Shoot the Moon

by Joseph T. Klempner

  He sees some kids in costumes coming toward him. There’s a Spider Man, a ghost, and a scary-looking hockey goalie. As they pass him, Goodman sneaks a glance over his shoulder, as though he’s still watching them. His peripheral vision picks up two men following him at a distance. But they don’t look like the same two men as before. My God, thinks Michael Goodman. I’m being followed by an army.

  The L is crowded, too, with an even greater concentration of costume wearers, and Goodman’s forced to stand. He tries to look around casually for the men who’ve been following him, but he doesn’t spot them in his car.

  But when he gets off at Sixth Avenue and sets his suitcase down at the bottom of the steps, there they are - four, possibly five of them. One, he notices, appears to be wearing a hearing aid, except that it’s got a wire running down from it into his jacket. Goodman starts up the stairs, wondering if it would be presumptuous to ask one of them to carry the suitcase for a while.

  Even before he hits street level, Goodman is absorbed by a crowd of bodies more dense than any rush hour he’s ever been in. He finds that individual progress is impossible - the crowd moves as one, at a single pace, like some giant slug pushing steadily ahead, all the while wiggling tiny nodules that make up its body. Goodman is simply one of those nodules.

  Fortunately, the creature seems intent on heading downtown, and one by one, the street markers overhead inform Goodman that he’s crossing Fourteenth Street, then Thirteenth, then Twelfth.

  “What’s going on?” he asks a young couple crushed against each other to his right.

  “It’s the parade,” they tell him in unison.

  And then he remembers: Kelly’s party is all about watching the Halloween parade, that thing where anyone who feels like it puts on a costume and marches through Greenwich Village. Funny, he’s always thought of the Village as more on the East Side; now he realizes this must be what they mean when they say the West Village.

  By the time it nears Eleventh Street, the slug seems to have lost some of its mass as people begin breaking away from it to find vantage points five and six rows deep behind blue wooden barriers that have been set up parallel to the curb.

  Before crossing Eleventh, Goodman stops and finds a spot where he can put the suitcase down for a minute. He leans against the building while he fights to catch his breath, wishing he was in better shape. Then again, he realizes, lugging forty pounds around - in a suitcase that’s plenty heavy to begin with - would probably tire out just about anybody.

  He looks at his watch, sees it’s 7:44. He’s got one block left to walk, and sixteen minutes to do it in. Early as always. He moves the suitcase right up against the building wall and sits on it, using the wall as a backrest. If he’s going to kill time, he might as well make himself comfortable.

  “He just sat down on the goddamn suitcase!” comes a voice on the radio.

  Abbruzzo grabs the microphone. “Where?”

  “Corner of Eleventh. He’s just looked at his watch.”

  “He’s gonna let the clock run down,” Abbruzzo says. “How many of you guys are on him?”

  Four units respond.

  “MOUSE?” Abbruzzo calls.

  “MOUSE here. Go ahead.”

  “You hearing all this?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Can you see him yet in the scope?” One of the more sophisticated pieces of equipment on board is a tiny periscope that peers out of a vent in the top of the van. It has infrared capability for night vision. Sheridan has been practicing on it by following a pickpocket who’s been working the crowd. By zooming in on the guy, Sheridan has actually seen him dip into two handbags. On one of the dips, he scored a wallet or a change purse. No question about it.

  “You should see this thing!” Sheridan exclaims. “It’s fuckin’ unbelievable!”

  “Gotta tell you something, Ray.” It’s Riley’s voice. “There’s gotta be a million people on this corner. I’ll let you know when we spot him. He’s ahead of schedule, remember.”

  If Goodman is ahead of schedule, Zelb and Farrelli are decidedly late. The two agents are in the lead car of a procession of four DEA vehicles, the other three being a Jeep, a cable TV truck, and a yellow cab. Caught in traffic at Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue, they’ve got the siren of their unmarked car on, but are still doing no better than a block every two minutes or so. There’s simply no place for the cars ahead of them to pull over in order to let them by.

