Burning Moon

by Richard Barre

  “That your big reach, Mojo?” he said. “Or somebody else’s?”

  “Just a feeling I had and hoped I was wrong about.”

  Denny took a breath, lost the shades, angled glances at the mirror. “McQueen, huh? I always thought Redford with more attitude and less hair. Which only goes to show, I guess.”

  Damnit, Wil thought. Goddamnit.

  “Then you are back in the life,” he said.

  “Define life.”

  “Just what you think it means, Den. Killing for money.”

  Denny dumped the remaining beer out the window, crushed the can, tossed it in the bag. “Facts-of-life, Wil-boy: no mon, no fun. And I sure wasn’t going to the old man for it, such as the crash left him. Which, by the way, almost made me feel sorry for him.”

  “I’ll bet,” Wil said.

  “Typical Wil, all black and white. You’ve heard of trying to get clear? Well, this is my chance, my own Bali Hai—beach breaks so perfect you’d think you’d died and gone to heaven. At what cost, you ask? A few Bandini bags that tend to call into question any semblance of a divine plan.” He thrust the mirror back in place, stayed on Wil. “And do we have to talk about this so goddamn soon? I thought you’d be glad to see me.”

  “I am, Den,” he said. “More than you know.”

  Denny said, “I mean, who else is left to us? Me and my fucked-up sister; you and that wife you can’t seem to let go of.” Leaning back in the seat. “Don’t sweat it, Trina filled in what I didn’t see myself. And she’s pretty, by the way, your ex. Japanese, isn’t she?”

  Wil kept his focus on the horizon.

  “What—too distilled for you?” Denny went on. “Well, in case you missed it, Mojo, the secret’s out. We’re all a baby toe from the third rail.”

  “Are you about through?” Wil said.

  The blue eyes bored into his. “Maybe when you fill me in on why you’d go to work for a VC. And don’t pull that look. You expected a free pass from me?”

  “In a word?” Wil said. “He’s a good man who didn’t do it.”

  “Sure he is, like so many I looked up after the war.” Denny’s whole face lit now. “Guys who swore they weren’t the ones who tossed the rats in your cage, stuck your head in the honey bucket. That is, when they weren’t employing ingenious little devices to show a guy a good time.” He paused for breath. “Care to know what I did to square things?”

  Wil said nothing.

  “Hell, who would?” Denny added. “At least tell me with the VC you’d been drinking.”

  “Tea, as I recall,” Wil said.

  Denny shook his head as if trying to make sense of something that made none; worse, constituted betrayal. “Wait, I’ve got it, sure as shit. The guy’s kid and grandkid who disappeared off San Miguel, you did it for them, right?”

  “And the wife. And the daughter. Innocents, Den.”

  His face darkened. “Nobody’s innocent: nobody. Where I’ve been, you learn that. They’re either doing it to you or thinking about it.”

  Wil felt his own anger rising. “You do Luc Tien on contract, too? Maybe hang around to watch his brother the VC hang for it?”

  “Not a bad plan. I wish I’d thought of it.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “You tell me,” he said: dead flat. “Is that what you think I did?”

  Wil let a breath out to pull it together. “What I think is that apart from some highlight-reel moments we share, I have no idea who showed up here today. Why did you, Den?”

  “That’s the past for you,” he answered. “Always got her makeup on, batting her eyes, and promising more than she delivers.”

  Unexpectedly, Denny Van Zant smiled; grinned broadly, then laughed: way more Redford than McQueen. “You want to know why this is such a hoot for me?” he said, slapping the longboard, eyes alive at his own humor. “You haven’t changed a damn bit.”

  57

  They were at Wil’s, the afternoon spent in selective reminiscence around applying some long-due goop to Southern Cross. Rewaxing Denny’s sudden-impulse buy and Wil’s call to John Pereira to see if he could rent the aging Cris-Craft the lawyer had bogged down in restoring.

  “When do you want it?” Pereira inquired after taking a muffled question from someone in the office.

  “Tomorrow,” Wil said. “Early, if it’s okay.”

  “Romantic getaway pumping bilges?”

