Moonlight Rises (A Dick Moonlight Thriller) (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

LIFE SUCKS. THEN YOU die.

Or, in my case, you die and then you live.

That kinda sucks too.

All I remember is getting the snot kicked out of me in a back alley off lower Broadway and then having this vivid dream about floating over my body, my “supposed” girlfriend cozied up with Some Young Guy right beside my deathbed. Next thing I know, I’m traveling through some time-warped worm tunnel and chatting it up with my long dead dad. I remember him telling me my time isn’t up. I remember him looking really good for a dead guy. I remember the still fresh red carnation pinned to his lapel. He was younger than me. But older too. I remember how good it felt to be dead.

But then, like life, death is but a dream.

The ICU is a beehive of activity.

Monitor alarms pulse.

Buzzers buzz.

Bells chime.

Nurses frantically work intravenous lines. They shout at one another. Get in one another’s faces. Their voices aren’t exactly discernable yet. More like those weird
Waa-Waa
adult voices on that old
Charlie Brown Christmas
TV special. One of them even starts to cry, like I’m better off dead.

Hell is other people. And I should know. I’ve been to heaven and back.

The tall, dark-haired doctor rushes back in, begins poking and prodding me. He shines the business end of a bright penlight in my good eye, and I instinctively rear back against the one-hundred-percent acrylic, allergen-free, nylon pillow.

The doc just about jumps out of his lime green Crocks.

“WE GOT A LIVE ONE!!!”

I can hear his voice plain enough. It’s enough to raise the dead.

“How long was he gone?! Come on people . . . How?! long?! Gone?!”

Crying Nurse steps up. She’s young, blond, and sporting considerable cleavage beneath a white blouse, and I’m at least alive enough to feel myself getting a rise out of her.

“I’m guessing just short of five minutes, doctor,” she sniffles. “His girlfriend said goodbye to him for God sakes.”

Here’s what I’m thinking:

Five minutes. That’s got to be a record or something, right? Book deal kind of record? Cable television movie kind of record? Somebody call an agent.

“Miracle of miracles,” the doc muses, shaking his head. “Never seen anything like it.”

He leans down into my ear.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Moonlight? If you can hear me, nod your head.”

I take his advice, nod my head.

“Can you talk?”

I open my mouth, try to spit something out. But it all emerges as a stuttering crackle. Like my tongue has dried out and is now stuck to the back of my throat.

“Take it easy killer. You don’t need to strain yourself.”

Gee, thanks doc.

Chin against chest, I manage a glance down at my lap. My erection is enormous. Too much blood for too little skin. The side effect of a severe concussion: spontaneous erections. The crying nurse with the cleavage can’t help but notice either. She smiles through the tears.

“My, my . . . Welcome back to the land of the living . . . Dick.” Turning to another nurse. “Find his girlfriend! Stat!”

Yah, that’s it. Go get my girlfriend. Go get the ever loyal Lola. Wait till she hears I’m alive. That should be a serious wakeup call.

Crying Nurse runs out into the hall. But not before reaching out with her right hand and giving my resurrected Johnson a flick of her index finger. SOP for an unwanted erection under hospital circumstances. Or so my ex-wife, Lynn, the one time Chief Nurse of this very hospital used to tell me back when we still acknowledged one another’s presence on planet earth.

I watch Johnson recede. Back to normal limp proportions.

Dead again.

As the doc exits the room, I sense some commotion coming from down the corridor. And then there she is. Jackie O sunglasses masking her face. My girlfriend. My love. My significant other.

Dr. Lola Ross, Licensed Clinical Psychologist and state university professor.

She rushes to me, bends down over me, embraces me. She’s so happy I can feel her tears pouring down onto my face.

“You were dead, Richard. You were so very, very, very, dead. They called it, just five minutes ago. Dead. Deceased. I was here. Right here standing by your side.”

I’m not dead anymore, I want to say. But I still can’t say squat. So I just let her cry while out the corner of my eye, I keep a vigil out for Some Young Guy. Maybe this time I’ll get a good look at his face. But he’s nowhere to be seen. Is it possible I dreamt him all up?

The medical staff decides it’s safe to leave us alone for a minute. Or maybe they’re rushing out to see who will be the first to call the papers, or
Ripley’s Believe it or Not
. Crap, maybe it’s just time for a cig break.

We stay silent for a while. Me and sig other. Correction: me and the
former
sig other. Until after a time, Lola separates herself from me, stands up straight. She asks me if I want a sip of water.

I manage to nod yes.

She holds a pale pink plastic cup with a straw in it directly in front of my face. I wrap my lips around the straw, sip with all my might, which ain’t much.