  “Shit!” Zelb mutters. “We’ll never make it at this rate.”

  “Maybe we oughta fuck the car and do the rest of it on foot,” Farrelli suggests. He’s already in character, talking like Vinnie.

  “What?” Zelb asks. “And leave $3.5 million sittin’ here double-parked on Fourteenth Street?”

  “We can carry it, man.”

  “Fuck that,” Zelb says. “Besides, we need the car. How else are we gonna give the signal for the backup guys to move in? Am I gonna open the trunk of my dick, or what?”

  Farrelli has to think about that one for a moment. He takes a look at his watch. “Shit, Jimmy. It’s five minutes to eight.”

  Zelb unseats the microphone from the car radio. “Two-oh-three to two- oh-one,” he says into it. He’s calling group leader Siegel’s car, a champagne-colored Cadillac seized from a drug dealer just last month. The supervisors get the best cars.

  “Two-oh-one,” comes back.

  “Hey, Lenny, we’re down to a crawl here-”

  “Is that your siren?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Turn it off,” Siegel says. “I can’t hear you.”

  Zelb releases the siren button. “How’s that?”

  “Better. Where are you?”

  “Stuck in gridlock at Fourteenth,” Zelb says. “We’re never going to make it.”

  “What’s your ETA?” Siegel asks.

  “Next Tuesday, at this rate.”

  “Are the other vehicles with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pull it over, then,” Siegel tells them. “Take a couple of men out of the other units, grab the suitcase, and hoof it.”

  “Hoof it?”

  “Walk! Run!” Siegel shouts. “I don’t care how you do it. Just don’t blow this meet. We need this case.”

  It takes Zelb a full minute and a half just to pull over from the middle lane to the curb. He slams the car into park. He pulls the trunk latch, opens the door, climbs out, and meets Farrelli at the back of the car. They’re joined by three other agents, one of whom takes Zelb’s keys from him and climbs behind the wheel of the car.

  “I’ll take the first shift,” Zelb says, yanking the suitcase out of the trunk. “Jesus!” he groans. “This must weigh a ton!”

  He’s exaggerating, of course. Empty, the suitcase weighs six pounds. With its contents of 35,000 $100 bills, it comes to 39.7 pounds. But as the old army saying used to go: After a couple hundred yards, you think the decimal point’s dropped out.

  Zelb and Farrelli head for Sixth Avenue. The other two agents fall in right behind them, their instructions abundantly clear: At all costs, protect their fellow agents and the money. Though not necessarily in that order.

  Goodman, sitting on his suitcase, looks at his watch, sees it’s 7:59. Taking a deep breath, he stands, yanks the suitcase up from the sidewalk, and begins the last block of his walk.

  “He’s moving! He’s moving!”

  As soon as they hear the transmission, every man in the MOUSE springs into readiness. All are armed; each has checked his weapon within the last fifteen minutes. Sheridan works the infrared periscope while Riley mans the radio. One of the officers peers out an observation port disguised as a taillight while the other waits for the signal to fling open the back door and lead the charge to arrest the Mole and Vinnie and anyone else foolish enough to get in their way.

  Which means, of course, that none of them is in a position to see what’s going on up at the front of the van.

  Street security for the Halloween par
ade is the joint responsibility of the NYPD and the DOT, the Department of Transportation. It is an understatement to say that these two agencies have never had an overabundance of love for each other. The antagonism dates back to the very inception of the DOT, a well-intended measure to free police officers from the rather mundane business of directing traffic and issuing parking summonses. The first salvo was fired by the “Brownies.” (The nickname dates back to the original color of their uniforms, but it is equally descriptive of the skin tone of most of their ranks and has managed to survive a recent switch to blue-gray outfits.) They began ticketing the illegally parked personal cars of police officers, in direct violation of an unwritten but longstanding policy that exempted cops from all parking laws. The officers quickly retaliated by arresting scores of Brownies for interfering with governmental administration, defacing city property, disorderly conduct, loitering, and a variety of other charges. Although an uneasy truce was ultimately worked out, occasional sniping still occurs, and relations between the Brown and the Blue continue to be strained.

