Moonlight Rises

by Vincent Zandri

  “Through there.” Then she says, “Kill the lights.”

  She pulls back the curtains, unlatches the window.

  “Georgie, you first. Richard, you’re next.”

  “You go first,” I insist.

  “If my father’s men find you, they will kill you. But they won’t do anything to us. We’re protected by blood.”

  Protected by blood.

  This I understand. I’d do anything for my boy. Take a bullet for him.

  Georgie opens the window all the way, climbs out into the darkness, inches his way down to the ground. I follow, put one leg through the open window.

  “You’re right behind me, Lo, right?”

  I purposely ignore Claudia.

  “You’ll feel my breath on the back of your neck,” she promises.

  I pull the other leg through, jump, hit the ground beside Georgie. The pain flashes through my torso. I have no choice but to swallow it.

  Behind me, no Lola.

  The window slams closed.

  Chapter 34

  So that’s it then.

  Lola has no intention of coming with us.

  Lola or Claudia.

  Standing in the dark behind the clinical psychology lab building with Georgie, I know precisely why. If her father discovers we’re all together, then he’ll have no choice but to punish her. Is it possible that the punishment could be so severe that he might kill his own daughter?

  Question is, why would he punish her?

  For revealing that he’s a traitor? An enemy of the United States of America? What precisely does that mean? What does my client, Peter, have to do with it? Other than being the biological son of Lola, the biological grandson of her dad, Harvey Rose?

  One thing is for certain: I have uncovered the truth behind my client Peter Czech: He’s a liar and he’s playing me, Captain Head-Case, for the fool. He’s also Lola’s biological son.

  I love Lola.

  I’ll say it again, I love Lola Ross (or is it Rose?), and even if she is conducting an affair behind my back, I’m going to protect her and defend her. Because that’s what bleeding hearts and head-cases like me do. That means getting to the bottom of just what Czech and Rose are doing, and how it constitutes their being traitors. It also means uncovering the importance of a certain box, and why Rose’s men are willing to kill, maim, and torture for it.

  I glance over my shoulder at Georgie.

  “Well old man, ready to make a run for it?”

  “What the fuck,” Georgie says.

  “That’s what I say, Georgie: What the fuck?!”

  Together, we run away into the black night.

  Away from Monkeyland.

  Chapter 35

  We make it back to Georgie’s place just before the dawn. We’re safe here, or so I try to convince myself. Georgie’s got no credit cards, no telephone, no forwarding address. His mother used to own the house, still owns it on paper, and she’s long dead. In terms of tangible ID, Georgie might as well be just as dead. Rose doesn’t know who Georgie is or where he lives. Neither does Czech, or Claudia. And Lola would never divulge the old pathologist’s address to her under any circumstance. At least, that’s what I’m betting on, and I still have to believe it’s probably a good bet.

  Since both our cells are history, I call Czech via a Skype account from Georgie’s computer. But all I get when his answering machine picks up is a loud humming sound. The service won’t allow me to leave a message, as though it’s full or not working right. I try his mobile, and I get something even more unsettling: “The caller you have reached is either disconnected or out of service.”

  The Peter Czech I know lives by his Blackberry. The freedom of modern digital communications provides him a direct extension to legs that no longer work. For him not to be connected means that he’s paralyzed in yet another way.

  I grab two beers from Georgie’s fridge and hand him one. We settle ourselves in the living room, the curtains closed, the lights off, the rising sun that filters into the room through the thin drapes casting a red-orange hue on the floor-to-ceiling stacks of vinyl record albums and posters from the 1960s, including a big poster of Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon framed upside down.

  I sit down hard on the end of the couch, pop three Advil I stole from Georgie’s medicine cabinet, and wash them down with a deep drink of beer.

  “OK,” I say, wiping foam from my mouth with the back of my hand. “So, here’s the deal. My client is not who he says he is. He’s not looking for his father. Nobody knows who his father is or cares to know. That leaves his mother, whom he most definitely knows and by all indicators, loves. That mother just happens to be my current significant other.”