The water burns the back of my throat, but it also loosens up the concrete rigor mortis that lodged itself there when I was dead. I open my mouth, and for the first time a real voice emerges, however sandpaper rough.

“I’m baccckkkk . . .”

She smiles warmly, takes hold of my hand. I smell perfume. The
Channel No. 5
she splashes on herself only on special occasions. Like before we have sex for instance.

“I was about to make preparations for . . . your . . . funeral.” She starts to cry again when she says the word “funeral.” But all I can picture is Some Young Guy with his hand on her butt, his lips barely inches from her lips.

I try to laugh, but only manage to cough up some nasty-tasting bile. I think about confronting her about her new boyfriend. But I’m in no shape for a fight. I’ve just been brought back from the dead after all. Even Lazarus must have known enough to pick his fights like his nose. Instead, I just hold her cold clammy hand, and let her sweat it out.

Lying back on the hard bed, I feel the weight of sleep consume me once more.

Moonlight head-case FYI: Sleep is a lot different than death. It’s relaxation as opposed to total, bodily freedom.

I close my good eye and drift off to the sound of Lola’s voice telling me to, “Sleep, Richard . . . Go. To. Sleep. But please don’t die on me again.”

As I drift off, I think,
Baby, are you gonna have some serious explaining to do when I wake up, or what?

CHAPTER 2

WHEN I WAKE UP again, I can see that I’ve been moved to another room outside of ICU. A room with a view of downtown Albany. And lucky me, I’ve got company. There’s a big side of beef standing in the open doorway dressed in APD uniform blues. A plainclothes dick takes up space just inside the room.

I don’t recognize the uniform.

Same goes for Plain Clothes.

But that doesn’t mean anything. I rarely have anything to do with APD’s finest anymore. Not since I busted up an illegal body parts harvesting op a few years ago. Half the department was dismissed over that scandal, and the other half that remained refused to give me any work as an independent investigator. Work I relied on to pay for food and other life essentials, especially when it came to my son.

To Albany law enforcement, I’m tainted meat.

Rotten. Stinky. Untouchable.

You can be damn sure I abide by the speed limit these days, because even a simple traffic ticket promises the possibility of jail time. Especially if a cop decides to plant an ounce of pot in my trunk, or maybe slip an unlicensed hand cannon inside my glove box when I’m not looking. Truth be aired: if the cops who pulled my sad corpse out of that back alley had even the slightest idea of who it was they were rescuing, they might have kept on walking.

Listen: exposing crooked cops can cost a head-case private detective like me dearly. Cops . . .
SmAlbany
cops . . . have a way of black-listing your ass. So when finances got so tight I had to send my six-year-old back home to his mother in Los Angeles because I couldn’t afford to feed and clothe him without skipping out on the heating bill, I knew that I’d better start looking for work other than private dicking around.

But as luck would have it, I did manage to score a small gig with an anonymous bar manager who claimed his abusive boss was running an illegal gambling parlor in the back of a used car operation that he also owned right next door. Said bar manager wanted me to go undercover as the place’s newest car salesman and in the process, try and gather up enough evidence to put the boss away for good.

But I didn’t even get past the job interview before I sort of managed to burn the used car operation down while the uncle and his girlfriend were still inside it.

I know what you’re thinking: that’s bloody horrible.

Well, the uncle and the girlfriend tried to kill me first by drowning me in a grease pit filled with old oil and gasoline. So they had what was coming to them.

The good news is that I solved the problem for the bar manager. Problem is, when the bar manager couldn’t pay me for my services, he gave me the bar outright. Which meant that Private Detective Richard Moonlight was now the proud owner of
Moonlight’s Moonlit Manor
.

Or “Moonlight’s” for short.

Place doesn’t bring me a lot of money by any stretch of the imagination, but at least I can eat and pay my bills. As for my son, he’s still in LA attending grammar school. Word up is that I’ll get him back for summer vacations. Or so his mother promised. But I’m not holding my breath. Just like the Albany cops, she considers me about one notch lower than rotting meat. You know, the kind with worms in it. But then, she never did have much of a sense of humor. Not even when she fell heels-over-head with my APD partner in the back seat of our assigned squad car.

Plain Clothes seats himself in a chair directly across from me. He’s wearing a trench coat which he doesn’t bother taking off. The insecure type, I know them well. He’s about my age, with thinning gray hair slicked back against his skull. Clean shaven, blue suit underneath the trench coat, maybe picked up at a thrift shop. Sal Army, not Good Will. Slim black tie we all used to wear back in the ‘80s New Wave days. Corner barbershop groomed. He looks neat and conservative enough for a department dick.

