker, you see, didn’t need the $78 we owed him. He was leaving tomorrow, going to Toronto, having been signed to a Canadian pro football team who’d given him a healthy cash bonus. So the $78 was just something he could use as an excuse to gloat.

  The past several years, we had taken Shaker’s money in small stakes poker games, and Shaker, having been coached over the years that “It’s not how you play the game, it’s whether you win or lose,” resented that. He felt we had continually humiliated him. But recently, he’d had a winning streak, and we now owed him. It was his turn, in other words, to humiliate us.

  And then, Selma had a suggestion. Did I mention Shaker’s girl friend, Selma? Blond hair, blue eyes, bosomy, cheerleader Selma?

  Selma suggested, “How about a streak?”

  Everybody looked at Selma and said, “Huh?” or the equivalent, and Selma batted her thick, fake lashes and said, “They’re having a wedding reception across the street. At the Holiday Inn. See? The guests are all standing around in the lobby and stuff.”

  She pointed out the window, and we looked over, and yes, we could indeed see guests milling around in the Holiday Inn lobby, dressed to the teeth.

  “Wouldn’t it be just gross if Wheaty and Kitch streaked all those wedding guests and everybody?” And Selma, having made her suggestion, began to giggle. Apparently the thought of anything gross tickled her. She and the Shaker were engaged.

  “I’ll do it, I’ll do it,” Wheaty said, with characteristic restraint. “Anything’s better than paying thirty bucks, especially when you don’t have it, YES I’ll do it, OF COURSE I’ll do it.”

  Everyone in the place was looking at us now, and we waited till they stopped before resuming our talk. Shaker was eating a couple dozen pancakes, and Selma was eating a hot fudge sundae. Wheat and I were having water.

  The Shaker still wasn’t convinced seeing Wheaty and me nude would be worth $78. But Selma was, and so Shaker said, “Both of you or no deal.”

  Wheaty turned to me. “Kitch? Come on. You undress all the time. There’s nothing to it. Come on. Think of my mom.”

  I resisted that thought and said, slowly, with deliberation, “I will not take off my clothes in front of people.”

  Wheat was crestfallen. He already had his short-sleeve sweatshirt pulled half-way off and couldn’t believe my refusal. “You won’t have to take your clothes off in front of people, Kitch! Your clothes’ll already be off when we run in there!”

  “What’s the matter, Kitchenette?” Shaker asked, with overacted mock innocence. “Got somethin’ to hide?”

  Selma said, “Oh Shaker, you’re so gross,” and snuggled into his behind of a shoulder.

  Meanwhile, I was blushing. I admit it.

  “Come on, Kitch,” Wheat said. “Let’s show the Shaker what we’re made of.”

  “Shaker and everybody else, you mean,” I said.

  “Hell,” Shaker said. “I’d rather have the seventy-eight bucks.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  Chapter 2

  Don’t ever try to undress in a Volkswagen.

  A guy Wheaty’s size has trouble getting inside a Volkswagen, let alone stripping in one. And it goes without saying anybody Wheaty’s size has no business driving a Volkswagen, if for no other reason that his knees would block his path of vi
sion.

  Wheaty drove a Volkswagen. A copper-color bug that was (as Wheat had told Shaker) still in his mom’s name, even though Wheat had been driving it since high school. Riding in Wheat’s bug is always an adventure in itself and perhaps all the times I’d come close to death in that rider’s seat made it possible for me to withstand the dangers of streaking and bank robbery.

  First, streaking.

  Wheat got his elbows in my eyes and got himself caught in his fly and there was some discreet screaming from both of us, but somehow, don’t ask me exactly how, we were both naked. Inside Wheat’s Volkswagen. In the parking lot of the DeKalb Holiday Inn.

  The parking lot wasn’t lit, fortunately, but the few wedding guests wandering around the lot were, which was equally fortunate: the booze-happy couples, strolling arm-in-arm (for support as much as affection) did not even begin to notice the two naked people in the Volkswagen, which was slowly pulling around by the lobby entrance. I had Wheat do a U-turn so the car would be facing the exit when we got back. We (meaning Wheat and me: Selma and Shaker were safely across the street, in Sambo’s, watching) were to run through the lobby and out across the Holiday Inn court and into the pool for a quick skinny dip, then cut directly across to the parking lot (which connected with the court) where the Volks would be waiting, engine running, our clothes on the seat. And we’d be gone. The essence of streaking is speed, and the getaway should of course be as fast or faster than the streak itself.