  “Don’t forget Claudia,” Georgie says from his perch at the window, where he’s keeping a watch on the city street outside while rolling a much-needed breakfast doobie. With his now trembling hands, it isn’t the easiest of operations.

  “I haven’t forgotten Claudia, the nurse who greeted me when I was resurrected just a few days ago. She just happens to be the younger sister of said sig other. Imagine the coincidence.”

  Georgie lights the joint, sucks in a big lung-inflating hit. Then he exhales. The room fills with the good smell of medicinal buds. It’s as close as I come to smoking it.

  “Finally,” I go on, “Claudia reveals that Lola’s father and her son are traitors. Traitors acting together. Whatever that means.”

  “Means they’re selling secrets, probably to the Russians.” He licks the duck-tail end of the joint to seal it. “What the hell else could it mean, Moon?”

  Something dawns on me then.

  “Czech is an engineer at Knolls Atomic. His granddaddy Rose is your average accountant who used to work for the same feds who used to oversee the Knolls program.”

  “You told me Lola described him as a businessman.”

  I head back over to Georgie’s laptop, take it with me back to the couch. Since there’s no way in hell the security personnel guarding the grounds of the Knoll’s atomic plant are going to allow us through the gates, I decide to take the next best approach. Once again, Google.

  I type in “Knolls atomic plant.”

  Turns out, the secure nuclear facility maintains a flashy website, complete with the operation’s “Mission,” which is none other than providing, and I quote, “superior nuclear propulsion systems for U.S. Naval ships by designing the world’s most technologically advanced, safe and reliable reactor plants and systems, supporting the operating fleet of nuclear ships and training the sailors who operate them.”

  The propaganda is followed up with slogans that seem lifted right out of the old USSR Cold War Bible. Slogans like, “Teamwork…We Work Better Together!” And, “Loose Lips Will Sink Ships: Be a Patriot! Report All Suspicious Activities to Your Supervisor!”

  The rest of the website is all about employment opportunities and military links. There are happy-at-work-in-the-nuke-lab photos of lab geeks, and full-color action shots of our Navy’s submarines diving or crashing up through the ocean’s surface like big mechanical blue whales.

  It’s all very important-looking, and it’s all tantalizingly apparent that the secrets harbored behind the electrified fences of the Knolls atomic power plant might indeed be of considerable value to our old Russian friends. And apparently, Rose recognized that value so clearly, he was blinded by the big bad bright lights and the dollar signs which would surely follow.

  I kill the link, turn back to my big brother. “How much does your average accountant pencil pusher make per year, Georgie?”

  He smokes a little more of his medicinal joint, cocks his head in thought. “Good accountants can pull down one hundred large per year. Even working for the feds. Especially if he moonlights during tax season.”

  “Good money for your basic, average, garden-variety Joe. But not for somebody with a hard-on for all the riches in the world…and willing to do anything to get it.”r />
  “Even if it means selling off your only grandchild…your daughter’s only child.”

  “I wonder what kind of pad Rose lives in, and why he’s so difficult to locate on the public meter? Be interesting to find out.”

  “We know he can afford to hire a small army of Russian tough guys to rough people up.”

  “And he’s also willing to kill to protect what’s his.”

  “Like that missing box for instance.”

  I close the laptop lid, stand up, down the rest of my beer. “We need to do some fieldwork, Georgie. We need the contents of that box or container or whatever the hell it is.”

  “What kind of container, Moon?”

  “I’m banking that we’ll know it when we see it.”

  He looks at me. “We get hold of it, we hold all the cards.”

  “We hold all the cards, we have the leverage we need to find out just what Czech and Rose are up to, how they might be traitors, and the identity of the bastards who killed me in order to keep it a secret.”

  “And more importantly, Moon?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You get to find out how deep your girlfriend is involved in all this crap, and if she really is cheating on you.”

