The Moonlight by Nicholas Guild

was old, so what did she expect?  The dog had been his wife’s, so if it was such a thing for her to clean a little shit off the carpet once in a while she could find herself another job.
    Goddam bitch.
    Anyway, she took care of things nice, and for an old broad she wasn’t such a bad piece of ass, so maybe it was okay about her hiding in the bathroom every time he went out with the dog.
    She was down in his will for a quarter of a million—what the fuck, she was the last woman Leo Galatina was ever going to get it up for.
    Leo glared at the dog with something like hatred.  His wife had bought it as a puppy, saying they needed some company now that they were old, and five weeks later the damn woman had fallen down dead of a stroke.  And ever since, Leo Galatina, who used to be a pretty tough guy, had to take the stupid poodle out four times a day so it can sprinkle the bushes.
    A car passed on the road, dark red, shiny as a new dime.  He watched as it pulled around the bend and disappeared.  The sound of its engine died away almost at once, as if it had stopped just up ahead.  One of the neighbors must have brought a new car home.  Well, they could all afford it.
    Leo lived in the smallest house on his street, but he could have bought and sold everyone on Mill Road twice over.  He was a rich old man and, although his wealth did not show in his manner of life, he took a pride in it.  He took an even greater pride in just being old, in having lived so long when so many of his friends and enemies—and especially his enemies—had been rotting in the earth for decades.  But he, Leo Galatina, expected to die in his bed, surrounded by his family, having taken the sacrament and unburdened his soul of its many sins.  Why not?  He had nothing to fear from his enemies anymore.  His enemies were all dead.
    “Come on, dog.  Let’s go.”
    On Mill Road you could hear the traffic on the freeway that ran parallel to it only sixty or seventy yards north, but the road itself had hardly any traffic.  He had seen one car tonight already, but he might not see another before he came home again.
    He would walk the dog to Birch Tree Lane and back, which was three quarters of a mile in each direction.  That was enough at his age.  Then he would watch television with Louise until nine o’clock, and then he would go to bed.  Louise would bring him a glass of warm milk, no different than as if he was a baby, and she would sit on the edge of his bed in her nightdress and wait for him to drink it.  She knew just how to be nice to a man and, if he could manage to get it up, she would take the nightdress off and come into bed with him.  Sometimes she would anyway.
    What the hell, she was paid to be nice to him.  There wasn’t another housekeeper in Fairfield County who got anything like her salary.  And she was in his will.  She could damn well afford to take her nightdress off once in a while.
    Bitch.
    Sure enough, the red car was parked in the Crockers’ driveway, its hood just visible as it emerged from the shade into the last of the sunlight.  Leo Galatina only made the identification and then glanced away.  The habits of a lifetime kept him alert, but he would have been ashamed to admit to any curiosity about his neighbors.  Except for their names, they were strangers to him, in some cases even after twenty years.  They knew who he was—or, more to the point, who he had been—and they had never wanted to know any more.
    So screw the pack of ’em, fuckin’ Yankee Doodle pansies.
    There were no sidewalks, and all the front lawns along Mill Road were guarded by fences of one kind or another, so you walked on the tarred gravel, long since worn to a smooth silver gray.  Leo had a bad leg, the result of a gunshot wound he had received in his forties, and part of the reason for these evening strolls was to keep it exercised.  But the leg meant that he couldn’t walk very fast—a mile and a half in forty minutes did