From my bed, I shoot a glace at his wedding finger and see that it’s empty. Moonlight the observant. I also see that the sun’s rays haven’t quite tanned the white ring-line that remains. Another newly-separated-on-the-way-to-divorce cop. Big surprise there.

“Mind if I ask you a few questions, Mr. Moonlight?”

“Dick,” I offer. “Dick.”

“’Scuse me?” the uniformed side of beef breaks in. He’s obviously under the impression I’m trying to mess with his boss. Or maybe he’s just trying to pick a fight with the near dead, or the hardly alive.

“That’s my name. Dick. As in, your boss may call me Dick, as opposed to
a
dick.”

Beefy Super Cop takes a step back, his face assuming a beet-red patina. Plain Clothes turns around in his chair.

“Tell you what, Mike. Head down to the cafeteria and grab a coffee. I won’t be long here.”

Sufficiently chastised, the cop shoots me a glare, like most cops around here do now since bringing down half their house.

“You need me, Detective,” he mumbles his glare never veering from my face, “I won’t be far away.”

When Super Cop is gone, the detective sets his eyes back on me.

“I’m Detective Dennis Clyne,” he says. Then, “I’d shake your hand, Dick, but under the circumstances . . .”

“No matter,” I whisper, my throat still feeling like someone rubbed sandpaper against the back of it. “Go ahead and ask your questions.”

Clyne reaches into his trench coat pocket, pulls out a small spiral notepad like the reporters used before they could record everything you said with iPhones. He flips open the top, gives the blank page a quick look-see.

“Give it to me from the start.”

That’s when I ask him for a drink of water.

“What?” He makes a frown, shakes his head like my request doesn’t compute.

I tell him to pour me some water from the pitcher set out on the little table beside me. Pour it into the plastic cup. Then I ask him to put a straw into it, and place it towards my mouth so I can drink it. Can’t spill my guts to him with a dry mouth.

His eyes go all a flutter.

“Maybe we should call a nurse.”

“
Youuu cannn dooooo eeeet,”
I encourage in a raspy voice.

Exhaling like my ex-wife used to do when I asked for morning sex, he gets up, pours the water into the cup, tosses the straw into it, sets it under my chin.

“Pillow,” I add, just to bust balls even more.

More exhaling.

“Need a little more elevation,” I add.

I sit up as far as I can. With his free hand he shoves one of the acrylic pillows down behind the other, compacts it tight. He exhales for a third time and holds the water in front of my face again. I tongue the straw, wrap my lips around it and suck. The water burns when it goes down my pipes, but it offers some relief too.

“We good to go here, Moonlight?” Clyne poses, wide-eyed and tight-lipped, the agitation in his voice as plain as the white walls. “I seriously don’t have all afternoon.”

“You give new meaning to the term public servant,” I say, sitting back, the straw sticking to my lips, until it comes loose and drops to the floor. “What’s on your mind?”

The detective sits back down, crosses his legs. When his pant legs rise up I can see he’s wearing white tennis socks. I’ll bet his wife never would have let him out of the house like that. But then, what do I know? He sees that I see that he has white socks on, and he quickly uncrosses his legs, sets his feet flat on the floor.

He picks up his notebook.

“You were attacked,” he recites from the pad like his memory needs a jumpstart. “Physically assaulted by roughens in downtown Albany. Broadway at the corner of Beaver. How many were there?”

“The
roughens
you mean?”

He nods.

“Three.”

He lifts his writing hand, makes a curling motion with the wrist. Like he wants me to extrapolate.

“They were big, I think. Dressed all in black. Jeans, boots, sweatshirts. President Obama masks covered their faces. These goofy rubber masks that made them look like cartoon presidents.”

“How old?”

“Young enough to do this to me.”

He looks me up and down, starts to write something. “Between 20 and 70,” he says under his breath. “All male. That pretty much narrows it, Moonlight.”

“Look, they were using those handheld electronic machines for talking. You know, the little machines that throat cancer survivors use after their voice box has been removed.”

“You mean a voice synthesizer.”

“Yah, one of those.”

“So, they beat you with them?”

I can’t help but crack a smile. I might even laugh if I don’t know how much it’ll hurt. The brokenhearted Clyne has a sense of humor after all. Laughter: the best medicine. Jack Daniels might argue with that.

“No, Clyne. They pressed them up under their jaws when they spoke. Came out all electronic. They were masking their voices.”

“American voices?”

“They were definitely speaking English. I think. Or . . .”

