Dick Moonlight - 01 - Moonlight Falls

by Vincent Zandri

  84

  JOY LIVED, OR HAD lived, in one of those just-add-water, prefab condominium complexes that had been hewn out a large section of second growth woods just two miles outside the Stormville city limits. One of those white, vinyl-sided units set inside a complex of one or two-hundred identical condo units that overwhelmed the newcomer with repetitious confusion.

  Or was it disorientation?

  George and I pulled onto Woodside Drive, straining our eyes, stretching our necks trying to follow the numbered sequence mounted to every identical mailbox along the way. In the end we didn’t have much trouble finding the place. Not with the four-door Ford Explorer parked maybe thirty feet down from Joy’s place.

  Printed on the side panels of the S.U.V. in big red on white letters: The Times Union.

  Could they be any more conspicuous?

  “The reporter beat us here,” George pointed out, as he pulled the El Camino over to the side of the road, just a few parcels up from Joy’s postage-stamp front lawn.

  As far as we could see, not a sign of life was showing itself outside fifty-two Woodside Drive. Nothing was stirring. Not even a goddamned rat like Cain. Were it not for the garage-mounted lamplight coming from the two identical condos that adjoined Joy’s on either side, the place would have been completely blacked out.

  I told George to wait in the car while I checked around back. The back was just as black and dead as the front.

  No Lyons, no photographer.

  No nothing.

  Back at the El Camino I suggested to George that maybe Lyons was still waiting inside the Suburban. I recall how the rain had all but stopped by then; how the air was moist and cold. Even for May.

  The two of us took it slow and easy along the gradually declining road, both of us knowing full well that Cain could have set a sweet little trap for us. Thumbing the pistol safety off, I peered into the driver’s side window of the Ford.

  The S.U.V. was empty.

  I suspected then that it was quite possible, if not probable, that somehow Lyons had let himself into the condo. But then, how the hell would he have gotten in if he didn’t already have a key?

  One thing was glaringly obvious: something wasn’t right.

  I had to trust my instincts. Cain was planning something. Exactly what he was planning I would have no way of knowing until it decided to jump out and bite me in the face.

  Like a viper in the grass.

  George followed me around the garage to the wood-paneled front door.

  Because I was the only one with a gun, he was careful to stay close. A foot or two away from me at most.

  At first glance the door appeared to be undisturbed.

  All quiet on the suburban front.

  For a split second I thought about the doorbell.

  With my pistol tucked into my pant waist, I pulled the ring of keys from my left hand pocket, started inserting them one at a time into the lockset. The first four out of a dozen keys, while sliding easily into the lock, did not turn the tumblers. That is, until I got to number five. Slipping the smooth metal key into the slot, I felt the mechanical release of the tumblers. Holding my breath I turned the knob clockwise, gently pushed the door open and I was in.

  I looked over my shoulder at George. There was this look in his eyes that somehow I knew would be there. This look that said, this is an unhealthy place.

  We stepped into the dark vestibule. Looking up, I could see the vague lighting that leaked in through an arched picture window mounted above the front door. The wall to my left was decorated with a giant poster. Some fully framed half-man, half-lizard kind of thing. A bright green devilish looking creature with a long devil tail that smiled at me with sharp, dog-like fangs and piercing red eyes that immediately reminded me of the newly deceased Albino man. The creature was holding a bottle of liquor in his left hand. Some kind of booze that was supposed to bring the devil out in you.

  To my direct right, a staircase followed the perimeter of the exterior wall. From where I stood I could see that the stairs led to a second floor loft and some bedrooms beyond it. The wall to my right was covered in original artwork. Abstract modern stuff that looked a hell of a lot like the pieces Scarlet and Jake had displayed inside their house before it burned. Expensive art. Not the kind of thing a rookie cop would be buying on rookie pay.

  No family photos, no snapshot of Joy with a girlfriend or boyfriend or with parents or siblings for that matter. It was like he hadn’t really lived there at all.