  “Oh yeah.” I swallow. “There’s that.”

  Chapter 36

  Georgie’s van is still parked out front of my building down inside the abandoned Port of Albany. But we can’t very well go back there. Place is way too hot. But his old orange Volkswagen Beetle still works. It’s in “optimum condition,” as Georgie puts it, the former hot-wire-man-turned-pathologist having rebuilt it in his spare time over a period of twenty years.

  We’re driving in the orange Beetle out of the city, in the direction of Czech’s suburban house on Orchard Grove. In the early morning, with the newly risen sun hidden by cold gray clouds, the streets are about as empty as Armageddon itself.

  “There’s just one thing that bothers me,” I say, after a time. “Why would Czech hire me in the first place?”

  “Because you’re Lola’s boyfriend?”

  “But why get me involved? And why do it based upon a lie?”

  “My guess is that, for whatever reason, Czech hired you to expose Rose.”

  “But they’re partners.”

  “Doesn’t mean they like each other very much anymore.”

  “You really think they’re traitors, Georgie? Like the fucking Rosenbergs?”

  “Yes, I do. Claudia explicitly said that both Peter and her father were traitors. You don’t make that shit up.” Georgie tokes on his still-lit joint, taps the fiery end on the tip of his callused tongue, and stores the roach in a pocket on his leather jacket. As he drives, I notice that his hands are no longer shaking, his face is no longer showing signs of pain. No tight jowls, no grimaces. “But in exposing his grandfather,” he goes on, “Czech most certainly will be exposing himself.”

  “Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Georgie admits. Then suddenly, “We gotta make a pit-stop, Moon.”

  He twists the wheel, hard right, pulls off the main road and into an alley that leads to an aluminum overhead door that I recognize. It’s a body shop. But not your everyday, advertise-in-the-Yellow-Pages body shop. It’s an anonymous body shop with no sign mounted to the old brick wall outside to alert passersby to its existence. Not that much of anyone other than the occasional wino would be found passing by this narrow Albany alley.

  Georgie gets out, leaves the Beetle running. He disappears inside the building through a sort of trick door that’s been cut out of the overhead door. I wait inside the empty alley for maybe five long minutes before that trick door opens back up again, and Georgie comes back out carrying a duffel bag.

  He slips back behind the wheel of the Beetle, sets the bag between us, unzips it. He pulls out an S&W 9mm just like the piece that once served and protected me at the APD. He hands it to me along with three fresh clips. He pulls an identical one out for himself, stuffs the barrel into the waistband of his pants and the three clips into an interior pocket of his leather jacket. I store my weapon and clips exactly the same way.

  Then, reaching into the bag once more, he pulls out two cell phones. The old-fashioned kind that flip open and have no real apps other than text messaging and picture-taking capabilities. He hands me one of the phones. “Number’s taped to the back.”

  I looked at it, then shove the phone into a jacket pocket separate from the clips.

  Georgie reaches into the duffel bag one more time, comes back out with an honest-to-goodness stun gun.

  “What’s that for?”

  “That’s for me.” He smiles.

  “You get all the cool toys.”

  “Pays to have good friends in low places.”

  He picks up the now empty bag, tosses it into the back seat of the Beetle, and we’re off to Czech’s home-sweet-home.

  Chapter 37

  We make a drive-by of the Orchard Grove home before stopping.

  Pays to be prudent.

  It’s only 6:45 in the morning. More than likely, Czech is still home, getting ready for work. It’s a slightly overcast morning. Chilly. We drive past the home slow enough to notice if any lights are on, which they most definitely are not. Doesn’t makes sense. That is, unless the handicapped man likes to wheel himself around in the dark.

  Moonlight the sharp-eyed.

  We come around again, and this time I ask Georgie to stop in front. I’m listening to my built-in shit detector and it’s telling me Czech isn’t home. Since the blaze orange Beetle sticks out like a blood blister on a newborn’s butt cheek, I tell my big brother to pull back around to the main road where we can access a private drive that leads through a patch of woods behind the Czech backyard.

