A Girl’s Best Friend (Moonlight Detective Agency Book 3)

by Isobella Crowley

  Riley didn’t seem to care. She drifted past him and fluttered slowly down into the blue faction’s hole.

  Remy rubbed his chin as he watched her.

  It’s definitely time for an intervention. I need to have a talk with her about the dangers of manipulating random men and basing her happiness on the amount of bullshit they buy for her.

  As soon as they were alone, of course. He hoped she got some rest in the meantime.

  Chapter Three

  Sally’s Café, Astoria, New York City

  “So.” Remy sighed and frowned. “It’s come to this.”

  With him having to wait overnight for Riley, he needed something constructive to do with his time. Taylor’s orders were to start the snooping today.

  Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of much under the circumstances. Finally, he’d descended all the way to the bottom of the proverbial barrel and decided to talk to the press.

  “Yeah…I’m really getting desperate.” He dodged a Vietnamese couple arguing as they walked their schnauzer and rounded the corner. His destination was in sight.

  As he ambled toward Sally’s Café with his hands stuffed into his pockets, he consoled himself with the proviso that The New England Inquirer barely qualified as “the press,” anyway.

  He slipped his phone out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. He’d received nothing from Don Gannon, which meant that there were probably no problems and the old geezer would show up on time.

  Don hated to miss out on a potential story, after all. Although as journalists went, he was a decent enough guy, really.

  It was approaching late afternoon by now. The café appeared to be moderately busy, and by the time his business there was done, the early rush hour would be underway.

  At least this was all happening on one of his “off” nights. After how badly Alex had kicked his ass, Remy had finally enrolled at a mixed martial arts gym to get himself back in shape and learn to fight properly. He’d shown up for every class.

  At first, he hadn’t been able to do much—he was still recovering from a couple of broken ribs, which limited his mobility—but they’d started him with basic exercises to improve his strength and flexibility. From there, they’d drilled the fundamentals of movement, balance, timing, and a few basic moves into him.

  Finally, things were starting to get interesting. He was now healed up well enough that they’d been able to demonstrate a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu takedown without putting him in the hospital, not to mention a couple of elementary Muay Thai strikes.

  “And,” he mumbled to himself, “the bastards seemed to enjoy throwing me on my ass. I’d say that’s all the motivation I need to do it to someone else should they unwisely decide to fuck with me.”

  Of course, they’d also advised him not to get into any fights. Not only to avoid legal entanglements but, furthermore, because he’d need more training to put the moves together with the balance and timing necessary and fully understand the nuances of everything he was doing.

  But what did they know?

  He opened the door, stepped into the café, and scanned it quickly. It looked like a nice little place. There was a Please Seat Yourself sign, handwritten on one of those mounted blackboards. This was fortuitous since he also located Don Gannon seated at one of the booths in the far corner, steadily drinking coffee and facing the door. A few other patrons gradually consumed coffee and sandwiches at a table alongside the man.

  Remy walked toward the reporter and his mind ambushed him with something he’d seen in a couple of really cool spy movies—he couldn’t recall the titles—a few years before.

  Two clandestine agents had met in a café much like this one, seated in different booths with their backs to one another, and had made seemingly random comments into the air as a way of communicating with one another via code. Plus, no one could honestly say they ever saw the two men “sitting together,” and the noise provided by the other customers conveniently interfered with their comments, anyway.

  He decided to give it a try. He and Gannon were there to discuss sensitive matters, after all.

  Remy sat in the seat directly against the reporter’s back and pretended to ignore the squinty, puzzled stare the man gave him as he passed.

  As he settled, he made a loud half-grunt and half-sigh, stretched his arms, and picked the menu up. “Ahh…” he began, speaking to no one specifically, “now I’ll have to inquire as to how the coffee is here. I really could use something to blast me back to full attention, like…uh, a double-barreled Remington.”

  One of the dowdy-looking old ladies at the table next to Don shot him a cockeyed glance. Behind him, the man’s raspy voice intoned, “What the hell?”

  The waitress, a nice Chinese American girl, approached and asked how he was and what he’d like to get started.

  “Coffee,” he told her, “with a dash of cream on the side, please. I’ll probably have food also, but it will take me a few minutes.”

  “No problem,” she responded. “I’ll be right back with your coffee.”

  After she departed, he waited for an upsurge in the ambient noise before his next attempt at surreptitious communication.

  “It sure is a nice day,” he began and directed his voice vaguely upward, “at least for January. Who knows where the weather will lead us next, though?”

  Don uttered a ragged, exasperated sigh. His coat rustled and he stepped around to the booth and slid into the seat across from him.

  “Hey,” Remy said, “do I…uh, know you?”

  The reporter pursed his lips and glanced briefly at his mug. “This was from a movie, wasn’t it? Some spy crap. Well, it works a hell of a lot better if both parties actually have a code agreed to beforehand. Wouldn’t you think?”

  “I suppose.” He pouted.

  “In any event,” the man continued, “nobody really gives a crap about either of us being here.”

  The waitress returned and placed a steaming mug, plus a tiny container of creamer, before the investigator. She did a brief double-take when she realized Mr Gannon had switched booths but turned it seamlessly into a promise to refill his cup directly.

