Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (152 page)

YOU’RE DROWNING.

The entirety of your fragile head thrust deep down into the watery business end of a white porcelain toilet inside the men’s room of a Ralph’s Tavern in Albany. The water is cold and tastes vaguely of rust and urine as it enters into your mouth. You’re on your knees, hands pressed flat against a piss-stained floor, the cold hard steel of a pistol barrel pressed against your spine, a bear claw of a hand shoving your head down deeper into the toilet with each thrust.

“Who sent thee?” the poet barks.

Pulling you back out by the collar on your black leather coat, you spit out the rancid water and make a desperate attempt to inhale a dose of men’s room-fresh air. You want to be cooperative, being that this man is your client, whether he knows it or not. You want to at least try to answer his query. But instead you’re choking, gagging, and vomiting rancid toilet water.

“Who sent thee, scoundrel?”

The pistol barrel is jammed so tight against your spine you feel like it’s about to burst through skin and bone and enter into your stomach. You hear a fist banging on the men’s room door. Somebody shouting to open up. Somebody who’s got to drop “a big fucking deuce.” But the poet doesn’t care. He’s locked the door. Dead-bolted it secure. He’s already shot one man already, or so legend has it. What difference does it make if he shoots you too? The poet is desperate. He’s on the run. He’s drunk and wired up on cocaine. Enough Bolivian marching powder to fire up a power line.

You hear the barrel being cocked. You feel the mechanical action of the pistol against your spine. In a second or two, you’ll hear the blast and you’ll see your bullet-shredded pink stomach lining spatter up against the toilet and the graffiti-covered plaster wall—the work-in-progress canvass for the drunk and the damned.

“One more time. Who sent thee?”

You open your mouth once more, try to spit out the words. It’s like tearing the skin away from the back of your throat. But in the end, you manage to form a single word.

“Agent,” you whisper. Then, “Your. Fucking. Agent.”

“Liar,” the poet shouts, thrusting your head back into the toilet, but immediately pulling it back out, your face and head dripping wet like an overused toilet brush. “You are nothing but a scoundrel and a liar and I will have my revenge upon thee.”

The pistol barrel shifts from your spine upwards to the back of your skull. In your brain, you picture the poet. His thick, white, Ernest Hemingway
Old Man and the Sea
beard, his full head of salt and pepper hair cut close to the scalp. You see his short, bull-dog build, and his many-times-broken pug nose. You see his ratty khaki safari jacket, its pockets jammed with notebooks, scraps of paper with story-lines and poems written on them, pens, pencils, unsmoked joints, cash, candy bars, and who knows what the hell else. The poet is years older than you, but bears the strength, power, and build of a rhino. A drunk, coked-up Rhino.

“No wait!” you spit. “Wait. Please. Fucking wait, Mr. Walls. I can explain.”

More pounding on the door. More words. Someone about to crap his pants if you don’t open up.

“My agent might be a heartless, soulless cunt who would sell out her own aging mother to make a ten-spot,” Walls speaks in his deep, throaty, formal poetry reading voice. “After all, that’s why I’ve signed on with her. But she would never stoop so low by sending a private detective in search of me. You sir, are a liar and scoundrel.”

“You don’t know me.”

A slap upside your head with Walls’s bear claw hand. It makes your head ring.

“Cease thy banter, rogue.”

The pistol is pressed harder against your skull. Now you see brain matter, blood, and bits of bone spattered against the wall. With any luck it will cover up the hand-scribbled erect cock and the phone number written below it beside with the words,
“I give great head. Call me.”

More pounding on the door. More shouts.

“She cares about you, Mr. Walls,” you spit. “She needs you back at your writing desk. You’re all she’s got. She needs you. You need you. You need to be writing. It’s my job to bring you back home.”

Silence fills the bathroom, like the pause after a carefully recited stanza at a college sponsored literary reading.

“Liar,” the bearded poet whispers, “turn to me.”