  So, about twenty minutes ago, when an NYPD sergeant pointed out to a DOT captain that a van parked at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street was involved in official activity, the captain had nodded absently, not overly impressed. Now, some twenty minutes later, when he gets a call on his walkie-talkie from a DOT truck, telling him there’s a vehicle illegally parked on one of the side streets, he forgets all about the earlier advisory. In his most professional-sounding voice, he issues what in his business amounts to an official directive.

  “Hook the fucker up,” he says.

  Now, saying “Hook the fucker up” to a Brownie behind the wheel of a tow truck is kind of like saying “Run” to a gazelle or “Eat” to a great white shark - you don’t have to stand around too long to see what’s going to happen next.

  * * *

  “I think I see him!” Sheridan whispers, his eyes pressed against the view box of the periscope.

  Riley hunches forward in his seat at the radio controls, and for a moment, he assumes that the shifting of his weight is what’s caused the van to lurch slightly. Riley catches himself, knowing that any sudden activity inside the van can be detected outside and can therefore give them away. But he has the distinct sensation that his movement - even though it’s ended - continues to rock the van in a sort of ripple effect. But without a window to look out of, he has no way of knowing for sure, and he decides it may be only his imagination at work.

  Sheridan experiences the phenomenon slightly differently. Just as he’s spotted the Mole - or thinks he has, at least - the periscope starts playing tricks on him. Instead of responding to his fingertip commands, it now suddenly seems to have taken on a mind of its own, intent on viewing first the Mole’s legs, then his feet, and finally the pavement in front of him. Within a matter of seconds, Sheridan’s lost sight of him altogether and is focused instead on other pedestrians and parade watchers.

  As for the two officers at the very rear of the van, they find themselves inexplicably pressed up against the inside of the back door. They’re able to sense that the van is in some kind of motion, but - just as is the case with Riley - without a view of the outside world as a point of reference, they’re disoriented as to just what the motion is. They look at each other, hoping for some clue.

  “We’re moving,” one of them says.

  “No,” says the other. “We’re lifting off!”

  The truth is, of course, that they’re both right: The van is simultaneously rising (at least at the front end, that is) and moving forward, a phenomenon made possible by the DOT’s latest piece of equipment, a hydraulic speed-lifter, affectionately nicknamed the “bump and run,” after a popular defensive technique on the football field.

  And by the time any of them realizes what’s happening, the MOUSE is pulling away from the intersection.

  “Open the door!” Riley shouts, and the officer pressed up against it yanks desperately at the handle. Success would all but guarantee him serious injury, since the moment the door opens, the combined effect of the van’s speed and the forces of gravity would land him on the asphalt of West Tenth Street. But here some clever engineer at General Motors has come to the rescue: An automatic locking mechanism - designed to prevent children, pets, and cargo (and, in this instance, cops) from tumbling out of the moving vehicle - kicked in ten seconds ago, as soon as the van attained a speed of five miles per hour.

  The officers, being resourceful young men, will ultimately figure out how to override the device, and they’ll eventually manage to open the door and tumble out of it, just as the van reaches its destination. But by that time, they’ll be at the DOT pier on Thirty-Ninth Street and the Hudson River, along with several thousand other illegally parked vehicles. Just an average day’s catch for the dedicated men in brown.

  Goodman arrives at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street at precisely eight o’clock. He crosses Sixth first, then Tenth, all the while looking for Vinnie or T.M., or a suitcase identical to his own.

  He sees no sign of any of them.

  Jimmy Zelb is taking his second turn carrying the suitcase as he and Frank Farrelli finally near the corner of Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street from the west, closely followed by the only two backup agents in sight (all of the others being hopelessly stuck in traffic back up near Fourteenth Street).

  Zelb, despite his football background, is sweating and out of breath. He was a lineman, after all, and the only running he was ever called upon to do was in short spurts, with frequent rests between plays. And never while carrying a loaded suitcase.