  One before the other we tiptoed into the kitchen, just past a door that led out to the garage and another door that led to a bathroom.

  My pulse was pounding in both temples, the pressure in the center of my head intense.

  Fuck it, I told myself. I called out for Lyons, but got no response.

  Not from anywhere inside the house.

  Nothing but silence and a buzzing hum that came from the motor on the white G.E. refrigerator.

  We moved on a few more steps, me with the 9 mm raised at chest height.

  The narrow kitchen ran almost the entire length of the first floor living space. At the very end of it was a sliding door that accessed a wood deck. The wet deck glistened in the little bit of light that shined onto it from the next door neighbor’s exterior spots. The same bit of light that leaked in through the plate glass doors and vaguely illuminated what at first looked like a crumpled bundle set on the kitchen floor—like a plastic Hefty bag.

  And another thing: there was this sweet smell in the air.

  A smell I recognized.

  A smell George must have recognized right off too.

  I reached out with my left hand, ran it along the wall, found a light switch, flipped it on.

  You could not miss him now, nor could you mistake him for a bag of garbage.

  Laid out on the green tiled floor in the bright overhead lamplight, Brendan Lyons lay face down in a pool of his own blood.

  85

  I KNEW THEN THAT the newsman had made it here too fast, took the bullets meant for Joy, George and me. I didn’t know if it had been them who’d jimmied the door or if it had been Cain. But then what did it matter at that point? He was dead. So too was my witnesses and my newspaper story.

  I cocked the pistol hammer. I wanted the mechanical noise to serve as a warning.

  I knew Cain was there. Christ, I’d known he was there even before I saw the dark green Hefty bag bundle, even before I’d hit the light switch, even before I’d seen the jimmied door lock.

  From that point on, everything seemed to move in this kind of slow, stuttered motion.

  Like a DVD. when it’s slowed to a fraction of its normal speed.

  Then came a quick Pop! just before George dropped down to his knees.

  I tasted the salty blood on my lips and tongue. The blood coated my mouth at the precise moment George collapsed down flat onto his chest and face, the quick thump of Cain’s silenced pistol barely registering.

  It was like a dream, it all happened so slow and quiet, but then fast and violent at the same time. While I definitely felt the quick slam against my head it was followed by the sensation of nothing at all. As the world shut down and numbness ensued, everything inside my head went black.

  86

  WHEN I REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS, I opened my eyes, saw one body at my feet. And a second to my direct left. The blood that covered the tile was so thick and rich it appeared more black than red. I could feel it soaking into my pant leg.

  I tried propping myself up onto my elbow.

  But it was then that I sensed a weight shift in my head and the pain settle in like two separate ice picks lodged directly behind my eyeballs. I sat up straight, felt my stomach constrict.

  Everything came up on me.

  “That’s it,” Cain offered. “Out with the bad.”

  When I was through, I sucked a deep breath and used my left hand to push myself back up against the refrigerator. I tried to stand, but it was impossible.

  The spi
rit was willing, but the brain was near dead.

  I had to just sit there, knees tucked into my chest, head between my legs. Fucking Cain had cold-cocked me twice in the same place, in the same week, with the same goddamned gun.

  He’d seated himself up on the counter beside the sink. In his right hand, a 9 mm Smith & Wesson service pistol identical to my own. Set beside him on the counter, what looked to be a black skullcap. He was dressed in a long black leather jacket, black pants and sneakers.

  This much was certain: my fragile life must have been a testament to how much Cain needed me alive to take the rap. For everything.

  In any case, sitting there on the floor, head splitting, stomach reeling, ribs busted up, I might have welcomed death. Maybe death offered me only blackness and nothingness. But it was also painless.

  Cain fired up a cigarette, smiled.

  “And now for the drawing room scene,” I whispered out the right side of my mouth, feeling the hurt in my chest and throat when I talked.