You don’t turn to him so much as he forces you up by your coat collar. Forces you up enough for you to shift from your knees to your ass.

“Open up,” Walls spits. “Take thee into your mouth.”

You open your mouth, your eyes shifting from the black barrel to the poet’s round, red, bearded face. You feel the barrel slide inside, its cold metal pressed against your tongue and against the roof of your mouth.

“Swallow until you see the colors of the noon,” recites the poet from one of his most famous works. “Swallow until you lose your mind and your soul. Swallow for love. Swallow for me. Swallow your death.”

You close your eyes, and wait for the barrel to come down and for the world to turn black. You’ve died before, so why should this time be any different? We all owe God a life. That’s what Shakespeare said. And you, Richard Moonlight, part-time private eye, part-time dad of one, part-time lover, part-time scribbler of words, full-time head case… You are long overdue.

But the hammer doesn’t come down. That’s when something else happens instead.

The pistol barrel slides back out of your mouth as the poet rises up, filling the stall with his four-by-four body. He doesn’t shoot you, but he doesn’t leave you in peace either.

“This is where me and thee take our leave,” recites the poet. “One from the other.”

When he raises up the pistol barrel, you know what’s coming. You close your eyes and wait for the collision of steel against bone.

“Be advised, Mr. Moonlight, that Roger Walls will never see the inside of a prison cell again. Do we have an understanding?”

“Duly noted,” you utter through clenched teeth. “But you haven’t done anything wrong.”

The high-pitched sound of your own scared-like-a-girl voice is the last thing you remember before the men’s room turns black.

Seventeen Hours Earlier

CHAPTER ONE

IN THE DREAM, I’M RUNNING.

Running along the side of the road. Running slow. Jogging. A nice, slow, steady gate, the blood pumping through my veins, heartbeat elevated, breathing nice even breaths in and out, a small sheen of sweat building up on my skin, coating it like a transparent glaze.

I’m feeling good. Feeling at one with my body and the fresh air. Feeling healthy. Like the little piece of bullet lodged inside my brain doesn’t exist at all. Like I have nothing to look forward to but a long back-nine of a life without the threat of dying at any moment should that little fragment of bullet decide to make like an active fault line and shift.

Then the cars start passing by.

I’m facing traffic as I run along the roadside, so I can easily see the faces of the drivers and the passengers as they motor pass. There’s something about the way they’re gazing upon me. The drivers are slowing down and craning their necks in order to get a good look at me. They’re risking injury to life and limb by taking their eyes off the road to get a full eye-fill of me, your average, everyday jogger taking in his morning run in the sun.

Or am I?

When a carload of college-age girls goes by and they begin to scream and hoot, the driver blaring the horn and swaying into the opposite lane of oncoming traffic, I know something must be up.

That’s when I begin to feel a breeze.

It’s slight at first. But it’s a breeze alright, and it’s blowing against my midsection. The farther I run away from home, the more intense the cold wind blowing against my junk becomes. I stop running. I look down at myself. It’s then I realize I’ve left my home without my shorts on. I’m jogging along the soft shoulder of a public street in the middle of a bright busy morning, with only a t-shirt and sneakers on, the rest of me exposed to the world.

Panic fills me.

I about-face and try to sprint back to my loft. But my feet won’t move. I’m paralyzed on the street-side as the cars and trucks begin piling up. They’re not flying past now, satisfied with a simple rubbernecking gaze. They’re pulling off to the side of the road and getting out. Old people, young people, men and women, girls and boys, cops, firemen, construction workers, students, suits, priests, bearded rabbis, you name it … they’re all stopping their vehicles and getting out. They’re standing in the road gawking at me with these wide-as-hell eyes, looking me up and down, feeding upon my nakedness. Upon my exposed manhood.

Those eyes…

…They are the same kind of wanting eyes that stare at me now.

