Dick Moonlight - 01 - Moonlight Falls

by Vincent Zandri

  “Never better,” I lied. “What about you? Can you handle this?”

  “He’s coming back in,” she said. “I have to go.”

  “You won’t hear from me until this thing is over. One way or another.”

  “Live,” she said, and hung up.

  74

  TURNING AWAY FROM THE piles of papers and overturned desk drawers, Cain lit up a cigarette, faced Lola Ross directly.

  “If you know where Divine and Robb are and I find out you’re just giving me the strong/silent type routine, I will come after you with everything I’ve got.”

  Cain smiled as the blue smoke oozed from out of his nostrils.

  Lola stood tall, stiff, in ironed blue jeans and black t-shirt, bare arms crossed over her chest. When she abruptly reached out with her right hand, snatched the cigarette from the Cain’s mouth, tossed it onto the floor, his gray eyes went wide.

  “On the day they bury your cancer plagued body,” she whispered, “I will do a dance on your grave.”

  Cain looked down at the still smoldering cigarette, then looked back up.

  “Not if you go first,” he said.

  75

  SOON AS GEORGE GOT back in the car I told him exactly what I knew. Did it as calm and collected as possible.

  There was no worse time for panic.

  But that didn’t stop George from racing out of the parking lot.

  With not another word exchanged, we drove back to his town house as fast as we could without running the risk of a pull-over.

  Maybe God was on the side of right. Because the home’s exterior was quiet and calm.

  But that didn’t mean we weren’t being set up for a trap.

  Pulling the 9 mm, I followed George up the back steps to the rear entrance. Once inside, we scanned the place up and down. No one was there. No cops in the closets; no Marshals on the rooftop.

  Just the dead bodies in the bathtubs.

  Immediately we loaded the Montanas back onto the flatbed of the El Camino, salvaging what we could of the ice, tossing it all into the mix. The whole operation took about twenty minutes. As George locked the joint back up, we began to hear sirens in the distance. We had no way of knowing if the sirens were intended for us. Neither of us intended to wait around long enough to find out.

  But then George brought up a good point.

  He said, “They got their finger on me now; they’re gonna plant a bead on the El Camino.”

  Now that he was being charged with complicity, his whole manner seemed more serious, less relaxed than before. His face no longer showed hints of a smile, but instead had gone tighter, more gaunt. I had to wonder if the stress of out sit-rep was causing him more internal pain than he already had to endure, day in, day out. For a quick moment I thought about asking him. But then thought better.

  He told me to get in.

  “I know a guy owes me a favor,” he said. “He’ll help us out with the car.”

  We were off towards the downtown in the direction of the river. I didn’t say anything about it, but I could see that George was careful to drive the minor roads, keeping away from the main avenues and thoroughfares.

  Soon we came to a downtown warehouse area that was situated maybe a hundred feet from the river. Just one of those old brick monsters that used to serve as an industrial mill in its previous life.

  He pulled up in front of a pair of roll-up doors and got out.

  He walked up to a metal door that was positioned beside the roll-ups and pressed the bell. After a beat or two, a man dressed in oil-stained overalls showed himself. The man was wearing an old Yankees baseball cap and he was holding a towel in his grease-stained hands.

  I watched them talk for a minute. Then I saw them both turn around, get a look at me. I felt weird. Paranoid and weird. I saw the man nod his head while he wiped his hands with the towel. He closed the door behind him. As George made his way back to the car, the overhead door began to roll up.

  George got back in, threw the El Camino in drive.

  He said, “Don’t say anything to these people, Divine. Doesn’t matter that you’re a fugitive. You’re still a cop and they know it. Just stand off to the side while they do their work. All goes well, we’ll be out of here in an hour, an hour-thirty. By then, it’ll be almost dark and we can go to work.”

  He pulled the car into the mechanic’s garage.

  Behind us the roll-up went back down.

  The place was brightly lit with two separate bays that contained hydraulic jacks and grease pits underneath. There was a fire engine red Porsche Carrera situated on the raised rack to our right. The guy with the Yankees cap was working underneath it. There were racks and stacks of tools and tires piled one atop the other. The walls were covered with old Sunoco and Mobile tin signboards and posters of half-naked busty models, wrenches gripped in hand like big metal phalluses, the words Snap-on Tools printed below their bare feet.

  We drove straight over our empty bay and into a separate wing behind the pits.

  When I got out of the car I could see that the concrete floor was stained with layers of paint. There were so many colors of paint, it all seemed to blend into a kind of orange gray.

  I wasn’t out the door before two equally paint-stained grease monkeys began taping black plastic to the windshield and side windows.

  George told me to grab a cup of coffee in the outer office. He said to wait there with the door closed until his people were done.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him.

  “Hair cut,” he said before walking out of the shop.

  76

  WHAT SHOCKED ME WAS not the new dark blue paint job on the El Camino.

  Nor was it the thin sheet of metal that was now tacked over a flatbed that had been widened on its two sides and extended in its rear. It was not the blocks of dry ice they then filled the closed-in space with. It was not the speed with which the Monster Garage chop shop crew worked.

  What shocked me was George’s new do.