  “Deep sea fishing,” Wil said. “Provided the current hasn’t dislodged Harmony from your coordinates.”

  “Time on your hands, I take it.”

  Wil explained, more or less: cursory search; any port in a storm the way things were shaping up. Or rather, not shaping up.

  “Key’s under the duckboards,” Pereira said. “For what it’s insured for, I could buy three boats that work. You ever want to invest in one of these things, and I do mean invest, see me first. Then see a therapist.”

  “Full tank and your usual case of Boone’s Farm do it?”

  Pereira laughed. “You’ll need to top off to get out there. And stay on the tube, will you? The wife gets a kick out of saying we know you.”

  “I’m glad somebody does,” Wil said.

  “Wait’ll you own a boat.”

  “So where’s your dog,” Denny asked as Wil hung up. Shirt off and sunning on the deck. Iced tea beside him and his feet up.

  Matt, Wil told him; temporary guard duty at the Tien’s.

  “Temporary, you say? Just make sure he’s in the room when they serve soup. At least the kind they gave us.”

  “Enough, Den, okay? Give it a rest.”

  “Resting works for you, does it?” Grinning at him.

  “When I let it,” he said.

  “Yeah, sure it does.”

  Still grinning, Denny cocked an eye at the Rincon and went to the scope, nodded and looked back. “Anybody mention second wind? I mean, it’s not Todos out there, but if your goop’s cured…That is, assuming it ever will be.”

  “When will I know?” Wil answered him.

  ***

  The twilight surf was even better than the morning’s: water holding the day’s warmth, thinned-out crowd and wind, light bathing the mountains behind them in gold, then apricot, then pink before leaving the field to an already-emergent moon.

  Runs were capsule-moments of the places recalled while waiting in the lineup: Steamers, Malibu, Trestles, La Jolla—surfer girls and hotdoggers, free-for-alls and e-ticket breaks—each a piece of the jigsaw that was them. As if Nam and what followed had never been, life was sun-warmed Coppertone, drive-ins, and Duane Eddy guitar riffs, and each day was the first day summer.

  Denny hadn’t lost a beat, playing to the small but appreciative crowd that had gathered to watch them. And afterward, feeling the double-dip in shoulders and legs, they’d driven home with the windows down and the radio up, Wil moving gingerly as he stepped out on deck to the fragrance of searing tri-tip.

  “Dawn patrols a thing of the past, huh?” Denny said, turning the meat in a hiss of smoke.

  Wil grinned. “Today gaining on yesterday.”

  “All my troubles seem so far away. Which reminds me, the answer is no.”

  Wil waited.

  “No, I did not do Luc Tien,” Denny said.

  “But something…”

  “Something, yeah. I had a contract to do him.”

  “From the Po Sang.”

  Denny glanced out of the smoke. “The Po Sang, huh? Well, well,” he said. “The brother made fertilizer out of people who crossed him. To grow his orchids. You do know that?”

  “Heard it,” Wil said. Then, “Good money, I assume?”

  Denny stayed intent on the meat. “I’ll ignore that because it’s you, Mojo. Bali hai—that’s all it is and ever was. My own special island.” Removing the tri-tip from the grill.

  Wil finished running the slicing knife across the sharpener, wiped the blade, handed it over. “So what happened?”

  “What happened, old friend, is t
hat somebody took out the eight-ball while I was lining up the shot. And if you’re asking me to feel anything for these people, you’re talking to the wrong guy.”

  “Maybe.” Wil giving him a second. “You familiar with the name Under Heaven?”

  “Damn, impress me twice,” Denny said, back to slicing the meat onto plates with the green salad Wil had made. Slabs of polenta bread he’d cut apart.

  “Terry Leong mentioned it.”

  “Ah yes, him. The gang cop who wants to thank me for stepping on the bug that did his partner.”

  “Leong’s no joke, Den, don’t make that mistake,” Wil said. “Second, he thinks Under Heaven might be muscling the Po’s. And I thought you didn’t take sides anymore.”

  By now the oil rigs were lit up, a line resembling party ships in the channel. Cars had their headlights on, their rush sounding like the surf sliding in beyond the roadway. Smoke still leaked from the vents in the barbecue lid.