  “Thanks,” the reporter quipped.

  Remy added quickly, “And I’ll need a couple more minutes.”

  “That’s quite all right.” The girl turned to attend to the old ladies’ table.

  He looked across at his contact. Don was a tall man, although he tended to stoop a little. He was close to the end of middle age with long, rangy limbs and an equally long, careworn face. His somewhat shaggy hair and short, bristly beard were streaked with silver. Today, like every other day Remy had seen him, he wore a brown trench coat that probably qualified as a golden oldie.

  “That was clever,” the aged man rasped and paused to cough, “but this isn’t East Germany before the Wall fell, for God’s sake. I thought you were old enough to know that two men who look nothing alike meeting for coffee and talking about weird shit was not exactly cause for alarm in our city.”

  “Well—” he started to protest.

  “And not even that weird, really. It isn’t as though anything we have to discuss is much different than a contractor asking his buddy in real estate about any properties about to be developed, or a wannabe homewrecker asking how someone’s marriage problems are coming along. Is it?”

  Remy shrugged. “Fair enough. Did you have a nice Christmas?”

  “Splendid,” Don returned at once. “I always was more partial to New Year’s, though. There’s a real American holiday.”

  He wasn’t about to argue with that. “It does seem like they spike the eggnog more heavily.”

  Their waitress returned and asked if he was prepared to order food yet. Feeling self-indulgent, he requested a Monte Cristo sandwich, confident he could eliminate the calories within the next day or two.

  “Sounds good,” the young woman remarked. “That’ll be out in a few minutes.” She took his menu and hurried off into the surrounding bustle.

/>   “So,” Remy started to ask the older man but paused to sip at his coffee now that it was no longer liable to create heat blisters on the roof of his mouth. “Have you heard anything lately about…uh, strange things coming into the city?”

  He fixed Don with a carefully innocent look and waited for a reply.

  The old man sighed and looked somewhere toward the ceiling.

  “You’ll have to be more specific than that. All kinds of rumors make their way to the Inquirer’s staff. Do you have any idea of some of the crap that reaches our ears? Everything from Unidentified Flying Objects sighted over JFK International to mind-control cotton candy surreptitiously produced by the Deep State and then distributed at Coney Island.”

  Remy swished his coffee in its cup. “Touché. I haven’t been to Coney Island in a couple of decades, so I’m afraid I can’t comment. But, yes. What I’m looking for, more precisely, is any stories pertaining to odd things, merchandise or what have you, coming into New York by boat and being unloaded by little men.” He took another sip of coffee as Don leaned back and thought. “Well, short men,” he clarified as the man still looked confused. “Some of them are about as wide as they are tall.”

  The reporter furrowed his heavy brow. “I can’t say I’ve heard anything about ships,” he related, “but there is one rumor that might be of use to you. ‘The Seven Dwarves are looking for Snow White in Harlem,’ so it goes. People love stories of fairy tales coming to life in one way or another. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “It might.” He scratched behind his ear. “At least that narrows the search down to Harlem. Last I checked, New York was kind of big.”

  His sandwich arrived and he dug in and carved away at the fried and sugared bread and its contents with gleeful abandon. Don took the opportunity to ramble for a few minutes about his joint pain and his dislike of digital journalism. The younger man at least tried to listen and nodded politely about every five or ten seconds.

  As Remy paused near the end of his meal, the older man half-smiled around his cup as he took a long swig. “Now, then, per our arrangement…what do you have for me?”

  Before he could answer, their waitress suddenly appeared. “Will you gentlemen have anything else tonight? Dessert, maybe?”

  Don shook his head.

  Remy looked at the young woman. “Mm…no, thanks. We’ll head out in five minutes or so.”

  “Okay, I’ll be right back with your checks. Separate?”

  He gave her a thumbs-up and she hurried off as he returned his attention to Mr Gannon.

  “Well, Don, I can’t tell you all the salacious details, due to there being an ongoing investigation and whatnot,” he said, “but I can point you in the right direction.”

  The reporter’s eyes took on an almost hungry look. “I’m all ears.”

  “The feds,” he continued, “are concerned that an Israeli-Egyptian crime syndicate may be trying to expand its operations to our fair city, and that it may be involved with certain experimental substances they stole from the IDF. Possibly. That’s the word on the street, anyway. It ought to be tons of fun, reporting on something like that.”

  “Hmm.” The journalist rubbed his hands together. “Yessir, that’s some juicy material. Potentially. The kind of thing I can write about in such a way as to leave the door open for all the conspiracy theorists to run hog-wild but without exactly saying anything too authoritative. Plausible deniability for us, you see.”

  Remy pantomimed shock and allowed his mouth to fall open. “Are you trying to suggest that the Inquirer is afraid of lawsuits? That would almost imply that you’re worth suing.”

  “Hey, now,” Don wheezed, “I don’t insult your line of work.”

  True. I need to stop pushing people’s buttons simply because they look easy to push. It’s another bad habit from the old days that needs to go.

  Before he could apologize, though, Don continued.

