“eBay,” I nodded.
“Craigslist.”
“So what do we do now, Doc?” I asked as I got up from the table. “In your professional opinion.”
She crossed her arms and legs. “Just keep on doing what you’re doing,” she said.
I turned to her, leaning back against the counter. “And what have I been doing?”
“The right thing,” she said. “The purpose behind your being hired by the A.P.D. in the first place. As a detective attempting to find the true cause behind Scarlet’s murder. Find out how she died, you’ve done your job. In the meantime, you discover who done it, you win the grand prize.”
“The ‘why,’” I said. “You also have to establish the ‘why’ in order to derive a total understanding of a case.”
“Precisely,” Lola agreed.
I walked over to where she was sitting. “What’s the grand prize?”
“Justice,” she said. “Redemption.”
“For me?”
“For Scarlet. If you’re going by the book has Cain so frightened to the point of arson and homicide,” she continued, “then there’s no telling what kind of grave he could be digging for himself.”
“Nice choice of words,” I said. “But then, I don’t want to be his next homicide. I’m already a short-timer. . . speaking of graves.”
As soon as I said it, I knew I shouldn’t have. Lola had spent the better part of a year counseling me on the reasons behind my suicide attempt. As a professional and as a friend, she had talked me out of my funk, my death wish. She gave me reason to live, or at the very least, move on with my life, as precarious as it may be. So any funny talk of death never failed to just plain piss her off.
She sat back in her chair, running open fingers through her long brown hair. I looked down at my hands folded in my lap. For a split second, I thought about revealing them to Lola. But then something inside held me back.
“Maybe you think your life and death is a big joke,” she said after a time. “But I am a part of you and I don’t think it’s a big joke at all.”
She was right. Maybe the bullet was inside me, resting, waiting, but it was Lola who felt the pain.
Outside the kitchen, I heard the rumble of thunder not far in the distance. Perfectly, ominously timed. Then the lights went out.
“Now what?” I grumbled, looking around a now powerless kitchen.
“Power outage,” Lola correctly surmised.
She got up and looked out the window above the kitchen sink, I guess to see if any of the neighbors were also out of power. She said she couldn’t really tell from where she was standing.
It wasn’t the first time the power had gone out inside the old Moonlight homestead. Which meant I wasn’t going to worry about it. Not with more pressing matters at hand.
She looked down at my left hand, pointed to the number 9 hastily scribbled upon the skin. I told her that it was a reminder to meet Lyons at the airport at nine o’clock. She glanced at her watch.
“I have a class to teach in thirty minutes,” she said, standing up. “And you, my Moonlight friend, have four hours.”
“Four hours to do what?” I asked, feeling two separate pressure points ^one expanding in my head, another inside my sternum.
“To sober up before your meeting with Lyons.”
42
My pockets were bone dry.
Lyons had picked up the tab the last time I met up with him at the Skybar. It would be a gross injustice for him to pick up this one too. Reciprocation was important in matters of shared information.
I pulled into a Mobile gas station and went inside to use the ATM. There was a young kid behind the counter that displayed cigarettes, candy, chewing gum and dirty magazines still protected in transparent plastic. He was wearing headphones attached to a white iPod hanging by a thin cord around his neck. He had short hair, a hoop earring in his left ear and a peach-fuzz chin beard. No pimples.
He’d barely gazed up at me when I came through the door, approached the cash machine, slipped my card into the required slot, and typed in my four-digit PIN number.
When the card shot back out along with a receipt that screamed “Insufficient Funds,” I knew there had to be some mistake. Sure, money was tight, but I had already deposited what was left of the cash down payment Jake had handed over. The money should have been readily available.
I slid the card in one more time and got the same result. This time I waved my hand at the kid. He looked up from his magazine and pulled off the headphones.
“Yeah?” he grunted.
“Something wrong with the machine?” I asked. He shrugged. “I just do the register.”
The door opened. A teenaged girl stepped in. Her dirty blond hair was tied in braids. She was wearing tight hip-hugger jeans and a tight boy-beater, the word JUICY stretched across an ample chest.
She approached the machine, threw me a bright Pepsident smile.
“Are you still using. . .?” She let her words trail off.
I took a step back. “By all means,” I offered.
She put in her card and punched in her number. After a second or two, the machine spit out three fresh twenties. The girl made it look easy.
She retrieved the card and her cash and exited the store.
“See,” the kid said. “Machine works good.” Smart kid. Speak the English very well.
I decided to give the plastic one more shot. Same humiliating turndown.
Fuck it, I said to myself. I pulled out my near maxed-out Visa, popped it in, and began hitting the buttons that would authorize a two- hundred dollar cash advance.
But it was another turndown.
I tried again and again and was turned down again and again. By now, the kid behind the counter was growing suspicious. So was I. I might have been a head case, but I was beginning to get the distinct feeling that somebody somewhere was fucking with me. Fucking with my life. First Jake’s sudden demise, then the tax lien, then the power outage, and now insufficient funds.
Cain.