  “Reality check,” Denny said at length. “I do the people nobody misses and everybody’s better off without. I do it because some things stuck to me over there that might not have to the other guy, and because I need the money other people are willing to pay. As to who these people are is beyond the fact. I don’t want to know, and you especially don’t want to know.”

  “Small town P.I. not ready for prime time, is that it?”

  It brought a smile. “How modest, our young Mojo. But I know about you from Trina, remember? How you canceled John Pomphrey’s subway pass that night on the roof?”

  “Straight on and him calling the shot,” Wil said.

  Denny grinned, the cat with the canary: “One of a number of candidates, if the article I read was accurate. And you haven’t exactly been invisible the last few days. Good dinner, by the way.”

  “All of which amounts to what, Den? That what you do is okay and should be with me? Because it isn’t, if you need to hear that.”

  The grin disappeared. “Aren’t we kind of far down the road for the approval bit?”

  “Guess that depends on the road.”

  “Wil, Wil…where did I get you?” Taking a hit on the Tecate he’d cracked. “You want to talk morality plays, we can do that. But ‘wrong’ hasn’t cut ice with me for a lot of years and for a lot of reasons. Besides, I didn’t come here for that.”

  “Maybe it’s time you told me why you did.”

  “No kidding. You’ll shut up and listen if I do?”

  “While we’re young, if that works.” What might come of this deeper cut falling away like a first-stage booster.

  “I was never young,” Denny said. “You just never noticed.”

  “I noticed,” Wil said, matching him. “And I’m still here.”

  “All right, then. Your guy Tien offing his brother the way he did was fine with the people I’m in with. Saved them a lot of trouble and money. Uh-uh, don’t interrupt, I know where you stand here. Long story short, I was going to pop in on you to establish an alibi if it came to that.” He drew off the beer can, set it down. “Not that it would have or I didn’t want to see you—I did. It’s just that business had to come first. Anyway, it’s not often I lose a job, so I decided to violate my own rule and hang around. See who stole my money and if I could reason with them.”

  By now his face was largely in shadow.

  “Then you begin generating all this ink about your guy not doing it despite the evidence, blah-blah. Made some people nervous, people who give other people calls late at night.” He folded his hands under his chin. “You catching my drift here?”

  “Sorry,” Wil said. “You’re going to have to spell it out for me.”

  Denny dipped a last piece of bread in the juices and ate it. “It’s like this: Keep banging the garbage cans and somebody’s going to come out and make the noise go away. Now do you get it?”

  “I think so: the somebody meaning the best they’ve got,” Wil said. “Who could get close enough to put a .22 magnum in my ear.”

  “Fair assumption, m’man.”

  Holding Denny’s eyes, he said, “Not the same somebody who spared a kid who refused to kill two little girls in a jewelry store? Who took the heat off his family once for a murder he didn’t commit and one of them did? Not that somebody?”

  A different look passed between them.

  Night traffic on the highway.

  Denny’s smile was tired, frayed at the edges. He tapped the beer can on his teeth, shook his head. “You ever think maybe life’s too fucked to get worked up over?” Pause. “No, I didn’t think so, not you, not our Wil. What time you say you were going out in the morning?”

  58

  Wil came awake to something that became the creak of footsteps: hours later, his radio alarm reading three. He swung his feet over the edge of the bed, eased down the hall to the living room, and saw him.

  Bent in his skivvies, Denny had a hand against the window frame, the vertical blinds slanting moonlight onto his sweat-bathed face and chest. His breath was coming hard, as if just in from a run. Turning to make out Wil and, with a little smile of apology, he said, “Sorry, Mojo. They still wake me up, napalm and night sweats. Hope I didn’t mess up your couch.”

  “What is it, Den? Malaria?”

  “Not exactly.” Wiping at the sweat with his forearm. “I managed to dodge that one.”

  “Not everyone did. Count your blessings.”

  “Yeah. Unless you figure the war was never more than bullshit to begin with.” His gaze returning to the window.

  “Tell that to the guys on the wall,” Wil said.

  “I did.” As though run through a sound processor. “They were strangely quiet about it.”

