Moonlight Rises (A Dick Moonlight Thriller) (9 page)

CHAPTER 24

THEY UN-TAPE US FROM the tables.

Having duct tape torn off your bare chest is torture enough. Big and short Obama get a kick out of the procedure, like they’re giving us a waxing that glam chicks out in L.A. only dream about.

Then a fourth Obama appears on the scene. Or maybe this Obama has been there lurking in the shadows the entire time.

This one is shorter than the short one with the Conair. And smaller too. Slighter. The newly arrived little one applies some Bendatine solution to Georgie’s chest. Following that, the little Obama bandages him up. What we have here is a torturer with a conscience

“Don’t take this off until later,” the little Obama whispers. “And those jerk-offs made me agree to all this.”

The voice shocks me more than that dead-in-the-water Conair did Georgie. It’s a female voice. It isn’t like the others. Do I suspect dissension in the ranks?

I most certainly do.

They yank us off the tables, stand us up, replace the duct tape on our mouths with fresh tape, and bind our wrists together behind our backs. Then they lead us up the stairs and out a trap door, to a four-door BMW with tinted windows.

No one says another word without the use of those voice synthesizers. That’s when something dawns on me. If they’re so protective of their voices, is it possible I know one of them? Otherwise, why hide your voice?

But I’m in no position to push the matter. Plus there’s the issue of the smaller one. The one with the woman’s voice. No way she’s a part of the original gang-of-three that beat me to death just other day. She’s a newbie. Far smaller than her teammates. By all appearances, she’s willing to blow her cover by whispering to us, and by helping mend the small punctures Georgie received from that Conair wire.

Commander Obama and short Obama snuggle up into the front shotgun seat. Commander is pressed up tight against the door, yet somehow manages to hold a .9mm on us over his left shoulder. The taller of the three Obamas gets behind the wheel, fires her up. The small female Obama squeezes in beside me, an identical .9mm gripped in her left hand.

That’s where they make their mistake.

Putting Georgie and me together like that. If I were doing the transporting, I would have placed someone in between Georgie and me. Or I would have at least put one of us up front in the middle, instead of that fireplug. That way they could prevent us from working together to undo the duct tape that binds our wrists.

To be truthful, it isn’t all that difficult.

As the BMW moves slowly across a barren landscape of formerly suburban McHomes, I maneuver my wrists towards Georgie even with them being bound behind my back. And I can do it without Commander Obama being the least bit suspicious. After all, he’s wearing a mask like the rest of them. And he’s also shoved up tight against the door. He has limited or even zero peripheral vision.

Partial blindness is also a mistake.

The tall and lanky Georgie is able to maneuver his arms enough towards his left hip to get a hold of my wrists and to begin working his long fingers on my tape. He also has the benefit of long fingernails as so many pot smokers do. The easier to roll a ducktail joint with. He works until I feel a tear in the tape, and then another, and finally one more.

I’m able to take it from there.

When my hands are free, I’m better able to attack Georgie’s tape in the same manner. When he’s free, we don’t have to say a single word to one another to know what to do next. Georgie and I have known one another for a lot of years. We’re as close as brothers. Twin brothers.

We move at the same time.

Georgie going for Commander Obama with both hands thrust out in front. Me springing my claws on the lady Obama beside me, snatching the .9mm out of her hands, slamming her over the cranial cap with the barrel.

She falls into my lap as I swing the barrel around, and press the pistol against the short Obama in the middle. When he pulls out his own piece I blow his pumpkin head all over the windshield.

Georgie wrestles with Commander Obama. I cock back the hammer on the .9mm, press it up against his brain and blood-spattered head.

“The piece. Give me the piece!”

But the driver swings the wheel hard to the right, making the car fishtail to the left, sending me and the woman in my lap against the door. Georgie falls back, and Commander Obama takes a shot that shatters the rear glass. With the tires squealing the BMW still spinning circles, I know this is our only shot at getting out.

“Bail!”

Georgie opens his door, falls on out.

I open my door, and both I and the woman fall out. I stand up as quickly as I can, plant a bead on the Beemer, trigger off three quick rounds that explode what’s left of the rear and front glass.

But when it comes to driving, the surviving Obamas are presidential material. The damaged Beemer burns rubber, and like Air Force One on takeoff, disappears into the thick black night.