It had to be somebody with pull and power. Somebody who could mess up another individual’s life and get away with it in the name of the law.
The counter boy stared at me hard. “Listen man, machine just doesn’t like you.”
I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes till nine. Already I was running way too late. Conspiracy to destroy my life or no conspiracy, I had a mission to accomplish.
Lyons is buying again, I told myself as I departed the Mobile.
43
Just like the last time, I parked the funeral coach in the short term parking garage across the street from the main terminal building. I unstrapped my shoulder holster, slid it out from under my jacket, and stuffed it and the Browning it housed into the glove box.
With the autopsy and tox report tucked under my left arm, I jogged across the two-lane, one-way access road that spanned the entire half-moon-shaped perimeter of the brick and glass structure. Once across the road I moved on past the nervous couples and families pulling luggage from the trunks of yellow taxis that pulled up along the curb and the even more nervous security guards looking on with a kind of tentative suspicion.
The automatic glass doors split open, allowing me entrance to the terminal.
I glanced over my shoulder in the direction of the huge multi-television monitor that was broadcasting a panoramic scene of Niagara Falls. New York State tourist propaganda. Maybe they should broadcast a short feature about our being the most taxed state in the nation. That would attract people to the Empire State. I shot past the few travelers lined up around the adjustable ropes set just a few feet beyond the U.S. Air counter and the two female attendants dressed in identical polyester suits who occupied the ticket booth and fed the baggage conveyor belt.
I stepped onto the escalator. It moved too slow. When I began to feel the badly timed pangs of dizziness setting in, I bounded the metal treads two at a time until I reached the mezzanine. No choice but to fight it.
> On the second floor, people walked past me in both directions along the carpeted corridor just outside the security scanners that marked the entrance to the second-floor flight gates. When I picked out Lyons standing there at the entrance to the Skybar, shoulder to shoulder with Cain, I knew that I’d walked straight into the hornet’s nest. Instinct told me I should about-face and select a direct line of retreat—the emergency exit stairwell directly behind me.
But that shit wasn’t happening.
Plainclothes FBI and uniformed cops emerged from out of the woodwork. It took only seconds for them to surround me. They came at me from behind the reception booths and portable counters; came at me in their windbreakers with FBI printed on the back in big yellow letters, handguns aimed at my head. They sprang at me from out of the mens’ and ladies’ rooms. They came at me from out of the Skybar. Cain had his 9mm drawn. Rather than aim it at me, he allowed the short barrel to bob against the side of his right knee.
He approached me casual as all hell—slate gray eyes peering into mine, the lips on his hollow cheeks forming a smile that shouted “I got you now, old partner.”
Behind Cain, Lyons just stood there, both hands stuffed into his trouser pockets, looking down at the tops of his shoes.
From behind, a cop ordered me to hold my hands up high where he could see them. “Do it now!” he shouted.
A voice I recognized plain enough. Officer Nicky Joy.
I raised them slowly, knowing full well that I was about to expose the cuts and scratches on my palms to both the A.P.D. and the FBI.
Cain stared at my palms and smiled. “Where’s you get those?” he asked.
Joy ordered me to drop down to my knees. I hesitated. Then instinct kicked in and I dropped my hands.
The barrel of Cain’s pistol—I never saw it when he whacked me across the head with it, putting me down on my face like a rabid dog.
When I came to, I found myself flat on my stomach.
My wrists were cuffed tight behind my back, the crown of my skull pulsing with pain. My right arm went stone stiff, my fingers dead.
“You saw him reach for a weapon,” Cain insisted. “Did you not see the suspect reaching for a weapon, Officer Joy?”
Cain’s words sounded distant and hollow, like they were being spoken through a tube. It was the same when Joy started telling me to stand while holding tightly to the cuffed wrists behind my back.
“Sure thing, Detective,” Joy said, but his tone lacked conviction. Fact is, the kid looked gaunt, nervous, almost like he was about to break out in tears at any moment. “The suspect appeared to be going for a gun.”
I couldn’t speak. My fucking head throbbed.
Cain in the lead, Joy began escorting me toward the escalators.
“Mr. Richard Moonlight, you have the right to remain silent,” Cain recited. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. . .”
He read off a Miranda I knew by heart, pushing me while I tried to maintain my balance. Reaching the top of the escalator, a barrage of flashes and video spotlights slapped my face, stinging my retinas. There was a sea of media crowded along the first floor where all the travelers should have been. Someone had to have tipped them off.
I had been caught up in a sting, plain and simple.
Lyons had been the bait and I was the sorry-ass fish that bought into it, hook, line and fucking sinker. By the looks of things, my built-in shit detector was on the fritz along with the rest of my head.
Christ, would I ever learn?
As we stepped onto the escalator, I couldn’t help but view the wall of television monitors to my direct right. That’s when I saw my handcuffed image being escorted down the mobile staircase, live and Johnny-on-the-spot!
“I know my rights,” I said to Cain. “I’m an officer of the law.”
“Tell it to your maker,” he said.