  For a moment they stood in the slanting light. Then Wil said, “It’s over, Den, we lost. And Vinh Tien didn’t kill his brother.”

  “Who?” Blinking as though coming awake. “Oh, yeah—your misunderstood VC.”

  “So what is it, Den? Straight out.”

  Denny’s eyes swung to his, and for those seconds it was like looking into the kid Denny once had been. The kid whose adopted father packed him off to Nam then washed his hands of him when he was declared missing in action. The kid who’d made it out with hell itself after him.

  As though having debated the point and lost, he said, “Agent orange, they suspect, all that hacking and jacking around in it. Poetic, huh? After all the other shit we waded through, turns out it was our own.”

  Wil had the feeling a wind had reached inside the house.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  Denny hesitated, then, “A form of lymphoma.” Running a hand across his face, wiping it on his shorts. “Slow but steady. Turned up in the tests they did when I was recovering in Baja. Welcome to the bonus round, huh?”

  Damnit. Wil’s first reaction. Goddamn it.

  He said, “Any chance they might have blown it?” The wind inside him now.

  “Nice try, no dice. Docs up here said the same thing.”

  All to hell…

  “Which means what exactly?”

  “Nine months,” Denny said, “maybe a year. No small part of the Bali thing is a guy, an herbalist who’s been working miracles down there. Need I say, he’s more optimistic.”

  And gone.

  “Jesus, Den, I don’t know what to say. There anything I can do to help?”

  Totally inadequate sounding. Still, Denny didn’t seem to notice, just swung his gaze back to the window, surf booming in the relative quiet, the diminishing skree of a night bird skimming the house.

  Then, without inflection, he said, “Actually, there is. Pay attention when I tell you these Under Heaven fucks are not the ones you want to mess with.”

  59

  Next morning they were at Peet’s by five-thirty, the harbor by six packing half-and-half’d Sumatra from double-cups, something to tilt the balance. But morning had at least in part delivered on its promise to banish dark thoughts, the coffee was strong and restorative, and Wil had a plan. />
  Such as phase one amounted to.

  “So tell me again,” he said, breaking the silence since they’d stepped aboard Pereira’s old Cris-Craft: Mr. Lucky, a peeling forty-something-footer with flashes of his restoration efforts. “You’re going out with me why?” Sunrise gilding the harbor’s masts and hulls, walkways and somnambulant water, the seawall and its flags.

  Denny gulped coffee and looked at him. Stained khakis and a cut-off gray sweatshirt, worn running shoes and black rubber sports Casio. As if the harbor were home.

  “Not that I’m not glad for the company,” Wil added, lifting the duckboard and finding the key, cranking the engine in a burble of blue exhaust until it caught. “Long as you don’t decide I’m banging on any garbage cans.”

  “Serious shit, Mojo—to add perspective.”

  “What I’m saying is you don’t have to do this.”

  Denny said, “Two years ago, you did things for me nobody had ever done.” Activating the instruments that needed it—built-ins and add-on GPS, depth sensor, and radio grouping. “I wake up with that.”

  “Done for your mom as much as you,” Wil said.

  “Now you tell me.”

  “The point is, you don’t owe me anything.”

  “Thanks,” Denny said, busying himself with the radio. “I believe I’ll just tag along.”

  “To report on me for somebody?”

  The grin. “Tag,” he said. “As in hang. Spend time.”

  “Meaning you might not shoot me today?”

  Denny looked at him, McQueen doublecrossed with Redford. “No guarantees, you don’t shut the fuck up.”

  “You always had a way with words.”

  While Denny loosed the lines, Wil stowed his bag containing windbreaker, backup long-sleeve tee and jeans and the sweatshirt-wrapped .45, then double-checked the gear he’d brought: dive fins and wetsuit with hood; BC vest and tank; regulator, weight belt, and dive knife; pry-bar and undersea torch…vague on the last time he’d been down for anything other than lobster. Deeper, at least, than fifty feet or so. He dug out the faxed coordinates, entered them in the global positioning system as Denny eased Mr. Lucky from her slip and into the main channel. Past the sand bar and the wharf and a flight of pelicans skimming low, past the entrance buoys and out.