  “Maybe you’re turning things around with your little errands for this agency, but prior to that, I’d heard you were arrested in Times Square again after reverting to your old ways.”

  His mouth almost puckered as if he’d bitten into an expired lemon. “That was part of the investigation we were conducting. I used myself as bait.”

  That phrase “old ways” was what particularly bothered him. Sometimes, it seemed like half the entire New York Metropolitan Area still remembered—and might always remember—the stupid, irresponsible, drunken, drug-addled playboy known as David Remington.

  “Whatever you say,” Gannon conceded with a shrug of his hunched shoulders. “I imagine it worked.” He didn’t sound like he was being sarcastic.

  The waitress returned with their checks and they thanked her, paid, and tipped within reason. Both stood and Remy put his coat on as Don slid his hands into the pockets of his own.

  “Mr Gannon,” he commented, “thanks again for your time and your suggestions. This is a fairly nice place, too. They have decent enough coffee. Anyway, I hope you find something interesting to report on.” He paused. “But don’t report on me, okay? I haven’t been in your publication much lately—Jenny Ocren must have found a new hobby or something—and I’m perfectly happy to keep it that way.”

  Don smiled and extended his hand. “I shall do my best.”

  Remy took the hand and shook it. “I’ll accept that answer. Have a nice…uh, Valentine’s Day, in a few more weeks.”

  They stepped out the door almost in unison, and the reporter turned right and vanished quickly down the street into the thick of the city.

  The investigator hesitated as he considered his next move. En route to the café, he had deliberately taken the longer route to give Mr Gannon more time to reach the location. He’d kept to the major streets and lost himself in the crowds, waited at pedestrian crossings, and all those fun things.

  On the way back to his car, he opted to take a shortcut through a back road. It ought to save him three, perhaps even four minutes. That way, he would have the fun of plunging into the first wave of rush hour traffic even sooner.

  From the café’s door, he turned left instead of right and ducked down the street.

  It was narrow and quiet, more of a glorified alley than anything else and sheltered from the winter breeze. Although he had always thought that Astoria was one of the nicer parts of Queens, this almost-forgotten little route was grimy enough to have character.

  He passed a block through it quietly, crossed the street, and continued on the other side. Here, both the buildings and the trees were a little taller, which left the narrow lane in relative gloom beneath the weak, cloud-covered winter sun.

  Someone stepped out in front of him.

  “Whoa,” Remy said and tensed reflexively. His senses rose to peak alertness when he also heard someone else move behind him. “I don’t have a cigarette. Let’s get that out the way right off the bat.”

  In the second or two it took for his brain to process everything it had seen and heard, however, he quickly reached the conclusion that these guys were after more than a smoke.

  The one ahead of him hadn’t so much as stepped out as pounced—and from behind a dumpster, at that. He was light-complexioned with shoulder-length brown hair that looked wispy and tattered.

  The man behind him had seemingly dropped into the street from a roof or tree branch. He was a round-faced South Asian man with a shaved head.

  Both were about twelve or fifteen feet away. Something about them—the look in their eyes, mainly—was instantly disturbing, not least because it looked familiar. It was a crazed expression of desperation, mingled fear, and anger like a cornered animal about to fight back, even though it was they who had cornered him.

  Alex had looked exactly the same way when he’d been under Moswen’s control.

  “Oh, crap,” he muttered.

  The two men snarled with bestial fury and attacked. Each wove slightly in a different direction but otherwise, seemed to hurl themselves toward him with total, lunati
c abandon.

  Remy hadn’t had much martial arts training yet, but what little he’d drilled into himself and what little he could remember kicked in. These were bolstered by the lessons he’d learned during these past months with the agency when he’d been in a disproportionately large number of fights, some of them to the death.

  He surged toward the one who’d come at him from the front and attempted to engage him first and eliminate the chance that both thralls would be able to attack him at the same time.

  Reflex and memory intertwined to remind him of his lessons on movement. He pivoted to the side as the ragged man made a powerful but clumsy swipe at his face with a hand twisted like a claw.

  The one behind was almost on top of them but Remy moved around the first one and aimed a fast kick at the back of the man’s knee. It connected, although not as straight or hard as he would have liked. Still, it was enough to make the bastard’s leg buckle, and his own forward momentum made him stumble forward and land on his knees.

  The investigator spun barely in time as the second attacker attempted to leap over his fallen comrade and barely succeeded. The man landed hard and needed a second to regain his balance.

  That was all the time Remy needed to fumble in the dumpster the first assailant had hunkered behind and seized the neck of a nice seven-hundred-and-fifty-milliliter liquor bottle. Sadly, it was empty.

  The South Asian guy, who seemed to gargle his own breath in a way that almost sounded like he was choking, threw himself at his quarry and tried to overwhelm him with sheer force, speed, and fury.

  For the blink of an eye, the investigator was afraid, but something dawned on him. These two were weaker than Alex had been and probably barely stronger than ordinary humans. Still, there were two of them, and they were pissed.

  He did an instant calculation of the trajectory of the man’s fist, and he swung out and upward with the bottle. It passed between his opponent’s arms and shattered against the left side of his jaw. One of the fists diverted off course, thumped him in the chest, and drove him back.