  “You really have no idea about what’s going on, do you, old partner?” Cain asked, full of giggles and smiles. “You don’t have a clue about what comes next?”

  “This is the part where you set me up for three more murders,” I said, the words coming out like they were ripping themselves away from the back of my throat.

  He stared down at me with those slate-gray, hawk eyes.

  “How can you be sure you didn’t kill them?” he posed. “Why do you assume I set you up?”

  I tried to hold my head up, tried to stand again. But it was useless. My chin kept bobbing against my sternum.

  He said, “Pull the clip on your piece. Smell the barrel.”

  I swallowed a breath, peeled the automatic from my right hand, pointed the barrel up at my face, took a good whiff. It smelled freshly fired. I thumbed the clip, looked into it. Three rounds were missing. Then, looking down at my feet, I could easily make out three spent shell casings sitting in a blood puddle.

  Something began to happen to my body then. Rather, to my head.

  This sort of electric buzz was overcoming it. As if my brain had been somehow plugged into an outlet. The music, it was just getting started.

  “Far as I’m concerned, Divine,” Cain said, “you’re just a one-man wrecking crew. No regard for the sanctity of human life whatsoever.”

  “I have this problem with my head,” I said.

  “You’re on a death march. Which is why, consciously or not, you went on a killing spree. You couldn’t stand watching all these people around you having a life.”

  In my head, the buzz getting louder and louder, the symphony warming up, the crescendo noise ringing in my ears. At the same time, the cacophony was somehow alleviating the pain on the back of my head where Cain had nailed me with the pistol.

  Not an electric buzz, but an adrenaline buzz.

  I gazed up at him, where he sat on the counter, smoking, his tongue shooting in and out of his mouth snake-like while he talked, the smoke clouding above his head. I took a second look at his black jacket, black pants, black sneakers, and the small Velcro holster wrapped around his right ankle and the .22 revolver it carried. I looked at that black wool skullcap. Not a skullcap at all. A black ski mask.

  He went on, “Picture a man standing inside a sixth floor room of an abandoned hotel. At his feet lie the remains of two innocent men, one of them a rookie cop.”

  There it was, I thought. He’d somehow discovered Joy’s and the Albino man’s bodies between the time I’d last spoken with him on the cell phone and the time it took him to arrive at the condo. Maybe he’d known all about what went down at the Wellington? Maybe he was fucking with my head? I mean, how was he so sure that I’d even show up here? Lyons … Lyons had to have spilled his guts.

  “I know what you’re thinking, old partner,” he continued. “That I’m a liar. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. Because in the end, how can you tell what’s real, or just a figment of your imagination? After all, you haven’t been acting in your right mind. You’ve got a bullet in your brain. You’ve been accused of Murder One, with a second count to follow. You attacked those guards transporting you to jail. You were in a terrible fall that landed you in the river. Your powers of recall may be warped because you’re not in complete control of your faculties. Fuck, Divine, for all you know, this whole thing is an illusion.”

  The 9 mm back in my right hand, six rounds left over. It was so heavy, I couldn’t begin to lift it off the floor. Was the temporary paralysis an illusion like Cain said?

  In front of me, my former partner’s face—the face of a man I once trusted with my life for nearly ten years; a face my son still trusted.

  “Let’s go further back,” he said. “Picture this same man fucking Scarlet Montana in her bed. Then when it was over, after shoving a whole bunch of drugs and booze down her throat, he runs a blade across her neck in a way that would strongly suggest suicide. Because after all, Scarlet was an unhappy woman. Less than a day later, the man comes up on Jake Montana from behind, cracks the big guy’s skull with a pistol barrel, leaves him lying on the kitchen floor to burn up with the house he torches in order to destroy evidence that will nail him as a calculated murderer.”

  My head, vibrating like a gong; my breath coming and going in little short spurts.

  But it was then I saw it standing just outside the glass sliding doors.

  The solitary figure—the silhouette.