Steely blue eyes that belong to a small but spunky forty-something woman by the name of Suzanne Bonchance, but who is better known in literary circles as the “Iron Lady” due to a pair of brass knuckles she keeps conspicuously perched on the edge of her desk. The same brass knuckles I can plainly see as I sit down in a black leather chair that’s positioned directly before the desk. A desk so long and wide it can accommodate a dozen or more manuscripts and still leave room for the Iron Lady’s many framed photos which are positioned so that a visitor like me can get a good look at them. Pics of her seated in a café in Paris with Salmon Rushdie. Pics of her dirty dancing with Jackie Collins. Pics of her walking the red carpet at the Oscars, Brad and Angelia only a few steps behind her. Pics of her standing beside Michelle and Barack Obama, a massive American flag perched on the wall behind them.

I slip my leather briefcase off my lap, set it down on the floor, and once more eye those brass knuckles.

“You ever use those before?” I ask, nodding in the direction of the steel and very illegal street fighting weapon, as she seats herself down gently into her leather swivel chair, her neck-length black hair settling perfectly upon perfectly carved shoulders. This morning those perfect shoulders are covered by a perfectly tailored gray top that perfectly matches a gray mini skirt and knee length leather boots for footwear. The forty-something woman looks like the offspring of an in-her-prime Sophia Loren and a
Friends
-era Jennifer Anniston—that is if they were ever able to physically hook up and spit out a love child. Her perfect wardrobe du jour costs more than my entire closet of Levis jeans and crew neck, all-cotton t-shirts. But then, I’m not a hotshot literary agent.

“Would you like to see me in them?” she asks, a hint of a perfect white smile forming on her red lip-sticked mouth.

“And only in them,” I say. Moonlight the Cagey. Or is it Moonlight the Dog?

She exhales and does that positively-taken-aback eye blinking thing that all classy women do when I surprise them with my wit and charm.

“I’ve been warned about your humor,” she says, after a calm and collecting inhale and exhale. “And about your…” Making like a pistol, she points an extended index finger in the direction of her right temple.

“It’s okay, you can say it. You being the perfect literary agent and all.”

“Suicide,” she says, the word coming out with a noticeable hint of English on it. As if this New York born and bred woman were from London.

“Botched suicide, to be perfectly honest. I couldn’t go through with it in the end. Call me a wimp.”

“But you bear the scars. Emotional and physical.” It’s a statement posed like a question.

“There’s a small piece of .22 caliber hollow-point lodged beside my cerebral cortex. On occasion it can cause me to pass out, especially during periods of great stress. Or it can mess with my decision making process. It can also cause me to die right now in this chair if it suddenly decides to shift. It’s a hell of a way to live actually, knowing you can die at any second. Makes you appreciate the time you have all the more.”

“Sounds positively warm and fuzzy,” she says, the corners of her pretty little mouth perking up. “But I trust the little piece of bullet doesn’t impede your performance?”

I smile.

“My performance is impeccable.” It’s a lie. But what the hell?

Her once cautious smile now turns into an all out ear-to-ear smile. Sitting back in her chair, she sets both hands onto the armrests. It causes her jacket to open up revealing a tight-fitting black silk blouse that’s unbuttoned enough to reveal some serious cleavage and a black lace push-up bra.
Victoria Secret.

“I’m not interested in that kind of performance,” she explains. “I’m interested in the performance of Dick Moonlight, private detective.”

“I like the way you say it.”

“Say what?”

“Dick.”

We sit in silence while I watch the lids on her eyes rapidly rise and fall. What for some might be an uncomfortable silence, but for me is a whole-lot-of-fun kind of silence. Moonlight the Ball Buster.

“Why don’t we get right to the heart of the matter, shall we?” the agent says after a beat.

“Goody,” I say, crossing my right booted foot over my blue-jeaned knee. “Let’s have it, Iron Lady.”

She shifts her gaze from me to the window wall on her left, as if looking out onto the Hudson Valley helps her think.