  If Zelb and Farrelli are late in arriving for their meet with Michael Goodman, they’re just in time for the parade. For a moment, Zelb is clueless enough to think that the cheering he hears is for his own arrival. But soon it dawns on him that all eyes - which at first seemed riveted on him - are looking past him, down Sixth. He turns his head slowly in that direction in order to see just what it is that has suddenly created such pandemonium.

  Jimmy Zelb is a Presbyterian, raised on a family farm outside Dusty Gulch, Nebraska; educated in Wooster, Ohio. He spent a year and a half as a cop in Toledo, and another five as a DEA agent in Detroit. He’s been in New York City eight months, and he thinks he’s seen it all. But nothing, nothing in his background has prepared him for this moment. Coming toward him is a majorette, tall and blond, decked out in a sparkling silver hat, the miniest miniskirt of all time, and shiny high boots, and flinging a gold baton high into the air every fourth step. She is completely topless, and her breasts are everything Zelb has ever dreamed of since the age of twelve, when a dog-eared copy of National Geographic had taken him down the Amazon River and into the storm cellar of his parents’ house for the next two hours. They are gigantic. The are humongous. They bounce with every step she takes. They are tipped with awesome brown nipples. And, best of all, they are heading right at him!

  How on earth is Jimmy Zelb - with no real sense of New York history - to know that the event he is watching originated some years back as the gay parade? Or that to this day almost half of its marchers put on their wildest drag-queen outfits, created just for the annual occasion? Or that the particular majorette of Zelb’s dreams goes by the name of Rick Verchinsky, shaves twice a day, played his own football as an outside linebacker for the Citadel, and works five nights a week as a bouncer at the Palladium?

  Zelb knows none of these things, of course. All he knows, as he puts his suitcase down on the sidewalk and out of his mind (so that he can stare open-mouthed and undistracted at the Breasts), is that he’s in love.

  Frank Farrelli, who by this time should be well into the role of Vinnie the drug buyer, can’t help noticing Zelb’s sudden change in focus. He swivels his body and follows his partner’s gaze in an attempt to see just what it is that’s suddenly captured Zelb’s attention.

  And Farrelli sees what Zelb sees: the Breasts. And, more or less, he does what Zelb is doing: He stares. (Though to be fair to
Farrelli, it should be pointed out that in the days and weeks to follow, he would steadfastly insist that he knew all along that the majorette was in fact a major, that the breasts were only real in the virtual sense, and that he was staring at them purely out of a sense of detached curiosity. As for the momentary lapse in concentration on the job at hand, however, neither agent would have much to offer in defense of his performance.)

  Goodman, too, hears the crowd break into a roar, and the sudden turning of heads en masse tells him that the first paraders have come into view as they work their way up Sixth Avenue. He strains forward to see, but there are so many bodies in front of him that his view is completely blocked: All he can see are the backs of other watchers.

  And a suitcase identical to his.

  There can be no doubt about it - the same size, the same shape, the same yellow-and-green floral print.

  Then, just as quickly as the suitcase had come into view, it’s suddenly obscured, and he can see only the backs of the two men standing closest to the spot where he saw it. But even from behind them, he can tell that one of them is slender, while the other is broad-shouldered and thick-necked.

  Vinnie and T.M.

  Michael Goodman has always been a careful person, slow to react, cautious in the extreme. He’s an old-fashioned accountant, wary of calculators - one who trusts his own ability to add a column of numbers better than that of some Japanese- or Mexican-made gadget whose battery might or might not be dependable. He likes to start at the top and add up the numbers, see what he gets. Then he adds them up again, this time starting from the bottom. (That way, he can’t make the same careless mistake twice, such as 29 + 6 = 33.) If he ends up with the same answer, he still might want to do it a third time, particularly if it’s essential that he get it right. And after that, if there’s a calculator that happens to be handy, it never hurts to double-check the answer, just to be on the safe side.