  “Picture this same head case sneaking around the back of Nicky Joy’s condominium, slipping into the kitchen by way of the sliding glass doors, pumping two rounds into Lyons’ head.”

  I knew then that he must have swapped pistols with me. We carried identical 9 mm Smith & Wessons. He must have cleaned his prints, switched the pieces when I was out cold. He must have made the switch. I was sure of it. Maybe I wasn’t in my right mind all the time. But I knew he made the switch. I didn’t have to see it happen to know it was true.

  “Picture the man putting a round into George Robb’s chest just as he entered the dark kitchen. I mean, the poor bastard—the poor innocent pathologist you dragged into this mess. Your mess. He must have had no idea what hit him in the dark when you tried to silence him.”

  Framed inside the sliding door I could see the figure as he stepped forward. This squat bulldog of a man.

  Cain slid down off the counter, approached me, reached down, pulled the 9 mm from my hand.

  “So what happens now?” he said. “Do I call in my people, take a chance on having you arrested once more? Do we arrange for a trial, give you the chance to escape again?”

  He aimed the pistol not at my face, but at the right-hand side of my head. At my temple. In the same place he got me the first time.

  I looked at the floor, saw his ankle and the .22 revolver holstered around it. It might as well have been a mile away from me.

  Cain backed up, let out a small laugh as the glass slider slowly opened behind him. In stepped a man, quiet as all hell, Cain not having the slightest clue.

  He said, “In the end, I’ll swear that I found you like this. I’ll surmise that you’d gotten tired of all the killing, all the running. In the end you realized how very sick you were. In more ways than one. You were going to die anyway, so why not cheat fate of its one final act?”

  He placed the pistol barrel behind my ear, pressed it up against my button-sized scar.

  “Come on, Divine, you’ve been here before. You know the routine.”

  But as I closed my eyes, I heard it, clear as day.

  Dr. Miner’s voice.

  “Mitchell Cain,” he said. “Put down the gun.”

  That’s when my old partner pulled the pistol back away from my head. He straightened up, looked at Miner, my dad’s buddy standing there in a black rain slicker, baggy khakis, work boots and a round-brimmed fisherman’s hat pulled down tight over a full head of curly white hair. He was sopping wet from head to toe. In his right hand, an old black-plated revolver, like the kind cops use
d to carry before there was color T.V. He was aiming it at Cain.

  “Don’t do this,” Miner said.

  Cain turned the 9 mm on the doctor, aimed for his face.

  “You have got to be kidding me, old man,” he said.

  “Who you calling old?” Miner said, maybe a split second before the blast.

  - - -

  “Jake Montana and Mitchell Cain decided they had you right where they wanted you—desperate and short of cash.” Stocky agent, pontificating. “They pulled you back in as a part-timer, asked you politely to rubberstamp a few of their open-and-shut cases. They told you the force was understaffed and you believed them. You were a cop. Now they needed you again. But you were different somehow. The bullet fragment had changed you, made you more naive, let’s say. You had difficulty telling the difference between right and wrong sometimes. You already fucked up one major arrest, gotten yourself busted down to forced medical leave. Which made you the perfect candidate for Cain’s operation. But even after willingly completing false document after false document, you make matters worse by getting in bed with the Police Captain’s wife.”

  “It all seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” I say.

  “You realize what I can do now?” the agent says, eyes peering not at me but at his silent partner. “I can book you on multiple counts of conspiracy to falsify police reports, plus multiple counts in the complicity to commit the illegal harvesting and sale of organs and body parts. Not to mention fraud and grand larceny. Then there’s all those murders, all that carnage. People connected directly to you.”

  I pull the pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket, set them on the table.

  “Let me guess,” I say. “You’ll book me unless I give you something else.”

  “You want your only child to know that his father is going to spend eternity in hell? Or would you rather he learned his lesson, repented, did the right thing for a change?”

  “You want me to finish the story, is that it?”

  Stocky agent leans up, gets right in my face. Nose tip to nose tip.