CHAPTER 25

DIZZINESS SETS IN.

I collapse onto the pavement. I don’t pass out this time, but I’m aware of that little piece of bullet lodged inside my brain and for the briefest of moments, I feel myself drifting off to
never never
land. It isn’t exactly like an out-of-body experience because I’m not dying. But it’s close enough, and I feel like my soul is once again trying to escape the blood, bone, sweat, and tears.

And who can blame it.

All three of us lie in the middle of an empty road.

Behind us in the distance I am able to recognize the fenced-off perimeter of the Albany International Airport. Civilization has all but abandoned this end of the mammoth facility. Or should I say eminent domain evicted the residents a long time ago when the airport authority bought out entire neighborhoods in order to lengthen the runways. Evidently the houses were all torn down, but not all the basements were filled in. I’m guessing our Obama friends know all about these basements.

I somehow manage to grip the .9mm in a trembling hand.

The small female Obama on the ground is struggling to get up. So am I. But I make it to my feet first.

Georgie follows me. When the masked woman raises herself up onto her knees, I press the pistol barrel against her head. She witnessed me put a cap into her teammate’s head just a minute ago. She knows now that I won’t hold back from shooting just for the sake of making a new friend.

“Stay there,” I order.

Then I pull off the mask.

The face that’s revealed is a real beauty.

It also nearly causes me to pass out.

This time for real.

CHAPTER 26

THE FACE BELONGS TO a woman I’ve been seeing a lot of in the past few days. The nurse from the Albany Medical Center. The pretty one with the cleavage and the push-up bra who most definitely got a concussion-induced rise out of me as soon as I was revived from the beating her partners gave me in that downtown back alley. I guess that explains how the Obamas were able to sneak into my hospital room. She no doubt arranged it.

“My head,” she says, her words slurred. “You hit me over the head with that gun. You head-case, son of a bitch.”

“You’ve got reason to complain,” I say. “You tortured my friend with a Conair hair dryer. And you had a gun pointed at me first before I walloped you with it. Makes us even.”

She’s still on her knees, but she’s trying to get up.

“That hair dryer was meant to put more fright into you two idiots than actual electricity. It’s U.L. tested and safety certified for scatter-brained teeny boppers.”

“Oh, my bad,” I say. “I take it all back. I definitely do owe you an apology. You were just doing your job; doing what was expected of you. How’s this for I’m sorry?” I raise my right leg, press my boot heel against her forehead, shove her back down onto the street.

Georgie comes up on me from behind. He draws back his right leg like he wants to add insult to injury by kicking her in the face.

“Not while she’s down, Georgie. She’s as good as dead anyway.”

I keep the pistol on her. It’s dark. But the halogen lamp-lit airport casts enough luminescence for me to still make out her face.

“You really work inside the hospital?”

“No”

“Then how come nobody saw through your act?”

And what an act it was. I seemed to recall tears streaming down her face after I was revived.

“It’s not an act. I’m a registered nurse.”

She’s claiming legitimacy. Maybe that explains the tears.

“You’re a registered nurse who volunteered herself for the job at AMC just because some Albany PI with a bad brain was ambulanced there after your Obama friends tried to kill him.”

“Nurses work for a lot of different hospitals, Moonlight. The hospitals don’t employ us. Agencies do. I’m employed by the Ferguson Nursing Agency in Manhattan, believe it or not. The staff at the Albany Medical Center just assumed I was a fill-in for somebody for the day. They’re always understaffed.”

“OK then, who do you work for when you’re not nursing? Are they political, religious, or criminal? And why did they want me dead?”

“They don’t want you dead,” she explains with a shake of her head.

“What is it they want then?”

She looks up at me, her face not so pretty anymore, her long blond hair pulled back tight and hidden under the wool cap, her once pert breasts somehow pressed flat under her black turtleneck sweater.

“Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Moonlight?”

“Leave Peter Czech alone, and hand over a box. Size, make, and shape unknown.”

She reaches up over her head with both hands. I thumb back the trigger on the automatic.

“Take it easy,” she says. “I’m just letting my hair down.”

She pulls away the rubber band and her thick blond hair falls down against her shoulders. She reaches up into her sweater, unclasps something, comes back out with an Ace bandage, her sweater immediately filling out with her breasts.