  But then “do” wasn’t the right word for it.

  His head had been shaved bald, his thin beard trimmed down to just a goatee and mustache. The jean jacket was gone as were the jeans, replaced now with a black turtleneck sweater, black wool pants, black cowboy boots. In his left ear, a diamond stud earring.

  Standing outside the shop office, he opened up his wallet to show me a new driver’s license, the name Gerry Horn printed under the photo I.D.

  Car registration, plates, serial number, VIN number had all been reinvented, not to mention formally registered with the Stormville Department of Motor Vehicles.

  Plus one final revelation.

  Under the metal-plated flatbed had been placed a pine casket. It was pressed up against the stacked bodies of Jake and Scarlet. The kind of pine box you see in the old Western movies. A narrow casket with a wood lid.

  “That’s your crib for the ride south,” George said.

  I looked at him like, You’ve got to be out of your mind.

  “It’ll take us an hour-ten minutes to get into Poughkeepsie and over to St. Vincent’s,” he said. “There’s roadblocks and checkpoints going into and out of the city—off the Thruway, off the Taconic.”

  “Does it have to be a casket?”

  “These guys keep beer in it. They said we could borrow it.”

  “Real swell of them.”

  “You’re going in a pine box or you don’t go at all.”

  I took a look around the shop, at the man still working on the Porsche, and the separate men pulling the black plastic off the El Camino’s windows, scraping off the old registration and inspection stickers, slapping on the new.

  “I guess I don’t have much choice.”

  George looked at his watch.

  “It’s nearly dark,” he said. “Time to resurrect that kid.”

  77

  I THINK IT HAD to be guilt that made me attend Kevin Ryan’s funeral back in the spring of the year. Guilt over not having the courage to te
ll the truth about his manner of death. In any case, I knew that his plot was located five miles inside the dark, heavily wooded cemetery. It was set beside a newly transplanted hyacinth that was now in full spring bloom with big white flowers. I knew the tree was meant as a metaphor for Kevin’s life. Rather, the memory of his life—the memory that would never die.

  Some of the petals from the tree had fallen in the wind and the rain. The leaves had scattered about the newly laid sod. In the dark they looked like big snowflakes. Ryan’s headstone had been recently quarried and was polished smooth. It glistened from the rain and from the hand-held battery-powered lamp that I shined upon it. It rose out of the ground maybe two and one-half feet high.

  An inscription read: “Kevin Dubin Ryan: September 2, 1984-March 6, 2002: Loving Son. May Your Spirit Bloom Forevermore.”

  I knew I couldn’t have been wrong about that tree. Not only had I been born into the death business, I had faced the hairy beast eyeball to eyeball on a dreary March night in 1999.

  George had temporarily traded in his new black cowboy boots for a pair of rubber lineman boots, his black trench coat for a yellow rain slicker. He was carrying a pickaxe in one hand and a shovel in the other. Stuff he picked up at the Home Depot.

  He tossed them onto the grass.

  “We’re gonna need more than this, Divine,” he pointed out.

  I told him that I had us covered with a backhoe that was surely still on site, parked inside a garage not far from where we were standing.

  “You have the keys to this backhoe?”

  “What’s that you once told me about your job before med school?” I asked him.

  Some rain dripped off his nose, onto his chin beard.

  “My little hot-wiring career almost cost me seven-to-ten in Green Haven,” he said. “Thank God for Viet Nam.”

  “At least the government was kind enough to give you a choice,” I said. “Or else you’d be scrubbing down pathology instead of running it.”

  He asked me where the garage was located.

  I pointed to the west.

  “Just behind those trees, back of that hill.”

  He bolted.

  I stood there for a while with the light turned off, just listening to the rain that fell upon the plots. We were alone for several miles in all directions. I felt lonely; lonely as hell. I’d been a little overwhelmed with the subject of death lately. First Scarlet, then her autopsy. Then having to lie myself down in her drawer. Then the pine box that would conceal me all the way to Poughkeepsie. And now standing all alone in a cemetery. For a beat or two, it dawned on me that I might already be dead. That I might be one of those ghosts who doesn’t know he’s had it—a spirit who must gradually come to the realization that he’s exited the carnal reality. I might have made a mental note to contact the good Psychic Fair Reverend over my newfound realization, had it not been for the rattle and hum of a tractor engine.

  The cemetery backhoe.

  Thank God for George. He had talent in those fingers. More talent than the hospital administration gave him credit for. He approached the plot, looked down at me from the machine cockpit, as if from on high.

  “It’s pretty amazing what you can do with one of these,” he said, holding up a scalpel with his right hand. Even in the rain and the dark, I could easily make out its smooth black, Teflon-coated surface—a surface as sharp as the smile planted on George’s face.

  “You having fun yet?” I asked him.

  He pocketed the scalpel into a leather sheath attached to his belt, pulled back on the lever that raised the bucket high.

  By the light of both the El Camino and the backhoe, George managed to dig a ten-foot rectangular opening, after which he removed the concrete casing and the casket.

  The whole exhumation took just fifty minutes from start to finish.

  Staring up at a sparkling George seated in that little black chair like a cowboy atop a mechanical dinosaur, I sensed that to him, exhumation was about as much fun as you could have with your clothes on.