44
Stocky Agent stands over me, slams his fist against the table with such force that even his silent partner standing off to the side jumps a mile. He bends down and gets in my face.
“You expect me to believe you had no idea about the body parts operation until the day they nabbed your ass at the airport?”
I smell his sour breath and stare back at him.
“You want me to believe that until Tuesday, May seventh, you never once put two and two together? Even after rubber-stamping all those case synopses?”
I shake my head, reach into my chest pocket with a trembling hand for another smoke, pop it into my mouth, and fire it up.
“I told you, man, my head.” I exhale the white smoke. “Sometimes my judgment’s not what it should be. My choices get confused. It’s why they won’t let me carry a gun—officially. It’s why they wouldn’t give me my son. Goddamned choices.”
“What choices, Richard?”
“The choice not to ask questions when Cain told me to look the other way; the choice to take his money and run; the choice to keep coming back to the trough for more work when I could have told them all to go to hell; the choice to sleep with Scarlet when I should have stuck with being her masseur.”
“Yet when Scarlet is found cut up in her own bed, you choose to take the moral stand even if it means implicating yourself in the murder. It doesn’t add up.”
“She deserved more. She was important.”
“So then you can tell the difference, can’t you, Moonlight?”
“What difference?”
“Between what’s right and what’s wrong.”
“I guess I never looked at it that way.”
Stocky Agent takes a step back, stuffs his hands into his pockets, pulls them out again, and sets them on his hips.
“You know what I think, Moonlight?” he says, glancing at his silent partner. “I don’t think you’re nearly the head case you make yourself out to be. Or maybe it’s you who’s playing the head games after all. Maybe you’re the one with something to hide, because not only did Scarlet trust you, you were the last to be with her.”
“Jake Montana was the last to be with her.”
“Okay, Richard,” Stocky Agent corrects himself. “You were the last to f-u-c-k her. Do I always have to spell shit out for you?”
I smoke. Tall Bearded Partner stands off in the corner, ever silent, ever the procedural witness.
Stocky Agent comes up on me from behind. He sets thick hands on my shoulders and begins to massage my traps. How funny: the FBI agent acting the role of the part-time masseur.
“Tell me something, Moonlight,” he says in a far softer voice. “As a cop, would you consider yourself guilty of criminal indiscretions? Or do you merely consider yourself a sad victim of circumstances?”
Great. Another one of those fucked if I answer, fucked if I don’t answer kind of questions.
Shrugging the agent away, I say, “I tried to do something about it. Even after they arrested me; even after I managed to get away. So if you’ll let me finish, I’ll tell you why I kept trying to prove my innocence. Even when I knew that if I was caught they would shoot to kill. Why would a guilty man put himself through all that?”
“Because people do fucked-up things in fucked-up situations,” Stocky Agent points out for the second time that late afternoon.
“Yeah, well, that was one pretty fucked-up situation.”
The agent sits himself back down. “Well, by all means, explain to me the situation,” he insists. “No bullshit. Begin with your preliminary hearing in front of Judge Hughes.”
45
The two of them stood there like human figures out of a bad dream.
Joy and Cain, the arresting officers, standing to the right-hand side of the bench. Only about seven to ten feet in front of the long table where I sat shackled and cuffed, directly beside my lawyer, Stanley.
This was the morning after my airport arrest.
Per S.O.P., I’d been called before the county court for a prelim hearing. For the show, they’d decided to
keep me dressed in my blazing orange county lockup suit. Albany was in an uproar so they sped the process up, made a circus of the whole thing.
With all the media attention the show was already getting, they weren’t about to allow a former Albany cop arrested in connection with two possible counts of Murder One to be arraigned in his best suit. They wanted me to appear the ruthless killer.
“Mr. Prosecutor,” the balding, ashen-faced Judge Hughes announced from high up on his bench, “you may proceed with your action.”
I sat there, careful not to rattle my chains. I didn’t want the noise to draw more unwanted attention. Like the attention I was getting from the spectators and media people allowed inside the hearing; like the hordes of angry Albany cops perched outside the courthouse. Maybe they were already building a gallows out in the parking lot.
Stanley tapped his feet. I heard the nervous clip-clop, clip-clop coming from under the table. The noise was unsettling.
For the hearing, he’d dressed himself sharply in a charcoal three- piece suit. His full head of thick gray hair was parted neatly on the side in a kind of wave that draped over his left eye, almost touching the rims of his eyeglasses.
To my immediate right sat the special prosecuting attorney for Albany County. Beside him sat an entourage of assistant D.A.s, lawyers, and clerks. Every member of the team had their own personal laptop computer opened and glowing before intense young faces.
O’Connor stood. He smoothed out the creases in his black suit, lifted a yellow legal pad off his desk, and started walking my way. He faced me, not three feet away from where I sat, little brown eyes cutting into me like lasers.
Until he turned towards the bench.
“Your Honor, the defense is requesting bail, but the county would like to present the argument to counter such request, based upon evidence of two counts of capital murder, the first of which we plan on proving beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Moonlight Falls (A Dick Moonlight PI Series Book 1) Page 17