  The backyard is surrounded by an old gray privacy fence, and the privacy fence is covered with overgrown pines and untended shrubs and bushes. The idea is to pull in there, then hide the Beetle behind the growth. That is, if a big blaze orange bubble can possibly be hidden.

  “What if whoever owns this here private drive calls the cops?” Georgie astutely points out. “You know, like the pesky neighborhood watch committee?”

  “Risk,” I answer him. “It’s what you and me are all about.”

  “Stupidity, too,” Georgie says, driving back onto the main road, and taking an immediate right onto the private drive, pulling off into a patch of trees directly behind Czech’s house.

  We both get out.

  I feel the weight of the pistol and the clips. It’s a good kind of weight to feel. We follow the privacy-fenced perimeter until we come to the slat fence that leads into the yard. Like most residential fences, it contains a gate that’s unlocked and incapable of being locked. We enter the backyard through it.

  The backyard is nothing special. Just a concrete patio, black wrought iron furniture, and your basic gas cooker on wheels. The patio leads to a sliding glass door that’s covered by a floor-to-ceiling curtain. There’s a step leading up to the door. Must be Czech has no trouble negotiating the step. This isn’t especially damning: the wheelchair-bound can learn to negotiate some pretty formidable obstacles.

  Georgie and I look at one another and approach the slider. He already has his Swiss Army knife out and ready to jimmy the lock. But the closer we come to the door we can see that jimmying won’t be necessary. There’s a fist-sized hole in the glass, and a long, spider-veined series of cracks in the rest of the glass. Obviously, we aren’t the first ones to visit the Czech household that morning.

  “Fix bayonets,” Georgie says, sounding a lot like his old Vietnam grunt self.

  I draw the 9mm, slide back the bolt, allow a round to enter the chamber. I thumb the safety off.

  Georgie does the same.

  When I give him the nod, he sticks his right hand carefully through the existing hole, grabs hold of the opener, and slowly slides the door open. Pulling back the cur
tain, he takes a step inside, and like Alice, disappears through the sliding glass.

  Chapter 38

  I follow close behind the old platoon leader while he takes point.

  The place is dark and smells like must and sweat. There’s the faint scent of some bacon having been cooked recently. Probably isn’t all that easy for Czech to clean the joint. Not on a daily basis.

  Georgie stops, runs his hand along the wall in search of a light switch. When he locates it, he flicks it on. Forget clean. The place has been left in shambles. It’s been flipped, no doubt about it. Ransacked. Couch overturned, chairs tossed onto their sides, green Astroturf carpeting torn up with a blade so that whoever did this could get a look at what might be hidden underneath it.

  It’s the same story in the kitchen, dining, and living rooms.

  Glass shattered everywhere. Drawers and cabinets opened, bookcases pulled away from the walls, the books torn open and shredded, carpeting ripped up, holes punched though the sheetrock walls.

  When we check the garage, the car is gone. And when we check the basement, the space is empty, other than about two dozen empty boxes piled up in the middle of the floor, the name Ashline Movers printed on the red tape that’s secured them. There’s a set of snow tires piled up in one corner, and some old furnace filters leaning against the boiler. Otherwise nothing.

  Our 9mms at the ready, Georgie and I head back upstairs and check the bathrooms. The medicine cabinets have been tossed. No surprise there. Broken mirror and glass cover the sinks and toilets, the overhead light reflecting off of the shards like mini fun-house mirrors. All manner and type of pill bottles lie on top of the shards of glass. Staring down at the mess, I can’t imagine a big box being hidden inside something so narrow as a medicine cabinet. But then, what the hell do I know? I’m just the jerk who’s given his life once already for this project.

  After we’re through with the bathrooms, we have one last room to check out. It’s located immediately off the front vestibule: Czech’s combination bedroom/office.