  He operated the separate handles of the machine like a pro, gingerly tickling the sticks until he got the bucket to dig precisely where he wanted it to dig, all the time his eyes filled with rainwater, but still glued to the open plot just the same.

  How the hell is it we didn’t get caught?

  We weren’t in any real danger of being caught. Relatively speaking, that is. Ryan’s plot was well out of the way of the main road (Route 378). I was the son of a mortician who once oversaw hundreds of burials at the Stormville Rural Cemetery. From experience, I knew that the excavation portion of the burial process always took place at night in order to hide the harsh reality of spending eternity six feet under from family and everyday visitors. Not that every cemetery did things this way, but nighttime work had been this burial facility’s policy for the past one-hundred-fifty years. Or ever since ground was first broke on the very first plot. To a group of innocent kids looking for a quiet spooky place to smoke pot and drink beers, I knew we’d just appear to be another night shift in action.

  We located the chain in the cab of the backhoe.

  Having attached it to claws that were soldered to the backhoe bucket, we were able to support the weight of the casket while carefully sliding it into the El Camino’s flatbed, to the left of the Montana cadavers and to the right of the pine box. To my amazement, everything fit inside the space like fingers inside a glove, which told me George’s chop shop friends knew precisely what they were doing when it came to extending the cab both the length and width of the cab. A few minutes later we had the hole filled back in, the sod replaced and the backhoe parked back inside the brick storage garage.

  This is what I was banking on: that to the outside observer, the place would appear undisturbed. Not a single blemish or blade of grass combed out of place. If I had to worry about anything it would be the tracks left behind by the El Camino where its tires dug into the soft ground, not to mention two divots dug out of the lawn by the backhoe’s hydraulic operated stabilizers. But then even those would disappear in a matter of hours what with the rain coming down heavier and heavier all the time.

  And what difference did it make anyway?

  In a matter of hours it would be daylight and Ryan’s remains would be autopsied, his illegally harvested body revealed, the proof I needed to nail Cain in the bag.

  78

  OKAY, SO IF MY borrowed life hadn’t gotten weird enough, I soon found myself laid out in a pine coffin.

  George was right. The confined space reeked of stale beer. The odor was enough to make me gag.

  On my back, arms crossed over my chest, I stared up at a blackness so thick it was as if I had been shot off into outer space inside a windowless capsule. Curiously enough, I wasn’t the least bit afraid. Nor was I the least bit exhausted or dizzy. I sensed the weight of the bodies beside me and there was the motion of the vehicle as it sped south along the Thruway towards the city. One full hour and ten minutes of doing nothing but taking slow, steady breaths with bruised lungs and ribs, listening to my heart throb inside my temples.

  Call us lucky, but this is about as dramatic as the drive got: we encountered only one security checkpoint along the way, just before exiting Route 90 onto the north-south Thruway. And even then we weren’t ordered to stop. We were merely waved on by the presiding State Troopers. Or so George told me later.

  This is what else he told me: that he had yet another friend who owed him yet another favor. That this friend was also a pathologist. That he would allow us one full hour inside the autopsy room of the Saint Paul’s Medical Center not a mile down the main road from Marist College. One hour, no more. This person would be there to greet us at the door. He would ensure that no one would disturb us. But after one hour, we were to leave the same way we came.

  Don’t ask any questions, don’t bother with cleanup, don’t so much as take the time to pee.

  Just get the hell out.

  Once inside the Saint Vincent’s basement
morgue, we wheeled the mud-strewn casket into the Decomposed Room, which was located down the hall from the much larger Autopsy Room. The windowless space was specially ventilated not only because of the horrific odor an exhumed body gives off once the casket lid is cracked, but also because of the contagious diseases it might carry.

  Located in the center of the room were two steel tables. Each table had hand-held spigots attached to its edges that provided running water for the pathologist and his, shall we say, patient. Stored inside the wall-to-wall glass cabinets were dozens of jars with screw-on lids, all of which contained body parts of one kind or another. There were eyes, ears, livers, appendixes, hearts and even one jar that held an entire premature human fetus.

  The whole place looked like some sanitized version of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. But then, this was a place where the dead did some real talking to the living.

  George had set up a video camera on a tripod. From its position in the far corner of the room, it would easily capture the entire procedure he was about to perform. Once we both put on our green gowns, protective eye shields and respiration masks, George hit the RECORD switch on the remote controller that was set on the stainless steel instrument tray by his right-hand side. When the little red light lit up on the digital video camera, I felt my stomach began to quiver, my whole body start to tingle.

  Because it had been laid inside an air and watertight cement vault, the casket had been perfectly preserved. The same could be said for the body. Maybe I had held my breath while George cranked open the lid, but I breathed a sigh of relief when I caught my first glimpse of Kevin. Despite the mold that covered his face (a common fungal reaction that, according to George, occurs in most airtight compartments), the flesh and bones were completely intact. Even the navy blue suit his parents had buried him in was still in good shape, as was the somewhat withered single red rose clasped between the folded fingers of his right hand.

  It didn’t take long to hit the jackpot.