“Oh my,” she says, “I’ve been feeling so confined.”

She issues me the sweetest pout you ever did see, while lifting herself onto one foot and then the other. Quite suddenly she has her looks back, and along with them, some leverage.

As she slowly rises up, her face gravitates towards my face, her lips looking all the more full, red, and luscious all the time. And her blue eyes, veiled with that blond hair, look good enough to swim in.

“Easy does it, Moon,” I hear Georgie remark. “This little tart did a slam dance on your head inside a back alley.”

“That wasn’t me,” she shoots back. “I had nothing to do with those goons. I wasn’t even there.”

“You’re just hired as a torture expert,” Georgie adds.

“I wasn’t torturing you,” she says. “I never even had a hold of the hair dryer. And even if it worked, a standard shock from rubbing your feet on the carpet gives you more of a jolt.” Her blue eyes wide. “It wasn’t throwing off any shock at all since I’d made sure to throw the switch on the GFI. What you felt was the prick of the wire. That’s all, big baby.”

Georgie gives her a look like he’s insulted for her having thrown the GFI. If he was going to be tortured, she should have the common courtesy to do it right. Or else, yeah, he looks like a big baby.

“So what are you trying to do?” he says after a beat, “work up sympathy for the devil?” Crossing arms over chest. “That freakin’ wire still hurt plenty.”

“I’m merely telling you I don’t get into that kind of torture crap and what I did, I did because the sadistic Russian morons would kill me if I didn’t at least go through the motions. Get it?”

Georgie looks at me like,
You believe her?

She was nice to me in the hospital, so I do sort of believe her. So long as she isn’t the one who fucked with that incision on my right side with a scalpel tip. And she’s definitely not that man.

She moves in closer to me, her lips almost touching mine, her breasts pressed up against my chest. I feel what’s become an all too common tight sensation in my midsection in the wake of my new concussions. Holy crap, if I don’t almost lay one on her. If the circumstances were different, I would wrap her in my arms, haul her off into some dark corner.

But what the hell am I doing? Am I that much of a head-case? Why can’t I control myself when it comes to beautiful women? Dangerous women?

“Moon,” Georgie repeats, his voice taking on the tone of a schoolmaster.

I’m hearing him but I’m
not
hearing him.

Her lips are touching mine now. I feel myself growing inside my pants. And then, the automatic is snatched from my hands, the barrel pointing me in the face.

The tables, they have turned.

She takes a step back, the piece now gripped in her right hand.

“Little known fact about the head trauma you suffered in that back alley,” she says. “Your concussion . . . the damage it does to the frontal lobe . . . it will make you so horny, so greedy for sex, you won’t be able to exercise even the most basic of good judgment. Remember that erection you raised for me when you were first brought back from the dead?”

Just what I need to hear. But I’m already fully aware of my little sexual problem.

“He’s got a small fragment of .22 caliber bullet pressed up against his cerebral cortex,” Georgie comments from behind me. “His judgment is already messed up. Or maybe you couldn’t tell.”

I feel a wave of shame wash over me. Maybe the Obamas are right. Maybe I should stay the hell away from Peter Czech. Maybe I should just stay inside the closed confines of my new bar, just like Lola wants. But it’s too late for all that. They are convinced I’m hiding something inside a box somewhere. A box that was apparently delivered to me but for which I have zero recollection.

Nurse starts stepping away into the darkness, that piece aimed at my face the whole time.

“What’s your name?” I insist. “At least tell us your real name.”

“You think I’m that stupid, Moonlight? Come now. I wouldn’t have revealed my identity at all had you not removed my mask.”

I’m slowly shifting to the right, into my own patch of darkness.

“Easy Moonlight,” she warns, that now repatriated pistol barrel following my every movement. “I haven’t quite figured out what to do with you yet.”

I keep moving while Georgie keeps shifting himself in the opposite direction. Until I hear him exhale as he lunges at her legs, taking her down with a form tackle that would make Vince Lombardi proud.

I surge forward, kick the pistol out of her hand.

“You prick!” she screams at Georgie.

He rears back with his right hand, makes a fist.

“This is for your pals poking me with a Conair,” he says, a split second before belting her between the eyes.