“Which is it, Mr. Moonlight?”

“Some of the words came out sounding stranger than others. And only one of them actually said anything. Maybe the voice was foreign. Foreign for Albany anyway. But the voice machines made it hard to make out. Plus they were pounding the snot out of me. But for sure the voice wasn’t young or old.”

“Interesting.”

“Glad I’m keeping it colorful for you. I was a cop like you once too. It’s not hard to tell how old someone is by the sound of their voice.”

“I get it. 20 to 70. Like I already said.”

“Yah, somewhere in there. More like 40 I’d say. All around.”

“OK we’ll go with that. Four-Oh. Next question. You piss anybody off lately?”

“How’s about who haven’t I pissed off lately?”

He rolls his eyes.

“Of course, the Russians, the body parts, the A-P-D cop thing, the local mob who used to own your new bar. You’ve been fighting a multi-front war, Moonlight. I seem to recall coming across a headline or two in the
Times Union
archives.”

“How is it you weren’t a part of all that, Clyne?”

“Just transferred to Albany six months ago. Came up from Yonkers. But I’m the type who likes to do his research.”

“You came up
here
? Nobody comes up
here
.”

“My wife wanted to raise a family up
here
in Albany. The country so to speak.”

I eye his ring finger again. The white line.

“Your wife,” I say. It’s a question.

He face goes cadaver stiff.

“Four or five weeks after we moved up here, she started seeing a personal trainer. Gold’s Gym.” Biting his bottom lip. “Let’s just say she liked his barbell better than mine.”

“I understand. Been there, done that. Goes with the cop job.” I raise my right hand, touch the bullet scar beside my right earlobe. An involuntary act, especially when it comes to talking about infidelity. Mine or my ex’s.

“You shot yourself in the head a few years ago and survived,” Clyne says, his eyes focused on the visible scar in a solemn way that makes me think he’s no stranger to contemplating suicide himself. “Took me a while to believe it,” he adds.

“It was an accident. And it was only a small piece of .22 cal hollow point that pierced my skull . . . That’s my story anyway.”

“You most definitely lived.”

“I opted out at the last second when a vision of my little boy staring down at his dead dad filled my mind. I pulled the barrel away from my head. But I was drunk, and my trigger finger was true. Ninety-five percent of the bullet shattered against my skull. But a small sliver entered into my brain, lodged itself beside my cerebral cortex. Can’t be operated on. Sometimes I get short term memory loss. Other times, I run the risk of a stroke. I could die, I guess, pretty much at anytime, with or without getting the crap beat out of me by a bunch of Obamas holding voice machines up against their throats.”

“Yet you go on living.”

“Like the
Ever Ready
rabbit.”

He stands up, shoves the notebook back into an inside pocket on his trench coat.

“That’s it?” I pose.

“For now. Sounds like those three perps could have been anyone, black or white or yellow, knowing how many enemies you have in Albany.” Cocking his head. “Could even be a random act of violence. Lotsa people out of work these days. Prices going up. Gas through the roof. Especially these guys turn out to be foreigners. Maybe that explains the Obama masks.” He smiles at his own political jibe. Witty.

“How ironical,” I point out. “However, they never took my wallet. But one of them did say something I understood perfectly well.”

Pulling his notepad back out. “Shoot.”

“They told me to stay away from Peter Czech.”

He seems taken aback for a beat or too. Like I suddenly passed gas.

“Spell it,” he says.

I do it.

“So who’s Peter Czech?”

“Wheelchair-bound young guy came to me a few days ago. Asked me to find his father. Claims he was given up for adoption immediately upon birth. Thirty years ago. He did some snooping on the web, found out it’s possible his old man still lives in Albany, right under his mustached upper lip.”

“What about his adoptive parents? They still alive?”

“Not according to him. Died in a car accident in the ‘90s. Head-on collision. Hit and run. Never found the guy who was driving the truck. Biological mother’s dead too.”

“You might have told me all this when we started.”

Me, pursing my lips.

“I tend to forget things sometimes. My head . . . it can’t always be trusted. Besides, I haven’t really done any work on the project yet, since I’m not entirely sure I want it. Which I might have explained to the Obama boys if they’d only have given me the chance to talk.”

He raises his right hand, pokes his skull behind his earlobe, in the exact place where the little piece of bullet entered my head.

“The memory . . . she comes and goes,” I say.

“Like my wife,” he says.

Beefy Officer Mike shows back up at the door.

“Everything OK, Detective?”

“Yah,” Clyne answers. “Just a minute.” Then to back me, “Care to give me the phone number and address of this, ah, Peter Czech?”